Court Orders 1337x, LimeTorrents, and More Blocked in Spain
As far as anti-piracy strategies go, website blocking is considered by entertainment industry players to be one of the most effective.
Following action by the movie, TV shows, music, sports and publishing industries, thousands of websites are blocked by ISPs in many countries, usually following copyright lawsuits against the providers themselves.
In Spain, following action by local music industry players including anti-piracy group AGEDI, even more sites can now be added to the growing list. Following a decision handed down by Barcelona Commercial Court No. 1, a total of seven torrent-based platforms will have to be blocked by local ISPs.
Perhaps the most recognizable of the group is 1337x.to, the world’s second most-visited torrent site according to TF’s recently published Top 10 Torrent Sites data. The site is blocked in many countries due to its popularity but against the odds, continues to grow.
Next up is LimeTorrents.cc, which ranked as the 7th most popular torrent site in our report. In common with 1337x, the site is subject to ISP blocking in several regions.
Two additional popular torrent indexers – Torlock.com and Torrentfunk.com – are also included in the group, along with ExtraTorrent.cd, a site that shares the name of the now-defunct giant ExtraTorrent but has no connection to the original.
Completing the list are Masquetorrent.com (which appears to be down), and Isohunt.to, which used to be a torrent indexing site but now redirects to TPB.wiki, a fairly comprehensive proxy and mirror site portal designed for unblocking blocked sites.
The decision by the Barcelona court means that major ISPs including Movistar, Vodafone, Orange, and others will soon have to begin blocking the sites. However, if ISPs use the same techniques as they did following previous court orders, a simple change of DNS will be enough for users to circumvent the blockade.
Local music industry group Promusicae (Productores de Música de España) welcomed the decision of the Barcelona Court, with president Antonio Guisasola noting that it contributes to “the end of the era of impunity” for pirates.
“We have suffered for many years at the hands of those who believed that music was a product that could be plundered and distributed without the slightest scruple,” Guisasola says.
“In the end, the efforts of creators and producers do not fall on deaf ears. Beyond the harsh generalized economic crisis, the music industry has suffered a bloody time that destroyed tens of thousands of jobs and put at serious risk the very development of our cultural fabric.
“The decisive changes implemented to favor new and more accessible modes of consumption require the backing of administrative and judicial authorities to rid themselves of the unfair competition of fraudulent businesses and resolutions such as this show that we are all moving in the right direction,” Guisasola concludes.
The music industry is not alone in its site-blocking efforts in Spain. Last year, Hollywood flexed its muscles to tackle sites offering movie and TV content illegally.
University Buys 14.4 Petabyte Bandwidth to Boost ‘Anonymous’ Torrent Client
The Tribler client has been around for well over a decade and during that time it’s developed into the only truly decentralized BitTorrent client out there.
Even if all torrent sites were shut down today, Tribler users would still be able to find and add new content.
The well-funded project is managed by dozens of academic researchers, which is a guarantee for continued development. One of the challenges in recent years has been to make torrenting via Tribler anonymous.
The Tribler team addressed this problem by adding a built-in Tor network to the client, routing all data through a series of peers. In essence, Tribler users then become their own Tor network helping each other to hide their IP-addresses through encrypted proxies.
This works reasonably well but has some downsides. A Tor-like network tends to be slower as files are shared through multiple connections. In addition, it relies on “exit nodes” whose IP-addresses remain visible to the outside world.
The latest Triber release, published today, aims to address these challenges in ways we’ve never seen before.
Professor Johan Pouwelse, leader and founder of the Tribler project, informs us that his lab at Delft University of Technology has bought 14.4 petabytes of Internet bandwidth. This bandwidth, provided by Leaseweb, will be used to scale-up the Tor-like privacy protection.
To pay for the bandwidth they sold a three-digit number of its Bitcoin stash. The University took an interest in Bitcoin in its early days and started mining years ago, and this money is now used for Tribler’s development.
While it’s certainly interesting to see that Bitcoin mining funded the bandwidth purchase, what Tribler is doing with it is even more important.
Tribler was the first torrent client to treat bandwidth as a currency. It added a blockchain which keeps track of people’s sharing habits and with the latest release users can now “mine” credits. The ultimate goal is to have a stable economy with users trading in bandwidth to ensure fast and anonymous downloads.
To kickstart this economy, Tribler will deploy “token robots” that can manage the bandwidth and operate exit points. This means that it’s easier for individual users to become anonymous.
“We create swarms of intelligent bots to manage bandwidth. These bots do as they are programmed, they can make smart decisions. We believe robots can’t be as easily corrupted as humans or forced to act against their own will,” Pouwelse says.
“They can autonomously buy servers using Bitcoin, self-replicate, operate a Tor-like exit node, and sell Tribler bandwidth coins to survive another month,” he adds.
More than 26 researchers worked on “terminator bots,” as they are called, and Pouwelse says that they are among the most autonomous and smart software bots out there.
By default, users are not operating as an exit-node in the pseudo-anonymity network. This can be changed in the settings, but people who choose to be an exit-node should be aware of the consequences.
Over the past several years, millions of euros have been spent on Tribler and related research. Professor Pouwelse and his team will continue this work during the coming years. They see themselves as a unique project without commercial interests.
There are others working on similar decentralization goals, combining BitTorrent with the blockchain. However, professor Pouwelse is not a fan of these initiatives.
“We are seeing Bittorrent bundling malware and promoting a spammy ICO offering. It is sad to see rot inside our great community. We are the only non-profit team advancing decentralization from the tested foundation of BitTorrent,” Pouwelse says.
Today the researchers released Triber V7.2 and those who are interested can take it for a spin.