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Saturday, August 3rd, 2019

    Time Event
    10:39a
    Mindgeek Asks Cloudflare to Unmask Tube Site Uploaders

    Mindgeek owns some of the most popular porn brands on the Internet. ‘Tube’ sites Pornhub, RedTube, and YouPorn are all company-owned, as are adult production companies Brazzers and Digital Playground, to name just two.

    One of its subsidiaries, MG Premium Ltd, operates the latter two brands and many more like them. As content producers, they also get involved in sending takedown requests to Google. In fact, MG Premium is one of the most prolific senders of DMCA notices on the Internet today, after sending notices targeting more than 215 million URLs on Google search alone.

    MG Premium – currently the 5th most active sender of notices to Google

    Despite all the takedowns targeting various domains, MG Premium appears particularly interested in the activities of several adult-focused ‘tube’ sites.

    Via applications filed in a federal court in Washington last week, the company says it is attempting to obtain the identities of people who illegally uploaded its content to Waxtube.com, Vivud.com, Veporns.com, Tubezx.com, Siska.tv, Redwap.me, and Pornbraze.com. It says it can do this by issuing a subpoena to Cloudflare, which all of the sites use.

    “MG is the owner of numerous copyrighted audiovisual works. In the course of protecting its works, MG has determined that infringing copies of these works, posted at the direction of individual users and without authorization from MG, appear on Cloudflare’s website, Waxtube.com,” the subpoenas read, substituting the site name at the end as appropriate.

    “Such infringements have been ongoing and MG has issued DMCA notifications to Clouflare’s DMCA Agent. All notifications have met the requirements of 17 U.S.C. § 512(c)(3)(A) by setting forth, inter alia, a representative list of the copyrighted works that have been infringed and the identification and location on Cloudflare’s website of the infringing material. MG now seeks to obtain a DMCA Subpoena to learn the identity of the individuals who are posting the infringing content.”

    The list and descriptions of allegedly-infringing URLs on Waxtube (which are detailed at the rate of roughly five per page in Waxtube’s case) run to six pages. The second site, Vivud.com, is backed up with more than 580 pages of URLs, with Tubezx.com and Redwap.com weighing in at close to 400 pages and 190 respectively.

    The existence of the subpoenas raises a number of questions, not least how useful Cloudflare can be in these cases. The subpoenas specifically state that MG Premium wants to “identify alleged infringers who, without authorization from MG, posted material to..” the sites in question.

    It’s not clear whether Cloudflare will be in a position to do that but it should be able to provide the details of the operators of the various sites, which may or may not provide a useful stepping stone for MG Premium to achieve its stated aim. Whether the adult company has further but as yet unstated plans will remain to be seen.

    All of the Waxtube subpoena documents can be found here 1,2,3,4 (pdf)

    Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and more. We also have VPN reviews, discounts, offers and coupons.

    7:07p
    uTorrent Desktop Client Will Stop Working on New Mac OS

    uTorrent for Windows first came out in September 2005. Soon after, it became the most widely used torrent client, which it still is today.

    Initially, Apple users were left out, but after three years BitTorrent Inc. released their long-awaited version for Mac OS.

    While official numbers are not available, uTorrent likely never gained the impressive market share it enjoyed on Windows. This is, in part, was due to the fact that there were already several established Mac torrent clients around, including Transmission and Vuze.

    In recent years there’s been very little progress on the Mac development front. The last client update dates back to last year, and there is virtually no discussion going on in the official Mac forums. It was also excluded from the recent BitTorrent Speed release, which is Windows only.

    That said, something big is expected next month. BitTorrent Inc. just announced that the desktop versions of uTorrent and BitTorrent Mainline won’t be available on the new Mac OS Catalina (version 10.15 and up). Instead, all users will be updated to the browser-based web clients.

    The reason for this is fairly simple. uTorrent Mac is only available as a 32-bit application, while Apple’s upcoming release of Mac OS Catalina is only compatible with 64-bit apps.

    “Therefore, in early September, we will automatically update µTorrent Classic for Mac to our newest torrent downloader and player, µTorrent Web for Mac. This is necessary to ensure that our torrent downloading software continues to work seamlessly with Catalina when millions of users update to the new version,” BitTorrent Inc announces.

    “We will start updating users in early September. If you are using µTorrent Classic for Mac version 1.87 or earlier version, you will automatically get upgraded to µTorrent Web for Mac.”

    It’s no surprise that support for 32-bit applications will end on the newer Mac OS. This has been known for a while and, for this reason, a 64-bit version of uTorrent was put on the feature request list last year. However, that request didn’t receive an official response.

    As a result, all users of the new Mac OS Catalina will have to move their torrenting activity to the browser, or find an alternative client. Users who haven’t updated Mac OS to Catalina can continue to use the desktop version

    Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and more. We also have VPN reviews, discounts, offers and coupons.

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