Friday, December 6th, 2019

Time	Event
6:14a	The Pirate Bay Moves to a Brand New Onion Domain The Pirate Bay has been operating one of its original domains – thepiratebay.org – for well over 15 years. During that same period, it has also burned through countless others due to anti-piracy action all around the globe. The Pirate Bay is also one of the most blocked platforms on the planet for the same reason, something that has led to the creation of hundreds of proxy sites, set up to facilitate access to the index, regardless of which official domain is in use. Last evening the operator of a site that indexes links to some of these proxies told TorrentFreak that their owners had noticed that The Pirate Bay’s Onion site had been down for several hours, which is unusual. After further investigation, it was discovered that the site had switched from the extremely messy uj3wazyk5u4hnvtk.onion to piratebayztemzmv.onion. Accessible via the Tor browser, for example, Onion domains grant access to the so-called ‘dark web’, which is a fancy way of describing sites and services that aren’t visible using a normal search engine or accessible by regular means. In the case of TPB, being hidden inside the Tor network also provides extra security for the raid and lawsuit-prone index. While there has been no official announcement from TPB’s operators about the Onion domain switch, the new address can now be seen when hovering over the ‘Tor’ link on the site. Exactly why the site’s operators made the change isn’t entirely clear, however. The new Onion domain is certainly easier to read than the old one, but still not easy to remember. That being said, it is an improvement over its predecessor and now is probably a very good time to get everyone familiar with it. As reported here recently, the Internet Society is in the process of selling the Public Interest Registry which currently controls The Pirate Bay’s .org domain. As a result, there are concerns that the new owners may throw the infamous domain overboard on copyright grounds. If that does indeed happen, the Onion domain will certainly come in handy, as will the hundreds of pre-existing proxy sites currently doing a dance around dozens of blockades, all around the world. Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and more. We also have VPN reviews, discounts, offers and coupons. (Comment on this)
4:28p	Anti-Virus Vendors Flag uTorrent and BitTorrent as a “Threat” Again After the TRON acquisition, uTorrent and BitTorrent’s social media channels have been predominantly ‘crypto’ oriented. The core audience of the file-sharing clients, which still consists of millions of users, remains mostly interested in downloading and sharing files though. This is something uTorrent still does well and the same is true for the BitTorrent Mainline client. However, new users of these clients have repeatedly been warned not to use the software by several leading anti-virus vendors. In the past BitTorrent Inc. classified such warnings as false positives which it could resolve relatively easily. While that may be true, it appears that the problem is rather persistent and likely more structural than some would think. After alarmed users reported the issue in uTorrent’s forums this week, we decided to scan the latest release for potential threats. According to VirusTotal, nine separate anti-virus vendors currently flag the software as problematic. This includes the popular Windows Defender, which labels the torrent client as a severe threat. While that sounds scary, the detailed description shows that it may include “Potentially Unwanted Software,” a term commonly used for adware. This is not the first time uTorrent has had this problem. Microsoft has flagged the torrent client in the past as well, as the dedicated Utorrent threat page shows as well. This flag was later removed, presumably after the software was updated, but now they are back in full force. Other anti-virus tools that warn users against uTorrent include Comodo, drWeb, Eset and Sophos, as the list below shows. It’s unclear what has triggered the recent warnings. According to VirusTotal, two anti-virus companies mention “Web Companion” as the problem. This likely points to Lavasoft’s Ad-Aware software, which is sometimes bundled with uTorrent. The warnings are not limited to the uTorrent desktop client either. The BitTorrent Mainline client, which shares most of its code with uTorrent, is also flagged as harmful by eight anti-virus tools and uTorrent web by four. When similar issues occurred early last year, uTorrent parent company BitTorrent Inc. informed us that a “false positive” was triggered by one of their releases. However, if these are indeed false positives, they are recurring ones. We reached out to the company for a comment on our findings, but at the time of writing, we have yet to hear back. Any uTorrent users who receive the warning should proceed at their own risk. When we installed the most recent uTorrent we didn’t spot anything nefarious being installed but, in the past, we have noticed that the client was bundled with adware. Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and more. We also have VPN reviews, discounts, offers and coupons. (Comment on this)

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