After five months without any progress in the criminal case against Megaupload, Kim Dotcom’s legal team has discovered that the U.S. Government has been granted permission to share critical case evidence with copyright industry groups.

An ex-parte order was issued last month and filed under seal, which means that its exact contents remain hidden. The information available reveals that the Government intends to share MD5 hash values of Megaupload users’ files, among other things.

Megaupload’s legal team is not happy with the ‘secret’ order and TorrentFreak has obtained a letter in which they voice their concerns to the U.S. federal court.

“It has been brought to our attention by Mr. Dotcom’s New Zealand counsel that this Court issued a sealed ex parte order on November 22, 2013, which requires that the Government publicly disseminate, through trade organizations and a press release, certain information related to the above-captioned matter,” the letter begins.

The lawyers claim that with the covert filing the U.S. Government has deprived the defendants of their due process rights. The order was issued without proper justification, they claim, as there is no valid reason to conceal it from Megaupload and the other defendants.

“The defendants have been indicted, their assets have been frozen, their business has been destroyed, and their liberty has been restrained. Given these constraints, it is unclear what evils the Government fears defendants will inflict if provided notice of the Government’s submission, beyond having Defendants’ counsel come into court to make opposing arguments,” the lawyers write to the court.

According to the available information the U.S. Government is aiming to help copyright holders who may want to file civil lawsuits against Kim Dotcom and Megaupload. The Government fears that if this doesn’t happen quickly, the alleged copyright violations may expire due to the statute of limitations.

Megaupload’s legal team disagrees with this line of reasoning and points out to the court that over the past months the Government did not appear to be in a hurry at all.

“Any claimed urgency, however, is entirely manufactured, given that the Government first indicted the defendants on January 5, 2012 and has made no previous effort to publicize the information. Having sat on its hands for nearly two years, the Government cannot credibly claim that circumstances are sufficiently exigent to outweigh defendant’s due process rights,” they write.

“Now, after two years, the Government is suddenly reversing course and claiming it is imperative to get its biased, selective account of the evidence out to the public. The claim of emergency rings hollow.”

The legal team further points out that the request goes against the law. The Government cites the Crime Victims Rights Act (CVRA) as an authority, however, the Fourth Circuit has indicated that the CVRA is “silent and unconcerned” with the rights of supposed victims to file civil claims.

Furthermore, the disclosure of evidence is problematic because it allows the Government to carefully select information that can tip the balance in their favor when it becomes public.

“The Government’s request also substantially prejudices the defendants in the case. Permitting the Government to widely disseminate a one-sided, cherry-picked set of facts threatens to improperly infect the jury pool before defendants are afforded any opportunity to present their side of the story.”

Among the information the Government intends to release are MD5 hash values of the files Megaupload users have stored. The lawyers point out that this information “implicates important privacy rights” of the company’s former customers.

All in all Megaupload sees the latest filing as yet another attempt to put the defendants at a disadvantage.

“From the outset of this prosecution, the Government has sought to deny defendants any semblance of due process. The Government has frozen every penny of defendants’ assets, made frivolous attempts to disqualify defendants’ counsel of choice, and sought at every turn to block defendants from filing briefs in their own defense.”

“The instant effort to circumvent the adversarial process through an ex parte filing is merely the latest example of this troubling pattern.”

Considering the above, the lawyers ask the court to withdraw the November 22 order. In addition, Megaupload’s legal team wants to be able to access and oppose the filings that formed the basis of the order.

It is now up to Judge Liam O’Grady to evaluate whether Megaupload’s protest is warranted and how to proceed.

While the covert action by the Government is already quite significant in its own right, it also suggests that copyright holders are considering legal action against Megaupload and Kim Dotcom. Since the MPAA has been very involved in the case from the start, the Hollywood studios are the prime candidate for such a civil proceeding.

Previously the MPAA asked the court to retain the files stored on Megaupload for possible legal actions to be taken against the companies and those associated with it.

“Independent of the ongoing criminal proceeding, the Studios have civil claims against the operators of Megaupload, and potentially also against those who have knowingly or materially contributed to the infringement occurring through Megaupload,” MPAA wrote last year.

Thus far there has been no sign that the MPAA or any individual movie studios have concrete plans to file a civil suit, but this may change in the near future.

Heya all,

We have updated the entire system for the guides. It is a LOT easier to find what you are looking for now, plus all the info has been updated and is up to date!!!

Please have a look through the new guides section, and let us know via the staff box if there is anything you can add or anything you want added !!!

You can use your usual method of getting to them, or you can click HERE

Just a heads up that we are looking for people interested in FMing and TMing in ALL the areas, i.e. even if the staff.php says their is a mod available for a particular section of the site, we would still be interested in seeing apps for those sections because areas like Windows, Playstation and Xbox require more than one moderator.

This will also help us in determining whom to contact next in case a position is vacant.

One of the most popular multi-purpose downloading tools on the web today is JDownloader, a Java-based tool compatible with Windows, Linux and Mac. The software is able to download video files, files from file-hosting sites, and extract them all once completed.

Back in June the software became embroiled in court proceedings over a specific feature present in an unofficial beta of JDownloader2 which enabled the downloading of RTMPE video streams on top of existing RTMP. It wasn’t created by AppWork themselves but was a contribution from an open source developer who had worked on the project before.

Since the plug-in handled encrypted streams the Hamburg Regional Court decided that this represented a circumvention of an “effective technological measure” under Section 95a of Germany’s Copyright Act. As a result the Court issued a preliminary injunction against JDownloader2 and threatened its makers, Appwork, with a 250,000 euro fine for “production, distribution and possession” of an ‘illegal’ piece of software.

Appwork found out about the functionality of the plug-in months before the court case and had already disabled it, but the judgment had the potential to have a chilling effect on open source development.

“Are developers really liable if another developer in the community commits code that might be protected somewhere in a software patent? How are Open Source communities supposed to check? What if a program that is included in another Open Source program makes an update that adds illegal functionality?” the company told TorrentFreak at the time.

To find out, Appwork filed an appeal and this week the project received the decision of the court. It was bad news not only for the company but also the open source community in general.

“In the eyes of the judges, our company ‘made the open source contributions our own’ mostly by having a copyright sign in the info dialogue,” Appworks’ Alex informs TorrentFreak.

“Therefore we are liable and must actively screen every code contribution and/or have protective mechanisms in place against someone committing something that might be illegal.”

Alex says that the decision is “worrisome” for the open source community and has the potential to deter people from getting involved in such projects when they discover they must take responsibility for the work of others.

“It doesn’t matter if the project owner did not do anything (i.e. write any line of code) or even if the project owner knows about anything illegal being committed,” Alex says.

“In our case, even when we didn’t even know about the functionality, which was part of an open source binary one of our open source developers used (rtmpdump), we were held liable anyway. Not from the moment on that we got notified about it, but even before,” he explains.

“This means that if any company or individual wants to use an open (or closed) source binary (commercial or not), they are liable for it if it contains any illegal functions. This practically means they are obligated to check every single line of code, which is almost impossible for smaller projects.”

Appwork are looking into the details of the judgment and are currently considering their options for appeal.

Led by Oxford graduate Duncan Greatwood, the company named Topsy provides access to the “firehose” of all tweets generated on Twitter. The service also indexed major social networks, including Facebook and Google+. Apple’s deal to buy Topsy for $200 million followed the acquisition of PrimeSense, an Israeli technology company, for about $350 million.

This purchase suggests that the tech giant is planning to expand its influence in the social media field, where it has previously struggled to make any impact after the failure of its Ping social music service. The company confirmed the purchase, saying that they buy smaller technology firms from time to time without disclosing their purpose or plans.

The industry experts believe that Apple’s purpose in purchasing the firm could be to improve its iAds service which experienced poor sales. Or the company might want to improve its general Internet services functionality while trying to compete with Google and Microsoft over shifts from hardware towards software and services. It is known that Apple lags behind Google in web services, where the latter has obvious advantages in areas like local data, maps, and voice search.

Apple may also intend to use the new service for indexing applications and to improve search using its Siri voice control system, or in the App Store, where users find is difficult to find the right app as the catalogue expands.

Topsy was founded six years ago and has since created a complete searchable archive of 450 billion tweets sent over Twitter. The service also added other analytics instruments to make itself useful to businesses. The companies are now able to buy pro services in order to tailor their social efforts.

Topsy had raised a total of $35 million in venture capital up to September 2013. Its co-founder and chief technology officer said a few months ago that the amount of data being created on Twitter plus Facebook was so far more than the data being created on the rest of the Internet. As you can see, social data has become the bigger public corpus. Topsy has also built indexes that could be applied to Facebook, and it had archived every public Google+ post as well. The company’s essential power is considered as being able to evaluate “sentiment” around tweets and in users’ comments on social networks.

Earlier today we reported that Hotfile and the MPAA have settled their legal dispute with a $80 million dollar settlement.

While the agreement left room for the file-hosting service to continue its operations by implementing a filtering mechanism, the company has decided to throw in the towel.

A few minutes ago the Hotfile site was replaced with an image with the following text:

“As a result of a United States Federal Court having found Hotfile.com to be in violation of copyright law the site has been permanently shut down. If you are looking for your favorite movies or TV-shows online, there are more ways than ever today to get high quality access to them on legal platforms.”

The notice in question is strikingly similar to the one isoHunt displayed last month following its defeat at the hands of the movie studios. The similarities suggest that both messages were drafted by the MPAA.

The decision to shut down the site without giving any notice whatsoever is causing problems among users and businesses who relied on Hotfile to store files and documents. Samsung firmware provider SamMobile, for example, has been forced to move its files to another hosting provider with a two day break in service.

“It will take at least 48 hours before we’re able to finish uploading all firmware, so do forgive us if you’re unable to get that firmware you wanted to download for the next couple of days,” SamMobile notes.

It’s unclear how many of the millions of Hotfile users stored files without a backup, but the number could easily run into the tens of thousands.

TorrentFreak has reached out to Hotfile to ask whether the company will offer a solution for affected users, but we have yet to hear back.

Following the Megaupload debacle early 2012 this is the second major blow for a US-linked cloud hosting provider. Needless to say, the recent events have put a serious dent in users’ trust, which may ultimately hurt the industry overall.

The next official "Free Leech Week" is on December 22nd, 2013. That means "Free Leech Week" will run between (12am Eastern Standard Time, December 22nd, 2013) and (12am Eastern Standard Time, December 29th, 2013).

And look out for something special for the new years.

It's possible you will not receive a confirmation mail, we try to validate manually as many as soon as possible, please leave a note on the forum if you want confirmation of the validation of your account

Its 3rd of December and Christmas day, Bodhi Day, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa and many more is closing fast!
Generally people are busy with their own preparations, that also go for us here in Staff!
As you may have notice, we have pushed out a Winter theme, and we(staff) know you all love it! (NO exceptions!!!)

We also have a XMAS calender, you can access that here :
best XMAS Calender ever!

We are gone run some contest during December, so if you are interested in that, be sure to look out after the news post about it!
Other than that I just want to say the following:

We here at TorrentShack would like to wish you all a Happy Holiday!
Remember to take a "time out" during this period, stress down and just relax.
When you do so, we would love if you stopped by in here to say hello!

Take care
//Staff

Discuss it here

The lottery is closed

- 1 Dec 2013 - 2013 1st Zoom Holiday Banner Competition

Click Here for Info

- 1 Dec 2013 - Zoom CDOW

Twilights Zoom CD Of The Week - 30th - 7th December

Wet Wet Wet - Step By Step The Greatest Hits

To download this great CD go here!



Wet Wet Wet are a Scottish pop rock band that formed in the 1980s. They scored a number of hits in the British charts and around the world. The band is composed of Marti Pellow (vocals), Tommy Cunningham (drums, vocals), Graeme Clark (bass, vocals) and Neil Mitchell (keyboards, vocals). A fifth, unofficial member, Graeme Duffin (lead guitar, vocals), has been with them since 1983.
They are probably best-known for their 1994 cover of The Troggs 1960's hit Love Is All Around, which was used on the soundtrack to the film Four Weddings and a Funeral. It was a huge international success and spent fifteen weeks atop the British charts. The week before it could have equalled the record for the longest-standing Number 1 single, held by Bryan Adams' "(Everything I Do) I Do It for You", it dropped to No. 2

Please leave your comments and thoughts on this CD for others to consider

Why not grab it now while it's Freeleech!

If you would like any of our onsite DJ's to play any of the tracks please use the request option when a DJ is live!

Cheers!

Johnny Bravo

P.S. I would like to nominate 'Twink' to select next weeks CDOW!

Posted by: Rudieger

Date posted: 01/12/2013 18:58 Title: Registration open from now on

The site is now open for registation for new members, for the next 2 weeks (until December 15th).

Depending on how many new members have signed in on December 15th, we could decide to prolong the open registation.

If you did not receive a confirmation mail, please leave a note on the forum (for manual validation)

Seasons Greeting from all of us at Twilight.
As you can see from the top of the site we will be freeleech until Christmas day.We have had a very fun year here at Twilight and we
feel its time we try to give all of you a chance to really stay and
not have to worry about your ratio even though the site is very easy
to keep a good ratio.

We will also be setting a freeleech new years eve and new years day,
We thank all of the subscribers this year as this has helped us a lot.
This makes it easier to know what we can count on as far as donations.
We at the Twilight staff also want to thank all of the folks who have
supported Twilight this year.When you see a user with a star.Please remember to thank them ,As we would not be able to do this without there support.

We thank all of you for being a part of Twilight

通告：Passkey泄露事件相关
近日的passkey泄露事件已经造成了极坏的影响。针对这个盗链方案，我们已经采取基本防范措施，正在进一步测试。
请全体会员切记：本站要求必须禁止 DHT 网络!
不要使用迅雷或者网盘离线，否则会泄露passkey；
密切注意自己下载完成的种子，如发现站外有磁力链接或流量异常请报告我们或到论坛回帖。

TTG管理组

Translate

Notice: Passkey leak event
The recent events have caused a leak passkey very bad effect. Hotlink for this program, we have taken basic precautions are being further tested.
Please remember that all members: This website requires DHT network must be banned!
Do not use Thunder or network disk offline, otherwise it will leak passkey;
Close attention to his seed download is complete, if found outside the station with a magnetic link or traffic anomalies, please report to us or forum posts.

TTG Management Group

Despite numerous distractions Mega.co.nz has gone from strength to strength since its launch 11 months ago.

The company currently has around five million users who between them have uploaded close to half a billion files. With a just-debuted iOS app already in hand, encrypted chat and email services are already penciled in for release next year.

As 2013 draws to a close, news from TheDomains.com yesterday stated that following a sale in November, Mega.co.nz had become the proud owner of Mega.co, a Columbian domain that reportedly changed hands for $60,000.

The domain was apparently purchased by cloud-hosting company JustCloud before being acquired by Mega. However, there are serious problems with the story.

TorrentFreak spoke with Dotcom who told us he had “no idea” about the acquisition of the domain and immediately expressed concerns that the .co TLD is under U.S. control. We then spoke to Mega CEO Vikram Kumar who categorically denied the claims.

“Mega Ltd. does not own this domain name and was not interested in bidding for it when it was put up for sale recently. We strongly recommend that people interested in MEGA only visit mega.co.nz directly,” he told us.

Kumar appears to be referring the fact that Mega.co currently diverts to Mega’s payment page and as such is attempting to pass itself off as a genuine Mega domain, which of course it is not. Only adding to the controversy are claims by Andrew Rosener of domains broker Media Options.

“For the record, Media Options had Mega.co under signed contract exclusive agreement at the time of this sale. We had been marketing the name aggressively and likely the buyer was made aware of the sale through our efforts,” Rosener explains.

“However, the seller/owner sold the domain out from under us behind our back and refuses to honor our contract with him. We are currently evaluating how to best handle this and recover our commission that we are due.”

So why are JustCloud (presuming they still own the domain and haven’t re-sold it) now diverting it to Mega’s payment page, even for Mega users that are already logged in? Thus far, JustCloud have not responded to our requests for comment.

Interestingly, while Mega aren’t the owners of Mega.co, they do have another backup domain, Mega.is. The domain is the property of a wholly-owned Mega subsidiary in Iceland and provides food for thought on Mega’s plans and future opportunities.

“Both the subsidiary and Mega.is provide future options for Mega,” Kumar informs TorrentFreak. “In particular, it is possible that Mega.is becomes MEGA’s primary domain
name to better reflect its global operations.”

Causing concern for Mega is New Zealand’s Telecommunications (Interception Capability
and Security) Bill which comes into force in a few months time and could require companies like Mega to put in place an interception capability for surveillance agencies.

“Mega will not allow any compromise whatsoever to its core service values of protecting the privacy of MEGA users or changing its encryption model (end-to-end encryption with user-controlled keys),” Kumar says.

While Mega is taking a “wait and see” approach, the company is prepared to take drastic action to thwart attempts at forcing it to monitor users.

“One such option is to stop offering MEGA services to New Zealanders and thereby remove itself from the scope of the new law. Services to everyone else will continue as usual,” Kumar says.

“However, at this stage, this option is purely theoretical as the law itself is a few months away, its actual impact unknown, and there are several other preferred options for Mega that are far less drastic than that.”

Kumar says that a switch to Mega.is a possibility whether the new law bites in New Zealand or not. In the meantime the message regarding Mega.co is simple – don’t use it.