Downtime (2014-09-22 - 2014-09-24) -1 day and 58 mins ago We just had a downtime of about 48 hours, due to hardware issues. We had to change the DNS records to our new IP address, which could take sometime to propagate around the internet, usually 2 hours, and maximum 48 hours, after that, all users should be able to access the site normally. Discuss it here

Tracker Name : Sportscult.org Signup Link : http://sportscult.org/index.php?page=signup Genre : Sports Closing Date : N/A Additional Information : New place for Sports events!NBA NFL NHL Champions League European soccer and all the international championships now and best from the past!

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Budget Support Update! We would like to announce our updated 3 tier VIP Program! You asked and we listened. After careful evaluation of our regular donation program over the last month and our gained feedback from our current discussions, never before has being able to support your beloved site cost so little for so much. We've also added the 3 main currencies for reference on all our promos and donation packages across the entire site, so you'll know exactly how cheap it can be to support your favorite site! Starting at only 5 dollars for an entire month, you can get full access to the Bitsoup Essentials you need to make the most of your site. A donor icon that is yours to keep forever so you can show your support at all times, access to our Platinum Club and so much more. That's right, an entire month for only 5 bucks! The base donation programs are online now and ready for use, so GO FOR IT! Please keep supporting your great site; the site we all love and treasure so much. We wouldn't be here without you, nor will be in the future without your continued support, so thank you!

More than 5k inactive users with bad ratio is deleted until now, we are still hunting down.

The UK Government is working with copyright holders and Internet providers to roll out a piracy education and warning system. Information obtained by TF shows that the Government has no marketing budget left to spend on the measures, and that it will justify the spending with an expected increase in sales tax. A few weeks ago the UK Government announced its support for a new anti-piracy plan, the Voluntary Copyright Alert Programme (VCAP). The Government teamed up with copyright holders and ISPs, who will start sending warning emails to pirating Internet users next year. In addition there will be a broader educational campaign to steer people towards using legal options. While the campaign is a private initiative the Government has decided to back it financially with several million pounds. However, TorrentFreak has learned that the Government funding wasn’t straightforward and was made outside of the available marketing budget. Through a Freedom of Information request we obtained an email conversation between the UK Intellectual Property Office (IPO) and music industry group BPI. In the email from May this year IPO’s Ros Lynch explains that there are no regular marketing funds available to support VCAP. “As part of the process of agreeing Government financial support for the educational element of VCAP we will need to seek a marketing exemption as we are currently not permitted to spend on marketing,” Lynch writes to BPI’s Ian Moss. To be able to get the exception the Government needs additional information from the entertaining industries, showing that the investment makes sense financially. Or put differently, that the Government will see a good return for their invested taxpayer money. “Essentially this will require a proper business case which includes hard figures,” Lynch writes. “For example, what research are you basing your target audiences on? How have you calculated your 5% reduction in infringement? What £ saving does a 5% reduction bring? What overall estimate can you make of the ROI of this campaign e.g. what financial benefit would a £2.2m Government investment bring?” The above suggests that the BPI is predicting a 5% drop in piracy from the anti-piracy measures. However, in a response to the IPO’s request the industry group writes that even with a lower success rate the Government’s spending will pay off. In a “Summary Business Case” (pdf) BPI uses the expected VAT increase to convince the Government of the “profitability” of the campaign. It estimates that if 15% of all illegal downloads are lost sales, piracy only has to decline 1% over three years for the Government to recoup their investment. “The underlying assumptions are based on very good data that has been produced by Ofcom and by a number of academic studies looking at the replacement ratios. It shows that only very small changes in piracy lead to significant returns to Government,” BPI notes. The music industry group stresses that the calculation only looks at VAT income and that the effects on the wider economy may be even greater. However, the static model they presented should already be good enough to warrant the funding. “So even from a very simple, static assumption, a small reduction in piracy of between .49% and 1% over the three years would return Government investment of £4m in an education scheme,” BPI writes. This prediction was apparently good enough for the Government to invest in the new anti-piracy plans beyond the available marketing budget. Even more so, the authorities committed £3.5 million to the campaign, instead of the £2.2 that was discussed in May. Whether the Government will indeed be able to recoup the taxpayer money through the anti-piracy campaign will be hard to measure, but the plan is going full steam ahead. http://torrentfreak.com/uk-govt-hopes-to-profit-from-anti-piracy-measures-140924/

It's taken almost four years but a man alleged to be the former operator of a so-called piracy 'topsite' has now been charged. The man from Sweden is accused of making available 2,250 movies between 2009 and 2010. Rights Alliance is representing six major movie studios in the case. After becoming almost synonymous with file-sharing and its connections with The Pirate Bay, Sweden began escalating its efforts to stamp out online piracy. As a result, during the past several years many file-sharers were targeted by anti-piracy groups looking to send a message to the masses. And with government providing additional funding, increasingly police became involved in joint operations. After a period of dealing with smaller cases, Swedish police have just charged a man for illegally making available large amounts of copyrighted material. According to their intellectual property division, the suspect “intentionally or by gross negligence” unlawfully made films available on 2,250 occasions. The police add that the individual acted “in consultation or concert with other persons, supplied, installed, programmed, maintained, funded and otherwise administered and managed” the file-sharing network from where the infringements were carried out. The charges are the result of an investigation initially carried out by Rights Alliance, the anti-piracy group previously known as Antipiratbyran. It’s been revealed they’re representing six major studios in the case, so the usual Hollywood giants will be directly involved. Few additional details have been made public but after contacting lawyer Henrik Pontén at Rights Alliance, TorrentFreak has learned that the charges relate to a raid carried out in 2010 against “The Scene”, the collection of servers and individuals which inhabit the top of the so-called piracy pyramid. The case involves a so-called ‘topsite’ known as ‘Devil’ which at the time was claimed to carry between 200 and 250 terabytes of media. During the raid, which according to Scene sources took place December 15, 2010, police seized a dozen servers and detained one person. In press releases following the police action it was claimed that the man was responsible for the unauthorized distribution of “tens of thousands” of mainly Hollywood movies. Those estimates appear to have been rounded down. An element of the case that remains a mystery for now surrounds the prosecution’s current claims that the man made the movies available “to the public”. Topsites tend not to deliberately distribute movies outside of their immediate circles for security reasons. http://torrentfreak.com/alleged-topsite-operator-charged-with-mass-movie-piracy-140924/

Last month UK police took down several torrent site proxies and arrested their owner. Now a UK developer has created a new & free service that not only silently unblocks any website without falling foul of the law, but one that will eventually become available to all under a GPL 3.0 license. The blocking of sites such as The Pirate Bay, KickassTorrents and Torrentz in the UK led to users discovering new ways to circumvent ISP-imposed censorship. There are plenty of solutions, from TOR and VPNs, to services with a stated aim of unblocking ‘pirate’ sites deemed illegal by UK courts. Last month, however, dozens of these went offline when the operator of Immunicity and other related proxy services was arrested by City of London Police’s Intellectual Property Crime Unit. He now faces several charges including breaches of the Serious Crime Act 2007, Possession of Articles for Use in Fraud, Making or Supplying Articles for use in Frauds and money laundering. While it’s generally accepted that running a site like The Pirate Bay is likely to attract police attention, merely unblocking a domain was not thought to carry any such risk. After all, visitors to torrent sites are just that, it’s only later on that they make a decision to infringe or not. In our earlier article we discussed some of the possible reasons why the police might view “pirate” proxies to be illegal. However, there are very good arguments that general purpose proxies, even ones that are expressly setup to bypass filtering (and are able to unblock sites such as Pirate Bay), remain on a decent legal footing. One such site is being operated by Gareth, a developer and networking guru who grew so tired of creeping Internet censorship he began lobbying UK MPs on the topic, later moving on to assist with the creation of the Open Rights Group’sBlocked.org.uk. After campaigning and documenting Internet censorship issues for some time, Gareth first heard of last month’s proxy arrest during a visit to the United States. “I was at DefCon in Las Vegas when the news of the Immunicity arrest reached me and I realized that for all my volunteer work, my open source applications, operation of Tor relays, donations and letters to MPs to highlight/combat the issues with Internet censorship, it was not enough,” the developer told TorrentFreak. “I felt that this issue has moved from a political / technical issue to one about personal liberty and Internet freedom. e.g. first they came for the ‘pirate proxies’, then the Tor operators, then the ISPs that don’t censor their customers. The slippery slope is becoming a scary precipice.” Since his return to the UK, Gareth has been busy creating his own independent anti-censorship tool. He’s researched in detail what happened to Immunicity, taken legal advice, and is now offering what he hopes is an entirely legal solution to website filtering and subsequent over-blocking (1)(2). “Unlike Immunicity et al I’m not specifically building a ‘Pirate Proxy’. Granted people might use this proxy to navigate to torrent websites but were I to sell a laptop on eBay that same person may use it for the same reasons so I see no difference,” heexplains. “In fact Section 44, subsection 2 of the Serious Crimes Act 2007 even states [that an individual] is not to be taken to have intended to encourage or assist the commission of an offense merely because such encouragement or assistance was a foreseeable consequence of his act.” The result of Gareth’s labor is the anti-censorship service Routing Packets is Not a Crime (RPINAC). People who used Immunicity in the past should feel at home, since RPINAC also utilizes the ability of popular browsers to use Proxy Auto-Config (PAC) files. In the space of a couple of minutes and with no specialist knowledge, users can easily create their own PAC files covering any blocked site they like. Once configured, their browser will silently unblock them. Furthermore, each PAC file has its own dedicated URL on RPINAC’s servers which users can revisit in order to add additional URLs for unblocking. PAC ‘unblock’ files can also be shared among like-minded people. “When someone creates a PAC file they are redirected to a /view/ endpoint e.g. https://routingpacketsisnotacrime.uk/view/b718ce9b276bc2f10af90fe1d5b33c0d. This URL is not ephemeral, you can email it, tweet it (there is a tweet button on the left hand side of the site) etc and it will provide the recipient with the exact same view. “It’ll show which URLs are specified to be proxied, which have been detected as blocked (using the https://blocked.org.uk database) and if the author passed along the password (assuming the PAC was password protected) they can add or remove URLs too,” Gareth explains. “Each view page also has a comments section, this could allow for a small collection of individuals to co-ordinate with a smaller subset of password possessing moderators to create a crowd sourced PAC file in an autonomous fashion. There is also a ‘Clone’ button allowing anybody to create their own copy of the PAC file with their own name, description and password if the PAC file they’ve received isn’t quite what they need.” This user-generated element of the process is important. While dedicated ‘pirate’ proxy sites specifically unblock sites already deemed illegal by the UK courts (and can be deemed to be facilitating their ‘crimes’), RPINAC leaves the decision of which sites to unblock completely down to the user. And since no High Court injunction forbids any user from accessing a blocked domain, both service and user remain on the right side of the law. In terms of use, RPINAC is unobtrusive, has no popups, promotions or advertising, and will not ask for payment or donations, a further important legal point. “To avoid any accusations of fraud and to avoid any tax implications RPINAC will never ask for donations,” the dev explains. “The current platform is pre-paid for at least a year, the domain for 10. At a bare minimum PAC file serving and education for creating local proxies will continue indefinitely.” Finally, Gareth notes that without free and open source software his anti-censorship platform wouldn’t have been possible. So, in return, he has plans to release the source code for the project under the GPL 3.0 license. RoutingPacketsIsNotACrime can be found here and is compatible with Firefox, Chrome, Safari and IE. Additional information can be sourced here. http://torrentfreak.com/the-art-of-unblocking-websites-without-committing-crimes-140923/

In recent weeks various music industry groups have sent takedown requests targeting Kim Dotcom's album Good Times. IFPI and others claim that Dotcom's music infringes the rights of their artists, but it appears that they fell victim to a DMCA prankster. Earlier this year Kim Dotcom released his first music album “Good Times,” giving it away for free to anyone interested. An official copy of the album was posted on the cloud hosting service Mega, which is linked from Dotcom’s homepage. This has never caused any issues, until a few weeks ago, when various copyright holders started sending unusual takedown requests to have the content removed. IFPI, representing the major music labels, submitted several DMCA notices to Mega claiming that the file infringed the rights of various artists. This resulted in a game of whack-a-mole in which the album was removed and reinstated a few times. Currently it’s unavailable yet again. When we previously covered the issue, Mega stressed that the takedown requests were clearly mistaken. The company accused IFPI of not doing their homework and doubted the accuracy of their notices in general. However, since the takedown notices kept targeting the same link, there was a good chance that these mistakes were orchestrated in some way. Assuming that someone was making IFPI and others believe that the link pointed to albums of other artists, we decided to do some research. Eventually we stumbled upon a series of Pastebin pages where the URL of Dotcom’s album is linked to titles of other artists. Several of the artists mentioned in the pastes are the same as the one’s IFPI listed in their DMCA notices, so this would explain the mistakes. The above is concerning for several reasons. First of all, it shows that IFPI and others don’t verify the legitimacy of their takedown notices. This means that pranksters can easily get them to censor legitimate content. Secondly, Mega usually can’t check the validity of a claim, or it simply doesn’t know whether or not a user has permission to publish it. So they have very little options to stop the abuse. “Mega aims to process all takedowns promptly, within a few hours. It is impossible to verify the claims as the files are encrypted so we don’t know the contents (unless the full link is provided with the key included), and we can’t verify if the person has a valid ownership/license or not,” a Mega spokesperson told us. Despite these restrictions, the cloud hosting provider says it’s setting up a system where repeated takedowns can be flagged to prevent this type of abuse in the future. “We are improving our systems to monitor the takedown process and will eventually be able to identify repeated incorrect notices,” Mega says. Until then, Dotcom’s album will most likely disappear from Mega a few more times. Luckily for the fans, there’s also a copy hosted on the soon-to-be-released music service Baboom. http://torrentfreak.com/record-labels-take-kim-dotcoms-album-140923/

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BitHQ's Halloween presents... ABC: Movie of the Week | Wikipedia

Title: LIFETIME V.I.P SPECIAL 70% OFF! -- Created on" 2014-09-23 16:20:25 -- By: Admin WE ARE OFFERING LIFETIME V.I.P. FOR 70% OFF at $30 USD OFFER GOOD TUESDAY SEPT. 23rd - THURSDAY SEPT. 25th JUST DONATE $30 USD AND I WILL MANUALLY UPGRADE YOUR ACCOUNT. IF YOU ALREADY DONATED THIS MONTH JUST DONATE THE REMAINING AMOUNT TO GET LIFETIME VIP! IE: IF YOU DONATED $5 IN SEPTEMBER JUST DONATE $25 TO GET LIFETIME VIP CHOOSE "UPLOAD CREDIT" WHILE DONATING AND I WILL CHANGE YOU TO LIFETIME VIP. YOU CAN DONATE HERE: http://hd-mkv.me/index.php?page=donate BENEFITS OF LIFETIME VIP OFFER INCLUDE 1. NO REQUIRED SEED TIME, SO NO HIT AND RUNS 2. GOLD MEDAL NEXT TO YOUR NAME TO SHOW YOUR LIFETIME VIP 3. NAME IN RED FOR EVERYONE TO SEE 4. ACCESS TO ENCODER FORUMS 5. 2TB UPLOAD CREDIT 6. 500,000 BONUS POINTS 7. 15 INVITES 8 ABLE TO UPLOAD TO THE SITE 9. ACCESS TO VIP FORUMS FOR INVITE OFFERS TO OTHER SITES 10. WARM FUZZY FEELING FOR HELPING THE SITE! 11. ALL WARNINGS IF YOU HAVE ANY REMOVED AND NO MORE HIT AND RUN WARNINGS TO WORRY ABOUT!! THANKS FOR SUPPORTING THE SITE EVERYONE!

System Hi, it seems our system or a bot has had a bit of wind in its brain and has completely removed all requests from the request section. Our sincere apologies for this and we have tried to recover these from the back up but unfortunately to no avail. So we ask, if you still would like a request filled that you have made previously please re-request and our entrepid Request fillers will do their upmost to accomodate you. Again apologies for any inconvenience this may have caused. Now off to spank the naughty bot that did this Twilight Staff This is a group message !

The emotions of the day! by Pymous - 09/22/2014 10:58 p.m. - Comment Good evening everyone! You have you know it, today was Monday! And like everyone else, it's just as rotten for you and Bookys! The waiter poorly digested a day last night, we paid dearly throughout the day. I'll spare you the details that are quite around boredom, but I still used to write a little message to reassure you! - Bookys did not die o / - The site is online and functional except for some minor problems with pages pagination (therefore including the Library) - The Tracker is offline - It's all temporary We are still working on it, and if it is not settled tonight, it will be sometime tomorrow

Yesterday, 08:41 PM - Uploading rules - Added by cr0nus Uploading rules have been updated. -No encode of the same film after an Internal release!

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Second batch of inactive users with bad ratio will be deleted soon.for any concern contact scenetime.

From tiny seeds, allegations that Usenet provider Giganews is actually an FBI-run operation spread far and wide last week. Now, in an attempt to quieten the wild claims and maintain privacy, Giganews sister company Data Foundry has sent a DMCA notice to the Internet Archive to have a several stored files removed. On the morning of September 11, 2014, TorrentFreak was greeted with one of the most unusual emails we’ve ever received. Sent from an alleged former employee of Giganews who identified himself as Nick Caputo, the email contained serious allegations about his former employer. Caputo told us that he’d begun working at the company in 2009 and as a “huge pirate” he loved to help people download “all the rich multimedia content they could.” But that was just the beginning. The email outlined Caputo’s rise through the company through two quick promotions in two-and-a-half years. However, it quickly descended into allegations that far from being a straight-down-the-line newsgroup provider, Giganews is in fact an FBI-run operation. Caputo says he discovered this after getting into a dispute with the company about removing child abuse material and elevating his complaint to the FBI. TorrentFreak decided not to run with the story, despite clear indications that Caputo is who he claimed he was. The story, which had plenty of detail, just didn’t hold up on its own. There was plenty of ‘evidence’ provided but the problem was that none of it added up to a level of proof that we’d be prepared to stand behind. But four days later and after being contacted by Caputo, Cryptome published the email and documents originally sent to TorrentFreak and possibly others. The story quickly spread around dozens of sites including Reddit and HackerNews forcing Giganews to respond, acknowledging that Caputo was indeed a former employee but denying the allegations. “This is a hoax. These allegations are 100% false,” the company wrote. “Unfortunately, since his termination, the poster has periodically posted versions of this information online. Sometimes, he tries to misrepresent himself as our CEO and sometimes he posts as himself.” With Giganews criticizing Cryptome for publishing the allegations, Caputo it seemed was not giving up. The archive of evidence originally offered to TF found itself uploaded to Internet Archive from where Caputo hoped it would be spread far and wide. However, according to a new email published by Cryptome, that has now been brought to halt by the issuing of a DMCA notice. Subject: archive.org item subject to copyright claim From:”Internet Archive” Date:Sep 18, 2014 9:41:11 PM Hello, Access to the item at https://archive.org/details/giganews-fbi has been disabled following receipt by Internet Archive of a copyright claim submitted on behalf of Data Foundry, Inc (datafoundry.com). The claim was submitted with information and statements requested by Internet Archive’s Copyright Policy (posted at https://archive.org/about/terms.php near the bottom of the page). If you have questions regarding the claim, please let us know. Sincerely, The Internet Archive Team While Giganews clearly thinks the contents of the archive are defamatory, one has to dig into the details to see where the company has a copyright claim over the file. That can be found in a dump of employee contact details which documents show were obtained from Data Foundry’s intranet. Each employee card has a photograph attached and those are likely to have been taken by a company employee in company time. Also included in the dump is a Giganews appraisal of Caputo’s performance during 2010. It was authored by a manager and the rights to the form will most likely sit with the company. While Giganews would probably write something different today, four years ago the company felt that Caputo was “the go-to guy” for getting stuff done on nights, ranking his overall performance as “exceeding” the standard required. “Giganews is in the impossible position of proving a negative,” the company said in a statement. “If we say our list of employees does not include any FBI employees, then they must be ‘using false identities.’ If we say the named FBI operatives don’t look like any of our employee photos, ‘the pictures must have been altered.’ Even the denial itself is used as further evidence of the truth of the accusation. In a court of law, such an accusation would never stand up to scrutiny, but on the Open Internet, opinions can be formed by only a few words on a popular website.” Whether the allegations will now calm down and go away is anyone’s guess, but a DMCA notice to one of the many sources of the file is unlikely to make it disappear forever. http://torrentfreak.com/giganews-resorts-dmca-quieten-fbi-allegations-140922/