The top 10 most downloaded movies on BitTorrent are in again. 'Mad Max: Fury Road' tops the chart this week, followed by ‘Aloha.' 'Terminator Genisys' completes the top three. madmaxThis week we have three newcomers in our chart. Mad Max: Fury Road is the most downloaded movie. The data for our weekly download chart is estimated by TorrentFreak, and is for informational and educational reference only. All the movies in the list are BD/DVDrips unless stated otherwise. RSS feed for the weekly movie download chart. Ranking (last week) Movie IMDb Rating / Trailer 1 (…) Mad Max: Fury Road 8.4 / trailer 2 (8) Aloha 5.3 / trailer 3 (1) Terminator Genisys (Subbed HDrip) 7.0 / trailer 4 (2) Pitch Perfect 2 6.8 / trailer 5 (3) Hot Pursuit 4.9 / trailer 6 (…) Dark Places 6.3 / trailer 7 (4) Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation (HDTS) 8.0 / trailer 8 (…) Cop Car (HDrip) 6.6 / trailer 9 (5) Furious 7 7.6 / trailer 10 (6) Insurgent 6.6 / trailer https://torrentfreak.com/top-10-most...e-week-081715/

Tracker's Name: Yelloworld Genre: General Sign-up Link: http://yelloworld.info/signup.php Additional information: Yelloworld is a Private Torrent Tracker for MOVIES / TV / GENERAL Looks like a new Private Torrent Tracker

ok thank you Sorry { WTB } CLOSED!!!

Two weeks ago the RIAA wrote a letter to BitTorrent Inc, asking the company to block "infringing" downloads in its popular client uTorrent. While it's technically feasible the request treads on a slippery slope. Will the RIAA ask web browsers to block copyright infringing URLs next? With more than 150 million active users per month uTorrent is without a doubt the most popular file-sharing application. Many people use the software to download pirated material, which worries copyright holder groups such as the RIAA. Earlier this month the music group sent a letter to uTorrent’s parent company BitTorrent Inc. urging it to do something about this unauthorized use. Ideally, the RIAA would like infringing hashes to be banned so that users can no longer share these files. “We are willing to establish a process to share the hashes with BitTorrent Inc. on a regular basis so that BitTorrent Inc. can use the information to deter further infringement of those files via its goods and services,” the RIAA wrote in a letter to the company. Technically speaking it’s quite easy to block hashes. Several BitTorrent trackers already do this to keep copyright holders appeased, but thus far this has been a bridge too far for the company behind uTorrent. BitTorrent Inc. hasn’t responded to our repeated requests for comment, but in a brief statement provided to Venturebeat the company notes that the protocol is open source, legal and that they themselves don’t host any infringing content. This is true, but the response also misses the main point. The RIAA’s request isn’t about the protocol or the technology. It’s about adding a piracy prevention mechanism to a neutral piece of software. Should BitTorrent be obliged to do that? Legally speaking BitTorrent Inc isn’t required to take any action. Browser developers don’t have to block infringing URLs either, even though hundreds of millions of people use their software to download or stream pirated content. However, the RIAA’s letter shows that the music group is trying to shift this obvious boundary, and they are not only focusing on BitTorrent. TF has learned that the RIAA and MPAA are pushing for automated pirate site blocking/warning technology. Outright takedown requests to browser vendors are not going to happen anytime soon, but subtle changes may appear. The RIAA previously noted that it would like Google to expand Chrome’s malware warning system to cover pirate sites. This would mean that users see a red warning screen when they attempt to visit known piracy sites. For its part the MPAA is actively lobbying for “site scoring” tools behind closed doors. A leaked copy of the group’s anti-piracy strategies lists site scoring services, which identify pirate sites, as a high priority. The Hollywood group writes that these pirate site lists can then be used as a blocking tool by advertisers, payment processors, domain name registrars, hosting providers and search engines. Web browsers are not mentioned specifically, but it’s not hard to imagine these also appearing on the MPAA’s wish list. In any case, the efforts outlined above show that copyright holders would like to extend anti-piracy measures beyond traditional service providers to software vendors. Today it’s BitTorrent clients but browser vendors may be next. Source torrentfreak.com

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Newsletter August 2015 New BT Revolution 4.0.5 program Team Unforgiven The Unforgiven team celebrated four years of existence in BT Revolution. It is with great pride that we celebrate this event that very few can boast to achieve. 4 years are not four days. 4 years are a piece of a life that they all shared with us all. Invitations The BT Revolution began accepting new users by invitation only. In order to get invitations have to fulfill some conditions such as time recording, received, rate, points and the most important participation in the forum. BT Revolution is much more than a simple P2P site, is a community! RSS RSS is the new feature of the site and BT Revolution program. Create custom fonts and receive your content automatically in the program.

Writers consider legal action against Moscow publishing house after discovering series about president circulated in their names. The Moscow Times reports A Russian publishing house has printed a series of books about Vladimir Putin under the names of prominent western analysts and journalists – without the knowledge or permission of the so-called authors. The Guardian’s Luke Harding, The Economist’s Edward Lucas and US-based Russia expert Donald Jensen say that they did not know anything about Russian-language books attributed to them and produced by the Moscow publishers Algoritm in a series called Project Putin. Harding says that his publisher, Guardian Books, will decide whether to take legal action against Algoritm once it has investigated. “The first I heard about it was a couple of weeks ago when a Russian friend said he’d spotted ‘my book’ in a Moscow bookstore,” said the former Moscow correspondent, adding: “Normally publishers buy rights, translate, then put out an edition.” Nobody But Putin, the book under Harding’s name, is advertised on Algoritm’s website as “developing the idea” of his previous (and officially published) work Mafia State. Lucas, the author of several volumes about Russia, said he had “absolutely no idea” about a book in his name, How the West Lost to Putin, which was published last year by Algoritm. “I have not given permission of any kind. It is clearly a breach of copyright,” he said. Washington-based think-tank fellow Jensen said he was not aware of a volume called Putin and the USA, printed earlier this year under his name and available to buy in Moscow shops. “I have not written such a book in any language. It looks to be a compendium of my [previous] commentaries,” he said. While Russia has strict domestic copyright laws, the country is known for piracy of international music, film and book content. The office of the US trade representative placed Russia on the priority watch list in its annual report on the world’s worst copyright violators in April. The director of Algoritm, Sergei Nikolayev, admitted that prior permission had not been sought from Harding to use his writings in the new book. “If he [Harding] surfaces then we will come to some agreement and pay him a fee,” Nikolayev said. He declined to comment on Lucas’s or Jensen’s claims, saying he was not familiar with their cases and had been off work for several days. Algoritm, founded in 1996, describes itself as one of Russia’s leading publishers specialising in controversial political and social content. It has printed works by a number of senior Russian officials including deputy prime minister Dmitry Rogozin and nationalist firebrand Vladimir Zhirinovsky. All the books in question appear in the Project Putin series, which consists of more than 20 titles about the president and his political views. Other titles in the collection include those apparently authored by former US secretary of state Henry Kissinger, murdered Russian opposition politician Boris Nemtsov and Russian political scientist Andrei Piontkovsky. Piontkovsky said he had given permission for his writings to be published in three titles for Algoritm and praised the series on Putin. “It’s a good series and they have put out a lot of good books,” he said. Moscow-based American journalist Michael Bohm also said that abook published in his name, President Putin’s Mistake, had been printed without his knowledge. Bohm, a former Moscow Times editor, said he had been contacted by the publishers in April about a possible collaboration, but discussions fizzled out without anything being signed. The material in the book was taken from his interviews and articles, Bohm said, including work originally published in English. “When you translate someone’s work, there’s always the risk of translation and mistranslation … there are mistakes in there,” said Bohn, adding that Algoritm had not responded to his query after he discovered the book last month. Algoritm head Nikolayev said in an interview with radio station Ekho Moskvy on Sunday that the publishing house had held talks with Bohm. “I think that we will sign an agreement and everything will be fine,” Nikolayev said. http://www.theguardian.com/world/201...g-luke-harding

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An Australian court has severely crimped the ability of a film rights holder to pursue individuals who may have illegally watched its film online. In a landmark ruling earlier this year, Australia’s Federal Court said that Dallas Buyers Club LLC and Voltage Pictures could require Internet service providers including iiNet to hand over details of some 4,726 individuals in Australia who had watched the the 2013 movie “Dallas Buyers Club” for free via BitTorrent. But in a ruling on Friday, Federal judge Justice Nye Perram removed much of the bite of the earlier ruling. Perram said that Dallas Buyers Club should post a A$600,000 (US$441,000) bond before it could have access to the subscriber data and send letters seeking payment from the alleged copyright infringers. Perram said that his decision was intended to prevent Dallas Buyers Club LLC from intimidating Internet users and to prevent it from profiting from doing so, a practice known as “speculative invoicing.” In a previous ruling in May on the same case Perram had required Dallas Buyers Club LLC to show the court the text of the letters it would send, and also show the court the prepared transcript of phone calls its agents might make to the alleged infringers. “Having had access to what it is that DBC proposes to demand … and the potential revenue it might make if it breached its undertaking to the Court not to demand such sums, it seems to me that I should set the bond at a level which will ensure that it will not be profitable for it to do so,” Perram said. He also explained that as Dallas Buyers Club LLC has no legal presence in Australia the courts would have no sanction over the company if it were in breach of its rulings. The company was understood to be seeking four kinds of payment from the alleged infringers: for downloading and making a permanent copy; a one-off license fee for redistributing the film by uploading it; further damages based on how many films the infringer had stored on their computer; and, reimbursement of Dallas Buyers Club LLC’s costs in pursuing the infringers. Perram said that he had agreed with payments for downloading and retrieving the cost of the action. But he said that Dallas Buyers Club LLC’s court action also failed because he denied the one-off license cost and penalizing infringers for other movies. Australia has high levels of Internet piracy and has seen a number of different cases go to court, most of which have favoured the ISPs. The platforms have argued that the film and TV industries in Australia should do more to provide legal alternatives to piracy by setting up online video services that deliver content quickly and cheaply. Australia now has more than four native streaming video services. In March they were joined by Netflix, which in only a matter of months is understood to have become the market leader. http://variety.com/2015/biz/asia/aus...se-1201570013/

New research shows that BitTorrent clients and BitTorrent Sync can can be exploited for Denial of Service attacks. With the help of the popular file-sharing protocol an attacker can reflect and amplify traffic through fellow file-sharers, boosting the original bandwidth 120 times. With dozens of millions of active users at any given point in the day the BitTorrent protocol is a force to be reckoned with. While BitTorrent swarms are relatively harmless, a new paper published by City University London researcher Florian Adamsky reveals that there’s potential for abuse. The paper, titled ‘P2P File-Sharing in Hell: Exploiting BitTorrent Vulnerabilities to Launch Distributed Reflective DoS Attacks’, shows that various BitTorrent protocols can be used to amplify Denial of Service attacks. Through various experiments Adamsky has confirmed that the vulnerability affects the uTP, DHT, Message Stream Encryption and BitTorrent Sync protocols. The attacks are most effective through the BitTorrent Sync application where the original bandwidth can be increased by a factor of 120. For traditional torrent clients such as uTorrent and Vuze the impact is also significant, boosting attacks by 39 and 54 times respectively. Speaking with TF, Adamsky states that it’s relatively easy to carry out a distributed reflective Denial of Service (DRDoS) attack via BitTorrent. The attacker only needs a valid info-hash, or the “secret” in case of BitTorrent Sync. “This attack should not be so hard to run, since an attacker can collect millions of possible amplifiers by using trackers, DHT or PEX,” he explains. “With a single BitTorrent Sync ping message, an attacker can amplify the traffic up to 120 times.” BitTorrent Inc has been notified about the vulnerabilities and patched some in a recent beta release. For now, however, uTorrent is still vulnerable to a DHT attack. Vuze was contacted as well but has yet to release an update according to the researcher. For users of BitTorrent-based software there is no security concern other than the fact that people are participating in a DDoS attack without their knowledge. The vulnerability mostly leads to a lot of wasted bandwidth. Source torrentfreak.com

Just a quick weekend update, There has been some new releases added to the board today, They included some superb live cds by Heart, Blue Oyster Cult and Journey. Drop in and get your ultra classic tunes, Only from Rockhard Lossless. Cya SD

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How’s piracy going? Piracy has been a huge topic of 2015, with new legislation and landmark legal cases. In June, the government passed a controversial website blocking law to much criticism. Both the government and the opposition in the Senate supported the new law, which would effectively introduce an “internet filter” across the country. The new bill allows copyright holders such as record labels, film studios and video game publishers to apply to the Federal Court for all Australian internet providers to block overseas websites that facilitate piracy. The rights holders must show proof that the sites’ sole purpose is to host and supply copyrighted material illegally before they are blocked. This means that sites like The Pirate Bay and illegal sports streaming site SportStream.tv will likely be some of the first to go. We haven’t seen any sites blocked as of yet, but expect to see them soon. The landmark case of Dallas Buyers Club v iiNet has all but ended last week too, when the Federal Court slapped a hefty $600,000 bond onto DBC if they wish to pursue downloaders. This is looking to be a big deterrent, because of those 4000+ people Has anything happened with the NBN? Sadly, not much at all. It’s still a big old bundle of disappointment, with the government continuing to roll out its multi-technology broadband network. The aim is still for all Aussies to have a minimum speed connection of 25Mbps by 2020, despite the fact that the USA has deemed 25Mbps the bare minimum for an internet connection to be classified as broadband. Good news for regional users though, the first of the new NBN satellites will be launching in October, allowing for faster and cheaper broadband for those in remote areas. Setting up a streaming service 2015 has been the year that streaming services have taken off. So what are your options and how do you set them up? The first name that will come to most people’s lips is Netflix, the US giant that launched here in March. It’s also the easiest service to access and sign up to, with apps on every device you could possibly want to watch a TV show or movie on, including your smart TV, video game console, iPad and phone. Signing up is as easy as going onto their website and filling in the form for a free 30 day trial, after which you select which plan you would like to continue on with. Those plans start at $8.99, which allows you to watch Netflix on one device at a time, the next tier is $11.99 which lets you watch in HD and on 2 devices at a time, and the most expensive $14.99 tier lets you watch Netflix on up to 4 devices at a time and in Ultra HD. If it’s just for yourself or you and your partner, the mid-range $11.99 tier is all you need, unless you are one of the lucky few with NBN, then you might think about the premium subscription that gives you Ultra HD access. Local offerings include Foxtel’s Presto, Stan and the struggling Quickflix. Presto and Stan arguably have the best offering of TV shows and movies, but both have horrible device support and their web browser interface is dreadful. Still, if you’re after the best selection of content, they both have 30 day free trials and sign up is dead easy on their websites. What about streaming music services? There’s no denying that music streaming services are the way of the future for the industry. They provide an all you can eat buffet of just about any song you can think of for around $10 a month. The industry leader right now is Spotify, which offers both a paid tier for $11.99 or a free tier with ads. Apple made a splash earlier in the year with Apple Music, which is challenging Spotify with its Taylor Swift filled library and Dr Dre filled radio station. The library on offer is good and so is the interface, however loyal Spotify fans aren’t swapping over due to its lack of great situational playlists.

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The passage of time is unstoppable, and time brings change to all things, even the staff page. It is with great pleasure we announce new additions to our staff team. Please welcome TARS, lawnmower, GandalfTheWhite, and newman. We are also saddened to announce the departures of SevenNationArmy, Oblivion, PepoteRouge, and chai. We will miss all of them, and would like to thank them for all of the time they volunteered to help keep our beloved site running. Finally, Logos and myself (Bourbon) have joined the administrators team.

Sorry maybe next time

Lobbying body Open Rights Group (ORG) has responded to a consultation by the UK’s Intellectual Property Office (IPO) on proposals to increase the maximum prison sentence for criminal online copyright infringement to 10 years. The would bring sanctions for online copyright infringement in line with those for physical copyright infringement. ORG agrees with the IPO that the online environment should not confer less protection for copyright holders. However, the IPO’s proposals could mean that people who share links and files online without any financial gain could be punished more severely than criminals who commit physical theft, which has a maximum penalty of seven years. According to Executive Director, Jim Killock, the key problem is that copyright infringement requires no ‘intent’ to harm. “Someone who shares copyrighted files can face a criminal charge because of the apparent value of the copies shared. The value of share files is hard to estimate and can easily be exaggerated. This makes the criminal copyright offence very wide and could mean heavy-handed sentences for ordinary people and businesses,” he warned. “We are asking the IPO to narrow the criminal charge to businesses and people intending to cause serious harm. Ten years in jail is a very harsh punishment, which should be reserved for real criminals who are making financial gains from copyright infringement,” he concluded.

The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) sent a letter to BitTorrent last week asking the company to help stop copyrighted infringement of its members’ content. Brad Buckles, RIAA’s executive vice president of anti-piracy, asked BitTorrent CEO Eric Klinker to “live up to” comments made by former chief content officer Matt Mason. Two quotes by Mason stand out in particular: “We don’t endorse piracy.” and “If you’re using BitTorrent for piracy, then you’re doing it wrong.” Both of these remain accurate, but the RIAA wants to see BitTorrent do more. We contacted BitTorrent to get their stance on the letter, and the company responded to VentureBeat with the following statement: Our position is that they are barking up the wrong tree, as it seems they were with their approach to CBS last week. As informed commentary in the past few days has made plain, there is a distinction between the BitTorrent protocol and piracy. Piracy is a real thing, but BitTorrent, Inc. is not the source. We do not host, promote, or facilitate copyright infringing content and the protocol, which is in the public domain, is a legal technology. We do however have a direct-to-fan platform for artists and content owners to use. More than 30,000 publishers have signed up for it to date, including some of the most popular music artists around the world. The protocol is also used by some of the biggest online businesses, including Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, Blizzard, Wikipedia, Etsy, Internet Archive and many other businesses, governments, universities and nonprofits. The CBS reference alludes to last week’s news, reported by Billboard, that a 16-member coalition that includes the RIAA sent a letter to CBS CEO Les Moonves alleging that CNET “has made various computer, web, and mobile applications available that induce users to infringe copyrighted content by ripping the audio or the audio and video from what might be an otherwise legitimate stream.” CBS owns CNET, which has a download section on its site that hosts hundreds of thousands of applications, and some of them aren’t very liked by the industry, according to the Billboard report. That letter was similar to the one sent to BitTorrent, and the argument CBS counters with is also in the same vein. Namely, the legality of such software hinges on “fair use,” and the responsibility falls on the user of the software, not its creator or distributor. You can read the RIAA’s letter to BitTorrent, which was first published earlier this week by Mashable, below. http://www.scribd.com/doc/273840673/...-to-BitTorrent

Destin Sandlin, operator of the Smarter Every Day YouTube channel, is becoming one of the faces of the fight against "freebooting", the act of pulling videos from YouTube, and placing them in a Facebook post without the owner's approval. Sandlin receives advertising revenue for his popular videos, which help fund future episodes and his children's college funds. While Sandlin's YouTube channel has three million subscribers, he could potentially have more viewers and subscribers if other entities didn't freeboot his material. This is causing Sandlin and other YouTube channel operators to not only lose money, but also allow Facebook to profit off his intellectual property. Sandlin says he noticed a freebooting incident earlier this month, involving his July 31 video on kangaroo pouches. "Somebody took the video off of YouTube, cut out the advertisement and then uploaded it to Facebook with just the parts they were interested in and then Facebook was running Juicy Fruit ads on the side of my video that had been cut," says Sandlin, who responded to a tweet notifying him of the situation. .@Jvfordham I'm really sad to see that @JuicyFruit has paid to advertise on stolen content on @FaceBook. pic.twitter.com/sg2bDOtKaG — Smarter Every Day (@smartereveryday) August 3, 2015 Sandlin says it takes him ten minutes to file the proper paperwork notifying the social media giant about copyright infringement. In one Smarter Every Day episode, he explains Facebook freebooting in-depth. Sandlin says the longer it takes Facebook to remove freebooted videos, the more money it makes. Tech Alabama reached out to Facebook for a comment, and a spokesperson offered this statement: "We take intellectual property rights very seriously. This is not new to Facebook. We have a number of measures in place to address potential infringements on our service. For years we've used the Audible Magic system to help prevent unauthorized video content. We also have reporting tools in place to allow content owners to report potential copyright infringement, and upon receiving a valid notice we remove unauthorized content. We also suspend accounts of people with repeated IP (intellectual property) violations when appropriate. "As video continues to grow on Facebook, we're actively exploring further solutions to help IP owners identify and manage potential infringing content, tailored for our unique platform and ecosystem. "This is a significant technical challenge to solve, but we have a team working on it and expect to have more to share this summer. As with all products and experiences on Facebook, we're listening to feedback, and want to continue to improve our content management tools for people and publishers." Sandlin calls this response "lip service", and he believes Facebook should make a stronger effort finding a sound solution to the freebooting problem. "We're talking about the people who made facial recognition software here," Sandlin remarks, "So for them to say that this is a serious technical challenge for them, is comical." Sandlin is becoming a national figure in the fight against freebooting. He has voiced his opinions in various online publications including Slate and Medium. While he stands to financially benefit from effective freebooting reforms, Sandlin says he is speaking out for not just himself, but also current and future YouTube channel operators. "I don't want to fight Facebook. I don't want to fight anybody," says Sandlin, "The only reason I'm doing this is because there's a lot of other people that don't have an online voice so it's important for someone who can speak to speak for those who can't."

His name is Priyank Paradeshi and he works for IBM in California as a Senior Manager. But that have not excited this educated and top-class company's employee as he felt that there is something related to movies that would give him a kick. So he uploaded a piracy print of Baahubali online. But what was revealed when this IT guy was nabbed by Jabalpur Police a month back is so alarming. In a saddest development, quite educated and employee of a world class company is the head of a piracy gang that is situated across the globe. From the guys who record movies with camcorders to the ones who send it to bosses like Priyank in USA, Khan Saahab in France and Khurram in Australia, to the ones like Lingarajan who prints and sells DVDs in local markets; they are the people involved in this piracy ring that pirated nearly 1243 movies till date including Baahubali, PK and Bajrangi Bhaijaan. With techies as bosses, the gang held 65 websites under its control for people to download movies. After Priyank, nearly 11 other people were arrested by Jabalpur police, after Telugu Film Chamber of Commerce started digging into the matter of Baahubali piracy print uploaded to internet on the same day of release date, July 10th. Quite sad for well settled and highly educated people like Priyank involving with piracy.

No one's saying the world needed any reminders of just how wretched Pixels is, but at least this one serves as an object lesson in how broken anti-piracy laws and policies are. Entura International, an anti-piracy firm representing Columbia Pictures, served Vimeo with takedown notices for a number of videos with the word "pixels" in the title. While the move was ostensibly aimed at eliminating pirated versions of the recent film from the video-hosting site, Entura only managed to inconvenience a number of independent artists. Incredibly, the only actual instance of Pixels footage being removed was the film's trailer. Score one for Entura on that one, for wiping away at least one promotional source that could have steered someone into seeing the movie. Also removed was Patrick Jean's award-winning short film Pixels, which inspired both the premise and the title of the Adam Sandler film. News of the takedowns comes from TorrentFreak, with the full text of Entura's takedown notice available right here. Among the other creators affected were NeMe, a non-profit group that hosted a 2006 short film called Pixels that was produced on a "shoestring budget" and "infringes no copyright," the group told Vimeo. The takedown notice affected a number of other Vimeo posts as well, personal projects that, in multiple cases, pre-date the existence of the Sandler film. There's a student-produced music video for the band, The Pixels. There's also "Pantone Pixels," a 2011 project with a description that reads: "A personal project that took me a very long time." While Columbia has every right to protect its investment, takedown notices such as this one highlight the flaws in the way the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) operates. The "kill first, ask questions later" policy at Vimeo, YouTube and other video-hosting services removes targeted content as a first measure. A subsequent investigation often clears up the confusion and halts the takedown, but only after the original content creator's been put through the headache of having their creation unreasonably yanked from the Internet. Here's the real problem: The DMCA takedown process is a tool in the hands of cash-rich companies that have the ability to throw money at firms like Entura. It might have bitten Columbia this time, since the only actual Pixels footage removed seems to have been an official trailer. But what about those other content creators, the ones that didn't pirate anything and have now been inconvenienced simply for using "pixels" in a title? It's a messy situation, and one that's unlikely to change until someone in Washington rolls up their sleeves and takes a good, long look at the current state of copyright law.

Anti-piracy mechanisms block reverse-engineering and security studies The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has used the DEF CON hacking conference to launch a campaign to stamp out digital-rights management (DRM) technology. In an ironic twist, the cyber-rights warriors hope to use the hated Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) to kill off mechanisms that attempt to thwart piracy and reverse-engineering. One of the DMCA's most pernicious parts is Section 1201, which makes it a criminal offense to circumvent technological controls on copyrighted products, or to distribute tools to do so. In the past this has been used to prosecute 2600 magazine after it published the secret to breaking the anti-copying technology in DVDs. Cory Doctorow, who rejoined the EFF to get behind this, thinks Section 1201 can be used for good. There's very little case law on Section 1201, he said, because the industry is very careful about when it prosecutes. It went after 2600 because the case would be heard in New York, where judges aren't tech savvy, and because most members of the judiciary aren't keen on hackers. But there have been successes. In 2004, Lexmark brought a Section 1201 case [PDF] against a company that was refilling its ink cartridges and resetting the chip inside to fool the printer into accepting them. The judge ruled against them on the grounds that the only copyrighted work in the cartridge was the DRM itself. But now, with the internet of things, huge numbers of devices have copyrighted material inside, and there's no way to check the security of them because of Section 1201. As a result, we have devices like insulin pumps and home security systems that have never been scrutinized because researchers don't want to break the law. "Section 1201 is deadly for security," Doctorow said. "We have one methodology for security that works, and that's disclosure and adversarial peer review. It's the same methodology that we used to go from the dark ages to the enlightenment." But, he pointed out, security researchers break Section 1201 all the time – they just don't talk about it. So the EFF wants to change that. One of the advantages America has is that there's a constitution and an independent judiciary, so stupid laws can get struck down if they are ruled unconstitutional, Doctorow said. That's how strong encryption was legalized, and he thinks it can do the same on DRM. "We want to know about the work you're doing and want to structure research so it's as litigation-proof as possible," he said. We also want to ensure that research is optimized to make sure any court judgement is a shining beacon on the hill, not a terrifying icon of how bad it is to go up against the machine. Once you eliminate Section 1201, then DRM will die out, he posited. If DRM goes in the US, then other countries will follow suit, he predicted, because "when one party in a suicide pact pulls out, the other one does too."

The biggest thing BitTorrent's Bleep messaging app can offer users is privacy, so it's rightly beefing up that feature even more. In BT's latest engineering blog post, senior software engineer Steven Siloti explains how his team has improved the security of asynchronous offline messages. The feature, which made its way to the app in December 2014, allows a recipient to receive offline messages even if the sender hasn't connected to the internet yet. Previously, both users had to be online for messages to be exchanged -- remember that Bleep doesn't have servers, so that update was a big deal. Anyway, BT's engineers were apparently not content with the security level of offline messages, because if someone manages to steal a user's "offline key," he could unlock every offline message he intercepted from the same user in the past. Note that this isn't a problem for online messages, because Bleep uses an encrypted tunnel protocol to protect those. In order to solve that issue with offline messages, they tweaked the system to generate new ephemeral keys for user pairs (first produced when two users add each other) each time the older one is used. Here's how BT explains it (we highlighted the important bits): ...the same DHT facility we use to exchange offline messages can also be used to exchange ephemeral keys. When Alice and Bob first add each other as contacts they generate ephemeral keypairs and publish the keys' public components in the DHT, just as they would an offline message. Alice and Bob save each other's offline ephemeral keys for future use. When Alice wants to send an offline message to Bob she uses their saved ephemeral keys to encrypt the message. When Bob receives the message he uses his copy of the ephemeral keys to decrypt it. After decrypting the message, Bob discards his ephemeral key and publishes a new one in the DHT. Once Alice sees Bob's new ephemeral key she replaces the one she has stored for him. Simply put, BT promises that nobody without the appropriate key can access offline PMs. Plus, it'll be very hard to steal those keys, because Bleep will now replace them with new ones after they're used. If you'd like to give the privacy-focused messaging app a shot, check out its website with links to its iTunes, Google Play, Windows and Mac downloads.

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Tracker's Name: TVChaosUK Genre: TV Sign-up Link: https://tvchaosuk.com/signup.php Additional information: Official IRC Channel #chaosuk @ irc.p2p-network.net