Regulars of fileheaven.org may have noticed the site has been gone for quite a while now and may have started to worry. As I previously noted in an older article, the admin group were notorious gamblers and lost the database on prior occasions to cover their choice of lifestyle:
https://www.dead-donkey.com/modules/news/index.php?id=477
However, we have luckily secured the database and code on the streets of Makati City, in a bar called "Mixed Nuts". We bring it back to you in all its glory on the following URL:
https://fileheaven.dead-donkey.com
Looks like China isn't the only place censoring your interwebs
Quote:
Websites that link to pirated music and movies or sell counterfeit goods could soon be blocked in America.
US politicians are about to consider legislation which includes a raft of measures to clamp down on such sites.
The Protect IP bill gives government and copyright holders tools to stop Americans reaching illegal material.
Digital rights groups said they were "dismayed" by the proposals and feared the effect the final law would have on the internet.
Bad actors
"The Protect IP Act targets the most egregious actors, and is an important first step to putting a stop to online piracy and sale of counterfeit goods," said Senator Patrick Leahy in a statement released as the bill began its progress through the US legislature.
"Both law enforcement and rights holders are currently limited in the remedies available to combat websites dedicated to offering infringing content and products," said Senator Leahy, one of 10 politicians backing the proposal.
The Protect IP legislation is a re-write of the controversial Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act (COICA) that narrowly failed to become law in late 2010.
The law is being opposed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) which warned that it was no less problematic than its predecessor.
"We are no less dismayed by this most recent incarnation than we were with last year's draft," said Abigail Phillips, senior staff attorney at the EFF. She said the remedies suggested in Protect IP raised "serious First Amendment concerns about lawful expression".
Sites targeted under the Protect IP (Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property) Act would be removed from the internet's address books making them hard to find by their well-known domain name.
It allows the blocking of any domains that infringing sites switch to in order to avoid blocking. The bill also contains clauses that would force search engines to stop listing so-called infringing sites in their indexes.
As well as letting government take action, the Protect IP Act would allow copyright holders to apply for court orders to get sites blocked or de-listed.
Payment firms and ad networks could also be told to stop providing services to sites found to be infringing copyright or peddling fake goods.
Sherwin Sly, deputy legal director at the Public Knowledge digital rights group, said Protect IP threatened to unravel the consensus that the net is built upon.
If passed, it would "accelerate" the net down a path that could lead to governments everywhere sanitising online content so citizens only get what those in power think they should see, he said.
Looks like our friendly pirate friends have cracked HDCP and leaked the master key code onto the web.
This will make copying HD content much easier, such as movies from your cable or satellite provider
Quote:
An antipiracy code used in set-top boxes, Blu-ray and DVD players has been cracked and published on the Internet, and as a result, we may soon see devices on the market that allow people to make unauthorized copies of movies.
Intel confirmed to CNET yesterday that code posted anonymously to the Internet earlier this week is the secret master key to the HDCP (High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection) protocol. Intel created HDCP to be used for ensuring that only authorized devices are playing copyright-protected video and audio, and it licenses the technology to hardware manufacturers.
The master key is supposed to be secret from everyone except a central HDCP authority. It is used to generate keys in consumer devices for encrypting the data and verifying that the devices have HDCP licenses. From this master key you can compute all the sub keys.
"Those keys let you play god for this protocol," said Paul Kocher, president of Cryptography Research. "It's only a matter of time before someone produces a device that captures high-definition content" and allows people to play and record movies at will. Kocher predicted that within three to five years such a product would hit the market. "We will see people in China building TV sets that aren't properly licensed (for HDCP) and don't work the way the protocol is supposed to work," he said.
This isn't your typical rip-and-burn type of piracy. Any devices using the leaked HDCP code would be capturing the content as it is being transmitted in real-time to a display.
"It's the digital equivalent of pointing a video camera at the TV," Kocher said. However, this means that advanced features and menu items, such as turning off subtitles, are completely lost.
In the meantime, people will continue to pirate content just as they always have. "HDCP has apparently not succeeded in stopping infringed copies of content from showing up all over the place, and that's not likely to change," said Ed Felten, director of the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton University. (Felten discusses details of the key leak here.)
Intel spokesman Tom Waldrop downplayed the significance of the master key leak and said it wouldn't hurt Intel's business. Making pirate devices won't be easy because the technology is built in to the chip, he said.
"In order for someone to use those keys to obtain digital content in an unauthorized way, they would have to implement them in silicon," he said. "As a practical matter, that's a difficult and costly thing to do."
In the case of any unauthorized devices being marketed, Intel will protect its intellectual property.
"We believe that this technology will remain effective. There's a large install base of licensed devices including several hundred licensees that will continue to use it and in any case, were a (circumvention) device to appear that attempts to take advantage of this particular hack there are legal remedies, particularly under the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act)," he said. "It's business as usual going forward."
However, prosecution is difficult when the criminals are in another country. "Piracy is driven by criminal enterprises, and it's not easy to sue them in U.S. courts," Kocher said.
Meanwhile, Intel is investigating who posted the code and how it was obtained, Waldrop said.
Kocher speculated that it came from someone who either had access to the keys during the development process or someone involved in testing HDCP-based devices or the chips that go in them.
There are other measures movie studios can do to protect their content, according to Kocher.
"They can put forensic marks into the content or tracing information before it is output," he said. "That said, there is no practical response to repair the protocol while maintaining compatibility. From a studio or security perspective these kinds of flaws are quite fatal...you either start from scratch or live with the problem."
It was only a matter of time before the proverbial cat was out of the bag. In two separate projects nine years ago, researchers revealed that they had uncovered serious weaknesses in the HDCP protocol.
In August 2001, Dutch encryption expert Niels Ferguson called the technology "fatally flawed," but said he would not post details about his research on the Internet for fear of running afoul of the DMCA.
Then in November 2001, a team of researchers from Carnegie Mellon University released a paper drawing the same conclusion. They said the protocol could be broken by using keys from at least 39 devices to reconstruct the secret master key.
"If the protocol had been designed properly from the beginning, we wouldn't be in this situation," Kocher said. "This isn't the way crypto is supposed to be done. This was preventable."
Aside from the broken copy protection scheme, HDCP has other problems, Felten said.
"HDCP does complicate some of the legitimate ways people want to plug their devices together," he said. "People complain that receivers don't work when everything is said to be HDCP-compatible but there are slight differences in the implementations."
Asked to respond why Intel has remained committed to a technology that has been proven to be flawed, Waldrop said because the technology protects content and people are using it.
"Essentially, it works and it continues to be effective," he said. "There are always methods to circumvent any such technology and there always have been. But the difficulty of those, combined with the business model we have in the industry for device makers and licensing and the enforcement avenues and regulations means, overall, it's still a very robust system. That doesn't change."
According to a recent article on the IT news related site Golem, Hollywood wants to have control over the search engines considering pirate copies of Hollywood movies.
They hired a company to investigate the pirate spreading of the new Star Trek movie.
The complete document from ViaCom is available here in PDF format.
An interesting result of the detective work is available here in PDF format.
Quote:
Search Engine: Google
Search engines provide quick and easy access to pirated movies. If one types in “watch
free movies” on Google, the first three unsponsored search results are “leech” sites with links to
pirated movies. The fourth search result is Hulu.com, a legitimate video site.
...
Conclusion:
The flood of stolen content currently available online – including every major theatrical
film within hours of release – poses an immediate threat to the motion picture industry, which in
2007 supported 2.5 million jobs, $41.1 billion in wages, and had a trade surplus of $13.6 billion.
The prevalence of pirated material online provides a strong disincentive for investment in motion
pictures and other professional video content, which are well-understood to be key drivers of
broadband adoption. Consumers are at risk for fraud or identity theft when they are deceived
into providing sensitive financial information to professional quality pirate websites. As more
fully described in the comments of MPAA in this docket, content creators must have the legal
and regulatory flexibility to use technological tools in partnership with Internet service providers
to stem the tide of online copyright theft.
This may sound ridiculous, but is actually true. There is a party in Sweden that stands on the side of p2p piracy. In yesterday's elections they managed to get enough votes to send one representative into the European Parliament.
Sweden's pro-file sharing Pirate Party is on its way to Brussels having secured more than 7 percent of the country's votes in the European Parliament elections, according to early exit polls.
Maybe the RIAA will find a way to sue people for just not buying.
Quote:
... teens using P2P networks to acquire music fell by 6% - not a dramatic decline, but it does support the shift from P2P networking to streaming media. It also appears that teens aren't burning CDs that much either, as this activity dropped by 26% in 2008. Conversely, teens using social networking and internet radio saw dramatic increases in 2008 - a growth from 34% in 2007 to over half in 2008.
Regulars of fileheaven.org may have noticed the site has been gone for a few days now and may have started to worry.
Apparantly, one of the admins has sold the domain name and database as part of a gambling debt (you may have seen the poker thread in their smalltalk section that has had a lot of racist posts removed after he announced he was tens of thousands of euros in debt).
Unfortunately, I have been unable to contact him or the new owner of the site (and database). I'll post more news on the forum as it occurs:
https://forum.dead-donkey.com/
The FCC has released its 67 page order, which spells out in profound detail just how unacceptable it found Comcast’s discriminatory policy against the BitTorrent protocol. In fact, the order is so berating to Comcast that one would think it was written by the very BitTorrent uploaders the ISP sought to throttle. Today’s official order supplements the August 1, 2008, announcement by Chairman Kevin Martin, who agreed with public complaints that Comcast was in violation of net neutrality standards.
Proportionate to the "crime"? That's a lot of jailtime for a civil issue... there's no mention of profit either, which makes it rather odd to get sentanced to more time than a rapist
Quote:
A US man has been jailed for 30 months for copyright infringement over his involvement in the warez scene.
David M. Fish, 26, of Woodbury, Connecticut, was further sentenced to three years on probation this week after he pleaded guilty to criminal copyright infringement and circumvention offences. The computer equipment used by Fish to commit the offences was forfeited.
Fish served as the site operator as well as a scripter, equipment supplier, broker and encoder for warez sites between January 2003 and July 2005, according to court papers. His work involved circumventing copyright controls on DVDs and uploading content.
The case is part of Operation Copycat, an investigation by the FBI and the US Attorney’s Office targeting online warez groups that illegally distribute newly-released movies, games, software and music online. Operation Copycat has resulted in 40 convictions thus far as part of a larger federal crackdown against the illegal distribution of copyrighted materials, known as Operation Site Down.
More background on the case, and on Operation Copycat in general, can be found in a DoJ statement here.
I forget how it works... Virgin / NTL denying something probably means they've just been caught planning it.
Quote:
[Virgin Media] Denies recent reports that it plans to run a trial of the controversial three-strikes-and-your-out policy proposed by the British Phonographic Industry(BPI).
This past Monday I mentioned how Virgin Media was reportedly gearing up for a trial run of the controversial three strikes-and-your-out policy that terminates the internet connections of those accused of illegal file-sharing.
Now comes a report that there is no planned trial run after all and that Virgin Media in fact feels the policy is too draconian.
“There is no pilot in place," said a Virgin Media representative. "There are no details to confirm as we haven’t come to any sort of agreement with the BPI."
“The BPI wants the Government and ISPs to adopt the three-strikes system, we don’t want to go down to that level as it raises questions about privacy and funding.”
The trial was expected to begin in a few months.
In response to the denials of a pilot program by Virgin Media, a BPI spokesperson said “We can’t talk about the pilot and can’t give out details but we have outlined plans with Virgin and do have a dialogue with them. But there is no confirmation of a pilot.”
It's hard to determine who's telling the truth here, but with the British Govt. threatening legislation if ISPs refuse to begin disconnecting illegal file-sharers it's not too much of a stretch to presume Virgin Media has some sort of plans to test the feasibility of such an effort. It's either this or it may be mulling over whether to challenge the policy outright and fight efforts to turn it into a data cop for the entertainment industry.
Very annoying if its true, but the newsgroup / usenet access is very good!
If you are on virgin media, I encourage you to look into newsgroups...
https://www.dead-donkey.com/modules/news/index.php?id=364
It is a rather efficient way of uploading and pre-spreading releases for those that enjoy that kind of activity.
A full guide and info can be found at the above link.
Quote:
Virgin Media in the UK has announced that it is working with the music industry to chase down its file-sharing customers and disconnect them from the internet. At the same time, it will offer an enhanced service which will see its customers get free Usenet binaries access, untraceable by the music industry.
Anyone familiar with Virgin Media’s advertising (previously Telewest/Blueyonder) will recall their TV commercials over the last couple of years which centered round the ability to download greater and greater amounts of media, faster than ever before.
Their ‘Best Things in Life Are Free’ TV campaign, complete with eye-catching computer graphics, with movie and musical themes throughout left the viewer with a clear message: if you want to download music and movies quickly (for free), join us. Now, in 2008, the situation has changed dramatically. Kind of.
According to a report, the ISP has had a change of heart and will be working in collaboration with the British Phonographic Industry (BPI). Starting with a pilot scheme, the BPI will deviate from its stated policy of not going after individual file-sharers by targeting Virgin Media customers on P2P networks and reporting them to the ISP.
Seems there's a big push to extend copyright with little payback to the public domain... and more amazingly, someone wrote to their mp and they listened!
With a novel idea recently being proposed in Germany where Copyright holders are taxed to prevent them "squatting" on patents/copyright and opening up the market, it seems a bit arse about face to blanket extend existing copyrights without anything going back to the public.
Copyright term extension made a brief appearance in the British House of Commons recently. A currently unidentified Member of Parliament objected to the bill when it was about to be discussed in the House, stopping it in its tracks.
Open Rights Group is reporting on this recent move, but is currently unable to identify the MP who objected to the reading of the bill. The only thing available is a streaming video which showed what happened. His face is visible at 4:56:57. He is sitting on the far left side of the screen sitting in the front row.
As it stands, the bill is currently going into its second reading. The delay means that the bill will go into its second reading next Friday.
The Open Rights Group says that the delay was the result of the people who wrote to their MP to tell them to not allow the copyright term extension to go through. They are currently requesting all those that have an interest in the copyright extension debate to write to their MP and tell them what the people think about it. They also are asking for European citizens to sign a petition to stop Copyright Term Extension European-wide.
Following the Gowers report on intellectual property law in the UK, the government is now asking for your input on various potential changes, including the right to make copies for personal use. You can count on big content to respond very forcefully against giving you any rights whatsoever - but it's up to you to make sure that your side of the story is heard.
In one fell swoop, Sony destroys any legitimate claims they may have regarding piracy...
Simply insane.
Quote:
The Recording Industry Association of America, the Darth Vader of the entertainment industry, is known for targeting average citizens who download music.
Now the RIAA has taken a new - and wildly outrageous - position. In a lawsut against an Arizona man who refused to knuckle under to a menacing letter from the RIAA, the organization asserts that it is illegal to transfer music from a CD one has purchased to one’s own computer.
From the Washington Post report:
Quote:
Sony BMG’s chief of litigation, Jennifer Pariser, testified that “when an individual makes a copy of a song for himself, I suppose we can say he stole a song.” Copying a song you bought is “a nice way of saying ’steals just one copy,’ ” she said…
The RIAA’s legal crusade against its customers is a classic example of an old media company clinging to a business model that has collapsed. Four years of a failed strategy has only “created a whole market of people who specifically look to buy independent goods so as not to deal with the big record companies,” [New York attorney Ray] Beckerman says. “Every problem they’re trying to solve is worse now than when they started.”
Continuing an aggressive campaign to defend his copyrights, pop star Prince is preparing to file lawsuits within the next few days in three countries–including the United States–against The Pirate Bay. Prince will file similar suits against The Pirate Bay in the U.S., France, a country with laws favorable to copyright owners, and Sweden, where The Pirate Bay is based. In addition, Prince is preparing to take civil action against companies that advertise on The Pirate Bay, many of which are headquartered in Israel, according to John Giacobbi, Web Sheriff’s president. Prince has hired Giacobbi and Web Sheriff, a service that protects copyright materials from Internet piracy, to coordinate the legal challenges against The Pirate Bay and others who the singer believes has violated his copyright.
Giacobbi said Web Sheriff is also helping to launch an investigation into The Pirate Bay’s off-shore connections to determine whether the company is compliant with Swedish and international income and corporation tax laws. The Pirate Bay has already weathered several attempts by the governments of Sweden and the United States to shut down the site. Yet, this is likely the largest civil challenge the Web site has ever faced. Prince, who Giacobbi said has the backing of the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, or IFPI, the group that represents the recording industry worldwide, is only adding to The Pirate Bay’s legal troubles. A prosecutor in Sweden announced that he plans to press charges against five people involved with The Pirate Bay before January 31, 2008, the blog reported. The five are being accused of infringing on intellectual property. Come on Prince, do you really think that you can succeed when gigants as Microsoft or Adobe already failed?
Looks like the intial court case has been won by ShareConnector, however small fines were given to people who had shared material with one another and the host for facilitating this.
i suspect there's probably going to be appeals and complaints but for the time being, ShareConnector an ed2k linking site was accused of facilitating piracy and this accusation was false.
Quote:
Litigation against the popular eDonkey2000 linking site ShareConnector has finally drawn to a conclusion. ShareConnector was accused of criminally facilitating copyright infringement by the Dutch Fiscal and Economic Police (FIOD-ECD), under supervision of the Public Prosecution Service for IP Fraud. Denying the charges, the two sides went to trial. After a nearly year and a half delay, arguments were finally heard this month.
And after all that time, none of the issues surrounding the legality of meta linking were resolved. Instead, three small fines of €250 ($345) - two against the administrators of Releases4U, and one against a hosting provider - were levied for uploading material. The administrator of ShareConnector (Adi), was not fined.
In fact, ShareConnector appears to have prevailed in this extended trail. The judge found that although ShareConnector could be found complicit in copyright infringement, there was not enough evidence for a conviction. Additionally, the court found there was not enough evidence to consider ShareConnector or Releases4U, in part or in whole, a criminal organization.
BREIN, who was looking for a conviction, was not entirely pleased with today's decision. BREIN only filed an initial complaint, however was not engaged in a civil complaint against ShareConnector.
"It is very important that the court ruled explicitly that the activities of such sites can be a criminal offense. That the court ruled in this case that the evidence was insufficient is of course disappointing. The public prosecutor might appeal the ruling or run a next case with more evidence," says Tim Kuik, managing director of BREIN. "Civil judges have repeatedly ruled that operating such a site is unlawful because they structurally organize access to copyright infringing files. This means that BREIN can hold operators liable. In the meantime it remains important that excessive cases are dealt with by criminal authorities. This ruling makes clear that this is in principle possible."
ShareConnector, which has been operating without impediment, now finds itself in a somewhat heightened position. Although this chapter in the online copyright war is over, its fairly evident that BREIN won't concede defeat. An appeal by the public prosecutor is probable sometime in the future, however what defines an appropriate amount of evidence - especially since ShareConnector's basic structure remains unchanged - remains to be seen.
Seem to have hit a spot of bother and are no longer secure
Quote:
DO NOT visit those sites, they have been taken over by F.A.C.T. and are we are no longer in control of the domain. So, just spread the word, those domains are not safe to visit anymore and please do NOT register or post at either one, DDG is down, but DrunkenDonkey is still functioning
This is an absolute classic. The previously posted mediadefender leak seems to have given TPB their smoking gun against a plethora of media companies that have broken the law in their enforcement of draconian anti-piracy laws...
Quote:
Thanks to the email-leakage from MediaDefender-Defenders we now have proof of the things we've been suspecting for a long time; the big record and movie labels are paying professional hackers, saboteurs and ddosers to destroy our trackers.
While browsing through the email we identified the companies that are also active in Sweden and we have tonight reported these incidents to the police. The charges are infrastructural sabotage, denial of service attacks, hacking and spamming, all of these on a commercial level.
The companies that are being reported are the following:
Twentieth Century Fox, Sweden AB
Emi Music Sweden AB
Universal Music Group Sweden AB
Universal Pictures Nordic AB
Paramount Home Entertainment (Sweden) AB
Atari Nordic AB
Activision Nordic Filial Till Activision (Uk) Ltd
Ubisoft Sweden AB
Sony Bmg Music Entertainment (Sweden) AB
Sony Pictures Home Entertainment Nordic AB
9 Months worth of email from Media Defender have been leaked and are now public. This covers tactics, etc.
-={ MediaDefender-Defenders }=-
Date: 2007-09-15
MediaDefender-Defenders proudly presents 9 months worth of
internal MediaDefender emails
By releasing these emails we hope to secure the privacy and
personal integrity of all peer-to-peer users. The emails
contains information about the various tactics and technical
solutions for tracking p2p users, and disrupt p2p services.
A special thanks to Jay Maris, for circumventing there entire
email-security by forwarding all your emails to your gmail
account, and using the really highly secure password: blahbob
So here it is, we hope this is enough to create a viable
defense to the tactics used by these companies, also there
should be enough fuel to keep the p2p bloggers busy for
quite some time.
When TorrentFreak reported that Media Defender (MD) was behind the video site MiiVi, they cast doubt on us. Now, in what is surely the biggest BitTorrent leak ever, nearly 700mb of MD’s emails have gone public. When MD’s Randy Saaf found out we rumbled MiiVi he said, “This is really fucked.” This is too, but much more so.
"I supported him by selling his records and making all that money off him... I don't know the guy, and i didn't like his music... but the money I made.
What a f*cking sh*t."
That Paul Quirk guy has to be the biggest f*ckin moron in the country
Quote:
Prince sparks fury with giveaway
The controversial singer, who is well known for his run-ins with the music establishment is giving away copies of 'Planet Earth'
Pop star Prince has sparked fury among music retailers by giving away his latest album in a Sunday newspaper.
The controversial singer, who is well known for his run-ins with the music establishment, is giving away copies of 'Planet Earth' in the Mail on Sunday and also at a series of London concerts starting next month.
Paul Quirk, co-chairman of the Entertainment Retailers Association, said Prince's decision to give away the album, which is not scheduled to go on sale until July 24 "beggared belief".
"The Artist Formerly Known as Prince should know that with behaviour like this he will soon be the Artist Formerly Available in Record Stores. It's an insult to all those record stores who have supported Prince throughout his career," Quirk added.
The innovative funk artist, who has sold 80 million albums world-wide with ground-breaking works like "Purple Rain," is unrepentant.
He said: "It's direct marketing and I don't have to be in the speculation business of the record industry which is going through a lot of tumultuous times right now."
Disclaimer The content of this website was created for dead-donkey.com, but may be published freely with reference.
Submitted reviews are owned by the original author who should be contacted for permission on reproduction or publication. All referenced movies, games, and literature are property of their respective owners.
All ed2k links submitted are unfiltered, unmoderated, and unedited, and are provided as-is from hashlinks found freely on the edonkey2000 network and exist regardless of this site. Their validity, legality and content is subject to the end users usage. Any harm encounted through such use is the responsability of the user. This site's code was written by Spud The Destroyer for www.dead-donkey.com 2005+
Fileheaven.org: Racist admin wins site in poker
