CyberLaw Blog

Archive for December 13th, 2008

Post from: TorrentFreak

Top 10 Most Pirated Movies of 2008

As 2008 moves toward its end, we have been taking a a look at the most pirated titles in various categories. Following our Top 10 games post where ‘Spore’ headlined, we now take a look at movies. Unsurprisingly, The Dark Knight comes out on top, with the rest of the chart featuring a few surprising entries, and some unexpected absentees.

Mirroring its success at the box office, The Dark Knight is leading this list of 2008’s most pirated movies on BitTorrent. Written and directed by Christopher Nolan, the sequel to ‘Batman Begins’ holds the record for the best opening week and weekend in movie history, and has grossed close to a billion dollars worldwide.

The film’s success doesn’t stop at the box office either. Earlier this week the DVD was released, and on the first day in stores 3 million copies were sold in the United States, Canada and the UK.

Alongside these impressive real-world sales, the film beat the competition on BitTorrent and other filesharing networks too. With more than 7 million downloads on BitTorrent alone, The Dark Knight now holds the title of most pirated movie of 2008. Comments on various BitTorrent sites reveal that many downloaders obtained an illegal copy after they had already watched the movie in the movie theater.

As with every other blockbuster, ‘The Dark Knight’ was leaked onto the Internet in various formats. It began right after the premiere in July with a cammed version, which was celebrated by the folks from The Pirate Bay. The ‘cam’ was followed by a DVD-screener in early September, and a DVD in November. The latter release turned out to be the most popular among filesharers.

As we look over the rest of the top 10, we see that there are quite a few differences between popularity at the box office, and on filesharing networks. ‘Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull’, for example, came in second at the box office, but only came in 30th place in the download chart. On the contrary, ‘The Bank Job’ is the third most pirated movie on BitTorrent, but just 66th at the box office.

The data for this list is collected by TorrentFreak from several sources, including reports from all the large BitTorrent trackers. All formats, including cammed versions are counted, and based on previous experience a correction is made for smaller .torrent releases that we might have missed.

Proposed Web Filter Criticized in Australia: “The system would force Internet service providers to block access to thousands of sites containing questionable or illegal content.

(Via NYT > Technology.)

BREIN Nukes 75 BitTorrent Sites: “BREIN has apparently taken down no fewer than 75 Dutch based BitTorrent sites, as reported in their press release today. The 72 sites were part of an elaborate hierarchy and made money from preferential treatment related to donations. With BREIN on an enforcement roll in the Netherlands, it’s surprising that any BitTorrent operator would continue operation in such a climate.”

(Via Slyck.com File-Sharing News And Information.)

Wired.com: New Service Makes Tor Anonymized Content Available to All

By Kim Zetter EmailDecember 12, 2008 | 6:46:20 PMCategories: Privacy

Two veteran coders have teamed up to create a kind of Google for the anonymous underweb.

Aaron Swartz, a Reddit founder, and Virgil Griffith, creator of WikiScanner, have created a new service called tor2web that gives users access to website hosted anonymously on the Tor network.

Though Tor — ‘the onion router’ — is more famous as a privacy tool designed to prevent tracking of where a web user surfs on the internet, since 2004 the system has allowed users to host servers as well. Unlike conventional servers, these Tor ‘hidden services’ cannot normally be traced to the person operating them.

One drawback to these websites: they’ve only been accessible to people who download and install the Tor software. Swartz wanted to free up the content to make it available to anyone, so he and Griffith created tor2web as a bridge between the public internet and the untraceable sites.

Tor is endorsed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and other civil liberties groups as a method for whistle blowers and human-rights workers to communicate with journalists, among other uses. It works by randomly routing traffic, such as website requests and e-mail, through a network of nodes hosted by volunteers around the world before delivering it to its destination. The traffic is encrypted enroute through every node except the final one, and the end point cannot see where the traffic or message originated. Theoretically, nobody spying on the traffic can identify the source.

Tor’s hidden services work in a similar manner to obscure the location of someone publishing a service or anonymous content on special websites accessible only through Tor. But until now, these sites — offered through the virtual .onion domain — could not be reached by ordinary web surfers.

With tor2web, however, anyone can browse or visit hidden .onion sites. Users who visit the sites, however, won’t be anonymous in the way they would be if they used Tor themselves.

Swartz (who sold Reddit to Wired’s parent company, CondeNet) started working on the tor2web idea three or four years ago when he tried to find a way to get a web server to speak to the Tor network. He got busy with other things and put the project aside until recently when Wikileaks, a whistle-blower site, experienced problems with entities trying to force it to remove content. Hidden Tor sites are useful for placing information (such as that published by Wikileaks) beyond the reach of a court. But such hidden sites are not available to everyone, so Swartz decided to devise a way to open access to them.

‘There’s all sorts of stuff people want to publish anonymously,’ Swartz told Threat Level. ‘The Tor tools have been really good for doing that. They’re really secure and have been well-vetted. But they’re kind of difficult to install and there’s no way you’re going to get everyone on the internet to install them. So the idea was to kind of produce this hybrid where people could publish stuff using Tor and make it so that anyone on the internet could view it.’

The service is new, so it has a few drawbacks. There are only a couple hundred hidden sites currently available to peruse (many of them are file-sharing and storage services) but Swartz hopes that number will grow as more users become aware that they can publish information anonymously through Tor.

Reaching the hidden sites through tor2web is also currently slow, given the nature of the relay process. Although once a user accesses a page the first time, it becomes cached and therefore quicker to access thereafter. Swartz says the service currently does a little more routing than it needs to do but he hopes that will be fixed at some point.

Another drawback is that many of the .onion web pages have strange alphanumeric URLs that make it difficult to determine a site’s content before you visit it. Swarz says he’s thinking of putting together an index or directory to make it easier to categorize and find useful hidden sites as more of them become available.

‘The first step has been building these tools so that it’s possible,’ Swartz said. ‘Now we have to start building better directories so it’s clear what kind of interesting things are out there.’

EU – New Safer Internet Programme: “(RAPID)
The EU will have a new Safer Internet Programme as of 1 January 2009. Following the overwhelmingly positive vote on 23 October in which the European Parliament expressed its support for the new Safer Internet Programme, the Council of Ministers has adopted the new Programme covering the period 2009-2013. It was proposed by the European Commission to protect children in the ever more sophisticated online world and empower them to safely use web services like social networking, blogging and instant messaging.”

(Via QuickLinks Update.)

EU – Improvement in filtering tools: “The new SIP Bench study on filtering tools shows that overall tools have improved over the last three years and have become easier to install. During the last year of this three-year project, Deloitte once again carried out the SIP Benchmark testing via a comprehensive study of 26 tools for parental control. This benchmark analyses how effectively these technical solutions protect children aged 6 to 16 against harmful content on the Internet. About 140 parents and teachers from various European countries were involved in the study. In addition to these ‘real life’ testers, an Internet laboratory was set up to conduct thorough testing under identical conditions. In general, we observe a very positive trend in filter accuracy.However an number of filters detect more potentially harmful content at the expense of unduly overblocking harmless content.”

(Via QuickLinks Update.)

EU – new Eurobarometer survey: parents’ perspective: “(RAPID)
A new Eurobarometer survey ‘Towards a safer use of the Internet for children in the EU ? a parents’ perspective’ has ben published. According to the survey conducted in all EU Member States, 75% of children aged from 6 to 17 years already use the Internet ? a trend which continues to grow. Half of the parents who did not use Internet themselves said that their child had online access. At least half of the parents stated that they talk to their children about their online activities. In addition, they take precautionary measures such as not allowing their children to disclose personal information online (92%) or to talk to people they do not know (83%). 59% of parents declared that they use filtering or monitoring software. Parents who do not use filtering tools say they trust their children (64%) or did not know how to access or use them (14%).”

(Via QuickLinks Update.)

I don’t agree with the views expressed in this article but cyberlaw.org.uk provides links to all views expressed on the IWF matter. The IWF’s role is NOT comparable to the Advertising Standards Authority and the IWF is an “unaccountable private organization” which assumed the role of “self-policing”. Its powers are not provided by law, its decisions lack transparency, it has a very debatable appeals procedure, and certainly it is not a substitute for the courts of law. Illegality, whether it is child pornography, or extreme pornography, is a matter for the courts to decide, not for an industry organization to decide. [Blog entry by Yaman Akdeniz]

Why the IWF was wrong to lift its ban on a Wikipedia page: “EDITORIAL: The Internet Watch Foundation faced a storm of criticism this week over its decision to add a Wikipedia entry to a blacklist of pages that ISPs block. Under pressure, the IWF removed the image from its blacklist. That decision was a mistake.”

(Via OUT-LAW News.)

IWF rethinks its role: “

Ministry of Justice misleads on extreme porn

Anger at aborted attempts by net censor, the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) to block material hosted on Wikipedia earlier this week may lead to radical changes in the way the organisation works – it has already changed the way the organisation is perceived.…

“

(Via The Register – Public Sector.)