So far, so good. In the first two steps, we established that anti-piracy firms use bots that check for certain parameters, the most important being keywords or keyphrases. If an exact release name is used as a title (for example Game.Of.Thrones.S05E01.FRENCH.720p.HDTV.x264-Scaph), it seems to triggers a sure takedown, even if the rest of the subject line clearly shows the file …
Highwinds And The New Usenet Monopoly
Usenet is one of the oldest discussion platforms on the Internet. Long before the World Wide Web with all its flashy websites and services became what we know today, people all over the world discussed politics, programming, or asked where the next episode of Star Wars would be released (remember that one episode of The Simpsons?). Of course, in the …
How To Get Started With XDCC
This article is part of the introduction to our series on XDCC / IRC downloading. If you already know the basics, feel free to click through to one of the other parts: Introduction: XDCC Downloading For Beginners How to get started with XDCC Part 1: How To Configure mIRC For XDCC Downloading Part 2: How To Download With mIRC Part …
How To Download Anonymously With eMule
(List of peers in eMule. Click to enlarge.) What do you mean by “anonymous downloading?” Every time you download a file on eMule and connect to the network, you transfer your IP address (“telephone number” for the Internet) to the network, meaning you can be identified easily by anyone who wants to. Among those people are your ISP, and various …
How To Download Torrents Anonymously
(List of peers / downloaders for a torrent. Click to enlarge.) What do you mean by “anonymous downloading?” Everytime you download a file on BitTorrent and connect to the network, you transfer your IP address (“telephone number” for the Internet) to the whole swarm, meaning you can be identified easily by anyone who wants to. Among those people are your …
Limewire – Once Popular, Now Defunct
Based on the Gnutella protocol, Limewire was one of the best known file sharing clients. Initiale released in 2000, it was available for Windows, Mac and Linux, and was dominantly used to download music, although BitTorrent support was added later, too. After a long battle in court, they finally gave way in 2010 and disabled all newer versions using a …
PeerBlock Review
PeerBlock, along with it’s predecessor PeerGuardian, has been around since 2003 as one of the first ways to protect file sharers from unwanted attention from anti-p(r)ivacy outfits and everyone else trying to analyse and track the networks, such as government agencies. Is it really worth the effort to install this free software to your computer, and how effective is the …
DMCA Experiment, Part 2: Ramping Things Up
Now that we got our first takedown in step 1 of this experiment, things are going to get a bit more effective and aggressive. Since the sheer amount of possibilities and variations in header, file sizes etc. are just too many to test using our home Internet connection, we’re moving to a VPS, a virtual private server you can rent …
DMCA Experiment, Part 1 Recap: Newshosting And The “One Strike” Policy.
It was kind of funny for it to happen in real time: Just when we were launching a new upload / post for our project (it was about 10% finished), our posting software suddenly came to a grinding halt. “440 Posting not allowed” flashed on the screen over and over again… That was when we received an email from Newshosting, …
DMCA Takedown Experiment: Our Collection Of DMCA Complains
Our first takedown: Read the complete claim here