Month: January 2016

World’s Oldest Torrent Is Still Being Shared After 4,419 Days

matrix-ascii-smallBitTorrent is an excellent distribution mechanism, but for a file to live on at least one person has to keep sharing it.

This means that most torrents eventually die after the public loses interest. However, some torrents seem to live on forever.

More than ten years ago TorrentFreak reported on a fan-made ASCII version of The Matrix, describing it as a really old torrent. This torrent had survived for 696 days, which was a rarity.

At the time BitTorrent had only a fraction of the users it has now so it was harder to keep them active. A lot of things have changed in the decade since, but the torrent in question is still going strong.

The torrent file of The Matrix ASCII was created more than 12 years ago (4,419 days) on December 20, 2003. Even though the original site is no longer online, it still has 8 active seeders at the time of writing.

There are also people actively downloading the file, most likely after they found a copy of the release on one of the torrent sites where it remains available. To the best of our knowledge, this means that The Matrix ASCII is the oldest torrent that’s still being actively shared.

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The 12-year-old release of The Matrix ASCII comes with a DVD cover and insert. While there are no accurate statistics available it is believed to have been downloaded by tens of thousands of people over its lifetime.

Perhaps worried that Hollywood wouldn’t appreciate the effort, the torrent includes a small disclaimer.

“This work is a parody. As such I do not believe that this DVD has any possibility of competing with the original in any market. It is not for sale,” the disclaimer reads.

Prospective downloaders have very little to worry about though. Warner Bros. is not known to go after this type of fan-art that’s created for non-commercial use and the creator has never been targeted either.

The people who’ve downloaded a copy of The Matrix have thus far responded mostly positively after watching the ASCII movie. That is, those who knew what to expect. Those looking for the original Matrix movie are less appreciative.

“Dude, tell me what to do with this Matrix ASCII, cause the picture is all green n stuff, can’t even see what’s going on. And, its in 4 VOB files, but why?” was the response of one unhappy downloader.

The fact that this torrent has been able to survive for so long is a testament to the resilience of BitTorrent. For us, The Matrix ASCII has become an iconic release and we’ll certainly keep an eye on how it fares in the future.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.


Source: TorrentFreak

Creative Kids Turn MIT Website Into a ‘Piracy’ Haven

spongepirateKids love to be creative and in today’s world, tablets and computers offer a wealth of options to do so.

One of these creative playgrounds is the visual programming language Scratch, which has been in development at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) for over a decade.

“With Scratch, you can program your own interactive stories, games, and animations — and share your creations with others in the online community,” the project explains.

Scratch targets children between the ages of 8 and 16, who can create and remix works of art through an easy to use web-based interface. The tool has become quite popular in recent years with over 12 million projects being shared.

More recently, however, it also gained the attention of copyright holders. Over the past months music industry group BPI sent tens of thousands of takedown notices targeting the creative playground, pointing out the use of various pirated tracks.

Indeed, upon closer inspection it appears that many kids projects feature songs of popular artists.

“Credit to the Internet for pictures”

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Many of the young creators may not be aware of their infringing acts, but the major music labels certainly are. MIT doesn’t publish any details on takedown notices but Google alone has received close to 40,000 alerts referencing infringing “scratch.mit.edu” URLs.

This makes the MIT website one of the top pirate sites on the Internet, and definitely the most infringing educational domain.

Interestingly, the youngsters are not completely oblivious to the concept of copyright. One user addresses the issue in the Scratch forums, asking whether it’s okay to use copyrighted music in his creations.

Other members quickly chimed in concluding that this type of use is permitted.

“Yep! Scratch has a special license that lets you use copyrighted music and other things – just be sure to give credit to anything you don’t own,” one commenter wrote.

“We’re technically protected under fair use because scratch is ‘educational’,” another comment added.

While this may sound reassuring it’s also a bit misguided. Scratch certainly doesn’t have a license to use all copyrighted music and even the educational argument could be contested in court.

The people behind the Scratch project seem to be aware of the potential issues. The site has a DMCA takedown policy in place which allows rightsholders to remove content, but not before giving it a second thought.

“In assessing whether or not a Scratch user has violated your copyrights, please keep in mind that Scratch is an educational and not-for-profit initiative, seeking to aid children’s learning by providing the tools for them to learn and express themselves using digital technology,” the Scratch project writes.

“We hope you also see Scratch not only as a good way of popularizing your creations/website but also as an opportunity to do something good for children’s education,” it adds.

If copyright holders still want to take down the kids’ creations they are welcome to do so, but they should think of the children first…

Luckily for the BPI and other copyright groups Scratch isn’t all bad. They would certainly appreciate this home-made anti-piracy PSA created by one Scratcher, for example.

“Don’t steal things”

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Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.


Source: TorrentFreak

The Site Lifting the Veil on Netflix’s Geo-Restrictions

Netflix has just announced its expansion into 130 more countries around the globe but the company’s penetration hasn’t always been so deep. Millions of potential customers outside the United States have had to wait for the service to land on their shores to become a customer – well that was the theory at least.

An open secret for years and common knowledge during the past couple of weeks, it’s possible – and easy – to be a customer of Netflix in one country and gain access to it from another.

Before the service landed on their shores last year this meant that Australians with no official access to the service have been able to view using a VPN. Equally, users with limited local libraries have been able to fool Netflix into thinking they’re American – with all the riches that provides.

Last week Netflix announced that it had begun cracking down on these content-tourists (or VPN pirates as they’re sometimes called) in order to appease rightsholders but for those who can still beat the system, what are they enjoying? The answer to that question and more can be found by visiting the ‘unofficial Netflix online Global Search’ or uNoGS for short.

uNoGS is essentially a searchable database which allows users to see which content is available on Netflix in any given area in the world. For instance, when Netflix unceremoniously curtailed my viewing of Donnie Brasco in the UK earlier this month, a search on uNoGS revealed the movie was still on the service and accessible from 22 other countries.

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This means that by using a VPN to switch countries I was able to continue viewing, but uNoGS actually goes a step further by providing details on which VPN, proxy or DNS providers can provide access on a movie-by-movie basis.

For example, selecting TorGuard reveals options in Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Netherlands, Norway, Sweden and Switzerland.

Selecting Private Internet Access reveals five usable servers located in Finland, France, Netherlands, Sweden and Switzerland. Since the language is also displayed by uNoGS, those seeking English audio are able to rule out the second and fourth options.

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Interested by the project, TorrentFreak caught up with uNoGS operator Brian to find out more about his baby.

“uNoGS is very much a one man show juggled as a hobby between work and family life. I initially built the site just for myself because the few sites that were providing a service like this were extremely limited in terms of search functionality,” Brian says.

“I wanted to be able to see what was available in every country, when it was added, when it was supposed to expire and when it actually expired. Once I completed the initial build for myself I decided to share it with everyone and uNoGS went live in early May 2015.”

Brian says the site’s aim is to provide an overview of what’s on in every country served by Netflix globally and to provide users with advanced search functionality to find titles by name as well as a variety of specific parameters. In addition to dates of availability, uNoGS provides details on audio tracks and subtitling. It also offers TV series data plus iMDb and Rotten Tomatoes listings.

Also available are total movie and TV show counts for each country. Found here, the table reveals the United States as the best Netflix region by far, with ‘French Southern Territories’ the most under-served.

In total, uNoGS indexes content available on Netflix in 243 territories and updates the same on a daily basis, but Brian suggests that in an ideal world his service wouldn’t be needed.

“Traditional media outlets like cable, satellite and terrestrial tv are dead but they haven’t fully realized this yet. Most of them are trying to hang on to their lucrative commercial models which they love but consumers hate,” he explains.

“At the moment these different providers have enough money to buy up the rights to a variety of shows making the geo-restrictions necessary. In time, this will change as more and more viewers go to disruptive services which charge a fair monthly fee and allow users to watch titles on their own terms. With the moves that Netflix is currently making, hopefully these changes will come sooner rather than later.”

In the meantime Netflix is in the clutches of copyright holders who it admits trying to appease with its recent VPN clampdown. TorrentFreak began speaking with uNoGS early January before that particular news broke but in our conversations back then, Brian made an accurate prediction.

“In the future with the advent of tools like Smartflix and search engines like uNoGS, I think [region switching] will become more mainstream and eventually upset the content providers enough to push Netflix to take action. I think this will be a shame but most likely inevitable,” he correctly concluded.

“Overall I think the VPN/DNS switchers are a good thing and most likely keep people from obtaining media through less official methods.”

uNoGS can be found here, complete with API access for those interested.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.


Source: TorrentFreak