Month: July 2015

Grooveshark Co-Founder Josh Greenberg Dies Aged 28

joshJosh Greenberg, the co-founder of the recently shuttered Grooveshark music streaming service, has been found dead in his Florida home.

The 28-year-old was discovered in his bed Sunday evening by his girlfriend in the house they shared.

“Josh Greenberg, co-founder of #Grooveshark was found dead in his Gainesville home Sunday evening. No evidence of foul play or suicide,” local police reported on Twitter.

Lori Greenberg, Josh’s mother, told Gainsville.com that her son had “never been sick a day in his life” and police had informed her that there was no evidence of any injuries or involvement with drugs.

“They are as baffled as I am,” she said. “It looked like he was sleeping.”

The popular entrepreneur’s mother briefly mentioned the closure of Grooveshark earlier this year after a prolonged legal battle with the major recording labels of the United States. She said that her son had been “more relieved than depressed” that the matter had been brought to an end.

“He was excited about potential new things that he was going to start,” she said.

Josh Greenberg and Sam Tarantino founded Grooveshark as 19-year-old freshmen at the University of Florida in March 2006. The company grew to become a major player in the streaming market with close to 150 employees but was continuously dogged by licensing and related copyright issues.

After spending increasing amounts of time and money on its legal defense, Grooveshark eventually threw in the towel at the end of April this year. Parent company Escape Media entered into a consent judgment with Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment and Warner Music Group which saw the operation shut down for good.

Friend Ben Erez, who describes Josh as his mentor, heaped praise on the entrepreneur.

“There are people whose names I hear over and over again who end up disappointing when I finally meet them. When I met Josh for the first time, I felt the opposite. Here was a guy who deserved every word of praise I had heard,” he wrote.

“I’m sad and shocked but I can’t stop imagining what Josh would say. Probably something very zen like ‘appreciate me for who I was, mourn my loss, and get back to enjoying life. It’s too short to not’.”

Comments from Josh’s girlfriend Abby Mayer cited in a police department report note that her spouse was not known to be sick or on any prescribed medication.

Toxicology results will take two or three months.

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


Source: TorrentFreak

French Anti-Piracy Regime Breaks 5 Million Warning Barrier

warningWhile site-blocking currently grabs most of the headlines as a key anti-piracy strategy of the entertainment industries, the so-called “graduated response” is still considered a valuable tool for reducing infringing activity online.

Also known as “three strikes”, these schemes are promoted as educational in nature, with alleged pirates receiving escalating warnings designed to discourage further infringing behavior.

In the fall of 2010, France became one of the pioneers of the warning system and now almost five years later a report from the country’s ‘Hadopi’ anti-piracy agency has revealed the extent of its operations.

Between September 2010 and June 2015, a total of 4,897,883 initial warning notices were sent to French Internet account holders. In the same period 482,667 individuals received a second notice while just 2,221 reached the third stage.

Referrals to the public prosecutor (for those still not getting the message) reached 169 in the first six months of 2015, up from 46 in the same period in 2014.

When it comes to overall notices sent, June 2015 was the most active month in the history of the program thus far. In total 231,000 account holders received a first strike, 21,400 received a second and 104 reached the third stage.

However, according to figures published by NextInpact, the volume of notices being sent out to Internet users represents just a fraction of the total number of complaints filed by rightsholders.

To date it’s estimated that more than 37 million complaints (alleged instances of infringement) have been filed with the Hadopi agency although many millions have been discarded. According to Hadopi, however, the processing rate is being improved, with around 50% of the 70,000 complaints currently filed by rightsholders each day being actioned.

The Hadopi report can be found here (French, pdf)

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


Source: TorrentFreak

UK Anti-Piracy ‘Education’ Campaign Starts This Summer

uk-flagIn an effort to curb online piracy, early last year the movie and music industries reached agreement with the UK’s leading ISPs to send ‘warnings’ to alleged pirates.

As we previously revealed, the Voluntary Copyright Alert Programme (VCAP) will monitor illegal P2P file-sharing with a strong focus on repeat infringers.

The alerts program is part of the larger Creative Content UK (CCUK) initiative, which will kick off with a broad anti-piracy PR campaign targeted at the general public.

This education part is nearly ready for launch and TF is informed that it will officially kick off this summer.

“…work has started on the education component of the campaign, which helps to lay the ground and is designed to inform and raise consumer awareness and to engage with people around their love of content. The first activities are scheduled to start later this summer,” ” a Creative Content UK spokesperson tells TF.

The education part is aimed at steering people away from piracy sites by pointing out how convenient and accessible legal services are.

The associated alerts campaign has no hard start date yet but is also being finalized and will begin at a later date.

“The education campaign will show consumers how to easily access content – such as music, film, TV, books, games, magazines and sport – from authorized online sources which provide a superior user experience. So it makes sense for this to happen before the alerts program starts,” CCUK informs us.

Both programs are supported by the UK Government with millions in funding. The Government justifies this contribution with an expected increase in sales, and thus tax revenue.

The ultimate goal is to bring down local piracy rates and during the months following the rollout the file-sharing habits of UK Internet users will be frequently polled to measure the impact of the campaign.

“The aim of Creative Content UK is to encourage greater use of legal content services and to reduce online copyright infringement. There will be regular measurements of legal and illegal consumption of content throughout the duration of the initiative, which will be compared with levels before the launch of the program,” CCUK tells TF.

To what degree the PR campaign and alerts will convert pirates into paying customers has yet to be seen. In any case, it won’t go by unnoticed.

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


Source: TorrentFreak

Top 10 Most Pirated Movies of The Week – 07/20/15

insurgentThis week we have one newcomer and one returnee in our chart.

Insurgent 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
torrentfreak.com
1 (…) Insurgent 6.6 / trailer
2 (1) Jurassic World (TS/Subbed HDrip) 7.7 / trailer
3 (7) Ted 2 (Subbed HDrip) 6.9 / trailer
4 (3) Home 6.8 / trailer
5 (2) Spy (Subbed HDrip) 7.5 / trailer
6 (4) The Longest Ride 7.1 / trailer
7 (5) Mad Max: Fury Road (WEB-DL) 8.5 / trailer
8 (8) Get Hard 6.1 / trailer
9 (10) Cinderella 7.3 / trailer
10 (back) Kingsman: The Secret Service 8.1 / trailer

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


Source: TorrentFreak

MalwareBytes Blocks Torrent Sites & Suspect Peers

Anti-malware software MalwareBytes has proven somewhat of a hit with pirates lately following a rather generous offer.

Rather than punishing people who use unlicensed versions of their software, MalwareBytes’ creators ran an amnesty program through which people could receive a premium product for zero cost.

It’s likely that many of those now using a free key will have accessed their previously unlicensed version from a torrent site. However, a feature present in the premium edition means that at least two of the world’s most popular venues are now completely off-limits to users of the software.

As can be seen from the screenshots below, visitors to Isohunt.to and LimeTorrents.cc – two of the world’s largest torrent sites – are currently rendered inaccessible by MalwareBytes’ “Malicious Website Protection” module.

isohunt-blocked

lime-malware

Puzzled at why the software should take this approach but noting the similarity between the IP addresses used by both sites, TorrentFreak approached MalwareBytes for comment.

“We’re blocking the IPs (amongst others) because there’s a plethora of IPs on the [same network] housing a ton of malvertising and fraud sites,” Malware Intelligence Analyst Steven Burn told TF.

“The ASN involved is thus far unresponsive and has been since March,” he added.

So, while neither Isohunt.to nor LimeTorrents are considered harmful by MalwareBytes, the company has chosen to block their IP addresses due to their proximity to others that are allegedly behaving maliciously.

These two sites are not the only ones affected either. Torrentdownloads.cc, Megafilmeshd.net, ebooks-gratuit.com plus a range of other sites hosted in Ukraine are all blocked by MalwareBytes’ Web Protection module.

While it’s easy to regain access to any blocked site by selecting the appropriate button in the corresponding MalwareBytes popup box, many users are likely to consider blocked sites as dangerous, despite them essentially being victims of someone else’s wrong doing.

Speaking with TF, Isohunt.to told TF that the blocked host in question actually provides a good service.

“These guys webcare360.com provide great hosting that is bulletproofed against different kind of abuses. So a lot of websites around the world use their service,” the site explains.

“Looks like MalwareBytes simply blocked all IP addresses that belong to this hosting provider.”

Another issue that raised its head during our tests is the seemingly random IP addresses MalwareBytes blocks while connecting to certain torrent swarms. On numerous occasions the software flags IP addresses as malicious and denies connections to them. Intrigued, we asked MalwareBytes for an explanation.

“Our main goal is to protect our users from malicious hosts that could either be servers participating in drive-by downloads or even home computers spewing spam,” Jérôme Segura, Senior security researcher at MalwareBytes, told TF.

“So the block of only certain IPs within that pool is simply that. We are blocking the ones that we have identified for malicious activity, which also happen to be torrenting.”

The blocking of these IP addresses raises an interesting dilemma. Due to their connections to suspicious activity elsewhere, MalwareBytes considers them malicious and excludes them. However, it’s worth noting that despite their potential bad deeds elsewhere, peers in a torrent swarm go through a kind of vetting process based on the hash content of the material they’re carrying.

Put simply, while they possibly cause mischief elsewhere, these peers can’t do any real harm to the swarm. Blocking them won’t cause any really serious problems either (unless they’re the only seeder) but since they don’t need to be blocked we asked MalwareBytes about their policy.

“You bring up a very valid comment and something that many people might wonder about. I will pass this information along to see how we can manage this in a better way,” Jérôme Segura notes.

In conclusion, both scenarios (site and peer blocking) are caused by the blocking of IP addresses either directly or loosely connected to malicious activity elsewhere. MalwareBytes users will have to use their discretion when deciding whether to block or allow those connections in future.

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


Source: TorrentFreak