O2 & Be Broadband Sent out File-Sharing Notifications

Subscribers of O2 and Be Broadband, alleged of unauthorized downloading copyrighted content, have already received notifications from their Internet service providers.

Local media reported that O2 and Be Broadband have begun sending out notification letters to their customers alleged of being involved in downloading copyrighted material. The notifications have been issued to almost 2,800 subscribers.

The Promo Bay Website Banned in UK

After successfully testing out promoting platform for musicians via file-sharing, TPB officially launched The Promo Bay as a separate platform for content creators. However, in a few days, the UK’s ISPs banned the website.

The Promo Bay was started as a launching pad for new content creators and proved to be a great idea. The Promo Bay was appreciated not just by TPB’s users, but also by lots of artists who signed up in a few months. 

Newzbin2 Given up to Pressure

After Newzbin2 was banned across the United Kingdom, the website decided to go offline permanently for good. This is a significant loss for both Usenet’s networks and a few thousands of users who relied on the site’s services.

Despite the Newzbin2’s efforts to continue operation by complying with all DMCA requests and satisfying their users’ needs, the portal finally went offline. Apparently, the decision in question wasn’t easy to make, but so was the anti-piracy campaign against the website.

Social Networks Failed to Increase Shopping Frenzy

When the American conglomerates started tempting people away from spending another day with their families after Thanksgiving, thus turning this time into the shopping frenzy of Black Friday, it became quite a good metric for going over the latest consumer buying trends. IBM’s extensive data sifting recently revealed that there were a number of interesting changes.

Google to Acquire Wi-Fi Provider?

A few days ago, Google released a statement saying that the company was purchasing public Wi-Fi provider ICOA for $400 million. For the next 2 hours that story seemed to be true. The matter is that the press release in question was posted on this wire, but when hacks came to follow up the release, they suddenly discovered that the company executives denied the fact.

Facebook Profits from Cyber-Stalking Ads

It seems that the largest social network in the world can give Google a run for its money. The industry observers point out that Facebook is answering Wall Street’s demands to make more cash by introducing advertisements that cyber stalk its users. This type of behavior has been lively discussed many times by the industry observers and the concerned parties. Now the discussion continues with a new hero of the story.

Copyright Cops Arrested 9-Year-Old Girl

The entertainment industry sunk to a new PR low recently – they managed to accuse a 9-year-old girl of piracy and confiscate her Winnie-the-Pooh laptop.

CIAPC – the very company that had TPB blocked by Finnish Internet service providers, has tracked some evil file-sharer.


The media reports say that they demanded that she pay €600 or go to court. Apparently, the company had no idea that the evil pirate was only 9, which means that €600 was undoubtedly out of the range of her pocket money. They decided to use the case as an example of its extra-judiciary powers. As a result, Finnish taxpayers paid for an expensive raid on the 9-year-old suspect’s home, with the police confiscating her Winnie-the-Pooh laptop.

During the police interrogation, the girl broke and told that she had no money to buy the latest album from local multi-platinum-selling songstress Chisu. Last year the girl switched to the web, first through Google and then the world’s largest BitTorrent tracker, The Pirate Bay. However, the download didn’t work and her father finally bought her music in the store.

Anyway, the copyright cops weren’t impressed with this story, claiming that the girl would lose her laptop to test the power of the entertainment industry. They also told her that it would have been easier for everyone if she had paid the compensation. According to the girl’s father, it was worse than dealing with the Mafia, because the latter doesn’t normally use police to do their dirty work today, nor it feels honorable to hit up 9-year-olds for cash.

According to Electronic Frontier Finland, this recent move clearly illustrates just how far copyright enforcement has progressed in the country. As for Chisu, the artist has said that she didn’t want to sue anyone and that no musician needs such kind of media attention.

Facebook Proposed New Data Use Policy

Last week the largest social network in the world announced its proposal for new Data Use Policy. More than 3 years ago, the company introduced a voting system, which enabled users to vote on data usage and privacy policies. While the first vote allowed the network members to vote for the proposal, the second one took place this past June. Actually, the results were surprising: only .038% of the users wanted to get involved.

 

RapidShare Imposed Traffic Cap to Tackle Piracy

The cyberlocker is currently reworking its infrastructure in order to improve the service’s performance, and has announced that it is planning to introduce new traffic policies in a bid to discourage piracy.

RapidShare has claimed that new traffic polices will be enforced this week. For instance, the file-sharing service will limit the daily outbound traffic, while increasing its download speeds, but with a catch to that.

After Kim Dotcom’s MegaUpload was dead, RapidShare promised to introduce slower download speeds in order to discourage people looking for copyrighted content on their site. Three years ago, the German-based cyberlocker received a fine of $33.4 million and was ordered to remove 5.000 songs from its servers. That was the moment the company received an advice to reconsider their strategy to fight piracy.

However, RapidShare’s new traffic limit only works for public traffic, while group traffic is still unaffected. It means that free users will be allowed to download only 1GB a day, but members with a Pro account are allowed to get 30 times more than that. RapidShare promised to fully implement the new traffic limitations in the end of November.


Aside from the company’s efforts to tackle copyright infringement, RapidShare has also been working on the new features. For instance, the cyberlocker announced the launching of a new service called RapidDrive. The latter is basically a Windows-based platform designed to help paying customers to manage their files. However, a release date for this one hasn’t yet been announced.

US Data Usage Increased by 120%

Sandvine has recently conducted a report titled “Global Internet Phenomena Report 2H2012“, based on its customers all over the world – US, Europe, Africa, Latin America, Asia-Pacific, and other regions. The results were not surprising for industry observers.

Asia is leading in mobile data consumption – 659MB of traffic per month. In the meantime, the data usage of North American fixed line networks recorded an increase of 120%, reaching 51GB.

Sandvine’s CEO explained that with a 120% increase rate it is clear that other ISPs will be introducing application-based plans in order to ensure cost certainty and a good quality of popular applications.

As for Europe, over 20% of all video streaming mobile traffic is taken by YouTube, and 33% of the North American fixed networks data traffic is taken by Netflix. Amazon is also popular on North America’s fixed networks (1.8%), as well as Hulu (1.4%) and HBO Go (0.5%).

The report confirmed that audio and video streaming is responsible for 65% of all downstream traffic from 9pm-12am, with half of that belonging to Netflix. It is vital to prioritize real-time apps like live audio and video in order to maintain a high quality of experience. The company’s video quality metrics, which can measure display and transport quality, can also help to understand the impact of the largest events like the World Cup.

In the meantime, BitTorrent accounts for 36% of the overall traffic. The report admits that Real-Time Entertainment continues to soar. Within the last 3 years, on-demand entertainment appeared to consume more bandwidth than “experience later” bulk transfers, and the experts expect this to continue through 2015 and drop to less than 10%.

Another issue is that today such services as Netflix, Pandora, and Hulu can only be accessed in certain areas, but it might change soon. Indeed, it is very frustrating that popular streaming services for some reason restrict the viewing experience for some geographic locations. But now there’s a new extension out there, Media Hint. The latter is able to lift all these restrictions, so that anyone could access all media streaming services from anywhere. The extension doesn’t require any additional set-up – all you should do is just install it and enjoy your favourite shows. This might also have impact on the overall picture of the traffic consumption worldwide.

ET birthday contest 2

As you already know, November, 15 is a birthday of Extratorrent!

Also will remember Extratorrent team decided to hold three contests with gifts for all Extratorrent fans!
The winner of each contest will get a prize iPod Shuffle, iPod Nano, iPod Touch!

Unfortunatelly, the contest #1 - "Suggest the funny interpretation of ET symbols" is over.

Here is the list of nominees!
"Epic Troll" by Chamara Sampath
"Earlobe Tickling" by Josh Arnold
"Endless tracking" by Marc Ferdinand Felix Santiago
"Einstein Tongue" by Sanju Man Maharjan
"Erotic Troll" by Debarpan Msd Panday
"Elephant Testicles" by Nitish Peechen
"Ex Tempore" by Darren Peloe
"Expecting Trouble" by Xtian Mokong
"East India Company Torrent" by Taker RealTaker
"Evil Toddlers" by Scott Allan Murphy

The winner will be declared on November,15!

But You still have a time to win another prize from Extratorrent - iPod Nano!

Here is a contest #2:

Write a poem about Extratorrent (4 lines or more)

The author of the best poem will get a iPod Nano!

AS always all about you can find on official facebook page

We are waiting for your poems! And good luck!

Skype Replaced Windows Messenger

Microsoft took a decision to replace its Windows Live Messenger with well-known and popular Skype. According to media reports, Microsoft’s team of developers is currently working towards retiring its Windows Live Messenger software in the coming months and integrating its functions into Skype.


It looks like Microsoft has slowly been moving Skype users over to the Messenger back end within the past several months. If you are one of those who have been using Skype, you should know that over 80% of those instant messages were processed on Microsoft’s back end. Industry observers expected that the software giant will soon announce the retirement of Windows Live Messenger, perhaps even this week.

Since Skype is using P2P protocol, instant messages could only be sent if both parties were online. However, with Skype running on Microsoft’s servers that problem would go away. This is the first advantage. Then, the Messenger was available from any PC, if the user was logged into their Live account through any browser. On the contrary, Skype required a desktop client which caused problems on Mac and Linux due to bad updates or lack of those. This problem will also be solved with Skype moving to Outlook.com – another apparent advantage at hand.

In fact, the move will mean that the two best pieces of the software will merge: while Skype was great at calls, Windows Live Messenger was better at messaging. In the meantime, the biggest challenge was to get Skype to link Microsoft accounts to its login names. For instance, if you are using Skype 6.0 for Mac and Windows, you will now be greeted with options to log in using a Microsoft or Facebook account.

New MegaUpload Already Under Political Pressure

If was a few days ago that Kim Dotcom announced he was going to opt for a new domain for his new portal so that it could avoid being shut down once again. That’s why instead of opting for a .com or .org domain Kim chose the Gabonese .ga. Nevertheless, the US government isn’t happy with his plans and is already trying to threaten Kim and take measures once the website is launched.

In response, the Gabonese Communication Minister Blaise Louembe claimed that they have to protect IP rights and fight cybercrime, which means that Gabon can’t serve as a platform or screen for anything aimed at infringing copyrights or be used by unscrupulous people like Dotcom.

Blaise Louembe also revealed that the Me.ga domain was originally bought by an undisclosed French citizen, who then transferred it to Dotcom. In addition, an investigation ordered by the Minister found out that the portal was redirecting all traffic to another site, which is also hosted in France. This past Wednesday, the Me.ga domain was shut down. In response, Kim Dotcom said that there should be no worries, as he had an alternative domain.

In the meantime, the redirection in question is believed to have something to do with a hacker group known as Omega, apparently not very fond of Dotcom. In their interview, the hacking collective explained that they were pure in a diogenist way – the true pirates, while MegaUpload’s founder was only taking advantage of them all. Omega called Dotcom a “megalomaniac with lawyers to take advantage of us all – the nobodies, the artists he wants to profit from”. That’s why they consider Kim neither better nor worse than Universal. In fact, they called him a separate industry, only there to pollute.

Thus far, things are not good for Kim, because Ome.ga is now controlling the Me.ga domain. However, it is unclear what they are going to do with it. The hacking collective claimed they will entertain offers from Dotcom’s enemies in the millions of dollars for the new domain. They also promised to donate 10% of the proceeds to FOJEGA (Gabon Youth Forum) if Universal Music decides to buy the Me.ga domain name. We’ll see what plan Kim Dotcom has now, but the experts believe he won’t give up that easy. MegaUpload is not to be forgotten and buried after all.

4G Networks and Piracy

The British Everything Everywhere was the first company to introduce 4G networks. Although many celebrated the faster wireless speeds, some people weren’t so hyped about it. Recently, a few anti-piracy supporters have claimed that it might cause more piracy in the already crowded environment.

For instance, the Federation Against Software Theft claimed recently that 4G networks are sure to launch a new wave of copyright violation. The outfit pointed out that at the time that the DEA had been drafted, mobile networks like 4G and public Wi-Fi weren’t deemed sufficiently conducive for copyright violation on such a large scale. Nevertheless, recent developments like the introduction of 4G networks and the increase of public Wi-Fi services are believed to open up new opportunities for copyright violation. The anti-piracy outfit also suggested that 4G networks justify the legal means for Internet service providers to include mobile network operators into their anti-piracy agenda.

In the meanwhile, the BPI and other industry outfits aren’t yet concerned about 4G networks becoming a new gateway for pirates. And they have no grounds to be, according to a recent study on mobile data pricing: the matter is that networks operators aren’t likely to offer unlimited data plans, as such expenses are too high to be supported by the average person.

Anyway, Everything Everywhere has announced their 4G data plans, which are £36 per month for 500MB and £56 per month for 8GB. Nothing to add – the numbers speak for themselves. In addition, you need too much traffic to be consumed to download music or video files to rely only on 3G or 4G networks. This is not the last argument – you can also take the example of majority of streaming music services, whose revenues normally are derived from monthly subscriptions. At the moment, such subscriptions encourage people to get a premium service by offering free access to music catalogues for limited time. But such offers are unavailable on mobile devices that are becoming more popular than desktops. And this is exactly what businesses are now trying to compensate for, but without apparent success. Strangely enough, nobody has considered an idea of coming up with a worthwhile model for monetizing music based on micropayments, which was announced last year.

Google Warns against Sophos Antivirus

Tavis Ormandy, one of Google’s security experts, claimed he revealed a few serious security vulnerabilities in Sophos Antivirus, so it shouldn’t be used at important computer systems. The security expert claims that Sophos makes easy mistakes and fails to issue patches quickly. He published a report where several flaws were mentioned that were caused by the company’s poor development practices and coding standards. Sophos didn’t respond fast enough to his warning, which only made things worse.

For instance, it turned out that Sophos’ on-access scanner could be used to launch a worm by targeting a firm receiving an attack email through Outlook. The vulnerabilities were all tested on a Mac, but the expert believes that wormable remote root can affect all platforms that run Sophos.

Tavis Ormandy made a conclusion that users who install Sophos Antivirus expose their computers to considerable risk. Unless Sophos doesn’t improve its security in the nearest future, its deployment may cause considerable risk to global networks and infrastructure. Ormandy pointed out that he gave Sophos 2 months to address the problem before he published the report.

Of course, Sophos was not happy about 30-pages report saying that it fails to do its job. It replied that lots of flaws had been fixed and the company hadn’t seen the fixed flaws being exploited in the wild. Sophos announced the release of further fixes in the end of November. However, Sophos believes it would take half a year to release a patch that fixes a single line of code, while Ormandy says two months. The security expert admits that the company is working with good intentions, but is still ill-equipped to address the flaws he alone revealed in his spare time.

Microsoft to Launch Cloud TV

Well-known software giant seems to be drawing up the plans to launch its own cloud-based television service. According to job listings spotted by the media, Microsoft is looking for a development lead, senior software engineer, and software development engineer. The personnel is being hired to work on a “new Cloud-based TV platform”.

The software giant wants applicants to be experienced in different web technologies like HTML5, Javascript, C#, as well as frameworks, including .NET framework and jQuery. In addition, it’s clear that any cloud telly should be geared for mobile applications outside Windows 8, with listings demanding experience in mobile application development for iOS and Android aside from development with Windows 8, Windows RT and IE.

In the meantime, the press reports say that it isn’t the first time Microsoft is talking about television. Last time, the company’s ambitions have been postponed due doubts about such things as “core competency”. However, now, with Microsoft’s decision to copy Apple business model, a cloud-based TV operation pushing content to personal computers and mobile devices makes a lot more sense. This move would provide much needed content from behind a walled garden that the software giant would control.

In addition, it’s obvious that the Xbox system is proving to be its test bed. As the experts remind, for the last year Xbox has been offering expanded on-demand material and entertainment applications. Microsoft has even introduced the Xbox Music streaming service. However, no details about what the TV service will entail exactly are provided by the company thus far.

Kim Dotcom to Support Pacific Fibre Cable

Apparently, Kim Dotcom’s defeat hasn’t forced him to stop his business. Actually, the shut-down of MegaUpload file-hosting service only drove Dotcom to fight back and defeat a corrupted system which can only undermine innovation and free speech. Thus far, Kim has already announced his plans to restart the cyberlocker under a new name Me.ga, and went further to encourage the relaunch of a failed project named The Pacific Fibre Cable.

The latter was under management of Chairman Sam Morgan and Director Rod Drury. Dotcom has offered them to restart the project of a fiber link cable, which would connect Australia, New Zealand and the US. Moreover, it seems that Dotcom is going to chip in with an impressive amount of money. This past summer, Sam Morgan had to admit that the project in question would be dropped because of the insufficient funds. They needed $400 million to set up 13.000 km of cable, which would be able to provide an impressive speed of 12.8 TB/sec and connect Sydney, Auckland, and Los Angeles. However, Dotcom isn’t all happy with the result, particularly taking into account that he is going to open an entirely new service.

The project’s chairman might b? hyped about the idea, but it is next to impossible to imagine that the US would approve this plan, particularly if Dotcom’s name appears on the papers. In fact, American authorities are still trying to deport Dotcom.

But it seems that Dotcom’s will can’t be easily broken – the speculations are that he is going to finance the subsea cable project, saying that since ISPs control the last mile and provide routers, they would still charge a small fee, but it might be 5 times less than the current price, with 5 times faster speeds.

If Dotcom pulls this off, it would prove that nothing can stop him from going back into the business. Still, his biggest problem remains the US, which would never agree with the project’s restart, despite the fact that the country would really benefit out of this move. Taking into account the stance of the RIAA or the MPAA, it is impossible that the United States would somehow give the thumb up.

The industry experts agree that the only thing we can do is wait and see what happens. Some of them believe that Dotcom is planning on a rightful vendetta, but the others claim that this project would change a whole lot of things online.

Anonymous Launched Attack

Hacking group Anonymous has recently started the attack it pledged for the 5th November. The group promised to target Australian government portals and big hitters like PayPal.

The hacktivists have embarked on a hacking spree which has threatened Facebook, NBC, PayPal and others. Local media reported that this spree was launched against systemic, global surveillance systems like TrapWire. The latter was the focus of a recent Wikileaks file drop earlier in 2012.

The experts point out that the vigilante-style nature of the hackers’ attack could be regarded by technologically un-savvy world governments as the event supposed to justify boosting surveillance and reducing civil liberties on the Internet, though that’s exactly what the hackers are fighting against.

The list of the companies allegedly victim to the attack includes ImageShack, PayPal, and Arcelor Mittal Steel. In addition, the Greek City website and the Ghana Consulate sites were also targeted, and VMware's ESX Server Kernel source code leaked. In the meantime, an attack against antivirus software developer Symantec is believed to be unrelated.

PayPal has made an announcement, saying that the company is currently investigating the issue, but thus far there’s no evidence that account details of any user have been compromised. However, the @AnonymousPress Twitter account claimed the opposite and linked to a post on PrivatePaste (which has since been taken down). In the event that the hack did happen, PayPal will face around 28,000 details being compromised.

The allegations are part of the hacktivists’ day of action on the 5th of November to coincide with Guy Fawkes Night. The suspicions were that the hacking collective will manage to take down the largest social network in the world in response to the social-games spammer Zynga’s plans to lay off its workforce. Hackers were also outraged by company’s actions against numerous developers which they see as devastating to the gaming industry. Anonymous urged Zynga to change its mind or face the consequences.

Anonymous has endured despite multiple attempts from the United States to shut the collective down. They also plan to coincide a march on Parliament with the Internet activism. By the way, “V for Vendetta” author Alan Moore supports the movement and has even released a single in support of the Occupy and Anonymous actions.

Wikipedia Filters Climate Change Issues

While the world’s press is lively discussing the idea that the weather disasters in the United States might be caused by climate change, Wikipedia has no mention of that suggestion.

Local media suggests that this is because the brains behind that Wikipedia page – Ken Mampel, an unemployed, 56-year-old Floridian, – appeared to be a climate change denier who is using Wikipedia page to push his own agenda. He created a winner on the page: his Wikipedia article was the most-viewed one about Hurricane Sandy, and he established himself as the most active contributor to it. According to the statistics, he made twice the number of edits than any other contributor.

The strange thing is that Ken Mampel made sure that the article about Hurricane Sandy, for 4 days after it made landfall in New Jersey, never mentioned “global warming” or “climate change”. Finally, on the 1st of November, a new section was added to the bottom of the page, titled “Connection to global warming”. However, it was instantly deleted by Mampel – the contributor insisted that it be sent to the global warming page.

Since then, Ken Mampel has continued to fight any discussions on global warming, making it clear that he didn’t believe in climate change. As such, he has had to bend a lot of the reports to make sure that climate change isn’t mentioned.

For instance, he pointed out that New York City’s Mayor Michael Bloomberg had endorsed Obama for president based on his handling of the disaster, but failed to mention that the mayor had specifically been talking about climate change in his speech.

In the meantime, there are lots of science-focused comments about Hurricane Sandy that are linked to climate change, but Ken Mampel doesn’t allow to add them to the Wikipedia entry. Even if someone pointed to a reference, Mampel still took it out because he believed it was not proven.

The experts have always claimed that the hijacking of Wikipedia by people with political views or those wishing to push an agenda has always been the main drawback of the world’s online encyclopedia. In our case it’s far from politics, but still just one editor having oddball ideas and trying to keep data which he doesn’t like away from the public.

Microsoft Financed American Surveillance

It seems that Microsoft is becoming an important player when it comes to providing Big Brother software to American security forces. It turned out that Microsoft is a big backer of an outfit that sells surveillance tech to police departments in a weird money loop supporting the sale its snooping software.

The National Fusion Center Association offers fusion architecture, running Microsoft Fusion Core software. In the meantime, Fusion Centers were created in 2003-2007 under the American Department of Homeland Security and the Office of Justice Programs in the US Department of Justice and were designed to help data sharing between agencies like the CIA, FBI, DoJ, military, and the government. By the way, the Fusion Core Solution was jointly developed by Microsoft and Environmental Systems Research Institute.

Nevertheless, a recent Senate survey discovered that fusion centers were actually useless in addressing terrorism, but appeared to be very good in infringing the privacy and civil liberties of American people. The local media confirmed that Microsoft helps pay for fusion centers that hand the grants to police departments to be used for new surveillance technologies.

According to the reports, Microsoft is currently making a killing selling its Fusion Core Solution, which is able to automate the collection, intake, workflow management, collaborative analysis, data visualization, and dissemination of business-performance metrics among other features.

Frankly speaking, Microsoft isn’t the only company that funds Fusion Centers – they also get money from ESRI, Thomson-Reuters, Mutualink and other companies willing to cooperate with them. But industry experts believe that this is one of the ways that Microsoft is becoming the largest intelligence solution providers in the world.