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The Pirate Bay is testing pirate streaming again
If you want to stream The Mandalorian but don't have a Disney+ subscription, there's a new, albeit illegal option: The Pirate Bay. A new green "play" button, or in some cases a "B" button, allows you to stream popular pirated streams on a new site called "BayStream," as spotted by TorrentFreak. It works with most film or TV show via a very simple YouTube-style interface that lets you play or skip to any part of the show, according to some quick testing.
Google Safe Browsing makes accessing The Pirate Bay harder
Guess what? There's another speedbump to browsing The Pirate Bay. Rather than internet providers blocking access to the URL (currently thepiratebay.org), certain web browsers are flagging torrent download pages with variations on the following message: "The site ahead contains harmful programs Attackers on thepiratebay.org might attempt to trick you into installing programs that harm your browsing experience (for example, by changing your homepage or showing extra ads on sites you visit.)"
Torrentz.eu quietly shuts down its torrent search engine
Popular Poland-based torrent meta-search site Torrentz.eu has removed its key functionality, effectively shutting down a major portal for finding pirated material on the web. According to a message on the site, which refers to itself in the past tense: "Torrentz was a free, fast and powerful meta-search engine combining results from dozens of search engines. Torrentz will always love you. Farewell." A click on the search box currently re-directs to a pop-up ad from Alibaba. The end of Torrentz comes after the world's biggest torrent site KickAssTorrents was shut down by the feds in July. The proprietor of KickAssTorrents, 30-year-old Ukrainian Artem Vaulin was arrested in Poland and charged with criminal copyright infringement and money laundering. Vaulin is accused of illegally reproducing and distributing more than $1 billion worth of pirated media. In 2014, the founders of the popular Pirate Bay torrent site were also rounded up and the site struggled to stay online as it was raided several times. As for Torrentz.eu, the site managed to stay in the game a little longer because it didn't host torrent links directly -- only made it easier to find them elsewhere. As Variety notes, the site was moved to the .eu top-level domain after its .com was seized by the US Department of Homeland Security. The domain is also blocked in the several countries, including the UK. Torrenting as a means of pirating material may generally be in decline, however. A study by a UK-based antipiracy firm found that most online piracy activity has shifted to streaming sites. And BitTorrent itself has already gone legit.
Pirates prove Kanye's new album isn't really Tidal-exclusive
Kanye West's anticipated album had a bizarre launch, but once the album was finally released early Sunday morning, we hoped the drama would be over. We were wrong. Shortly after putting up The Life of Pablo as a Tidal streaming exclusive that you could also buy outright, West decided to pull the album from standard sales entirely. In one of his increasingly-commonplace Twitter rants, West practically begged followers to sign up to Tidal and proclaimed The Life of Pablo will "never never never be on Apple" and would never be for sale.
uTorrent offers ad-free option for $5 a year
uTorrent recently opted to monetize with ads, but it turns out that pirates hate those as much as paying for content. Now, parent BitTorrent is trying something else -- offering a subscription to eliminate ads for $5 per year. That may not seem like much, but uTorrent has over 150 million users, so even if a small chunk of them opted to pay, it could generate millions in cash. (To be fair, torrents can be used for legal purposes, like streaming US election coverage.)
The Pirate Bay begins testing browser streaming
The Pirate Bay torrent site has blown around so much, you might not even be sure where it is right now (thepiratebay.se, we think). It's still kicking though, and now has a new trick -- streaming directly from your browser. It's able to do that thanks to a new plugin from Torrents Time, using the same technology as Popcorn Time (the second version, not the original). If you dare, all you have to do is download the plugin for Firefox, Internet Explorer or Chrome, and when you go to a given Pirate Bay torrent, you'll get the option to stream.
YIFY: The rise and fall of the world's most prolific movie pirate
It's never been hard to pirate movies, but for a long time, one collective has made it easier to watch the latest blockbusters than any other: YIFY. By focusing on speed, better quality rips and small file sizes, the group quickly grew to become the number one source for illegal movies, catering for the needs of millions of content pirates around the world. However, the YIFY name may soon fade into obscurity after it was revealed that its leader had been traced and named in a New Zealand lawsuit following a joint operation between the MPAA and its "international affiliates." While many believe that its releases won't be missed, YIFY's shutdown will leave a big hole in the piracy market and have a knock-on effect on streaming services like Popcorn Time -- at least until another group steps up.
UK police arrest pirate who cost the music industry 'millions'
In its ongoing fight to reduce online piracy in the UK, the Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit (PIPCU) often targets people suspected of illegally sharing movies, music and other digital downloads. In Liverpool, the City of London division has today, with help from Merseyside Police and UK copyright agency PRS for Music, arrested a 38-year-old Liverpool man linked with illegally distributing the UK's Top 40 singles via download sites.
Torrent tracker bans Windows 10 over 'terrible privacy policy'
Windows 10 is facing some fierce resistance from a few of the most dedicated torrenting communities. As TorrentFreak reports, the private torrent tracker iTS has banned its members from using the operating system over what it considers to be "terrible" new anti-privacy policies. These stem largely from a new Microsoft services agreement which covers select Windows 10 apps and services such as Cortana, Skype and Xbox Live: "We may automatically check your version of the software and download software updates or configuration changes, including those that prevent you from accessing the Services, playing counterfeit games, or using unauthorized hardware peripheral devices."
Danish police arrest two for running Popcorn Time guide sites
Danish law enforcement officers have reportedly arrested a pair of men for running two websites tangentially related to Popcorn Time, an outlaw site billed as the "Netflix for Torrenting." Not only that, the police have also shut down both Popcorntime.dk and Popcorn-time.dk, and seized the domains. Each man faces a maximum jail term of six years for his involvement.
UK ISPs ordered to block e-book piracy sites
In a major victory for book publishers, the UK's High Court has ordered internet service providers (ISPs) to block several sites offering pirated e-books. The decision means that BT, Sky, Virgin Media, TalkTalk and EE now have 10 days to comply and ensure their customers can't access the following link depositories: AvaxHome, Ebookee, Freebookspot, Freshwap, Libgen, Bookfi and Bookre. The Publishers Association (PA), which sought the blocks under the UK's Copyright Design and Patents Act 1988, claims the sites collectively hold around 10 million e-books, and that at least 80 percent of them are infringing copyright. It's been described as the "first action of its kind brought by UK book publishers," following similar ISP blocks levied against sites hosting music, movies and TV shows.
The internet's biggest TV pirate calls it quits after scam
If you enjoy getting the latest TV shows from EZTV, you may want to stop that now, and not just because it's illegal. It's also more risky, because the hugely popular torrent site is now in the hands of potentially bad actors, according to TorrentFreak. Former staffers said that EZTV's founder "NovaKing" was the victim of a hostile takeover by a for-profit group, following a series of wacky (and ironic) events. The problems started when Italy's .IT registry suspended the original site's domain name, and what followed was something out of a high-tech Kafka novel.
The Pirate Bay's new network is making ISP blocks useless
Despite global efforts to put the kibosh on infamous torrent site The Pirate Bay (TPB), the lair of internet swashbucklers is proving almost impossible to sack. Swedish police succeeded in taking the site down late last year, only for it to reappear the following month. And stronger than ever it seems, thanks to a new distribution partner that inadvertently circumvents most ISP-level blocks. When TPB rose from the ashes, it drafted in middleman CloudFlare to help deal with the colossal amount of traffic coming to the site.
UK ISPs start restricting sites that help bypass The Pirate Bay blocks
The never-ending game of whack-a-mole between file-sharing advocates, internet service providers (ISPs) and copyright holders continues. The Pirate Bay (TPB) has become a tricky site for torrenters to access, and it's given birth to numerous proxy sites that circumvent the blocks set up by individual ISPs. Copyright holders cottoned on pretty quickly and have been asking ISPs to block the proxy sites that are still giving torrenters access to illegal downloads. So what's happening now? Well, some dedicated users have set up sites that keep an up-to-date list of the best TPB proxy databases. It's all rather convoluted, but now, according to TorrentFreak, British ISPs are cracking down on those sites too.
The Pirate Bay comes back weeks after a police raid
We're starting to wonder if it's nigh-on impossible to keep The Pirate Bay down. Just weeks after Swedish police raided the bootleg file site and knocked it offline, it's back -- TorrentFreak reports that almost everything is up and running once again, complete with a phoenix graphic (above) to taunt authorities. With that said, it's not quite the same experience that many veteran users would remember. While the pre-raid content remains intact, many of the original staffers are locked out of this version. They're planning to create their own version of the Bay that supposedly restores the community spirit of the original. It's not clear if that'll work, but it sounds like cops and copyright holders may have created more problems for themselves in trying to take down one of the best-known pirate havens.
Swedish police raid The Pirate Bay and knock the site offline
Despite The Pirate Bay's efforts to escape an increasingly hostile environment in Sweden, the torrent site has been taken offline today. TorrentFreak and Swedish paper Dagens Nyheter report this is the result of a police raid as confirmed by Fredrick Ingblad, a special prosecutor for file sharing cases. The Rights Alliance is a local group backed by the music and film industries, and it took credit for the shutdown, claiming its criminal complaint lead to the action and called Pirate Bay an illegal commercial service. Only time will tell if this shutdown sticks, but TorrentFreak says it is affecting the site's forum Suprbay, as well as Bayimg.com and Pastebay.net. [Image credit: shutterstock]
The last Pirate Bay founder has finally been caught and arrested
It was only a matter of time. The last of The Pirate Bay's three co-founders was arrested yesterday on the border between Laos and Thailand, signalling the end of a drawn-out manhunt for the site's infamous creators. Fredrik Neij's apprehension follows an arrest in June for fellow co-founder Peter Sunde, as well as a three-and-a-half year prison sentence handed down to compatriot Gottfrid Warg last month.
Google explains how it fights piracy in search results
The anti-piracy road hasn't played out easy for Google, to the point where past claims have stated that the company's efforts simply aren't working. But Google says it's doing everything it can to combat piracy across its services, of which Search is likely the most important one -- at least to copyright holders. With this in mind, the technology giant has released an updated version of its document "How Google Fights Piracy," in which it dives into detail about what steps it's taking to crack down on pirated content. Google says this includes new ad formats in search results, such as what's pictured above; improved downranking of known delinquent sites; and removing more autocomplete predictions based on DMCA takedown notices. Part of it is also pointing people to trusted sources when searching for music or movies, including services like the Play store or Spotify -- Google plans to do this only in the US for now, but the idea is to make it a global feature at some point in the future.
Google sees over 1 million daily takedown requests for pirate links
While sites like The Pirate Bay are busy improving the experience for the torrent-loving crowd, Google's facing the task of processing an extreme amount of removal request for pirate links. According to a recent transparency report on the matter, Google is now seeing more than 1 million DMCA takedown notices per day. In the previous week alone, for instance, the tech giant was asked to remove about 8 million results from its search engine. As TorrentFreak points out, the amount of copyright removal notices sent to Google has seen a tremendous spike in recent times -- it wasn't long ago that the number of takedown requests was in the low-hundreds for the entire year. With the growth of the internet as a whole, however, it's easy to see how that's come to be. You can peruse the report in full here, if you're into that sort of thing. [Image credit: will never stop us/Flickr ]
The Pirate Bay makes it even easier to torrent on the go
Regardless of what you may be searching for on The Pirate Bay, it wouldn't hurt to be doing so with style and ease of use. In consideration of this, the popular (and controversial) torrent-sharing property has launched a brand new mobile site, featuring a rather subtle, less clustered look that should make browsing through it a much more enjoyable experience. As TorrentFreak points out, this is the first time Pirate Bay's done a major design revamp in almost a decade, a change likely to be considered a breath of fresh air by its users, particularly those who like to use the website on devices like smartphones and tablets. The Pirate Bay doesn't appear to be redirecting all mobile visitors to the new page yet, but you can check it out here right about now.
