Popular Warez Scene Group Says ‘Goodbye’

October 31, 2009 by Yonah · Comments Off
Filed under: Announcements & Events, File-Sharing Programs, Networks & Services

photo credit: www.argentinepost.com

While operating ViRiLiTY has proved to be a very ‘productive’ warez-scene group, reportedly releasing about 8,000 commercial software and keygens. Now they quit the scene after 7 year s of activity.

In the retirement announcement ViRiLiTY thanks all those who have stayed by their side since their debut back in 2002, but also apologizes to all the software developers whom the group constantly annoyed through their cracked software releases. Here’s the announcement:

“After more than seven years and over 8000 releases the time has come, so that we are going to close the curtain now. We would like to thank everyone who supported us in the last years and especially those who have been loyal for years! Thank you for the nice friendships and the fun we had with all of you. A big sorry to the high quality software developers who have been defeated by us. But you can relax now, because the real competition is gone Its quite sad to see that 0DAYs today dir is getting more and more empty. We hope the future will bring some new talents to make the scene what it was a few years ago. Highly active, talented and with a strong competition between the groups. I would like to thank the group, active and former members, for the nice time we had and the more fun we are going to have as being part of the scenes history ViRiLiTY has always been a small but very strong group, which made ViRiLiTY the way it was. This is the the final release that has been dropped under the label of ViRiLiTY. So please shut down any types of open positions that are running under the name of ViRiLiTY. Otherwise we are going to hunt you down and cut your penis of.
Good Bye
ViRiLiTY 2002-2009″

The group’s last release was a keygen for Ashampoo’s Core Tuner.

Tags: file sharing sites, p2p

Files24: BitTorrent & IMDb in One Place

October 31, 2009 by Yonah · Comments Off
Filed under: Announcements & Events, File-Sharing Programs, Networks & Services, Movies, MP3, Digital Audio & Games

A new site was recently born and, at a first glance, it promises to incite the BitTorrent scene through its unique features

What is Files24?

One could probably see the service as a mixture between IMDb and BitTorrent. The site lists a number of movies each with useful movie data included such as a genre, plot summary, director, list of cast members etc plus the IMDb rating and a direct link to IMDb.

The uniqueness of the site which currently is serving up about 40,000 torrents goes further (movie freaks you gonna love this) – Files24 allows you to browse torrents searching after an actor or director.

TorrentFreak quotes Files24 founder Oleg as saying -“The actors and directors can be added by the users when they upload a torrent file. Also if we recognize the movie, we automatically check and fill in any missing data.”

Moreover, the site claims to have a dedicated tracker that is optimized to make possible the maximum download speeds – “We track which country users come from and the tracker then gives priority to peers from their own country. As a result users can download at much higher speeds.”

Files24 also offers music, nicely organized in various categories, TV shows and games and pretty soon apps as well but for now the advanced searches only for films (which makes us looking forward for further development of the site).

Tags: BitTorrent, file sharing service, file sharing sites, file-sharing, p2p

Medical Students Resort to File Sharing

October 30, 2009 by Yonah · Comments Off
Filed under: Announcements & Events

TechDirt has recently come across a very interesting study that shows file sharing has passed the boundaries of popular content such as music, movies, games etc and scientific papers are being downloaded for free by medical students who don’t want to spend their pocket money on research material.

The study tells about the trading of over 5,000 research papers by 125,000 medical students turned into illegal file sharers on a site devoted to medical topics and very popular among medical professionals.

About the results of the report ArsTechnica writes:

Over the course of six months, over 6,500 articles were requested, and over 80 percent of those requests were successfully filled. The articles received a mean of 4.47 views, with one attracting 177 downloads. The author found that the requests roughly paralleled the journal’s impact factors, with Nature and Science coming out on top, followed by more specialized medical journals. Figuring an average cost of $30 a download (the price requested by many journals), the publishing industry was potentially losing $1.4 million a year due to the site, although it’s unlikely that many of the downloaders would have actually exercised their option to buy an article.

Apart from the “ethically dubious,” practice which the author of the study points out there’s another valid aspect to be considered and which ArsTechnica brings about – “at least some medical professionals are apparently unable to obtain the publications they feel are needed for their training or practice; given their job responsibilities, it seems unethical to withhold these materials.”

The site goes on explaining another aspect which can make a big difference here in terms of perceiving the discovering of the study with an objective eye:

“For many years, it was traditional for anyone publishing a paper to order a stack of what were termed “reprints”—essentially the journal article without the rest of the journal’s contents—from the publisher, in order to share with colleagues or anyone who was interested, but did not have access to the journal. With the advent of digital publishing, this sort of service shifted to the emailing of PDFs—in a lot of ways, the file sharing seen here could be viewed as the next logical step in this publication sharing process.”

Tags: file-sharing

Google Launches Music Search Service

October 30, 2009 by Yonah · Comments Off
Filed under: Announcements & Events, Movies, MP3, Digital Audio & Games

This week Google extended its services with a musical one that offers free streams and downloadable MP3s but probably to see in it a challenger to Apple’s online music market would be too soon.

The idea of the service which uses Google’s Onebox search feature (which presents the user with contextual information for his searches), is to enter a music-related term such as a track title, artist, album name, or even some song lyrics and it will display results with a song clip if one is available.

For now, at least, Google’s Music Onebox will only be available to U.S users. For content the service has reached deals with Lala and iLike, (the MySpace-owned music service). Music Onebox will also rely on Gracenote to help identify songs using searches related to lyrics in the song.

Google’s Internet rival ,Yahoo offers a similar service that lets you play full songs and sample clips within your search results with its music being provided entirely by Rhapsody. While Google’s Music Onebox uses a pop-up, Yahoo’s music service is based on a player constant within your search results window.

Music Onebox is designed to also enable music discovery by linking to sites like Pandora, imeem or Rhapsody.

Tags: digital music, google

ISPs React to Lord Mandelson’s Drastic Anti-Piracy Plans

October 30, 2009 by Yonah · Comments Off
Filed under: Announcements & Events, Legal P2P News & Issues

Internet service provider TalkTalk wants to take the matter to court

In a P2PON post two days ago we reported about Lord Mandelson’s plans (read: threat) to implement the “three strikes” policy from July 2011 if the sending warning letters to suspected pirates fails to lead to a 70 percent reduction in illegal file sharing.

As expected, (new) critics were quick to come: Internet service provider TalkTalk has launched a threat of its own against Lord Mandelson’s plans. The ISP wants to sue the British Secretary but according to lawyers for the case has to wait for European laws that are still pending.

On the TalkTalk’s blog, the company’s executive director of strategy and regulation expressed their total disagreement with Mandelson’s principle of ‘guilty until proven innocent’:

The unintended consequence of Lord Mandelson’s plan will be to encourage more wi-fi and PC hi-jacking and expose more innocent people to being penalised.

TalkTalk will continue to resist any attempts to make it impose technical measures on its customers unless directed to do so by a court or recognised tribunal.

In the event we are instructed to impose extra judicial technical measures we will challenge the instruction in the courts. Last week we launched a campaign against Lord Mandelson’s plans called Don’t Disconnect Us.

Whether or not TalkTalk may have a solid case here depends mainly on the results of formal talks in the European Commission concerning the extent of the internet piracy laws.

From TalkTalk’s blog: “Today we are launching an online campaign using a specially commissioned Brightdance from Michael Bosanko, the original bright dancing artist. It features a pair of scissors cutting a computer cable. The film may also be used in an X Factor ad break.”