Video-Sharers Made Happy: YouTube Video Upload Limit Increased to 15 minutes

July 30, 2010 by · Comments Off
Filed under: Announcements & Events, File-Sharing Programs, Networks & Services 

Earlier this week YouTube announced that it will soon change the video upload limit from the current 10 minutes to 15.

Videos exceeding10 minutes were until now reserved only to YouTube Partners and other content owners but due to a torrent of requests from users the limit had to be pushed a bit further for everybody as well.

Of course, the most popular video-sharing site in the world didn’t miss out on the opportunity to promote the new feature with a “15 minutes of fame” ad.

From the site:

“Imagine that this video is all the world will ever know about you: what would you want to communicate? What will be the enduring stamp you’ve left on us all? Tag your video with “yt15minutes,” upload it by Wednesday, August 4, and we’ll select a handful of people to truly gain their 15 minutes of fame by featuring them on the YouTube homepage in a future spotlight.”

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Sad Day for UK Gamers: R4 Cards Declared Illegal

July 30, 2010 by · Comments Off
Filed under: Announcements & Events, Legal P2P News & Issues 

The British High Court has banned a popular copying device used by many gamers to play illegally copied games on the Nintendo DS

Now illegal to sell and market in the UK, the R4 cards, are storage devices that fit into the DS cartridge slot, circumvent security systems and allow people to play pirated games that had grabbed using file-sharing sites.

While the cards were advertised as ‘backup’ devices, Nintendo’s claims that they were mainly used in copyright infringement acts have been seen by the High Court as justified and the legal uses of the devices labeled as secondary and irrelevant.

Some months ago the game producer pointed to piracy as the main culprit for the loss in sales of the company saying that the increasing popularity (and low prices) of Iphone games is not at all accountable for the decline of Nintendo DS software purchases.

The precedent was created by a Dutch ruling according to which online retailers are legally liable for importing R4 cards as well as Wii modification chips.The popular devices favored by pirates everywhere were also banned in Japan last year.

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HADOPI Gives the “Go” to French Three Strikes Law

July 30, 2010 by · Comments Off
Filed under: Announcements & Events, Entertainment Industry, Legal P2P News & Issues 

Late last year France adopted the controversial three strikes model much to the joy of the entertainment industry and the discontent of advocates of human rights. However, the green light for imposing the law was given by HADOPI (Haute Autorité pour la diffusion des œuvres et la protection des droits sur Internet) only yesterday.

Perhaps even a greater impact will have the news that a number of companies in the music industry (SACEM, SDRM, SPPF and SCPP) and film industry (ALPA)are now legally allowed to collect IP addresses.

Here’s part of the decree as published by Zeropaid (Google translation):

The Google translation of the decree says, “The High Authority is now in a state begin its work. it determine the appropriate time to send the mail early warnings to offenders, based on referrals received from the rights holders.”

The decree goes on saying “The graduated response mechanism implemented by the Highest authority opens a pedagogy of responsibility on Internet. The user who is guilty of acts of infringement on the Internet incurs heavy penalties. Intake fundamental flexible response is to provide a device alternative, less heavily punished, leaving its place to teaching and explanation”

This basically means people should expect warning letters with copyright infringement accusations. They plan to move Internet users to authorized sources and those who fail to do so will face harsh penalties.

The main flaw of the system was never removed – the person accused of copyright infringement is guilty upon accusation and it’s his/her job to prove their innocence. This basically violates human rights as we know them.

This is what happens in a system that took the wrong turn right from the start since tracing an IP address does not mean it will direct you to the person who actually committed the copyright infringement act. It is not possible to link an IP address to an individual especially in the case of a household of people or when that household used Wi-Fi which could have been hacked.

These are only a few of the problems the implementation of the three strikes law ignores and probably how it will deal with them in a concrete manner we’re bound to find out in the near future.

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uTorrent Web Adds Compatibility with iPad and Android

July 29, 2010 by · Comments Off
Filed under: Announcements & Events, Downloads, File-Sharing Programs, Networks & Services 

BitTorrent Inc. keeps on further developing its services and expanding the capabilities of its popular client uTorrent. Last month the company added support for the iPhone and due to a latest upgrade the remote access ‘Web’ feature of its uTorrent Falcon client now supports the iPad and Android devices. This mean that those heavy downloaders using uTorrent can now remotely control their downloads on the mobile device of their choice no matter where they are.

uTorrent ‘Web’ users are also able to add, pause and delete torrents through an interface which feels pretty much the same as uTorrent app in every aspect.

“Since launching µTorrent Web for iPhone, users have been clamoring for something similar on other devices,” said BitTorrent’s VP of Product Management Simon Morris. “So, today we are very excited to announce support for the iPad and Android platform – including the Nexus One and Google Ion devices. Now you can control torrents via your web browser on a PC, iPhone, iPad and Android”, he added.

While so far most of the users offered a very good feedback, there are some for whom the privacy issue makes a good reason not to completely trust such a service. Morris, however, ensures:

“Just like with µTorrent Web for iPhone, we continue to take users’ privacy very seriously – all your private data is encrypted from the moment it leaves your browser right to the client on the other end. So, as before, users can rest assured that the private details of their µTorrent usage are never exposed to BitTorrent Inc. or any third parties.”

TorrentFreak explains:

“In order to use the web interface, users will first have to download and install the latest Falcon release or uTorrent 3.0 alpha. In the client users can set a username and password that they can use to access their torrents remotely. After an encryption swipe and logging in, users will see the mobile compatible interface that gives them all the controls they are familiar with in their regular PC client.”

Go here to download uTorrent Web

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100 Million User Data Spreads on Bittorrent Sites

July 29, 2010 by · Comments Off
Filed under: Announcements & Events, File-Sharing Programs, Networks & Services 

Ron Bowes, a security consultant at Nmap, has caused quite a turbulence in news earlier this week as he made available through file-sharing sites the public Facebook profiles of 100 million users of the social networking site which makes about 20% of the site’s global membership.

Facebook hurried to smother worries saying that the information that has been gathered (around 2.8 gigabytes) is in the public domain and no confidential data has been compromised due to security breach.

“In this case, information that people have agreed to make public was collected by a single researcher and already exists in Google, Bing, other search engines, as well as on Facebook”, said the company in a statement.
According to The BBC newswire, Simon Davies, the director of Privacy International, has warned a few times in the past about the risk of such exposure.

“Facebook should have anticipated this attack and put measures in place to prevent it”, BBC quotes him.

“It is inconceivable that a firm with hundreds of engineers couldn’t have imagined a trawl of this magnitude and there’s an argument to be heard that Facebook have acted with negligence”, Davies added.

He continued by emphasizing how confused users of such social networking sites are, in fact, when it comes to privacy settings and pointed to the revision of Facebook’s privacy settings a few months ago, saying”People did not understand the privacy settings and this is the result.”

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