The Pirate Bay has been blocked by XS4ALL and Ziggo a few days ago, the domain name redirects to http://blokkade.ziggo.nl/ and switching DNS server just gets you the following result

xeross@alfa ~ [ ping thepiratebay.org
PING thepiratebay.org (194.71.107.50) 56(84) bytes of data.
^C
--- thepiratebay.org ping statistics ---
140 packets transmitted, 0 received, 100% packet loss, time 139003ms

At this moment in time I have no new information on the appeal and where it stands at the moment. Also all ISPs that BREIN has sent requests to to block The Pirate Bay have refused and are awaiting the appeal.

Sources/related links:

• TorrentFreak: Dutch Pirate Bay Blockade Goes Live
• TorrentFreak: Dutch ISPs Refuse To Block The Pirate Bay
• TorrentFreak: Dutch ISPs Ordered To Block The Pirate Bay

Today in a main proceedings that was filed by Stichting BREIN the court in The Hague has ruled that 2 of the largest ISPs in the Netherlands, Ziggo and XS4ALL, will have to block access to The Pirate Bay, they have until the 25th of January to implement this or will face fines of €10,000/day up to a maximum of €250,000.

After this victory BREIN is also trying to get other ISPs to also block The Pirate bay, using the court ruling as leverage. However these will wait to see if XS4ALL and/or Ziggo will appeal, before going through such drastic measures.

The following IP addresses and domain names are ordered to be blocked (Source: Tweakers.net):

Stichting BREIN has also been given permission to supply additional IP addresses and domain names to be added to the blockade, which is worrying as they can be added without any proper review of what is being blocked, however they are held liable if IP addresses or domain names they provide aren’t directing to The Pirate bay.

Something Interesting

One thing of particular interest is that Stichting BREIN had to prove that people using XS4ALL and Ziggo as their ISPs are using The Pirate Bay. To do this they sampled 50 movie torrents. This gave them 11,105 IPs exchanging the movies, of which 5,143 Dutch IPs of which in turn 1,477 (28,7%) are Ziggo IPs and 240 (4,7%) are XS4ALL IPs. However it is unclear if this sample provides an accurate average.

Then, to determine how many people using these ISPs have downloaded from The Pirate Bay they extrapolated the results, using data from AdPlanner (Note that it isn’t very that accurate), which estimates the amount of unique visitors from the Netherlands per month at 500,000. This leads to an estimate of 143,500 Ziggo customers and 23,500 XS4ALL customers that supposedly exchange copyrighted material through TPB. Note that they are extrapolating IPs collected from trackers on torrent downloads with website visits, while they are unrelated.

The judge based on this concurred that 30% of Ziggo customers and 4.5% of XS4ALL customers have recently downloaded illegal material from The Pirate Bay. This is crooked because the torrents could’ve come from someplace else, the material isn’t necessarily copyrighted (Free and open source software, and alike). Plus downloading movies and music both aren’t illegal in the Netherlands, which is completely ignored, partially because BREIN asserted that, even though you can disable uploading, no one actually does this.

Updates

January the 11th 2012: XS4ALL has officially announced to appeal the court ruling, their CEO stating the court ruling is “Censorship” and that this is “A dark day in internet history”
January the 12th 2012: Ziggo has also officially announced to appeal the ruling.

Further Reading:

• https://torrentfreak.com/dutch-isps-ordered-to-block-the-pirate-bay-120111/
• http://www.cyberguerrilla.info/?p=3778
• (Dutch) http://tweakers.net/nieuws/79266/ziggo-en-xs4all-moeten-the-pirate-bay-blokkeren.html
• (Dutch) http://tweakers.net/reviews/2446/brein-vs-punt-pirate-bay-internet-naar-de-haaien.html
• Stichting BREIN being hypocritical idiots: https://torrentfreak.com/copyright-corruption-scandal-surrounds-anti-piracy-campaign-111201/

Various “news” sites have reported that EA, Nintendo and Sony have dropped their SOPA support, though they’ve never published a press release about it and they weren’t even on the official list of SOPA supporters, Techdirt explains what caused this error.

So they don’t support SOPA? No, they do support it, as they’re all members of the ESA (Entertainment Software Association) which supports SOPA as can be seen in the official list of supporters (Mirror).

If you want to check whether a tech company is supporting SOPA don’t forget to look at the list of members of the ESA and the BSA (Business Software Alliance) who also support SOPA.

A security advisory was released yesterday detailing a denial-of-service vulnerability that most of the web could be affected by.

The vulnerability lies in the hashing algorithms used by a variety of programming languages (including Python, Ruby, PHP and Java). When collisions happens these algorithms will take up large amounts of CPU cycles to deal with them (From what I understand).

To give you an idea of the extent of this problem I’ll quote the PDF linked in the advisory, take for example PHP:

On an i7 core, the 60 seconds take a string of multi-collisions of about 500k. 30 seconds of CPU time can be generated using a string of about 300k. This means that an attacker needs about 70-100kbit/s to keep one i7 core constantly busy. An attacker with a Gigabit connection can keep about 10.000 i7 cores busy.

Or Ruby:

A typical POST size limit in Ruby frameworks is 2 MB, which takes about 6 hours of i7 CPU time to parse. Thus, an attacker with a single 850 bits/s line can keep one i7 core busy. The other way around, an attacker  with a Gigabit connection can keep about 1.000.000 (one million!) i7 cores busy.

This allows someone to take down almost any webserver with (very) limited resources. Possible workarounds are: limiting CPU time, limiting the POST size, or limiting the maximum amount of POST variables.

I’m currently waiting for the first PoCs and exploits to be published and will post an update when I get my hands on one (Which will also confirm if I understand the exploit correctly).

Update: I can see how this will ruin your day

Update 2: Go here for an easy to understand explanation.

GoDaddy has seen a massive amount of domains being transferred away from them as customers are moving elsewhere because of their support for SOPA. Among the companies transferring are Wikipedia and the Cheezburger Network (Who own over 1000 domains). It all took off when a GoDaddy boycott was started on Reddit. Various other domain registrars are even offering discount codes for anyone transferring to them.

Just today (The 25th of December) the counter is standing on 28,656 domains transferred out as seen on DailyChanges, and the amount just keeps climbing, day after day more and more domains are being transferred away.

GoDaddy has now retracted their public support for SOPA but the damage has been done, not to forget that they helped write SOPA, not just support it. I have no idea how long this will keep going and how many people will move away but it’s gonna hurt (It’s already hurting actually). GoDaddy is even begging for people to stay.

I’m sure more companies will face the wrath of the public because of their SOPA support, and various companies are already retracting their support for it, some companies never even explicitly supported SOPA “they agreed with Floyd Abrams’ analysis of SOPA. That’s it. They didn’t say their firms supported SOPA”.

It seems that download.com has decided to start making all their downloads use their own installer, which seems to come with an optional toolbar that gets installed by default, and optional homepage/search changes (Also set by default), unless you, of course uncheck them.

Why are they doing this you might wonder. Well according to their FAQ they are doing it to: “ensure a safe and improved download experience by making it easier for Download.com users to complete downloads and launch the software’s installer”. I don’t see how this would make this easier, the installers shipped with the software are usually just fine. And by the looks of it they are wrapping the actual installer, so you’ll have an installer that installs an installer that installs your software, yep brilliant.

Also, it seems that if you as a developer don’t want CNET to wrap your installer you have to get a premium subscription: “Yes. If you would like to opt out of the CNET Download.com Installer you can sign up for a Premium subscription or PPD promotion, both of which are being excluded at this time”. Which boils down to “We make a shitty wrapper around your software and if you don’t like it you can pay us to remove it”.

I’ve used download.com in the past, but with these kinds of shenanigans I highly doubt I’d want to use their service ever again, let’s hope they realize their mistake before everyone turns their back to them.

Further reading:

• http://www.extremetech.com/computing/93504-download-com-wraps-downloads-in-bloatware-lies-about-motivations
• http://www.ghacks.net/2011/08/17/the-cnet-download-com-installer/

~Xeross

The outcome of lawsuit of BREIN against The Pirate Bay doesn’t mean much.

Legal experts said that the current ruling can be largely attributed to the lack of defense, and the fact that the defendants failed to show up. With this ruling in hand, it is not unlikely that BREIN will put pressure on Dutch ISPs if the Pirate Bay doesn’t block Dutch visitors within 10 days.

This is an update on: The Pirate Bay blocked in the Netherlands

Some recent news was that a big company was going to buy The Pirate Bay from the current owners and convert it into a legal download site . But it seems the potential buyers, Global Gaming Factory couldn’t gather enough money to buy the website, And they have been given a week by The Pirate Bay owners before the deal is off.

The plan was that Global Gaming Factory would buy the torrent site, Then utilize the computer power of some users and the cash of others, Then pay the necissary companies off to stay legal. The person that was leading this deal (Wayne Rosso) who joined two weeks ago already left the company again, He said that the companies CEO (Mr. Pandeya) wasn’t straightforward enough with him, And he also said they aren’t going to rist their reputation any further.

Rosso added, “The more time we spent with Mr. Pandeya, the less confident we were,” and that, “I don’t think there’s going to be any money raised with GGF’s current (lack of) plans.” And the people who were going to fund the project were also misinformed. TorrentFreak went to the spokesman for The Pirate Bay who said that he’s unsure what will become of The Pirate Bay if the deal is cancelled.

This is an update on: The Pirate Bay is going to be subscription based

The Pirate Bay has to make their website unavailable to people from the netherlands in 10 days.

This is what the judge decided  after BREIN sued the admins of  The Pirate Bay. For every day they don’t take action they are fined 30.00 euro’s, with a max of 3 million.

So this will probably mean it will be blocked in the Netherlands, however I’m not too sure if the folks over at TPB will actually take it down, But we’ll find out soon enough I guess.

As always, I’ll keep you posted.

Update: The Pirate Bay blocked in the Netherlands