A number of popular BitTorrent websites have been taken down after Swedish police raided a data centre near Stockholm.
The newly founded Intellectual Property Crime Unit of the City of London Police has scored its first victories. Several domain names of major torrent sites have been suspended by their registrars following an urgent request from the unit. SumoTorrent and MisterTorrent lost control over their domains and ExtraTorrent had its .com domain suspended. Not all registrars are caving in that easily though, as easyDNS is refusing to comply and sees the requests as abuse of power.
When Mega launched this week as “The Privacy Company” their claims of super-security were bound to come under the highest levels of scrutiny. Predictably, security experts all over the world have been examining the site looking for flaws and any sign that user privacy could be breached. After responding to some of the critics, Kim Dotcom has announced that he will issue some kind of encryption challenge. “Let’s see what you got,” he says.
Following its successful application to have The Pirate Bay blocked by several leading ISPs in the UK, the recording industry is back again with new demands. The BPI has reportedly asked Internet service providers such as BT, Virgin and TalkTalk to block leading torrent sites Kickass Torrents, H33t and Fenopy. The ISPs have refused to do so voluntarily but will all do so should a court order a blockade. That will happen, it’s just a question of when – the BPI has Christmas in mind.
The Pirate Bay has made an important change to its infrastructure. The world’s most famous BitTorrent site has switched its entire operation to the cloud. From now on The Pirate Bay will serve its users from several cloud hosting providers scattered around the world. The move will cut costs, ensure better uptime, and make the site virtually invulnerable to police raids — all while keeping user data secure.