Torrent sites blocked by Trojan...

A trojan named Troj/Qhost-AC has been spotted on torrent sites labeled as a keygen for popular software. But in a strange surprise, the trojan would modify the users host file, rather than generating a key, changing popular torrent web sites like, The Pirate Bay, Suprbay (The Pirate Bay forum) and Mininova, the two most popular torrent sites on the internet to 127.0.0.1, making it impossible to visit these sites.

The Trojan caused pop-ups on users screens and played a sound file saying "downloading is wrong". The Trojan didn't install any other spyware or malware onto the victims PC, other than blocking the three web sites, something that many users thought was strange.

I know this is not so harmful trojan,but only if you know the technical details.For novoice users it can block their daily torrent spot.So,beware and very before you download torrents using vertor.com

TorrentSpy must pay $110 million to MPAA

A clear message to all torrent websites hosted on the US soil was sent all over the world today: A federal judge is hitting the shuttered TorrentSpy service with a $111 million penalty for facilitating the infringement of thousands of copyrighted works. U.S. District Judge Florence -Marie Cooper in Los Angeles, ruling in a case brought by the Motion Picture Association of America, said site operator Justin Bunnell and associates must pay the maximum $30,000 for "each of the 3,699 infringements shown." The case, producing what is among the largest fines in copyright history, was bolstered after the MPAA allegedly paid a hacker $15,000 for internal TorrentSpy e-mails and correspondence.

via rlsLog

MPAA sues website linking to pirated media

The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) has sued Pullmylink.com, a website featuring links to free - and allegedly pirated - movies and TV shows, claiming the site promotes and profits from copyright infringement. The lawsuit is the seventh action filed by the MPAA against content aggregators in the US since late last year and is part of a larger anti-piracy campaign that included a criminal raid on the UK headquarters of the website TV Links. The campaign against sites that link to, but do not host, illegal content has raised some eyebrows with critics asking why the association doesn’t go after the host sites or search engines such as Google, which owns video sharing site YouTube.

“...Is the message that it’s less criminal to host illegal content on YouTube than it is to link to it from a site such as TV Links?...”

Guardian technology columnist Jack Schofield wrote in the wake of the MPAA-directed raid on TV Links in October.

rlsLog.net

Indonesia Blocks YouTube!

Indonesia has become the latest in a series of countries to block popular video sharing site YouTube over content concerns. According to Sukemi, an information ministry official, at least four Indonesian ISPs have blocked access to the site for carrying a Dutch lawmaker's film, titled "Fitna", that accuses the Koran of inciting violence. The move follows a government ban on broadcasts of the film by Geert Wilders, leader of the Dutch anti-immigration Freedom Party, which alternates images of the September 11, 2001 attacks and other Islamist bombings with quotations from the Koran.

The four companies which have blocked access are: PT Telekomunikasi Indonesia (Telkom), PT Telekomunikasi Selular (Telkomsel), PT Exelcomindo Pratama Tbk, and Indonet. Telekom had also previously blocked social networking site MySpace and is still looking for other sites and blogs that have posted the film to block them, Eddy Kurnia, vice-president for public and marketing communication, said in a statement.

More @ ReUters

Sony BMG Sued for Software Piracy!

Sony BMG, a company known for enforcing its intellectual property rights, is now facing the other end of an Intellectual Property related lawsuit. A report (French) says the complaining company, PointDev, seized some of Sonys assets which revealed that the pirated software appeared on four of their servers.

PointDev, a small software company, mandated a bailiff to raid one of Sony BMGs owned building in January this year. The raid revealed that four of the Sony BMGs owned servers contained the pirated software.

It appears as though the company discovered this when an IT department employee requested assistance for the use of a product called Ideal Migration. When technical support looked into the case, they discovered that the key used to activate the software was a pirated version.

Essentially, the PointDev CEO says that the BSA has said that French Corporations have a software piracy rate of 47%. The CEO also says that piracy may even be a part of Sony's business policy - if you can't afford it, pirate it. It is said that Sony was in the process of merging with BMG when the pirating incident occurred.

An additional report (French) (Google Translation) says that the CEO of PointDev wants to make this piracy case an example.

Sony told La Province to not report on the ongoing investigation. Clearly, Sony is not happy that this case was made public at all.

via zeropaid.com

News: Pirate Bay to buy country 'seaLand'

Notorious file-sharing site The Pirate Bay is planning to buy its own country and turn it into a copyright-free piracy paradise.

Currently based in Sweden, The Pirate Bay uses BitTorrent technology to let visitors share videos, games, software and music - mostly without each work's copyright holder's permission.

This week it launched Buy Sealand, a campaign to buy the former World War 2 gun platform now known as the Principality of Sealand, located six miles from the UK coast.

The island is reportedly for sale after its infrastructure was badly damaged by fire in summer 2006.

The Pirate Bay plans to fund the £100 million sale through donations from users who will automatically become citizens of the principality.

"It should be a great place for everybody, with high-speed Internets [sic] access, no copyright laws and VIP accounts to The Pirate Bay," the group said in a statement on the buysealand.com website.

If the bid for Sealand fails, The Pirate Bay plans to look elsewhere. "We will try to buy another small island somwhere [sic] and claim it as our own country," it stated.

Reviews: untangle - Open Source Network Gateway

Untangle is the free & open source alternative to Sonicwall. In addition to the basics (Firewall, VPN, IPS & routing), Untangle makes it easier to block spam, spyware, viruses, phishing, porn, gambling, MySpace, Facebook, IM, peer-2-peer & much, much more.

• "Best Security Solution" - LinuxWorld 2007

• Runs at the gateway... No clients to install!

• Easy to use: Intuitive GUI, logging, reporting & automatic signature updates

• Installs on standard Intel/AMD hardware

Lively forums & a great Wiki

More @ untangle.com

Google logs half of all US searches

Overall, Americans are searching more than they did a year ago: queries have increased by 11% since 2006.

Google, the only search engine among the top five to gain market share, logged more than half of all search queries last month. Research firm comScore recorded 7.6 billion search queries in May, 3.9 billion of which were made from Google, giving the search engine a 50.7% market share. The figure is a 1% increase from April, when Google claimed a 49.7% market share, and an increase of more than 3% since the start of 2007.

Yahoo saw its market share drop from 26.8% to 26.4%. The firm has seen its share of the search market fall by more than two per cent since the beginning of the year. Time Warner's search services, which include former net giant AOL, dropped from 5% to 4.6% in May. All other search engines combined accounted for 3% of all queries. Of the top five search engines only Microsoft's saw its share of the market remain constant, logging 782 million queries last month and giving the company 10.3% of the US market.

vnunet

Oracle amends complaint in SAP suit

Oracle amended its lawsuit against SAP on Friday, alleging its rival copied its software and support materials to the point of repeating minor errors it had in the original versions.

Oracle, which in March filed a lawsuit against SAP and its wholly owned subsidiary TomorrowNow, alleges TomorrowNow copied and stored its proprietary software and support materials when accessing its system. TomorrowNow, a competing third-party support and maintenance provider, targets Oracle's PeopleSoft, J.D. Edwards and Siebel customers.

Under the amended complaint, Oracle has added allegations that TomorrowNow violated its copyrights and breached contracts.

SAP's TomorrowNow, as with other third-party support and maintenance providers, is generally allowed to access a company's systems to retrieve the needed information that is covered in that customer's contract. Oracle, however, alleges TomorrowNow systematically accessed its files and software to a level far beyond what the contract called for.

Oracle, for example, created a Daylight Saving Time (DST) document with instructions on how to conform Oracle's software to the new daylight saving time change. But the software maker alleges TomorrowNow copied the information on two occasions in January and swapped out Oracle's logo and copyright and placed its own logo on the documents.

Read More...

Porn played on Disney Channel in N.J.

Cable operator Comcast is investigating how hardcore pornography was broadcast during a popular cartoon program on the Disney Channel.

Customer Paul Dunleavy would also like to know. He was stunned Tuesday morning to find his 5-year-old son watching something other than "Handy Manny," a cartoon about a bilingual Latino handyman and his talking tools. "It was two people doing their thing, it was full-on and it was disgusting," the Middletown father of three told The New York Daily News for Wednesday newspapers. "I couldn't believe it."

Fred DeAndrea, a spokesman for Philadelphia-based Comcast, confirmed the programming error occurred around 9:30 a.m. Tuesday. He described it as an "isolated issue in a local New Jersey facility."

"We automatically detected the issue and it was corrected promptly. We apologize to any customer who experienced an issue yesterday morning," said DeAndrea, who said the mistake was made by his company, not Disney. DeAndrea declined to provide the duration of the pornography broadcast, how many homes it reached, how the mistake happened and whether anyone will be disciplined for the X-rated error.

Philly.com

Xbox 360 Ad Banned

A TV advertisement for the Xbox 360 has been banned in the UK because it promotes and glamorises dangerous driving. The ad featured a rooftop and street car chase ending with the protagonists congratulating each other and swapping roles. "We were concerned that the ad gave the impression that reckless street car racing was exciting and fun, and considered that was compounded by the congratulations offered to the other driver at the end of the race by the other young men involved," stated the Advertising Standards Authority.

Microsoft had defended that ad stating the publisher and the ad makers had worked hard to avoid misconceptions that the console was encouraging dangerous driving. As well as airing the ad after 9pm the ad featured on-screen text explaining the stunts were in a controlled environment and that at no point were the cars breaking speed limits. However, the ASA found that "the text reinforced the sense that the events in the ad were real, rather than fantasy, and were therefore capable of being copied."

The advert will not be shown on UK TV again due to breaching rules on health and safety and driving standards. Videogame companies face regular run-ins with the Advertising Standards Authority. A number of complaints about violence, glorifying violence and advertising to children were received by the ASA recently over a series of advertisements for the launch of the Nintendo Wii. However, all seventeen complaints were rejected.

GamesIndustry.biz

DeluTube offers to view deleted YouTube videos!

YouTube was just in a trouble of putting some not-puttable videos online. And they have removed such things. But, someone got different idea and launched a new service which provides deleted videos from YouTube. Amazing! I mean how fast are these people?

DeluTube, as its name implies, can serve up some video clips even after YouTube has purged them. That includes clips that contain copyrighted music and many clips that aren’t work safe. Delutube allows visitors to enter the video ID (pulled from the end of the YouTube URL) of a deleted clip, then attempts to retrieve the clip from YouTube's system. Clips are apparently not deleted from YouTube's database at the moment they are taken down (or they at least persist in YouTube's cache before being cleared), allowing DeluTube a chance of retrieving them. The site also allows for the easy downloading of the clips.

DeluTube isn't the only service that can do such a thing, of course, but it's possibly the most ironic; the site makes money serving Google ads. The creation of these services shows how much demand exists for this sort of material, and what a hard time content owners have controlling it. The line of legality is very fuzzy since the clips all come from YouTube's servers, whether they infringe on copyright laws or are simply inappropriate. Lawsuits are undoubtedly coming, but will they target YouTube for not completely removing the videos or will they target DeluTube and other sites like it?

What do you think? Is this YouTube's partner or supported by them to slap the lawsuit? Leave Your comments on this.

Turkey lifts YouTube ban after two days

Turkey lifted its ban on YouTube Friday, an official for the country's largest telecommunications firm said, two days after a court ordered the Web site blocked because of videos that allegedly insulted the founder of modern Turkey. Ahter Kutadgu, head of corporate communications for Turk Telekom, told the Anatolia news agency his company had been notified of a court decision to lift the ban.The Istanbul court that ordered the site blocked on Wednesday had said it would lift the ban as soon as it ascertained that videos insulting Turkey's founding father, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, were removed.

The ban had been condemned by the press freedom group Reporters without Borders and drew attention to Turkey's shaky record on permitting free expression. It is illegal in Turkey to insult Ataturk, a revered figure whose image graces every denomination of currency and whose portrait hangs in nearly all government offices.

Source: News.com

Oooh...Turkish court bans YouTube!

Access to the popular video-sharing website YouTube has been suspended in Turkey after clips insulting former Turkish leader Mustafa Kemal Ataturk had appeared on the site. Even after YouTube removed the offending clips, a court order blocked all access to the site. Turkish visitors to the site are now greeted with a message in English and Turkish reading "Access to www.youtube.com site has been suspended in accordance with decision no: 2007/384 dated 06.03.2007 of Istanbul First Criminal Peace Court".

According to Turkish media, there has been a "virtual war" between Greek and Turkish users of the site, with both sides posting insulting videos. The clip prompting the ban reportedly dubbed Ataturk and Turks homosexuals. Insulting Ataturk, the founding father of modern Turkey is an offence which can result in a prison sentence. Paul Doany, the head of Turk Telecom, the country's largest telecoms company, said that they had blocked access to the site as soon as the court order came through and will continue to do so as long as the order stands

Source: BBC News