Running Tor anonymity system on Your TV

From Slashdot:

Running Tor On Your TV

"TorTV is an early effort to embed Tor in household computing: run it on your TV at home. So far only WDTV installed with the homebrew WDLXTV firmware is supported. What other platforms do you think are viable for it?"

WDTV  is the Western Digital's version of the Roku / Google TV box.

Tor (anonymity network)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Tor (short for The onion router) is a system intended to enable online anonymity. Tor client software routes Internet traffic through a worldwide volunteer network of servers in order to conceal a user's location or usage from anyone conducting network surveillance or traffic analysis. Using Tor makes it more difficult to trace Internet activity, including "visits to Web sites, online posts, instant messages and other communication forms", back to the user and is intended to protect users' personal freedom, privacy, and ability to conduct confidential business by keeping their internet activities from being monitored.

"Onion routing" refers to the layered nature of the encryption service: The original data are encrypted and re-encrypted multiple times, then sent through successive Tor relays, each one of which decrypts a "layer" of encryption before passing the data on to the next relay and, ultimately, its destination. This reduces the possibility of the original data being unscrambled or understood in transit.

The Tor client is free software and there are no additional charges to use the Tor network.

https://www.torproject.org/

Wikileaks Reveals BitTorrent Lawsuit Background

From Slashdot: http://yro.slashdot.org/story/11/08/31/1218220/Wikileaks-Reveals-BitTorrent-Lawsuit-Background


"A US diplomatic cable published by Wikileaks has revealed much of the previously hidden background behind the BitTorrent court case currently playing out in Australia's High Court, including the Motion Picture Association of America's prime mover role and US Embassy fears the trial could become portrayed as 'giant American bullies versus little Aussie battlers.'' Oops. Looks like there's a little bit of egg on the movie studios' faces!"

The Pirate Bay Founders Go Legit With BayFiles

FROM : http://yro.slashdot.org/story/11/08/30/1248227/The-Pirate-Bay-Founders-Go-Legit-With-BayFiles


 "The founders of The Pirate Bay, possibly the best-known BitTorrent tracking service in existence, are going legit with a new file-sharing site which they claim will adhere to all copyright rules and takedown requests. BayFiles, as the new service is named, isn't BitTorrent powered. Instead, the site borrows its method of operation from the likes of Megaupload and RapidShare: a user selects a file and uploads it to the site via their web browser, after which it becomes available for anyone to download, assuming they have the link."

Hurt Locker lawsuit targets a record-breaking 24,583 IP addresses

Thanks Domi,

Sent to you by Dominic via Google Reader:

Hurt Locker lawsuit targets a record-breaking 24,583 IP addresses

via Engadget by Jesse Hicks on 5/27/11

It's been almost a year since the producers of The Hurt Locker filed a lawsuit against 5,000 alleged pirates suspected of distributing the film via BitTorrent. Now Voltage Pictures has updated its complaint, adding almost 20,000 IP addresses to the list of defendants. That makes it the largest file-sharing lawsuit of all time -- a crown previously held by the company behind The Expendables, according to Wired. The plaintiff has already reached agreements with Charter and Verizon to identify individual users, but no such deal with Comcast, who owns nearly half the supposedly infringing addresses. Linking those addresses with user accounts would let Voltage manage individual settlements -- probably somewhere between $1,000-$2,000 -- rather than continue legal action. All of this eerily echoes the Oscar-winning film's plot, about an adrenaline junkie who couldn't resist downloading just one more movie. Or defusing one more bomb. We're a little fuzzy on the details, but venture into TorrentFreak to scan for familiar IP addresses.

Paramount Pictures To Release Film On Bittorrent

From Slashdot:
In a little over two months time, the long-awaited horror movie "The Tunnel" will receive its world premiere. Rather than a traditional theatrical release, the movie – which is set in abandoned real-life tunnels under Sydney, Australia – will make its debut online for free with BitTorrent. Simultaneously it will be released on physical DVD, to be distributed by Hollywood giant Paramount Pictures.

This is Interesting. Paramount also tried releasing movies on USB drive back in Nov 09 using the Mo-DV DRM technology.

IsoHunt to court: Google is the largest torrent search engine

From techspot.com:
IsoHunt is still fighting its legal battle with the MPAA. In the latest episode, the torrent website filed a reply brief (PDF, via TorrentFreak) to the US Court of Appeals in which it suggests that Google, and not IsoHunt, is the largest BitTorrent search engine on the Internet.
IsoHunt is essentially arguing that if it is going to be targeted by movie studios, so should Google. Last month, Google got involved took interest in the ongoing court case between IsoHunt and the MPAA, fearing that the standing injunction could damage it. Although the search giant did not dispute IsoHunt's liability, the company is clearly concerned. Here's the crux of IsoHunt's argument:

Neither Google nor Plaintiffs mention the 95% overlap between torrents available through Defendants’ systems and torrents available through Google and/or Yahoo!. (AOB 29-30.) Neither Google nor Plaintiffs mention the 96% of Torrentbox tracker users who get torrents from places other than the Torrentbox torrent site, such as from Google or Yahoo! (AOB 11.) Defendants might argue to the jury that it is unfair to hold Defendants liable if Google, unbothered by Plaintiffs, provides torrents to ten or twenty times the number of users that visit Defendants. Defendants might argue that Defendants are being scapegoated. Defendants might argue that holding Defendants liable while ignoring Google would not curtail infringement. Defendants might argue that Plaintiffs have litigation purposes other than curtailing infringement.

Through the appeal, IsoHunt hopes to reverse the permanent injunction which orders it to filter its search results, and obtain a jury trial instead of a summary judgment. In its reply brief, IsoHunt argues that the majority of the files that can be found through its search engine are also available via Google.
While Google is not a torrent search engine, it does index and cache hundreds of millions of pages with directs links to torrent files. There's even a filetype command that allows users to search only for torrent files (by specifying the .torrent extension).

Microsoft Patents DRM'd Torrents

Microsoft has received a patent for a 'digital rights management scheme for an on-demand distributed streaming system,' or using a P2P network to distribute commercial media content. The patent, #7,639,805, covers a method of individually encrypting each packet with a separate key and allowing users to decrypt differing levels of quality depending on the license that has been purchased.

Cox Blocked

I downloaded a movie using Bit Torrent off of Isohunt. But this movie was really a trojan of a new flavor. Turns out the wmv video file was set up to have the video codec to call back home for DRM activation over the net. So when you try to play this file, Cox Cable uses this to shut down the Internet connection. For a few hours there was no way to get back on. It seemed completely dead.
Fortunately there was an easy fix. Eventually you will get a page about DMCA violations with a link to restore the connection.

Every web site you try to access come back with this page.


That link is http://anydomain.com/?action=reactivate The second time this happened, I already knew this and was able to reactivate instantly.

Now for the Wacky Idea: first run movies on Bit Torrent.

I have the rights to make a movie based on a famous SciFi writer short story who just passed.

After 3 years of rejections from Hollywood, I was thinking that maybe we can fund the movie with donations and grants and release the movie freely (GPL style) over Bit Torrent and BlueRay and then see what it will take to get it played in theaters. I really think it would be so cool and set a whole new model for film production, copyleft movies. Am I a nut job or is this just crazy enough to work?

If you have any thoughts on that please leave a comment.

Or you can mail me at http://www.videotechnology.com/contact.html

Also see my other blog post
copyleft-movies-can-it-be-done

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Update:
South Park To Be Available Online Free and Legal
http://entertainment.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/03/27/175241"

South Park is coming online, free and legal. My brief research has not indicated if it will use DRM, require some silly Windows-only software or be otherwise substandard. According to a Wired blog article, 'Parker and Stone said they were inspired to start the site when they got 'really sick of having to download our own show illegally all the time. So we gave ourselves a legal alternative.'" In this regard South Park joins fellow Comedy Central notable The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, whose archive was made freely available online late last year.