//beconfused

LokiTorrent.com has been shut down.

There are websites that provide legal downloads. This is not one of them.

This website has been permanently shut down by court order because it facilitates the illegal downloading of copyrighted motion pictures. The illegal downloading of motion pictures robs thousands of honest, hard-working people of their livelihood, and stifles creativity. Illegally downloading movies from sites such as these without proper authorization violates the law, is theft, and is not anonymous. Stealing movies leaves a trail. The only way not to get caught is to stop.

(A notice now replaces the LokiTorrent web site and it doesn’t seem as if the webmaster added it.)

It’s another sad day for the P2P (Peer-to-peer) world. Another BitTorrent site is down – LokiTorrent this time. Before that, it was Suprnova that went burst. I wasn’t surprised that LokiTorrent fall though. But I am surprised that it’s so fast.

Previously, LokiTorrent accepted donations to fight against the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America), I guess it’s quite useless now – they lost. I wonder how many BitTorrent sites are the MPAA going to pull down before they grow tired of the whole thing.

I suggest everyone to stop downloading the damn movies and just spend a couple of bucks to rent DVDs. They’re much safer. Even buying pirated DVDs from Malaysia seemed safer. Hey, even shoplifting seemed to be a better deal.

Court: Hollywood gets P2P giant’s server logs

A Dallas federal court has ordered file-swapping site LokiTorrent.com to shut down and provide Hollywood lawyers with access to its full server logs, including data that could expose hundreds of thousands of people to copyright lawsuits.

The Motion Picture Association of America said Thursday that it had won a quick court victory against LokiTorrent, and was launching a new round of actions against other online piracy hubs. The data provided by the onetime file-swapping hub would provide “a roadmap to others who have used LokiTorrent to engage in illegal activities,” the trade group said.

Hard numbers on the site’s traffic are hard to come by. However, according to researchers at the Delft University of Technology, LokiTorrent was responsible for more than 800,000 downloads in the month of October alone.

MPAA executives said the information could “quite possibly” lead to lawsuits against individuals.

“This should give us information about LokiTorrent visitors who were involved in flagrant piracy of filmed entertainment,” said John Malcom, director of worldwide piracy operations for the MPAA. “We are going to look at all the information…and decide what the appropriate action is to take.”

Source: CNET News.com, by John Borland

I just surfed upon this piece of news. Apparently, it says Suprnova.org is gone. In case you’re wondering what that is, Suprnova.org is a web site with lots of torrents to be downloaded. They include torrents of games, music, movies, comics, TV shows, applications and just about everything else that your PC can open. None too legal.

.torrent files contains hash information and instructions for the BitTorrent client to download the files. BitTorrent is a P2P network.

Suprnova.org goes offline for good

A message on Suprnova.org, which describes itself as the Universal Bit Torrent Source, said that it is “closing down for good” in the way that “we all know it”.
It won’t host or track any torrent links either, and the lads and lasses said they’ve tried everything to stay up.

The message said they’ve tried everything, including mirrors, including everything but it’s a “sad day” for them.

You can read the message here.

There has been quite a bit of Bit Torrent stuff going on in the last week, but our Bulgarian correspondent hasn’t been around to report it. Sorry ’bout that.

Source: The Inquirer

Yes, it’s gone.

This post has been updated due to personal reasons. Sorry about that. Do read other posts though. Thanks.

This is what that is left in my post:

You can get pirated software from Smart Play Trading, or rather Smart Play Illegal Trading.

It’s so advance now. They have a PC there. Choose the game you want and the copy the game into an Imation CD-R for you using Nero Burning Rom. I believe that is pirated too. You just have to wait for less than 5 minutes and it’s done. It costs SG$4.00! An Imation CD-R costs less than SG$0.40 [buy a lot]!!

You can find illegal items from Smart Play Trading, at Blk 154 Bukit Batok Street 11 #01-310 Singapore 650154. You can call them at (+65)64251976 and fax them at (+65)65606443. Pirated Playstation and Playstation 2 games can be found there. The computer in the shop has full of those. I think they even store their CD-images into a DVD! I think the person in charged is David Wee. I am sure the local law enforcement will find their shop very interesting.

Enjoy your day. This post is amended and shortened on Sunday, March 14, 2004 on 11:16 PM, Singapore Time.

Yong Liang passed me the SPEED album last Thursday. I didn’t ask for it, I am quite skeptical about SPEED doing a come back. SPEED is a popular Japanesegirl group that broken up so as to further their studies. [Rumor says there are disagreements in the group that cause it.]

I secretly owned one of the SPEED compilation albums called “Dear Friend 1″. It’s one of the two compilation albums released moments before their split. The second album was cleverly titled “Dear Friends 2″.

I really liked that album of mine, but I didn’t share with anybody. Nobody suspect I was listening to this type of music as I listen to English music mainly.

Enough of that, so Yong Liang offered to lend me the album. I’m quite surprised because no one offered to lend me their CDs before, lol. Then he told me it’s copy-controlled.

Great. Can’t copy. [He previously asked if I want him to burn a copy for me, I turned him down as I prefer it in WMA format, my portable CD player reads WMA.] I announced to him that I have my ways to get it ripped into my computer.

My method:

# Place the copy-controlled CD into scorching hot water.
# Put a teaspoon of pepper and 2 tablespoons of Tabasco sauce.
# Stir well and put some strawberries inside.
# Put everything in the oven and set the oven at 200 degree Celsius for 20 minutes.
# Remove it from oven and it’s ready to serve to the CD drive’s tray.

Anyway, I didn’t do my method, I just popped the disc in my CD drive and Windows Media Player (WMP) just popped up. I commanded WMP to search for the names of the tracks. The search is successful, WMP auto-fills in the names and even the composer too.

I clicked on the “Copy Music” button. I was in for a surprise.

Not that WMP explode [boom!] or something.. It copied! There was no message whatsoever, it just copied. So much for a copy-controlled CD.

The same thing happened for the Blue CD – Guilty. It supposed to be copy-controlled but I did a CD-to-CD Copy and the CD worked fine. The same thing happened to 5566′s new album, I copied and ripped. It allowed me to. [I am not into Blue or 5566, it's my brother.. I want more Shiina Ringo.]

So what’s this copy-protection about, can anyone tell me?

We witnessed the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) catching people who download music. It seems that the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) has begun to follow suit.

Adam Moss, who is a freshman in management information system, downloaded 52 movies while participating in distribution through Internet Relay Chat (IRC).

MPAA then contacted K-State, who provides internet access and shares liability for its Internet users’ actions.

A representative came and deleted Moss’ files as well as obtained his log files, which are proof the movies were present and now are deleted. Moss also was required to write a letter of apology to the MPAA. His punishment from K-State was having his Internet taken away until the end of the year. [I will mourn for my Internet if it happens to me.]

“I told everyone on the floor that got movies from me to delete them. I told other kids not to do it,” he said. “People are looking for people like me. On top of that, they also took log files saying these are the people that actually downloaded from me and going after them. It’s a huge chain reaction,” said Moss.

And says who IRC is not targeting. Many of my friends thought so. For your information, I used to [keyword: used to] share around 50 gigabytes worth of anime in IRC. Although anime is not exactly the type of stuff the MPAA is after, it’s better to be safe than to be sorry.

The actual reason that I stop distributing in that I am tired of it, I am tired of leechers [people who only download, and not share].

This people are trying to be on the safe side. They’re thinking “I download but I don’t share, the RIAA and MPAA is not going to target me”. For that kind of selfish thought, no anime for them. I get pissed off when I see downloaders sharing their empty folders.

Now I use the BitTorrent protocol, which forces everyone to share. No share, you no get thing. Share, you good, you get thing.

A particular piece of news caught my attention while I was reading news through my browser.

As you have probably known, the music industry has turned its big legal guns on Internet music-swappers – including a 12-year-old Upper West Side girl who thought downloading songs was fun.

Brianna LaHara said she was frightened to learn she was among the hundreds of people sued yesterday by giant music companies in federal courts around the country. She’s the first of 261 defendants to settle their lawsuits with the association. Brianna LaHara agreed Tuesday to pay US$2,000, or about $2 per song she allegedly shared.

“I got really scared. My stomach is all turning,” Brianna said last night at the city Housing Authority apartment on West 84th Street where she lives with her mom and her 9-year-old brother.

She’s not the only one who downloaded, so why pick her?

“We are taking each individual on a case-by-case basis,” said Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) spokeswoman Amy Weiss.

Cary Sherman, president of the RIAA, said the civil lawsuits were filed against “major offenders” who made available an average of 1,000 copyright song files. The RIAA said it was pleased with the settlement. There are 260 cases still pending.

“Nobody likes playing the heavy and having to resort to litigation,” said Cary Sherman, the RIAA’s president. “But when your product is being regularly stolen, there comes a time when you have to take appropriate action.”

Record companies blame illegal music file-trading for a 31% fall in compact disc sales since mid-2000.

Brianna and the others sued yesterday under federal copyright law could face penalties of up to $150,000 per song, but the RIAA has already settled some cases for as little as $3,000.

Count herself lucky, at the same time unlucky.

There’s one thing for sure – she’s got lots of supporters. The Brianna Project has been launched to help pay back the US$2,000 by donation from the public. The last time I checked, The Brianna Project collected US$1,603.

By the way, did you know she’s an honors student. I guess she can kiss her honors goodbye. She will forever be known as “The girl who downloaded music illegally”. It’s sad isn’t it? RIAA just destroyed her life.

This article is compiled by me. My sources are from New York Post, FoxNews, The Brianna Project and CNN.