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TorrentBits.org and SuprNova.org Go Dark
Numerous people wrote in with similar stories: "Without providing a reason, both of these sites have shut down: SuprNova.org and TorrentBits.org." We mentioned a few days ago that the MPAA was going after Bittorrent sites.
A big point many people miss -- trackers are what keep the torrents together. Indexers like SuprNova, although highly popular, do nothing but point people where to go.
It's like asking a bartender about the street corners where the girls hang out late at night. If he responsible for how you use the information; ie, if you engage in prostition?
It's a sad, sad day when information is made the scapegoat. If anything, they should be applauded, and kept as a means for getting to the real criminals.
"An infinite number of monkeys typing into GNU emacs would never make a good program."
People, please stop posting links to your favorite torrent site that is still up and kicking. They are already under tremendous pressure right now, and I don't want them to have any more attension brought to them. Those that are interested can find the sites themselves, so please, help save the few that are left and stop posting links.
this is the same sort of thing that happened with the original Napster. Any sort of centralization is going to become an immediate target for MPAA/RIAA legal action. At least with BitTorrent there can be other sources for .torrent files, but so long as they can shut down any large repositories like suprnova.org, finding files will be too cumbersome for all but the most determined users.
DC++ seems to have the same weakness, with the hosts, but as long as host lists are legal, it will remain pretty easy to find new hosts. Gnutella seems pretty safe, but they've managed to pollute the network enough to make it almost unusable.
alas, it is only a matter of time before something comes along that perfects this problem and leaves the MPAA/RIAA with no option but to come up with a new business model. Free music seems to me to be a fine way to advertise a touring artist who is making money off of the shows. Movies may have to resort to product placement, or something.
How's this for a solution to film piracy?
...wait a few weeks
.... wait some more
1. Forget chasing 'pirates'. This will save a lot of expensive legal bills. Cut back drastically on advertising too, as you don't need to whip people up into a frenzy to get them to theatres in the first week.
2. Make film (Citizen Kane: starring Adam Sandler or something).
3. Make a VCD cut and make unlabelled cheapo vcd's. Using the economies of scale, sell these so cheap that the guys selling pirate vcd will buy from you rather than burn their own copies. Your margin is the difference between a bulk pressed cd and a small scale burned copy.
4. Simultaneously sell the film as a download for the same price as you get for the vcd.
5. Make a nicer, longer dvd cut of the film and, again, sell these so cheap that the guys selling pirate dvd will buy from you rather than burn their own copies.
6. Sell the dvd cut of the film online at the same price as the DVD wholesale price.
7. Theatre release of film in lovely THX/35mm
8. Boxed set dvd release with extra everything.
By doing this you make money from the guys currently selling 'pirated copies' of films and money from people who can't be bothered to find a torrent of your film. The money saved on lawyers and advertising would probably pay for setting up the servers.
At stage 3 you are the sole supplier of vcd of your film, it is uneconomic to burn copies so you own the market. People may share your film over the internet but the hassle of finding a torrent and/or running P2P software is competing against the paid download (4) which is priced as low as a blank cdr.
This is simple economics. Cut back on expensive things like lawyers and advertising, then put out bargain bin priced product to soak up the sales to misers and the poor. You can still make bigger margins on the nicely packaged versions to people who want to buy them.
They whose government reduces their essential liberties for temporary security, receive neither liberty nor security.
What about all those folks who said at the last "SuprNova is going bye-bye" story that it couldn't be touched because it was somewhere in Europe where the MPAA can't reach them?
We can't really say this is the result of MPAA, can we? Can they "get" the folks related to suprnova.org if they are located in Belgium or Turkey or whereever?
I only post comments when someone on the internet is wrong.
Are you under the illusion that the MPAA would not already know about these sites? I mean, you reckon they don't have google or are you thinking the don't have an internet connection? Maybe they work from a dail-up connection and don't get to check out any forums? A bit more respect for the powers of the dark side might suit you well
I have nothing to say, just want people to read my cool new sig
And then they fuck people over by removing my only way of watching it before it comes to DVD?
WTF? I do feel your pain (well, I could have, if I were the least interested in Star Trek), but you're not being "fucked over".
You'll just have to wait until you can watch it legally. I.e. when a TV station you have access to broadcasts it, or when you can buy the DVD. Tough shit.
You have no right to download stuff (or more precisely, in more civilised non-DMCA-afflicted countries, people have no right to illegally distribute stuff) just because it's not yet available legally where you happen to live.
Some retard modded your post "insightful". I think it could possibly be "informative" or "interesting", since despite your confused outlook you provided an example of yet another effect of the anti-piracy crusade.
... of the MAN trying to keep us down...
I'll miss SuprNova... A lot of good old tv there.
Kenny P.
Visualize Whirled P.'s
Look man, everyone knows he with the gold makes the rules.
So if you really want torrents to continue being available on the internet, and in general any kind of p2p activity to be available on the internet for US customers - then the following must happen.
1) You need to get some gold for your own lawyers. That is just the fact of the matter. It sure is nice to get all this free stuff, but as they say - there is no free lunch.
2) You need to get some gold for your lobbiest to the congress critters. They only know what the MPAA/RIAA mouths tell them. A politician basically knows only how to get elected, otherwise they would be doing something else.
3) You need to get politically motivated. You need that political organization named above. You need your own moveon.org to keep the membership active in letter/fax/email writing and informative campaigns.
Play time on the internet is over. It is time to grow up and realize politics, government, and all that corruption is part of the game now.
A big point many people miss -- trackers are what keep the torrents together. Indexers like SuprNova, although highly popular, do nothing but point people where to go.
It's like asking a bartender about the street corners where the girls hang out late at night. If he responsible for how you use the information; ie, if you engage in prostition?
The big point that you are missing (and most people running torrent trackers) is that if you have a reasonable suspicion that the information you are providing to someone is going to be used for criminal purposes then you are treading dangerously close to the definition of "conspiracy".
Let's take your example of the helpful bartender a bit further. You wander into a bar and over several drinks proceed to tell the bartender about your sleazy business partner and how he is cheating you. The bartender tells you that "he knows a guy" who can take care of your problem for a bundle of cash. You take the number he gives you, meet with a contract hit man, and pay him a wad on money so that your business partner meets a rather violent demise.
Is the bartender a participant in your conspiracy to commit murder? According to the law he is. A reasonalbe person would have no problem conecting the dots here and information that was provided had a purpose...
To drag this back in to the real world, you might want to take a look at how the law deals with flea markets and swap meets where counterfeit goods are being sold. The person organizing the swap meet can post as many signs as they want saying that they have no idea what you are selling and are only providing a place for people to put their goods on display, but the law treats that claim like the BS it truly is. The people running the torrent trackers know what is being provided and what their role in the game is, and if they try to claim that they are shocked that people are trading pirated music, software, and videos on these services they will be bitch-slapped by the law.
How can posting a list of files possibly be illegal?
That is all that Suprnova ever did. Now, if its illegal to post a list of files, it must also be illegal to print one in a newspaper, or write one on a piece of paper with a pencil anad photocopy it.
If you go a google search for "index of" apache *.dmg* "port 80" you get lots and lots of links to copyrighted software. By your flawed logic, Google "is just plain illegal" because it provides lists of files just as Supernova did.
Printing a list can never be an illegal act. At least not in a free country it cant.
ATH0 Bitcoin: 1DnwFLXczVZV8kLJbMYoheUrpqHesjxrSi
"Since I read somewhere that it's closed source, and there is no intent to port it to linux... I hope Exeem dies a firey death, as places like suprnova can easily be replaced.
Now if Exeem because opensource, and becomes availible for Linux... well... another matter entirely."
Only on Slashdot would nonsense like this get moderated up. Please explain what is insightful about this? He proclaims he read something that he cannot backup with a source and he shows that he is a zealot and hopes that all non open source projects fail. That's really insightful.......
> How am I going to watch Enterprise now?
;-) Seriously, *everything* gets posted there a day or two after it's released. Just follow the white rabbit to a big premium news server provider and download anything you want without the possibility of the MPAA or RIAA ever seeing your IP.
It starts with a "U" and rhymes with "BLUESNET".
All these episodes of Hex and uncensored Degrassi: The Next Generation and advance Battlestar Galactica I'm watching in the U.S. have to come from somewhere...
Funny how Europeans always complain about not getting American shows in a timely manner, when most of what I want are Canadian and British shows I can't get here (or can't get uncensored, like Degrassi), or U.S. shows that were cancelled here before showing all episodes but have all the episodes shown overseas (like the sexiest teen show ever on American network TV, The Opposite Sex). The new *Battlestar Galactica* is the only exception, but it's a joint U.S.-British production shown in Britain first...
I'd gladly pay for subscrptions to premium British and Canadian TV services if I could, but I'm not allowed thanks to geographically discriminatory content licensing. Content providers need to be pushed into broader worldwide same-date (or at least close--not many months or years difference) availability. Funny how in the era of "free trade" the multimedia content industry is the only one erecting more barriers to trade instead of tearing them down. While geographically I can't just subscribe to Britain's Sky Digital since their satellites aren't positioned for this side of the world, there's no technological reason I shouldn't be able to subscribe to Canadian services. I'm not permitted to by Draconian content licensing.
Artificial trade borders are gone on the Net, but instead of adjusting to exploit it the content industry is trying to protect the old fiefdoms. Instead, it should be doing for downloadable TV what iTunes did for downloadable music. But it's too complacent and protectionist to adapt.
"It's a damn poor mind that can only think of one way to spell a word."--Andrew Jackson
Well, I dunno about the "insightful" either, but I for one would never use a closed-source p2p client.
:)) is nothing I'll trust on...
It's really just a matter of safety (and paranoia): only with opensource clients I can be relatively sure that the client won't rat out on me or install malware of various sorts. Honor among thieves (or pirates
The portability is an added (very nice) bonus.
Don't whistle while you're pissing.
the MPAA is co-operating in criminal investigations with police in Finland, the Netherlands and France, so it is reasonable to infer that reports of raids in more European countries are likely to surface shortly.
Yes, the MPAA is acting on behalf of its members and copyright holders, ensuring that intellectual property is not distributed for free. They have the law on their side, and can probably buy or lobby anyone of importance that disagrees with them.
That said, I think the MPAA is fighting a losing battle. People like to share, to spread what little wealth and happiness they have around.
BitTorrent enables a system where people of like interests and hobbies can reward one another as they are connected to the same torrent. And yes, this includes both legitimate and illegitimate uses.
Sharing is part of human nature and any organization that throws its weight around in an attempt to circumvent our instinct to share will ultimately prove to be futile.
Why not distribute .torrents by using emule or irc... lets go underground..
You also need the trackers. You can't distribute those.
No sig
Am I the only one who thinks it's stupid to register an account to download warez? It's just one more thing for them to track.
"You have a right to do anything that does not harm another. Since they are not even trying to get his money for the show, there's no basis whatever for any claims of monetary losses. The author gains nothing by keeping his work from others, so disseminating it cannot be said to harm him."
Look, I'm no Nazi when it comes to the occasional IP theft. I have been known to use p2p apps from time to time; but what you just wrote is false. When you pirate a copy of something, even when the creator has no plans to try and sell it to you, you're still harming him by eroding his ability to control the distribution of his own work. That's a very important thing in the eyes of musicians, writers and filmmakers.
Also, your assertion that the author is not losing money due to your theft is lost if you consider the fact that he might choose to market his creation to your area at a future time. He has lost potential income, even if it's years before he decides to take action on it.
Like I said, I'm not trying to be self-righteous on this as I've done my own share of downloading, but people who think p2p downloading of things is a purely correct thing to do really need to think about what they're doing a little more.
This tagline is umop apisdn.
They are *broadcasting* it in the first place. If they want to control the distribution, they're going to have to use a system where it is possible to control it, instead of blaring it across the airwaves for all takers.
Better to try convincing them now than after you're facing a civil trial.
Rather than threaten him, why don't you sit back for a moment and consider that it's exactly what he's doing?
Convince other Americans that the Public Domain is a Good Thing.
Good advice, but the best way to do this is through demonstration...not rhetoric.
You *can* do something about the law...Run for office if you have to.
"Going through the system" is almost impossible under the current regime. The people who run the system get their paycheck from folks like the MPAA, they have specifically designed 'the system' in such a way that folks like you and me have a snowballs chance in hell of getting anything changed.
What he's doing is real change, not imagined or self-righteous change. It takes courage, and self-belief. Let your government bully you if you prefer, let everyone wave the word 'law' around like it's a word from god, but don't try and convert him for our sake. We need more people like him.
It took Martin Luther King and Malcolm X to make real change then. It takes the same two types of people to make real change now.
"When patience has begotten false estimates of its motives, when wrongs are pressed because it is believed they will be borne, resistance becomes morality." --Thomas Jefferson
The government has a defect: it's potentially democratic. Corporations have no defect: they're pure tyrannies. -Chomsky
To paraphrase an old expert's opinion, while not even being an expert: it depends
In a digital network, you either have a central authority able to control all data flow or you have none. There is no middle ground, I fear. So you either have a "watchful eye", if I might call it that, above you, screening all your traffic. Or you don't.
If you accept a central authority, no problem. But remember, they can check you silently and must do so everytime you say, send or receive anything through the net. They will need to monitor your opinion, your preferences, your private and casual conversations and worse.
What makes this central network authority a prime target for bribery and despotism. Like the police today. Anyone, even law enforcement officers, have their price and/or can fail in their morale. While a police investigation leaves a paper trail, has multiple officers involved and has an electable politician or sheriff behind it, network auditing has not. Criminal investigation usually happens after a crime was committed and affects those related to a crime, but scene network screening has to run regularly and affects everyone. On one hand they need to have proof to convict you, on the other the proof is a set of bytes with no identifying properties.
Short: anti-authoritarian movements can be tracked, silenced and imprisoned more easily if you have a central authority scanning traffic.
The main goal of Freenet is to prevent usurpation of power by the executive branch. Those in power will always reject dissent and sooner or later try to use a subverted law against true freedom of speech.
In my own humble opinion I can say freedom all is a higher goal than protection of few children. Now mod me down, flame me to oblivion, whatever you like. Call me stone-hearted if you like, but if I must choose between truly free speech, truly anonymous and open or prevention of children's suffering, I chose the first.
Dictatorship in one country hurts more children than all molesters can do worldwide. Preventing dictatorship is the best way to help and care for all children. Chasing molesters only helps a few.
And I will not let my emotion for hopeless underage victims overwhelm my rational thoughts. I will not trade "a good thing" for "no bad thing" as this will lead me nowhere. And I will never ever become a tool of population control, spreading memes of fear and scare for a threat that is perceived way out of proportion if you look closely.
I think those organizations shutting down these sites just started to initiate the next generation of decentralized P2P clients... That's usually the only thing they do, help speed up the next generation of file sharing software, more clever than the last time. It usually doesn't happen if not a great deal of sites are taken down, since then there's not as much need to advance technology.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
"Maybe this is a troll, but I'll bite anyway. You have a right to do anything that does not harm another. Since they are not even trying to get his money for the show, there's no basis whatever for any claims of monetary losses. The author gains nothing by keeping his work from others, so disseminating it cannot be said to harm him."
Nonetheless, the person who owns the copyright has the exclusive right to choose how it's copied. Whether you think they're making the right choice, or whether you think that they'd agree with your decision, or whether you think that they'll suffer no monetary loss makes no difference. It's their right, not yours.
The balance here, of course, is that anybody can create something and copyright. If you don't like what somebody does with their own intellectual property, you are completely free to release your own under the terms you choose.
Sitting in my day care, the art is decopainted.
Everything is running fine until some moderators feel obligated to let the unwashed masses in on the secret of SuprNova.
Next time there is good working P2P systems up and running, please don't WRITE ARTICLES ABOUT HOW GOOD THEY ARE.
Seriously, can we let the lawyers find out about The-Next-Best-Thing(tm) on their own. Do we have to spoon-feed it to them and put a big bullseye on everything good?
But if a few children are being exploited, does this mean you have a free society at all?
Yes. Do you think that a "free society" means everybody is safe and happy? No. That's not what a free society is. A free society is one where you can succeed or screw up on your own, where the Man doesn't force you down 'cause there is no Man.
There is no such place as Utopia. Some people will always be fated to suffer, but, in a free society, most people have every chance to make their own destiny. A free society is as close to Utopia as we can get.
What you are arguing, sir, is the fallacy of the excluded middle.
i'd hit it so hard, if you pulled me out you'd be the king of britain [bash.org]
"If someone drugged you, raped you, took pictures of the rape, do they automatically have the right to put distribute those photos on the Internet? What about your rights?"
You're conflating two unrelated ideas. If someone drugged me and raped me, they've already broken the law, and ought to be arrested, tried, and put into prison. The photos are a non-issue.
People are allowed to take photographs, even of bad things. Photojournalists are allowed to take photos of people comitting crimes. It's important to not confuse the issue of what the real crime in your example is. The crime is the drugging and the rape, not taking a photo.
A photograph is a record of an event, just like a written story, or even an orally told story. If you're suggesting that photographing crimes is wrong, you're also strongly suggesting that writing about them or even talking about them is wrong. Is that really the position you want to take?
Its laws, like its territory, are inviolable and the business of Slovenians.
That's what Iraq said as well. Don't forget the US government do not care about international law if it goes against their commercial interests.
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
I haven't read the proof of Fermat's last theorem. Nevertheless, I think it's probably true, because:
For similar reasons, I also believe that the structure of DNA is what my chemistry teachers told me it is, even though I haven't personally performed the necessary experiments.
*Most* of the things I'm asked to believe on a daily basis are things I've never personally verified. I decide how much faith I should have in them partly by thinking about the processes by which they were arrived at.
Not that I have *that* much faith in the process that produces bittorrent. But still, it's important to realize that there are ways you can get assurances from the open source process without personally verifying every line.
--Bruce Fields
ok to help you out a bit in that article in magazine Mladina...
I live in the country where so called "sloncek" is so much into trouble. And no he's not into trouble. Only servers are down and are not comming back no time soon, as FBI, MPAA and RIAA are making their cowboy dance. The man is harmless, and he didn't do anything illegal at all by our Law.
And to awnser final question! YES USA are the biggest Copyright brakers, as 37% of all suprnova hits was from US.
Things in a rear mirror might be behind you
Seriously, can we let the lawyers find out about The-Next-Best-Thing(tm) on their own. Do we have to spoon-feed it to them and put a big bullseye on everything good?
/. doesn't really deserve to be out there in the first place. You're just whining that you can't get to your free warez as easily as you've gotten used to. So what?
What's the point of having a good thing if you can't tell anyone about it?
Obviously it wasn't that good if it went down with the mere threat of a raid by the authorities. It wasn't that good if the authorities in multiple countries could be talked into performing such a raid. Sites that demonstrably use Bittorrent for purely legal distribution of such files that they own the copyright to will not be going down. Your favorite Linux distro, for example, will still be available by Bittorrent most likely.
No lawyer has any legal ground to stand on to convince the authorities in France to shut down Mandrake's Bittorrent tracker, run by Mandrake and published with a link on Mandrake's own website. SuprNova and the others are going down for the same reasons the original Napster went down; because they were too centralized and operated on the fringes of legality, if not totally outside the law.
What's that old saying again? What doesn't kill an Internet technology will only make it stronger. This won't kill BT for 100% legal uses and a new decentralized P2P technology is already evolving (exeem?) to replace BT for stuff like warez that can't be shown to be 100% legal. If you try to keep things secret you just put off the inevitable. The lawyers will always find out about and attack questionably legal things eventually, that's their job. Plus, the more people you keep out with your secrecy, the worse performance you'll get from your BT downloads.
In the end, the next "working" P2P system will be that much closer to being indestructible. They certainly won't be able to take it down just by shutting down one website or writing an article about it on Slashdot. Anything that can be killed by a simple article on
Bittorrent was never even designed to do what it has been used for by sites like SuprNova, despite how cool it may have been while it worked. The creator of Bittorrent said so himself. It was not designed to be an instructible way to exchange copyrighted data illegally without fear of reprisal. It's not Slashdot's fault that you and others decided to use it for this purpose anyway. Slashdot is really doing you a favor by hastening the evolution of the next generation P2P clients. You'll get access to your warez and old TV shows, don't you worry. It just won't be via SuprNova.org after today.
You have no defensible point and yet you were modded +5, Insightful. At least 3 mods should be ashamed today.