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The Truth About Suprnova Shutdown
Romeo E. Cabrera writes "You might remember it was exactly a year ago when Suprnova, once the most popular BitTorrent search engine went dark. Today, Suprnova's admin Sloncek, reveals the truth and details, about the events occurred then."
Yep. Like the dog, Suprnova was on fire.
News for nerds, digg mirror with threaded comments.
I spent far too much time on that site :(
Safe to say that the torrent community has gone downhill since, I'd say.
~ Crummy
So, summarizing the article:
Nothing happened
Case dropped
Suprnova still gone
Incredibly lucky for the guy, really... but do you think it was because prosecutor couldn't figure out how to get the guy?
MoM++ - A Classic Expanded - [Master of Magic 1.5]
http://mompp.sourceforge.net/
Why normal people are catapulted into a spotlight they didn't ask for will always be a question of concern. If you want to be famous, you can be. But think about it. If you want to be famous, you're not thinking straight. As small site owners are plummeled with traffic and legal issues, how can we help them survive? This reminds me of the blogosphere, which recently experienced growing pains with the servers and datacenters struggling to cope with demand.
that last letter he received is a wonderful explication of his innocence. or maybe not. i'm not too solid on that language, which, to be honest, i can't identify. google, let's get some translation going, eh?
go get it
Sloncek's story is disputed by Slyck here.
slyck of course being the most prominent file sharing news source on the web.
Good to know that nothing really happenned to the guy. Sometimes us leechers forget that behind every torrent/p2p website, there's still good people working behind the scenes who made it all possible... sadly, they are usually the ones who get all the blame.
I'll be honest. I would have done the same thing as him. I mean really, Everything turned out okay for him in the end anyway. He didn't serve any jail time, and he got all of his stuff back. Hell, hes probabbly glad about the site bein' kaputs. All these people that will say that he should have fought, etc... Well, they need to understand this guy has a real life as well, and not just one that encompases a website that gives torrent files to materials in wich you didn't pay for.
Yay, I have a sig.
Oh hell, anybody here speak Slovenian?
This Like That - fun with words!
What if some or most of those are U.S. law enforcement honeypots?
so what shud we make out of this will the torrent be up again?
Slovenia is a member of the EU, so whatever EU law says about these P2P issues is probably relevant as well.
Any of our Euro-dotters care to comment?
I have a feeling this is not a fully-harmonized area, EU-law-wise, since the good folks at the Pirate Bay continue to entertain us with their responses to legal threats.
This Like That - fun with words!
Then don't use the ones that are.
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
There still has been no explanation on what Loki did with it.
(slovenian speaker here)
.. .. .. .. .. ..
The legal document basicly says:
Legal case against Andrej P. (his address blacked out), charged with criminal act of helping copyright infrigment by 1. article of 159. of some law with following objects written into log:
- server with serial number
- server with serial number
- server with serial number
- server with serial number
- personal computer
- personal computer
are returned to the owner because legal charges against A. P. are dropped.
And them some more legal talk where he can get his stuff in 30 days.
That is about as much as I can handle at this early hour.
Huh? The article was written by "Suprnova's admin Sloncek". He is the one who came close to being prosecuted, his computers were confiscated, etc. He is the only one who can give an account of the story, and if he choses to say blah blah and blah blah, there is nothing anyone else can do to fill in those details.
Your remarks would make sense if an original news item was dumbed down for the "general public".
If the guy who got the letter from the prosecutor does not wish to quote verbatim from it, or he thinks it is not relevant, why question it? It's probably not relevant anyway, just some law numbers and dates.
He does provide the original letter (in Slovenian), so read it yourself for the gory details. Or, scroll down for helpful translations below.
NewNova is online, it offers the same content that SuprNova once had.
am i the only person here who goes to mininova.org instead? seems like the same library of media, justabout
On my end, Adobe lawyers contacted my ISP and sent a short, but curt letter: "Shut him down, or we will." I balked and so did my ISP after some heated conversation. I ran a VERY popular macintosh serial # site and yeah, serial numbers are sort of a grey area as far as I was concerned (and so thought my ISP thought, as well).
Whoops.
Yeah, it was stupid on my part but I enjoyed the money that rolled in from my sponsors. In the long-term I got burned, much like this fellow will. I had to claim bankruptcy, due to my mounting legal bills. I'm basically screwed for the next 7 years. Hooray. Some people can walk that thin grey line between legal and illegal but I found a way to trip over it. Oh well.
When you kill the sandworm, you do not really kill it, but spread its sandtrout to form new sandworms everywhere.
With napster, there was a central target. With BitTorrent, they would have to get each individual tracker. And many are hosted in countries with laws that allow the sites to exist legally. American laws don't have much weight in Sweden
If you build it, nerds will come. Soylentnews.org
Backup early. Backup often. And, of course, put the backup in safe places.
news are fucking entertainment.
vcrs (famous betamax decision) helped people carry out an illegal act.. but it was legal.
just providing the means does NOT equate into illegal actions.
napster got in trouble because they kept the master file list on their own servers- and then couldn't filter out content the riaa & others wanted blocked.
Laws concerning morality never fit in with the 'average' views of the citizenry--
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
Suprnova may have been popular at the time, but like all websites, they come and go. There is always someone else to take their place. Remember isonews.com when it was taken down by the FBI years ago? Hey guess what? Their back up and running with a new website theisonews.com
Now we have sites like thepiratebay.org which is probably one of the best torrent sites on the internet. Heck, they even tout the lawyers and post the threating legal letters on their website for everyone to read http://thepiratebay.org/legal.php
Quite hilarious if you ask me.
Of course you have other torrent sites as well, like torrentspy.com which is another popular site.
sites come and go, they come and go....
~Later~
http://www.demonoid.com/account-signup-inv.php
How the hell does an admin go a week, let alone "November to December" without having a single clue as to why police would raid his servers? Why his site was shut down? Fear or apathy?
His statement strikes me as someone who was simply hoping the problem would go away (as quoted) from the onset. More pressure on both the police and a legal defense from the onset could have both quelled the investigation as groundless and gotten the site back up.
It's an unfortunate truth that law enforcement often only succeeds in setting legal precedent in computer investigations only because people aren't more diligent in defending themselves.
In the US, this would probably have said "after taking advice from my lawyer, I have decided not to say anything more".
I wish him luck.
what sloncek forgot to mention and always does is the fact that he actually made millions of SIT(his local currency) so he really didn't have a big problem living this year.
And i bet suprnova suckers are still ready to pay him even more money for "servers" and stuff.
ahhh the sweet taste of simply minded warez lovers =)
Crime is the art of knowing when to quit.
-Me
Intolerance for ambiguity is the mark of the authoritarian personality.
Seriously, this site was a massive hub to pirated material. ...
I looked at it a year ago and thought to myself, wow, this should be should down.
I mean, links to torrent files of movies, music, software
This is clearly unethical at best and should be shut down.
Disclaimer : I'm a self employed software engineer and I defend my living vigorously. If you worked for yourself, sold your own software and someone pirated and made it availble on bittorrent, you'd see it the same way.
If it was me, I'd have sued this guy, fuck his christmas.
Spoofing!
A blog about stuff.
Looking at just the title, I was wondering about how one would go about stopping the explosion of a star, then I read the blurb.
// file: mice.h
#include "frickin_lasers.h"
The person who modded me flamebait is clearly a warez leecher.
When you grow up you'll understand.
Slashdot has gone downhill recently, they allow to many idiots to mod.
I guess digg.com is the upcoming site, although they too have a lot to learn.
The Jolly Green Giant's Toe!
/.rs might think "Great, a win for the small guy." It was on several levels, including that JGG went away, and I had no more restrictions. But do you have any concept what happens with multiple teams of rapacious lawyers over 5 years who work for you & me, who figure you are going to lose and go bankrupt anyway, so "Let's just bleed the chicken now, before he dies, so we can pay our overhead". I paid for more criminals to defend me than the JGG did to attack me. In the end, a single lone attorney, talked to the other side one time about the RICO issue, and in two days, the JGG was only a bad memory.
You may be right. JGG may have harmed you. JGG may have taken your property or deprived you of assets or income wrongly. But the JGG is so large that one little nudge can spell the end of your life, & (in the U.S.) he can get a legal judgement that goes even beyond bankruptcy. The JGG can get a judgement that locks you out of your field of expertise (unless you want to leave your native country, and even then today that may not help).
Trust me that when they accuse you, it is a curse, and when they claim (rightfully or not) that you have caused $60 million (or pick the number they invent) of damages, and are willing to spend millions to shut you down (because they only claim something might not be right, and can say without penalty later, "well, I guess he didn't do anything wrong, but we didn't know that until we did discovery and got a jury verdict", and the JGG has no fear of being sued for malitious prosecution), you generally have no choice (though you might just be stupid enough to fight). What a horrible sentence (in so many ways).
It happened, and stupidly I figured I did not have anything to worry about, since I did not cause them harm. The JGG just assumed I would eventually cause harm & they said "So hammer the SOB".
In the end the JGG made a FATAL mistake, and David caused JGG to go back to his hole, but ONLY because the JGG organized a really horrible RICO crime operation, which I found out about when gathering evidence to defend my self (from where I will not tell), which would have landed the multi-national JGG in world headlines had they gone a single step further.
It worked out to about $1 million in defense fees, out of pocket, the JGG was not harmed and I won?
"You don't tug on Superman's cape and you don't mess around with JGG", to coin a variation which I suppose could infringe someone's copyright, except we are allowed to do short quotes for literary review.
Some take longer than other to learn...some lie...some view themselves as immortal...but the time and money are what will take you down, if you insist on stomping on toes.
Safe to say that the torrent community has gone downhill since, I'd say.
On the contrary! Torrent sites have split up and decentralized, that is true. But that, in many ways, is a good thing, and the content has in many ways improved in quality; back in the days of Suprnova I still would search for most things via DC++ or IRC because the general level of quality and content was better, even if Suprnova had the quantity. But nowadays, even if they're harder to get into, the torrent sites have precisely for that reason grown more vibrant and connected within themselves. Instead of faceless posts of questionable content, we have tightly knit communities!
Really, look me straight in the eye and argue that places like Demonoid and Dimeadozen aren't stellar examples of what the torrent community can be (each in their own ways; Dimeadozen perhaps the most notable, considering that it works expressly to share media from live music, and in doing so ensures a rather high quality of content, something that just wouldn't happen with stuff of similar subject matter back on Suprnova).
I remember sigs. Oh, a simpler time!
Thanks for your much more eloquent posting, but I was pleased to hear about this - whether or not Sloncek was very coherent, that he'd re-surfaced was news to me. I'm happy this is on Slashdot, whether you like the subsequent discussion or not. You clearly don't care enough to use your own username, anyway, so crawl back into your hole...
"This is the worse thing that has ever happened to me" - so get outside some more. You'll have a lot worse happen.
Like they say, laws are for animals.
Per Aspera Ad Astra.
Although Cydoor had cleaned up its act considerably since its earlier days, the stigmatism associated with the adware product doomed eXeem before it was ever released.
I found this part of Slyck's writeup at http://www.slyck.com/news.php?story=1033 interesting. Now, I've never heard of Cydoor so I'm not sure which context of the word stigmatism Slyck was trying to go for:
stigmatism Pronunciation Key (stgm-tzm)
n.
1. The condition of being affected by stigmata.
2. The state of a refracting or reflecting system in which light rays from a single point are accurately focused at another point.
3. Normal eyesight.
I'm a big tall mofo.
It doesn't matter if you're on static or dynamic IP. Your ISP keeps logs of IPs issued (changing your MAC will not help one bit either), and you also have a reverse DNS i.e. 216.109.112.135 resolves to w2.rc.vip.dcn.yahoo.com. Same for your own IP, even if it changes it should always resolve to the same thing (and from that you can get current IP as well). You don't get any more protection from being on a static IP whatsoever - just a false sense of security.
Sounds to me like the music-mafia have simply backed off on the case since their recent change of heart regarding BitTorrent.
Evan
Is that the police are at his house a month after he shut down the site. Sort of seems like going after a suspected murderer after giving him a month to leave town.
I think everyone here (including myself) owns him AT LEAST a paint of beer. For me, that site saved me a lot of trouble more than once.
If you add numbers to the name of the scanned JPG, you get the rest of the sequence of letters not linked to from the main page:
Named (Andrej Preston) can take above mentioned objects at District State prosecutor office in Ljubljana in 15 days from receiving this letter. After 15 days, all objects will be destroyed.
Named (Andrej Preston) can take above mentioned objects at District State prosecutor office in Ljubljana in 5 days from receiving this letter. After 5 days, all objects will be destroyed.
Objects at District State prosecutor office in Ljubljana have been impounded.
Objects at District State prosecutor office in Ljubljana have been crushed into a cube.
Named (Andrej Preston) can take previously mentioned cube at District State prosecutor office in Ljubljana in 30 days from receiving this letter.
well i guess thats what happens when you offer warez over HTTP.. atleast be a little more secretive.. shit man.. you know when your site comes in Google searches for free movie torrent downloads, that its NEVER a good thing.. its like a pot dealer with a delivery website.. you're gonna get caught.. but if ya just divvy it out amongst your friends, things are gonna be just fine.. god damn glory..
*plays the Apogee theme song music*
Every religion there is condemns (usually to hellfire or whatnot) those who commit adultery, yet adultery is legal almost everywhere outside the Muslim world.
OTOH no bible, whether Catholic, Protestant, Bhuddist, Muslim, Wiccan, or anywhere else condemns marijuana, yet pot is illegal almost everywhere.
When the law and morality coincides, it's usually a coincidence.
That's why we send process servers.
The only time I've ever seen or heard of anyone getting anything mailed to them that told them to appear in court is for small claims. For everything else, someone goes in person to present them with the subpoena. Where I live it's the county sheriff (It's about the only thing the Sheriff's Office does besides transport prisoners) or a private process server.
I suppose you could just try to deny that you were ever served, but I don't think you'd win that game when it came to your word versus the Sheriff's.
Maybe they mail subpoenas in situations where the person who's being required to appear isn't going to be hostile, but if you were a potential criminal or civil defendant in the U.S., you probably wouldn't have the opportunity to just 'not pick something up at the post office,' because somebody would come to your house or workplace and give you the paper.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
I've seen a lot of people getting modded up, myself included, for criticising Slashdot this year, but to get modded down for defending it... !
That's amazing...It would never happen here. The lies and trickery I've witnessed from state prosecutors here in the US is sickening.
AFAICR copyright infringement is _not_ a crime in Sweden.
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
Confiscation of rapidly depreciating capital assets and diminution of character is not without cost.
But nobody ever compensates you for this.
And you're giving your government even more excuses to do it without true cause.
In general, Sweden is not free of copyright. There are however explicit provisions for copying anything to family and friends. This goes around to the labels through a general tax on all recordable media. Interesting idea, but it maddens you when you pay a few cents extra per DVD even when you're printing holiday pictures. If you are a frequent producer of material, you can apply for being exempt from the extra charge to media.
The one that sucks the molecular substance out of these henchmen who bully or pay the police to seize equipment, documents, and cause upheaval in the lives of the occasionally innocent?
They NEED to get in the habit of being forensically competent enough to COPY what they are looking for and then get the hell out of the house or abode. If they "carry out the public duty" and hold people's STUFF for months, depriving the person of his or her work, homework, or hobby, they should expect the WORST possible nutcase response or the mildest (if lucky) response.
If they get in the habit of doing a thorough search and then COPYING instead of seizing, then the people who actually turn up innocent will be less pissed off. Those who ARE guilty of something will have to decide to be smart enough to 'booby trap' their servers. Even so, they'll have to use a load of attention-getting crypto, which will only implicate them more. So, when the police get a warrant to search and possibly seize, they should do some homework via the ISP and say, "If you can show us this guy is NOT really up to 'no good', then we can show up to you in the future with a better disposition (even if the RIAA is paying us or causing us to order you with this warrant...)..."
Seizing equipment is not just about "preserving evidence" and "looking for clues"; it's the punishment factor that serves as a deterrent. But when the deterrent hits the wrong, innocent person... (Think "RAGE", George C. Scott movie in the 70's, in which the US Army loses several soldiers to chemical weapons test poisoning and then lies to their parents... GCS' character finds out he'd been lied to; hence, the title... Not the best of movies, but it can serve even in THESE times... stopy spying on the populace, lying to the populace, subjecting the populace to the whims of lazy corporations...
I felt dismayed reading the article, but felt better that he's getting his stuff back. Was only a few months, but even if you have archives and try to get back to work with new equipment and your tapes or off-site disks, they'll find out from watching your traffic on the wire or signals leaking from your home, and they' be back with another warrant. You most likely will NEVER get anything done if they suspend their search for guilt in the name of suspending the search for innocence. Hence, a round-robbin of deterrence, delay, punishment and state-sponsored low-level terrorism in the name of corporates that over-price, get lazy about protection, over-protect, then whine about pirates.
I think my copyrighted materials will be designed and released in such a way that copying will be less enjoyable than the real thing. I'll try to derive money not so much from selling copies of ones and zeroes, but from (affordable, non-greed-based) licensing and support... but, the proof will be in the future...
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
You forgot to log in.
As long as 50% of it is altar boys!
or at least make a ton of money.
It looks like the new site is still javascript based. So, all the RIAA has to do is to raid the site again, install spyware to infect the PCs connecting to it via your typical javascript exploit, and then they can do whatever they want. Prevent the PC from playing designated mp3s, build an iron-clad case in court (no more "it was my kid" defense), corrupt the torrents (though that's routeable), and put in a ton of ads on the PC. This is a money-making scheme for the *AAs just waiting to happen.
Honestly, the ONLY reason the *AAs haven't been successful with some of these sites is because of a lack of understanding of technology, a lack of imagination, and a lack of real hacking skills.
The only thing nearly as silly are the people like to flaunt the laws in their own country, and leave themselves wide open to javascript attacks.
Personally, I stay away from lame sites that don't understand security; so
I'll stick with PirateBay, thank you very much. Those folks look like they have a clue, at the least. Which is what you want, in case they ever get raided (think log files here).
WTF, this copy of "Dogma" is actually "The Passion" ... darn you VTH (Vatican Torrent Host)!!!
The RIAA or MPAA could impose economic sanctions on sales in that country
a) Only on RIAA/MPAA music, domestic and independant is fine
b) Only on new music
c) Not likely from online merchants (since it's not a government sanction, but a corporate one, they cannot force all retailers to follow through)
d) In a remote country, US music is probably already outrageously expensive
e) If people can't buy it, the alternative of downloading becomes stronger
They do have an influence. They showed a bit of force with the initial arrest. They'll show more force next time to get their way.
Yes, but up to a point. Many countries other than the US have laws limiting the actions that corporate entities can take, even in the courts. Hell, within the US various states have laws that would limit certain behavior (SLAPP laws, etc).
Because there is an intellectual reason why they might (pissed off a bunch of corporate fatcats with his warez links) vs the legal reason (was an law actually broken in his country).
Often enough it seems you don't have to actually break any laws, just annoy people who have a lot more money than you.
Maybe I RTFA wrong, but what I got out of it was that the big corporations that be went after another P2P site, and when it came down to the meat and potatoes nothing was being done wrong, but they still got their way. I know everyone around here hates the patriot act and the spying and such, but what really scares me is that atleast the government is kept in check by the constitution, declaration of independance, civil rights, etc.. (It's being pushed right now because we are at war, but that's another issue - and it will get turned around one way or another) - while the these corporations are only kept in check by the size of their war chest, and they have declared war on john que public...
IMHO, bigbrother isn't coming from the government(s) but from the powerful corporations.
At least when you are busted from the governments that be (you are presumed inococent until proven guilty) , depending on the nature of the crime - you are given a chance at rehabiliation because simply put the punishment is to fit the crime. While with the corporations, you are guilty untill proven inocent (the complete opposite), even if you are lucky enough to be able to afford to defend your self - atleast with the government if you aren't you are given a public defender, and in the mean time they are going after to ruin your life, and I'm sure succeeding...
I gave up on Poser because I didn't fully understand how to use it, and I didn't want to bother learning. If I had a friend who was already using it, I'm sure I would have asked lots of questions, and stuck with it. That's a freakin' powerful program. I can't even suggest that they simpify it, because if they did, they'd need to remove functionality. It wasn't really something I needed, and not really something I'd use a lot anyways. For what I do, GIMP is fine. :)
Indeed, a wonderful program and a good example of a program which was priced low to sell in quantity. (And also so they can get fees for professional artists selling their models) *wry grin* Admittedly, that's in the "low-priced for professionals" category, so the hundred dollars or so is still beyond the amateur dabbler. It was also a reasonably intuitive interface once you got past those glitchy bits like the feet starting out cemented to the ground and the difficulty of undoing changes. The first three, at least, came with a fairly good instruction manual, but I can understand that that didn't make it into the pirated version.
This sig has absolutely no significance and serves only to take up screen space and waste the time of the reader.
If you like 'em young, the vat will probably be willing to work out a deal.
Encrypt that data folks.
Please!
Notice that copyright infringiment not being a criminal offense and being free of copyright are extremely different things. I, personally, don't think copyright infringement should ever be a criminal offense.
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
Yes, but when the investigation disrupts your business/life severely, at a certain point it becomes unreasonable. If all it takes is a "tip" from a wealthy complainant to have your servers/property seized, then it puts too much power in the wrong hands. Just because harassment is done using the law doesn't make it any more right.
You might expect the police to march in and ask questions, I doubt many people expect them to walk in and walk out with all your electronics equipment.
I was searching for info on a certain band the other day on Google. On page 2 of the search results was somebody's website where 2 full cds of the bands music was in a directory which was indexed by google. Google provided me with the location of where to obtain these files yet the police aren't knocking on there door for providing this information. How was SuperNova doing anything different from what google is doing by indexing where to find the information on the internet?
I don't understand how you could shutdown a supernova. I mean, when one of those babies decides to blow, that's that.
Indeed, if they have gained enough evidence ahead of time to indicate criminal activity is taking place, then they should be able to seize systems. However, if I - being not a large corporation - had made a complaint similar to the ??AA, would the same situation have occurred? If the servers belonged to a larger corporation, perhaps a bank, would they have so easily decided to seize them?
Lots of things are forbidden but are not criminal offenses. When you do something that is a criminal offense, you are subject to penalties determined by law (fines, jail time, community service, etc.) When you do something that is forbidden but is not a criminal offense, you are still subject to the civil liabilities (also known as "damages", indemnizatory or punitive.)
Some jurisdictions consider copyright infringement as simply a civil offense, ie, something that is forbidden to do but will not land you in jail for doing -- if you're caught and taken to court, you'll still have to pay damages to compensate the copyright holder for their loss of income (and, where applicable, possibly punitive damages.) You are investigated by the copyright holder, and prosecuted by his lawyers (which are good) but the standard of evidence that must be held against you is somewhat low (which is bad.)
Other jurisdictions (like Brasil, where I live) consider copyright infringement as a criminal offense, ie, in casu, you get to be investigated by the police, and prosecuted by the D.A., and you can land in jail for up two years "soft jail" in the case of music and for up to four years "hard jail" in the case of software (which are bad) and OTOH the standards of evidence that must be held against you are are high ("beyond reasonable doubt" mumbo-jumbo -- which is good.)
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048