In recent years Coppersurfer.tk has quickly become one of the most used BitTorrent trackers.
Running on the beerware-licensed Opentracker software, the standalone tracker offers a non-commercial service which doesn’t host or link to torrent files themselves.
The free service coordinates the downloads of 10 million people at any given point in time, processing roughly billions of connections per month.
However, since last weekend Coppersurfer.tk has been offline. Responding to a complaint from Dutch anti-piracy group BREIN, hosting provider LeaseWeb suddenly pulled the plug.
According to a LeaseWeb rep “torrents are illegal” and the company had no other option than to shut down the tracker.
This came as quite a surprise to the operator, since his service doesn’t link to or host torrent files. In fact, Coppersurfer doesn’t know what titles are tracked or where all the corresponding torrents are stored.
Month: April 2015
State Trooper Disciplined For Taking Photo With Person With ‘Well-Known Criminal Background’
Tired of hearing about just the bad cops? Here’s one with a good cop, surrounded by worse cops, and the amazing amount of pettiness the latter group can display.
Texas State Trooper Billy Spears was working an approved security detail at the recent South by Southwest conference when he was approached by one of the performing artists and his publicist. The artist asked for a photo with the trooper, who obliged. The photo was taken by the publicist and later posted to Instagram. Here’s the photo.
Trooper Spears is on the left.
In most other realities, this would have been the end of the story — one Billy Spears would be able to tell for years. Instead, it’s turned into something else. It’s still a story that Spears will be able to tell for years, but there won’t be many happy memories attached to it.
ISP Teksavvy Appeals in Hurt Locker Piracy Case
After numerous experiments elsewhere, notably in the US, two years ago Voltage Pictures took its turn piracy-into-profit business model to Canada.
The company’s targets were 2,000 Internet subscribers at local ISP Teksavvy. The early stages of the case saw the ISP dig in its heels while bringing on board the Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic (CIPPIC) with the aim of protecting consumers from potentially large fines.
While CIPPIC was allowed to intervene, the subscribers’ identities were ordered to be handed over and with that in hand the arguments turned to who would have to pay for proceedings thus far.
Needless to say, Voltage Pictures’ and Teksavvy’s assessments were at the opposite ends of the spectrum, with the former saying that should it pay around $884.00 and the latter claiming a few hundred thousand dollars, $346,480.68 to be exact.
In the event the court rejected both sides’ claims, but the ruling was far away from Teksavvy’s expectations. The Federal Court told Voltage to pay $21,557 – $17,057 in technical administrative costs plus $4,500 in legal fees – associated with the IP-address lookups.
After being awarded just 6% of its original claim, it comes as little surprise that the ISP has now filed an appeal against the decision.
Turkish Censorship Order Targets Single Blog Post, Ends Up Blocking Access To 60 Million WordPress Sites
Last week, a Turkish court ordered an access ban on a single post in the vast sea of more than 60 million individual blogs on WordPress. But for many users, that meant their Internet service providers blocked WordPress entirely.
A lawyer and Turkish Pirate Party member tracked down the root of the sudden ban on all of WordPress: a court order seeking to block a single blog post written by a professor accusing another professor of plagiarism. This post apparently led to several defamation lawsuits and the lawsuits led to a court order basically saying that if blocking the single post proved too difficult, fuck it, block the entire domain.
It is the second sentence in the order, however, that caused the complete ban of WordPress in the country. “If the access to the single page cannot be possible due to technical reasons,” it reads, “block access to wordpress.com.”
TSA ‘Behavior Detection’ Program Targeting Undocumented Immigrants, Not Terrorists
A controversial Transportation Security Administration program that uses “behavior indicators” to identify potential terrorists is instead primarily targeting undocumented immigrants, according to a document obtained by The Intercept and interviews with current and former government officials.
The $900 million program, Screening of Passengers by Observation Techniques, or SPOT, employs behavior detection officers trained to identify passengers who exhibit behaviors that TSA believes could be linked to would-be terrorists. But in one five-week period at a major international airport in the United States in 2007, the year the program started, only about 4 percent of the passengers who were referred to secondary screening or law enforcement by behavior detection officers were arrested, and nearly 90 percent of those arrests were for being in the country illegally, according to a TSA document obtained by The Intercept.
Nothing in the SPOT records suggests that any of those arrested were associated with terrorist activity.
Those results aren’t surprising, according to those involved in the program, because the behavior checklist was, in part, modeled after immigration, border and drug interdiction programs. Drug smugglers and undocumented immigrants often exhibit clear signs of nervousness and confusion, or may be in possession of fraudulent documents.
“That’s why we started rounding up all the Mexicans,” said one former behavior detection officer.
Slaves Forced To Help With Guinness-World-Record Attempt
If you are thinking, well, why do I even have slaves if I can’t force them to help me get into the Guinness Book of World Records, you are missing the point entirely and are also an extremely bad human being.
If you are thinking, what better way to respond to allegations of poor working conditions than to force indentured servants to run a marathon in the desert, you must be Qatar.
Qatar, for those of you who don’t know, is not the newest member of The Avengers but rather a tiny emirate in the Persian Gulf that had the foresight to park itself over a place where oil would one day be found, and it is therefore one of the absolute monarchies that we are pals with. Although most countries in that area are shining examples of progressive humanism, Qatar has been repeatedly criticized for its treatment of workers who have migrated there to build stuff for the 2022 World Cup.
An investigation by The Guardian found that many of the laborers were being forced to work long hours in 120-degree heat, without enough food and water. In the summer of 2013, a worker died almost every day, half from heart attacks. (2014 numbers were almost as bad.) They were often not paid, required to live in “filthy hostels,” and their employers took away their passports so they could not leave. The investigation concluded that the conditions amounted to “modern-day slavery.” The committee that’s running Qatar’s World Cup effort said it was “deeply concerned” about the allegations and that it had been informed that government authorities were looking into the matter.
I’m gonna speculate that no radical changes were made, based on the report that last month hundreds if not thousands of migrant workers were bused in and forced to run a half-marathon in Doha (let’s be honest: in the desert) because the organizers were trying to break the world record for most participants. A source said he had “observed hundreds of men who appeared to be laborers, wearing jeans, flip-flops or running barefoot.” Some tried to leave, said another, “but were turned back and were yelled at that they need to stay and cross the line.”
The American Healthcare System
If you can’t read it, it says:
I have a coworker that is refusing treatment for lung cancer because he doesn’t want to put his three daughters and wife in debt for the rest of their lives.
He is literally choosing to die of a treatable disease because the debt of treatment would be such a burden on his family.
So yeah… Tell me that the american healthcare system isn’t broken.
How portugal handles drugs
Progress On The Police-Filming Front
Two or three pieces of good news here. First, the Texas bill that would have made it illegal for you to film a cop beating you (see “Texas Bill Would Make It Illegal for You to Film a Cop Beating You” (Mar. 26)) seems to have been withdrawn by its sponsor, the probably-well-meaning-but-not-too-thoughtful Rep. Jason Villalba. The legislature’s site just says “no action taken in committee” on HB 2918 (the bill was scheduled for a hearing on March 26), but there are reports that Villalba decided to drop it completely after the state’s largest union of police officers said it would oppose the bill.
Villalba reportedly insisted that he had only withdrawn the bill temporarily because “it’s being amended and the hearing [was going to] run very late,” but some (specifically, me) are suggesting that in fact he pulled it because pretty much everybody hates it.
Turns out there was already a competing proposal in Texas, HB 1035, which would not only state that recording officers is legal, it would make it illegal for law enforcement to alter, destroy, or conceal a recording of police operations without the owner’s written consent. I don’t know what that bill’s chances are, but would guess they are approximately infinitely better than those of HB 2918.
Second, as Courthouse News reports (also PINAC), lawmakers in both California and Colorado have also introduced bills aimed at protecting the right to film public servants in public.
California’s SB 411, sponsored by Sen. Ricardo Lara, would amend two anti-police-obstruction laws to state that, as long as an officer is in a public place or you are somewhere you have a right to be, taking a picture or making an audio or video recording of said officer “does not constitute, in and of itself, a violation” of those laws. Nor is it probable cause for an arrest on actual obstruction charges, or even reasonable suspicion for a brief detention.
Weirdly, on their face(s) the existing laws seem to punish attempted obstruction more severely than actual obstruction, which seems like a bad idea. That’s one area where you don’t want to encourage people to finish what they started. Anyway, you shouldn’t do either, but the bill would make it clear that a mere recording is not a violation of either law. The first hearing on that bill is set for April 7.
Colorado HB 15-1290, introduced on March 19, is aimed at the same problem but would address it by giving the photographer a right to sue the law-enforcement agency for the violation, and would establish a civil penalty of $15,000 (plus actual damages). It would also make it illegal for an officer to seize or destroy a lawful recording without either permission or a warrant.
These laws shouldn’t be necessary, but unfortunately they are. Taking pictures in public isn’t obstruction. Obstruction is obstruction. Also, just a suggestion—if you tell me I can’t film you in public, no matter what, filming you in public is going to move way up my priority list. Because what you’re telling me is, “I’m about to do something ridiculous, illegal, or ridiculously illegal. So don’t look.” I’m not only looking, I’m deleting all my other videos right now so I have room to get all of whatever you are about to do. So that’s how that works.
Under President’s New Cybersecurity Executive Order… Is Wikileaks Now An Evil Cyberhacker For Releasing Trade Deal?
Yesterday we talked about the ridiculousness of President Obama’s new cybersecurity executive order, in which he declares a national emergency around “malicious cyber-enabled activities” and enables his own government to do mean things to anyone they think is responsible for cyber badness (that his own NSA is the primary instigator of serious cyberattacks gets left ignored, of course). One of the points we made is that the definitions in the executive agreement were really vague, meaning that it’s likely that they could be abused in all sorts of ways that we wouldn’t normally think of as malicious hacking.
Helpfully, the ever vigilant Marcey Wheeler has provided some examples of how the vague language can and likely will be twisted:
The EO targets not just the hackers themselves, but also those who benefit from or materially support hacks. The targeting of those who are “responsible for or complicit in … the receipt or use for commercial or competitive advantage … by a commercial entity, outside the United States of trade secrets misappropriated through cyber-enabled means, … where the misappropriation of such trade secrets is reasonably likely to result in, or has materially contributed to, a significant threat to the national security, foreign policy, or economic health or financial stability of the United States” could be used to target journalism abroad. Does WikiLeaks’ publication of secret Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiations qualify? Does Guardian’s publication of contractors’ involvement in NSA hacking?
And, that’s not all. How about encryption providers? Not too hard to see how they might qualify:
And the EO creates a “material support” category similar to the one that, in the terrorism context, has been ripe for abuse. Its targets include those who have “provided … material, or technological support for, or goods or services in support of” such significant hacks. Does that include encryption providers? Does it include other privacy protections?And the EO creates a “material support” category similar to the one that, in the terrorism context, has been ripe for abuse. Its targets include those who have “provided … material, or technological support for, or goods or services in support of” such significant hacks. Does that include encryption providers? Does it include other privacy protections?
We’ve already seen some — including government officials — argue that Twitter could be deemed to be providing “material support” to ISIS if it didn’t take down Twitter accounts that support ISIS. Twitter wouldn’t directly qualify under this executive order (which targets non-US actors), but it shows you how easy it is to stretch this kind of thinking in dangerous ways.
Making sure the technology we use every day is secure is important. But vaguely worded executive orders and an over-hyped “national emergency” isn’t the solution. Instead, it’s likely to be abused in serious ways that harm our freedoms.