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[SFgate] Bay Area tech firms' insider trades, May 18-24

(author unknown) — Mon, 28 May 2012 09:22:24 +0000

[SFgate] Stageit takes concerts to you

(author unknown) — Mon, 28 May 2012 09:22:24 +0000

[ZeroPaid.com] After Kim Dotcom Asks for Defense Evidence, FBI Claims MegaUpload Had Child Porn

Drew Wilson — Sun, 27 May 2012 21:14:59 +0000

[Digital Music News] There Are 200 Million Music Buyers. And 7 Billion People...

paul — Sun, 27 May 2012 20:40:03 +0000

[TechCrunch] Video Highlights From Disrupt NY 2012 – Day 2 [TCTV]

(author unknown) — Sun, 27 May 2012 20:00:09 +0000

Continuing our trio of daily video highlights from Disrupt NY, Day 2 of the conference featured talks with Andreesen Horowitz’s Jeff Jordan, Sequoia’s Roelof Botha, and SV Angel’s Ron Conway. We also asked our Aol CEO Tim Armstrong some tough questions. Tuesday’s Battlefield competition included a startup trying to disrupt the dry cleaning business, a new way for musicians to collaborate and a neat 3D Modeling program in your browser.

Day 2 highlights can be viewed below. You can check out Day 1 highlights here and a Day 3 highlight post is coming soon.

More information about Tuesday’s highlights can be found in this articles:

[Techdirt] Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt

(author unknown) — Sun, 27 May 2012 19:00:00 +0000

[TorrentFreak] Busted: Microsoft Harbors BitTorrent Pirates

Ernesto — Sun, 27 May 2012 17:37:25 +0000

YouHaveDownloaded is a treasure trove of incriminating data on alleged BitTorrent pirates all across the world.

The site, launched late last year, exposes what people behind an IP-address have downloaded using BitTorrent. This data was gathered from public BitTorrent trackers, and the founders released it to show how much information can be found on BitTorrent users who don’t hide their IP-address.

The site’s founders inform TorrentFreak that since this mission has now been accomplished, they have stopped adding new info to the site. However, existing data is still online and that allows us to “out” a group of corporate BitTorrent pirates once more.

In recent weeks Microsoft has taken a strong position against copyright infringers. They censored Pirate Bay links in Windows Live Messenger, funded a startup that aims to kill BitTorrent traffic, and a few days ago it was revealed that they are the most active sender of DMCA takedown notices to Google.

Clearly, Microsoft is anti piracy. But would they also prevent their employees from using Microsoft office connections to download pirated films through BitTorrent? Let’s find out.

The methodology is easy. Look up a range of IP-addresses assigned to Microsoft and enter those into the search form on YouHaveDownloaded one by one. While we expected that it might take a while to find one, we already had a handful of offenders after two dozen tries.

Below are a few of our findings, all downloads that are linked to Microsoft’s office in Sammamish, Washington (or Seattle). Interestingly, most of the hits we ran into are movies such as “The Debt”, “Bordertown” and lesser known “Blind”.

No listing of pirated files would be complete without an adult film. We had plenty to choose from, but Rocco’s Psycho Love was one of the better ones.

In Microsoft’s office in Arlington, Virginia, (or Charlotte) there are also quite a few hits, including some educational and inspirational books.

The above shows that despite Microsoft’s anti-piracy efforts, there are plenty of employees downloading files though BitTorrent, and not just legal files either.

Of course this is hardly a surprise. In companies with thousands of employees there will always be people who use BitTorrent for illicit purposes. And in tech companies it’s probably even more common.

Microsoft is in good company also.

Previously we were able to show that unauthorized downloads occur even in the most unexpected of places, from the palace of the French President, via the Church of God, to the RIAA and the US House of Representatives.

Source: Busted: Microsoft Harbors BitTorrent Pirates

[hypebot] The Week In Music Commentary

Clyde Smith — Sun, 27 May 2012 15:50:00 +0000

Gold Motel's Eric Hehr: The Musician As An Entrepreneur
Tyler Hayes Asks Is It A Music Video Or A Video Of Music?
Infographic Answers Why Radio Plays Same 20 Songs: The Sad Truth Of Media Consolidation

[The Register - Music and Media] TiVo spits out monster 6-way Pace box for US eyes only

Faultline — Sun, 27 May 2012 15:03:05 +0000

[ZeroPaid.com] Exclusive: FilesTube Comments on Google Transparency Report

Drew Wilson — Sun, 27 May 2012 14:01:24 +0000

[ZeroPaid.com] China and US Exchange Shots Over Internet Human Rights

Drew Wilson — Sun, 27 May 2012 14:00:53 +0000

[Engadget] Frontrow has arrived to let you take and share photos from YouTube livestreams

(author unknown) — Sun, 27 May 2012 13:29:00 +0000

[Digital Music News] Want More People to Care About Your Music? Then Charge for It…

paul — Sun, 27 May 2012 04:14:16 +0000

[THE MUSiC VOiD] Vice President, International Business Development – Echonest (Boston)

Jakomi Mathews — Sun, 27 May 2012 00:39:58 +0000

[Washington Post] Let’s Sing app for iOs: A social, musical game

(author unknown) — Sat, 26 May 2012 22:59:00 +0000

[Washington Post] YPmobile: App takes the Yellow Pages on the road

(author unknown) — Sat, 26 May 2012 22:39:00 +0000

[Engadget] Engadget Mobile Podcast 139 - 05.26.2012

(author unknown) — Sat, 26 May 2012 21:29:00 +0000

[LA Times] Groupon tests new service, enters mobile payment battlefield

By Salvador Rodriguez — Sat, 26 May 2012 21:24:00 +0000

[TorrentFreak] I Was a Member of Centropy, The World’s Leading Movie Piracy Group

enigmax — Sat, 26 May 2012 20:40:48 +0000

In 2005 and along with many others, then 22-year-old Matthew Thompson of Lubbock, Texas, was raided by the FBI as part of Operation Sitedown. This international initiative spanning 10 countries was aimed at bringing leading figures of the so-called Warez Scene to their knees.

Thompson was involved in movie piracy, but not just with any old group. Wicked1, as he was better known online, was a member of Centropy, the world’s leading movie piracy group.

Today, 7 years on, Thompson is sharing with TorrentFreak readers an excerpt from his forthcoming book, This is the Scene.

This is the Scene

My name was Wicked1 and I was a member of Centropy. For people not around in the early 2000’s and/or think the pinnacle of movies comes from the likes of IMAGiNE or aXXo, allow me this chance to correct you.

Centropy (CTP), when we existed, was the biggest release group in the world. Most people tend to think of ISO games groups as the leaders of The Scene, but there has always been more than one group operating at a given time. During my time, there was Razor1911, Fairlight, and Deviance. There was only ever one group the quality of Centropy in the movie scene.

We were the pioneers in how to pirate a movie in theaters. Our releases of The Matrix Reloaded, and Star Wars Episode 2 were part of the reason why one of the most common phrases in the pirating of new release movies was “I’ll wait for the Centropy”. The quality of our releases is virtually unmatched to this day.

Through our former DivX release partners in Deity, and later under our own spinoff, Brutus, we also released some of the largest DVD copies of movies ever, such as Lord of the Rings The Two Towers. Our most famous release was the March 1st release of The Return of the King, almost 2 and a half months before it came out on DVD.

What was my job in the two years I was a member of CTP? Was I the guy sitting in the movie theaters or the guy who uploaded movies to our encoding boxes? No, I was the guy who supplied computer hardware to the guys who sat in movie theaters and the person who found the suppliers who gave us the vast majority of our movies.

I was also one of the guys in The Scene who people would come to with fast business Internet connections to help set up topsites for Centropy, like a site run out of Michigan in a Comcast datacenter.

I became a member of Centropy in 2002 after having been a member of some very different groups. First, there was A-Team, a scrubby movie release group. Our only claim to anything was a subpar release of the first Harry Potter movie.

After bouncing around a few other groups like Esoteric and Obus, I ended up helping the TV group FFN pay for the internet connection for one of its cappers. It got me a leech account on some of the better sites around then, and it helped me join the racing group Enrage.

The leader of Enrage, a guy who went by the name of Blackjack, was someone fairly high in the Scene. After I had left Esoteric, he came to me one day telling me that Centropy was looking for someone to help keep their supplier happy. Within two months, I was supplying hardware, money, and bringing in new potential suppliers. Random topsites like AKSISO, a gigabit site in the Czech Republic, decided to give me site-op privileges in hopes that Centropy would become an affiliate of the site.

Things were great for me as a pirate; I had access to whatever I wanted and was a member of some of the biggest groups that have ever existed. Then Operation Fastlink happened.

Operation Fastlink was a multi-year, joint-operation run by the United States Department of Justice and the Computer Crimes and Intellectual Property Section of INTERPOL designed to take out the groups Fairlight, Kalisto, Echelon, ProjectX, and Class.

I had been around somewhat in 2001 during Operation Buccaneer, but that had very minimal effects on the world of piracy. Fastlink was different, as Fairlight (FLT) and their associated acts were some of the largest groups and some of the most secure in all of warez.

I woke up the morning of April 22, 2004, to what could pretty much be called chaos on IRC [Internet Relay Chat]. The private Centropy IRC server was down, and nobody from the group was on Efnet or Linknet, and virtually all of my sites were down for security reasons.

When I finally got in touch with a few of my other Scene buddies, they had told me that FLT and most of their sites had been busted and that I should probably lay low for a while. The fact that FLT had been busted didn’t bother me all that much; what bothered me was that their two US sites, Optical Illusion and DOH, were both sites I was on and both had been busted.

Like most rational people who are scared of going to prison would do, I freaked out and destroyed my hard drives and burned every burned CD and DVD I had in a random field outside of my town. For the next two months, I disappeared from piracy until my friends korax and Dact told me about this cool gigabit US topsite run by a guy named Griffen.

That topsite’s name was CHUD, or Can’t Hold us Down. Griffen and his site would later come back to haunt us in the biggest way imaginable….

—————————-

Want to hear more? We certainly do. Matthew is currently running a Kickstarter campaign to raise funding to continue work on his forthcoming book, This is the Scene.

The campaign page and accompanying video are available here.

Source: I Was a Member of Centropy, The World’s Leading Movie Piracy Group

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