MtGox Founder Arrested in Japan over lost Bitcoins

Mark Karpeles, 30, the ex-boss of the now defunct popular Bitcoin exchange MtGox, was arrested in Japan over the disappearance of millions of dollars worth of the cryptocurrency.

 

 

The French-born Mark Karpeles was accused of falsifying information on the outstanding balance of the Bitcoin exchange, which used to be the world’s largest hub for trading cryptocurrency. According to Japanese news reports, officials from the Tokyo metropolitan police claimed that Mark Karpeles allegedly manipulated the exchange computer system to inflate its assets.

After media reports emerged about his arrest, Mark Karpeles claimed that the allegations were “false” and he would “of course deny” them. When the exchange filed for bankruptcy last year, Karpeles explained that 750,000 customer Bitcoins and another 100,000 Bitcoins that belonged to MtGox disappeared due to a software security bug. At the time of the bankruptcy filing, these 850,000 Bitcoins were worth $480m. The cryptocurrency exchange also said that over $27m was missing from its Japanese bank accounts.

Mark Karpeles blamed hackers for the loss and later announced that he was never going to hide from justice and managed to recover 200,000 of the lost Bitcoins. He was known as a self-proclaimed geek saying he was uncomfortable in his native country and hadn’t been back in years. The MtGox founder became interested in Bitcoin when one of the clients of his web-hosting services offered to pay in cryptocurrency.

After a while, MtGox was dominating global trade in Bitcoin. However, back in 2012, employees at the Tokyo-based exchange have already challenged the founder on issues including client money being used to cover costs.

Google Receives 18 DMCA Requests Every Second

Rights owners send Google more and more copyright takedown requests. The statistics said that the search engine is required to remove 18 links to "pirate" pages every second, and this number continues to grow. Rights owners can be understood – by sending takedown notices, they hope to steer prospective customers away from pirate portals.

The number of DMCA notices has increased dramatically over the years – while 7 years ago Google received only a few dozen requests per year, now the same number is reached in a few seconds. For example, over the past month, copyright holders submitted about 47 million notices, which makes it 18 links per second. As for the last week, the company got a staggering 12.5m reported links, which proves that the surge in notices is still ongoing.

The largest number of requests comes from the BPI and RIAA – they have sent notices for 5.5 million URLs over the past month (12% of all notices). However, the outfits are topped by takedown agencies Rivendell and Degban, who account for reporting 7.7 and 6.3 million links respectively.

Overall, within the past month, over 2,600 rights owners submitted takedown notices targeting 77,500 separate domain names. The top targets include the relatively unknown MP3 search engine myfreemp3.re and a number of The Pirate Bay related domains.

Usually, Google removes all of the reported URLs, but sometimes takedown notices also include duplicate or non-infringing links, and in this case the company takes no action. Even despite such a huge number of processed requests, many copyright holders are still not happy with the search engine’s take on the piracy problem. For example, such Hollywood representatives as the RIAA and MPAA have repeatedly stressed that Google does not do enough to remove pirated content from the top search results.

In respond, the company has gradually altered its search algorithms. In October 2014, Google introduced the most significant change yet, downranking websites that often link to pirated content.

Still, the entertainment industry continues to urge the company to completely de-list infringing domains and boost the rankings of legal alternatives. Apparently, until Google agrees to comply, the number of reported links wouldn’t decrease.

আসছে আরও টাইজেন স্মার্টফোন@ Aii tuo SUZog@@@

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এ বছরের শেষের দিকে টাইজেন অপারেটিং সিস্টেম চালিত আরও স্মার্টফোন বাজারে আনার পরিকল্পনা করেছে দক্ষিণ কোরিয়ান ইলেকট্রনিক্স জায়ান্ট স্যামসাং।

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এক প্রতিবেদনে সংবাদ সংস্থা রয়টার্স জানিয়েছে, স্যামসাংয়ের আসন্ন পরিকল্পনা সম্পর্কে জানালেও ‘বিষয়টির সংবেদনশীলতার কারণে’ তথ্যদাতা নিজ পরিচয় প্রকাশে রাজি হননি।
বছরের শেষ দিকে স্যামসাংয়ের, বিভিন্ন মূল্যের টাইজেন স্মার্টফোন বাজারজাত করার পরিকল্পনা রয়েছে বলেই জানিয়েছেন তিনি। কিন্তু ফোনগুলোর স্পেসিফিকেশন কী হতে পারে, সে ব্যাপারে সূত্র বাড়তি কোনো তথ্য দেননি।
অন্যদিকে স্যামসাংয়ের মুখপাত্রের সঙ্গে প্রতিষ্ঠানটির আসন্ন এ পরিকল্পনা প্রসঙ্গে যোগাযোগ করা হলে, তিনি এ ব্যাপারে কোনো মন্তব্য করতে রাজি হননি বলে জানিয়েছে রয়টার্স।
২০১৫ সালের জানুয়ারিতে প্রতিষ্ঠানটি তাদের প্রথম টাইজেন স্মার্টফোন জেড১ বাংলাদেশ, ভারত ও শ্রীলংকার বাজারে নিয়ে আসে। স্মার্টফোন নির্মাতা হিসেবে বর্তমানে বিশ্বে তৃতীয় স্থানে থাকা স্যামসাংয়ের প্রায় দশ লাখ টাইজেন স্মার্টফোন ভারতে বিক্রি হলেও, গবেষণা সংস্থা কাউন্টারপয়েন্টের মে মাসের প্রতিবেদনের তথ্য অনুযায়ী, জানুয়ারি থেকে মার্চ সময়সীমার মধ্যে সবচেয়ে বেশি টাইজেন স্মার্টফোন বিক্রি হয়েছে বাংলাদেশে।
টাইজেন অপারেটিং সিস্টেমের মাধ্যমে স্মার্টওয়াচ, প্রিমিয়াম টেলিভিশন সেট ও অন্যান্য ডিভাইসের নিজস্ব প্ল্যাটফর্ম গড়ে তুলতে চাইছে স্যামসাং। কিন্তু সেজন্য প্রতিষ্ঠানটির টাইজেন অপারেটিং সিস্টেমচালিত স্মার্টফোনের বাজার সম্প্রসারিত করা, এর ব্যবহারকারী ও থার্ড-পার্টি ডেভলপার বাড়ানো প্রয়োজন বলেই জানিয়েছেন বিশ্লেষকরা।

17 May: ITU’s 150th Anniversary Celebrations

German Court Shut Down Popular Torrent Trackers

A court in Hamburg has recently ruled that a hosting company has to identify the owners of 3 popular BitTorrent trackers, which coordinate dozens of millions of transfers every day. The court order was delivered following a complaint from German music group BVMI, which also claimed responsibility for the shutdown of the torrent trackers that went offline earlier this year.

OpenBitTorrent, PublicBT and Istole.it were popular torrent trackers that coordinate the downloads of 30 million people at a time. In order words, each of these non-profit websites, powered by the open source Opentracker software, handled 3bn connections per day. However, the services went offline almost 4 months ago, and now the German music industry group BVMI takes credit for the shutdowns. It explained that the hosting company took the tracker offline after it was ordered to identify its operators.

It also admitted that the host was fighting against the shutdown, initially refusing to disclose the personal details of the site operators. Now it is obliged to do so in accordance with the court injunction. This court ruling follows a complaint from the German music industry group BVMI and is recognized as the first against the so-called standalone BitTorrent trackers, which don’t actually host or process any infringing content themselves, but are just a neutral part of the BitTorrent ecosystem.

The entertainment industry admitted that they had to target standalone trackers, because they make it possible for those who offer and seek unauthorized content to make the first connection. The only problem is that these trackers are also used by legal torrents to coordinate connections.

Thanks to TorrentFreak for providing the source of the article.

Kim Dotcom Got Back Some of His Money

The founder of MegaUpload was allowed to get more of his seized funds in New Zealand. Kim Dotcom will receive millions to pay his legal expenses and extra $128,000 per month to pay mansion rent, buy grocery cover staff, security and other expenses.

 

In February 2015, Kim Dotcom came to court to ask for money to cover living expenses and pay his legal fees. Previously, Kim Dotcom was given about $15,000 per month to live on, but this was not enough for him. So, the recent ruling is largely good news for Kim Dotcom, with the judge also reviewing objections by authorities that he has funds in a trust that he could use. The judge ruled that the major asset of Dotcom's trust was its shareholding in Mega Ltd, but he couldn’t sell those shares until the planned listing of Mega. As a result, the judge decided that Dotcom does not have the ability to meet his legal and reasonable living expenses. Taking into consideration that Dotcom still owes his lawyers about $1.5m, the judge decided that Dotcom would need between $1.5m and $3m to fight against extradition. This money will be granted to him from currently restrained government bonds.

The judge also considered Kim’s needs to cover family’s accommodation costs ($60,000 per month) and his claims for such items as security, staff wages and other general expenses. Kim Dotcom currently has 8 staff in his mansion, but the judge ruled that 5 people would be enough and granted $19,000 per month for staff. He will also get $11,000 for grocery.

Overall, Kim Dotcom was awarded his legal fees and $128,000 per month to cover living expenses pending the expiry of the lease on his mansion (2016). Apparently, the position will be reviewed afterwards.

Thanks to TorrentFreak for providing the source of the article.

Companies Still Fail to Monetize Piracy

Financial results of Rightscorp, a piracy monetization company, show that monetizing piracy isn't as easy as it expected. Rightscorp did a great job by protecting more copyrights, attracting more Internet service providers to cooperation and settling more court cases, but it still ended up with an operating loss of almost $930,000.

Rightscorp’s mission is to turn piracy into profit: they cooperate with copyright owners, track file-sharers and send them a settlement offer to avoid lawsuits. There are a lot of copyright trolls out there, but Rightscorp only asks for $20 per case of violation, which is a relatively cheap deal in comparison to others. The only problem is that Rightscorp still can’t make its operation profitable: back in 2014, it lost $3.4 million, and the most recent results don’t seem much better.
As for the fundamentals, Rightscorp currently has 1.5 million in its authorized copyright catalog, but only 256,000 are in its full system. 233 Internet service providers cooperate in the scheme at the moment, and the company has access to 15% of all homes in the US. As a result, Rightscorp has closed 200,000 cases of copyright infringement in the past two years.
Reported revenue for Q1 2015 was a little over $300,000, but reported loss was almost $930,000 due to the costs, including fees it pays to rightsowners (half of revenues), wages and legal costs. Aside from the usual advice required for company operation, Rightscorp is being sued over the methods employed to extort cash from alleged pirates.
It remains unclear whether Rightscorp will eventually be able to monetize piracy – perhaps, increased volumes and economies of scale can help.
Thanks to TorrentFreak for providing the source of the article.

All Encrypted Traffic Comes through Torrents = 1/4 of Total Traffic

Nowadays, Internet traffic is more and more encrypted, and BitTorrent transfers are accounting for a quarter of the encrypted downstream traffic in North America, second only to YouTube.

It seemed that today BitTorrent users keep searching for options to hide their download traces, but thus far there was almost no information on how much of all encrypted traffic relates to file-sharing. A recent report finally clarified the picture. The data was gathered to find out how much of all Internet traffic is encrypted, and what the most popular sources are.
The outcomes of the research were the following: almost 30% of all downstream traffic is now encrypted, so you can understand that 2/3 of the traffic still remains unencrypted. As for the sources of encrypted traffic, YouTube currently accounts for most of it – over 11% of all downstream traffic comes from encrypted YouTube data, which makes it about 40% of all encrypted traffic. The second place is taken by BitTorrent (7.2% of the total downstream traffic), which accounts for almost 25% of all encrypted data.
However, the report only considers downstream traffic, while BitTorrent’s share of upstream traffic is usually much higher. In other words, the total percentage of all encrypted traffic will be well over 25%.
It should also be noted that before YouTube made the transition to support secure data transfers, BitTorrent was the most popular source of encrypted traffic. In the meantime, when Netflix moves to encryption by default, BitTorrent’s part may drop even further, while the overall traffic will keep growing.
Obviously, BitTorrent users are now increasingly using various anonymizing services to avoid troubles with copyright legislation.
Thanks to TorrentFreak for providing the source of the article.

Microsoft Tracks Windows 7 Pirates

Microsoft filed a lawsuit, claiming that it logged hundreds of suspicious product activations from one IP address. The software giant is currently seeking damages.

Such software as operating systems suffers a high piracy rate due to the fact that a user needs to be present on most computers in order for them to work at all. Over the last three decades, Windows OS has been pirated millions of times. The Seattle-based company had to accept this fact as granted, and regular users usually avoided Microsoft’s aggression.

Now at least one pirate is about to find out that the same can’t be said of users pirating Windows on a commercial scale. Microsoft targets a person or persons behind a single Verizon IP address, who are responsible for some serious Windows pirating. The tech giant analyzed product key activation data, including the IP address from which the key was activated. It should be noted that the users voluntarily provided this information when they activated Windows. The forensic tools of the company allow it to analyze billions of Windows activations and discover patterns that make it believe that pirated software was being activated through that particular IP address.

The company detained in its complaint that its cyberforensics have identified hundreds of product key activations originating from a single Verizon IP address. Microsoft claims that those activations make it believe that defendants are using the IP address in question to activate pirated Windows 7. The company provided evidence that the defendant(s) have activated hundreds of copies of its operating system using product keys “stolen” from Microsoft’s supply chain or having a valid license. In some cases, the keys were used more times than their license allows.

Microsoft is now claiming damages resulting from such piracy – aside from immediate injunctive relief and the impounding of all infringing content, the Seattle-based company demands profits attributable to the infringements, treble damages and attorney fees or statutory damages.

This is not the first time when Microsoft launches a lawsuit of such a kind. The company took a similar action last December, targeting a user behind an AT&T account.

Thanks to TorrentFreak for providing the source of the article.