Cloudflare Ordered to Expose YTS, Showbox, and Popcorn Time Site 'Operators' | Hacker News Reader

Cloudflare Ordered to Expose YTS, Showbox, and Popcorn Time Site 'Operators'

torrentfreak.com

164 pointsaravindhsriram41 comments

Well, now I know about YTS and Showbox...

Indeed, "Streisand Effect" [1] is strong with this one.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect

The Yiffy Torrents guys have an office in Shoreditch London they used to verify their identity on their website via an EV certs. I don't know why they don't start there - the street address is/was literally inside their certificate. And yes they're there, it's a coworking space and they recieve postal mail there.

Hmmm, sounds like they went with a competitor instead of using your certsimple then?

Ooh conspiracy theory! It could be that I like inspecting certificate org details and seeing if anyone had mississued anything, and I live in London (Ozone coffee nearby is pretty neat) so wandering by was convenient. But you're right: jealous over a few quid, George Soros, the globalists and I have decided to leak this info that, er, is in Yiffy's certificate already. Emoji thumbs up.

Heh Heh Heh, k.

It's just unusual - from what I've seen - to directly give pointers for locating some group in the physical world, specifically to bring harm to them IRL. :/

There's a lot of coworking spaces in Shoreditch, but more to the point, they already published the address themselves to anyone who clicked the lock in their browser.

How doable is a anonymous ipfs torrent tracker?

I don't know about IPFS, but ZeroNet (another distributed internet project) has a couple.

ZeroNet really is the perfect platform for this. Web-based, users can submit content, entirely p2p, very nice UI. It's the perfect platform, but nobody knows about it.

If you're interested, you can download and check it out here: https://zeronet.io

You can also check it out without installing anything by visiting my proxy: https://zn.amorgan.xyz

Play is one such ZeroNet site for movies: http://localhost:43110/zeroplay.bit https://zn.amorgan.xyz/zeroplay.bit

Funnily enough TorrentFreak is mirrored on ZeroNet: http://localhost:43110/1JNqdTGVATFWRLzzYwVu19CuWYus5VmoUS/ https://zn.amorgan.xyz/1JNqdTGVATFWRLzzYwVu19CuWYus5VmoUS/

And a wiki if you're interested in learning more: http://localhost:43110/138R53t3ZW7KDfSfxVpWUsMXgwUnsDNXLP/ https://zn.amorgan.xyz/138R53t3ZW7KDfSfxVpWUsMXgwUnsDNXLP/

And you should probably get the nopelist as a blacklist on your zeronet...Fucking Pedophiles ruining everything anonymous...

Which nopelist?

From the FAQ

> It's no more anonymous than BitTorrent, but privacy (the possibility to find out who is the owner of the comment/site) will increase as the network and the sites gains more peers.

I think users are much better off using something anonymous out of the box like I2P which has simple out of box support for downloading torrents anonymously.

It has Tor integration out of the box (obviously I haven't audited it, but in theory that's enough).

Don't use Tor for torrenting! [1] The network is not meant for providing fast downloads, it's there for providing anonymity. There is no reason to effectively DoS the network and get crappy speeds when you can simply pay a few bucks a month for a VPN that supports port forwarding.

1. https://blog.torproject.org/bittorrent-over-tor-isnt-good-id...

Not for torrenting, for accessing/delivering ZeroNet sites over. (i.e. connecting to the torrent tracker to get the magnet in the first place).

Yeah no torrenting is done over Tor here :) It's worth mentioning that ever since ZeroNet gained its BigFiles plugin, you can directly stream and watch the videos on ZeroNet. Just that nobody has made a nice interface for it yet.

There's sites like [KopyKate](https://zn.amorgan.xyz/big.kopykate.bit/), but they've sort of fallen downhill as the dev has stopped updating it.

ZeroNet's UI is surprisingly excellent. It feels extremely polished and has numerous applications already. It should be much more popular than it is. I'm afraid I don't know much about how anonymous it is, though.

Ipfs is very cool, but is not anonymous nor is a goal of the project.

https://github.com/ipfs/notes/issues/37 is one possible solution to anonymous IPFS.

Totally doable. Here I built a proof of concept of a DHT over Tor using IPFS's DHT libs: https://github.com/cretz/tor-dht-poc. I even went so far as making it readable (but not participate-able yet) via JS in Tor Browser though it's IPFS doing the heavy lifting.

I would guess you'd just start a different IPFS network, not the main one, and have a set of reliable onions as bootstrap nodes. Then just store the torrent info from its hash like BT mainline and I guess have people pin it. I have not dug too deeply, but in general an entire IPFS network all over Tor is very doable. Now, that's for a tracker, for actually downloading the data that's a different deal.

Is there an advantage to filing this in Hawaii? Seems like an unexpected venue choice.

In looking at dockets from that plaintiff (Venice PI), they have filed dozens, if not hundreds, of suits across the country. This just happens to be one case in Hawaii.

https://www.courtlistener.com/?q=venice+pi&type=r&type=r&ord...

"it is likely that the requested information will be handed over"

I would say the opposite at this point. Cloudflare has a track record of sticking to its principles and has demonstrated a willingness to defend them in court.

What principles? I can't find a mission statement or list of principles on their site, and it wasn't long ago that Cloudflare joined GoDaddy and others in shutting down the Daily Stormer -- one of the principles of a CDN might be supporting a free and open internet, but that isn't supported by their actions.

While I agree with you in principle, they aren't required to host content that they don't want to. They certainly shouldn't be actively shutting down content, however that's not the same as declining to host content. I'm somewhat surprised that a conservative network hasn't been established to support the White Power, Alex Jones, Gab types of places. It would seem to be at the minimum a viable business for a niche audience.

The problem with the US-based companies is, that they are required to reveal their private customer data even without judge's approval[1], depending on who asks for it.

[1] https://apnews.com/4986e44871dc4f70a467239fa49b15dd

Why do you limit this to US-based companies? I can't think of any country in the world where a company is sovereign and can withhold private data from the government. In most of them, a judge's approval would not be required.

The difference is, how much private customer data a company can reveal without a judge's approval. In many European countries it's limited only to meta-data (i.e., basic account information).

I'm thinking of China and Russia, South America, Africa, you know "most" of the countries of the world. You are thinking of "best practices" countries but really, most countries grant no such privilege to companies (or their citizens).

> You are thinking of "best practices" countries

I tried to compare the US to other Western countries, most of which are in Europe[1], but you might be right, that in this regard it stands closer to Russia and China.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_world#/media/File:The_...

The first part of that sentence that you omitted is explaining that they already did have their chance to respond to the order in court. They did not respond, and now the order stands.

Attorney here! (Not offering legal advice, though.)

That doesn't mean they'll prevail. It's very difficult to get a judge to quash a subpoena demanding a business produce customer records that are needed to identify a potential party to a civil action.

Any chance of that working went out the window now that they demonstrated the willingness to kick people off of the service altogether.

I don't have a problem with this. From the sounds of it, these 'operators' are distributing copyrighted content, which is illegal in many jurisdictions. IOW, they are party to the violation, not merely indices or what-not.

The fact that CF itself is not considered party to these violations (under DMCA) is a good thing.

Someone correct me here, but as I understand it, the torrent file itself is not the content. It is metadata about the content, and thus it can be shared without copyright violation. Using the torrent file, on the other hand, might very well be illegal.

As I understand it, uploading copyrighted content is illegal, but downloading isn't. So, if you don't disable uploading (or sharing) while downloading in your torrent client, then you are committing a crime when you download copyrighted content, since you are sharing it with other clients.

A torrent file is not copyrighted content. I'm sad to see people here repeating the talking points of the MPAA.

Since when is a .torrent file copyrighted content? That file only contains metadata about other files.

It might be facilitating copyright infringement, but it's not infringement itself, so it can't be under the DMCA.

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