Apple must have heaved a great sigh of relief when it heard its Christmas wish had been answered—Installous, the jailbroken iOS app pirating app from the Hackulous community, was finally dead. But not so fast, Apple. Now anyone can install pirated apps, and without having to jailbreak too. More »
The dev team behind the popular pirate app store for iOS, Installous, has announced that they have closed their doors and have shut down Installous as well. The team blames “stagnant” forums and the difficulty in moderating them as the reason behind their decision to kill the service, which will undoubtedly be a huge victory against iOS software piracy.
Hackulous has been a big name in the jailbreak community for years, and jailbreakers will no doubt miss their company. The one-stop shop for “cracked” or pirated apps and games on iOS was one of the main reasons that users jailbroke their iOS devices, but it looks like users will have to pony up that $0.99 for an app or game they would’ve gotten for free from Installous.
While Hackulous blames the lack of participation in the forums, we find it hard to believe that there was little activity on there, especially given the notoriety of Hackulous in the piracy and jailbreak world. The Hackulous repository, which was home to Installous and AppSync, a tweak that allowed users to sync their cracked apps with iTunes, has been taken offline.
Sadly, users who currently have Installous installed on their jailbroken iOS device will no longer be able to access the app, which will immediately prompt you with a “Installous will now terminate” message, and will simply go back to the iOS homescreen. This is certainly a small victory against app piracy in general, but it’s very likely that other developers will pick up where Hackulous left off.
[via iDownload Blog]
iOS jailbreak app store Installous shuts down, Hackulous closes up shop is written by Craig Lloyd & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.
Hackulous, the iOS piracy community behind the jailbreak app Installous, has suddenly shut down. Along with the community site, the Hackulous repository for the jailbreak store Cydia has also disappeared, rendering all of the community’s piracy tools dead. More »
It’s the end of the year and TorrentFreak has taken a look back at the year in movie piracy. The entire list isn’t exactly surprising, but there are a few weird entries on there. For instance, the top movie sucks. More »
It was predicted earlier in the year that the popular HBO series, Game of Thrones, was going to be the most-pirated TV show of the year, and it looks like that’s finally come true. TorrentFreak has issued their yearly list of the most pirated TV shows and movies, and Project X received the crown for the most-pirated film of 2012.
Game of Thrones topped out at almost 4.3 million downloads for a single episode, and while TorrentFreak notes that TV show downloads have leveled off the past few years, they’ve seen an increase in 2012. The biggest reasons why Game of Thrones made it to the top of the list are due to various airing delays and HBO’s choice not to make the show widely available online.
Project X ended up receiving over nine million downloads through illegal means. Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol and The Dark Knight Rises rounded out the top three. Surprisingly though, a few of the more popular movies were absent from the top 10, including The Hunger Games and the latest James Bond film, Skyfall.
Some other notable TV shows and movies that made the top 10 on their respective lists include Dexter, The Big Bang Theory, How I Met Your Mother, Breaking Bad, The Avengers, and Sherlock Homes: A Game of Shadows. Overall, a handful of HBO and CBS shows made the list, mostly due to not being available online, as previously mentioned.
Game of Thrones, Project X among most pirated in 2012 is written by Craig Lloyd & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.
Oh Kim Dotcom, will your exploits never cease? He’s in court battling extradition to the United States, and simultaneously developing a new product that’s probably going to piss off the copyright holders who are coming after him for Megaupload. Genius! More »
In what may end up becoming a legendary moment of public embarrassment, several movie studios have issued DMCA takedown notices to Google for legitimate content, including official Facebook pages, Wikipedia entries, and legal copies of their own movies. This is the by-product of automated takedown requests submitted on behalf of the studios by YesItIs.org, which has since gone offline, indicating that perhaps the issue isn’t as straight-forward as it seems.
The takedown requests concern a mixture of both infringing and legitimate links, with the proportion of legitimate links being exceedingly high. Several movie studios are swept up in the takedown requests, including Lionsgate, BBC Films, 20th Century Fox, Sony Pictures, Summit Entertainment, and Disney Pictures. Fortunately for them, Google has not censored most of the links.
Some examples include a takedown notice on behalf of Lionsgate, that, if it were followed through, would end with copies of Cabin in the Woods available via Blockbuster, iTunes, Comcast, and Amazon all being censored. This same sort of issue strikes the other studios, with other legitimate links including the Family Guy Wikipedia page, movie reviews on sites like The Independent and the Daily Mail, news pieces published on various websites, including CNET and Forbes, as well as links related to films other than the ones specified in the takedown notices.
There is speculation, however, that the takedown notices are not valid. The website YesItIs.org, which issued the takedown notices on behalf of the movie studios, now leads to a Go Daddy landing page. There’s no official word yet on whether the takedown notices were authorized, but if they weren’t, this is an excellent example of how the system can be abused by those with ill intent.
[via Torrent Freak]
Movie studios’ automated takedown requests target legitimate links is written by Brittany Hillen & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.
Torrenting, it’s the tool of thieves and pirates, right? The evil protocol no honest person should ever dare touch? Not quite, but it’s got that reputation with some, and it’s trying hard to shake it. According to BitTorrent’s executive director of marketing Matt Mason, they plan to take it all the way in the other direction and really get in deep with legal distribution next year. More »
We’ve talked over the past couple months about the impending anti-piracy system that was slated to go into effect across the US. The system is implemented by major Internet service providers, each of which will warn subscribers who engage in copyright infringing activities, ultimately punishing those who continue to do so after being warned. Thanks to Hurricane Sandy and some other unspecified factors, however, the Center for Copyright Information has been forced to extend the launch date to early 2013.
The Center for Copyright Information is a collective of five major Internet service providers, including Verizon, AT&T, and Comcast. Alongside the MPAA and RIAA, the service providers formed an agreement wherein copyright-infringing subscribers will receive some sort of alert, depending on which provider they use. Upon receiving a certain number of alerts, the subscriber will then receive a punishment, which also varies based on which provider the individual uses.
Each service provider has its own system. We first got a peek into what Internet users have in store thanks to a leaked AT&T memo, which detailed a large portion of the anti-piracy system the company will use, which includes several warnings when infringement is detected, followed by an “online education tutorial on copyright.” Verizon users will be given two warnings before being forced to sign an acknowledgement of infringement, followed by severely throttled Internet speeds for a couple of days. Time Warner subscribers will be directed to a landing page rather than having their speeds reduced.
The system was slated for launch today, November 28. However, the Center for Copyright Information has announced that the launch date has been bumped due to Hurricane Sandy, and won’t be implemented until early next year. “Due to unexpected factors largely stemming from Hurricane Sandy which have seriously affected our final testing schedules, CCI anticipates that the participating ISPs will begin sending alerts under the Copyright Alert System in the early part of 2013, rather than by the end of the year.”
[via CCI]
Anti-piracy system launch date bumped to early 2013 is written by Brittany Hillen & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.
Verizon is being sued by a group of adult movie companies because it has refused to hand over personal details of alleged BitTorrent pirates. More »
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