Hasta La Gadget!

For over a year now, there have been rumors floating around about major ISPs’ plans to institute a “six-strikes” plan to curb piracy. According to some leaked AT&T training documents drudged up by TorrentFreak, it’s finally rolling out for real on November 28th. More »

Anonymous is at it once again, this time launching what is being called “the biggest thing to ever happen in Anonymous history.” The group posted a video to YouTube yesterday in which is calls for Anonymous supporters to help it attack a number of Swedish government sites for the perceived slights against The Pirate Bay and controversial Wikileaks founder Julian Assange. Today, The Wall Street Journal is reporting that, sure enough, a number of Swedish websites have been taken offline after being flooded with traffic.

That includes the websites of the Swedish Security Service, the Swedish Prosecutors’ Office, and the Swedish Central Bank. It sounds like these sites were all taken down by DDoS attacks, which has become the trademark weapon of Anonymous throughout the years, in a way. In all, over 20 Swedish sites have been taken down this week, though authorities can’t say at this time if all of those attacks are related.

It’s clear that Anonymous is behind at least some of them, however. This new operation is being called #OpPRQ #OpPirateBay, and though some were claiming this was a honeypot – essentially a government-organized setup to catch these Anonymous members in the act – the AnonNCarolina2 Twitter account said earlier today that there isn’t any evidence that a honeypot is being carried out.

Interestingly, The Pirate Bay has been down for a few days now, and we’re not really sure why. Earlier this week, The Pirate Bay’s former host, PRQ (the same service mentioned in the name of this operation) was raided by police, but The Pirate Bay Facebook page says there’s no relation between the raid and the site outage. Instead, the outage seems to be the result of “power problems,” though we aren’t getting anything in the way of specifics. Whatever the reason, those who run The Pirate Bay expect the site to be back up tomorrow, and it appears that this Anonymous operation will be ongoing, so we’ll share any new details that surface. Stay tuned.

[via PCMag]

Anonymous attacks Sweden for Pirate Bay Justice is written by Eric Abent & originally posted on SlashGear.
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The case of Megaupload’s founder Kim Dotcom gets odder by the day, with the latest official documents revealing that the police simply didn’t know, or didn’t bother checking, if Kim Dotcom was a New Zealand citizen or not. More »

America, land of the free and home of the torrenters, apparently. Musicmetric, an analytics company, tallied up all the torrenting that happens across the world to find out which country is the biggest pirate and the United States of America is an unsurprising number one. Good job, guys! More »

Online file-sharing is considered illegal and an infringement of intellectual copyrights of the content that is being shared, if it is not available publicly and for free. However, very few cases related to online file sharing have surfaced in the U.S. so far. Among them is the case of Jammie Thomas, the first case that involved unauthorized file-sharing.

The case has been around since 2007 and has since lingered on between multiple courts and hearings. Initially, Jammie Thomas was asked to pay $222,000 for sharing 54 unauthorized copies of songs on Kazaa. In later trials, the damages that were to be paid were bumped to $1.92 million and then subsequently reduced to $1.5 million. (more…)

By Ubergizmo. Related articles: Google Censorship List Now Includes Pirate Bay Domains, Android is designed for piracy, developer says,