reddit torrent vas direcct Veteran Pirate With Millions of Says “Sharing is Caring” A veteran uploader of cracked software to sites like The Pirate Bay and says that nine years of uploads have resulted in millions of downloads. 'Thumper' began on TPB in April 2010, later achieving 'Trusted Uploader" status. The motivation? "Sharing is Caring," she insists. Every week, millions of pirates head off to popular torrent sites for their software fix. Whether they’re looking for the latest operating systems, graphics tools, or DVD/Blu-ray burning software, most things are available for free download. What most people never question is why these tools are available for free and indeed, who puts them online. Today we can put a little meat on those bones. We recently spoke with Thumper, aka ThumperTM, one of the longest-standing uploaders on public torrent sites like The Pirate Bay and 1337x. But this isn’t just any uploader. Thumper is responsible for almost 1,000 torrent uploads over the past nine years, leading to millions of downloads across the Internet. Thumper identifies as female (impossible to confirm, but we’ll proceed on that basis) and sports the profile picture as seen top right. It’s an image used by many Internet users so probably isn’t an accurate depiction. Thumper also claims to be from Switzerland but in this game, such ‘facts’ should be taken with a pinch of salt alongside a knowingly obvious nod to security. What cannot be denied, however, is the popularity of Thumper’s torrents. If we take her Office Pro Plus 2016 release as an example, that has received more than 801,000 downloads on 1337x alone. “This torrent has been download a few million times from all sites, because Office is one of the must-have programs for most of us,” Thumper informs TF. Of course, not all torrents are this popular but Thumper’s history goes back around 14 years, when torrents weren’t even a priority for her. Things began on so-called “one-click” hosting sites in 2005, with a progression to torrents in 2007. “I started uploading torrents at H33t, , 1337x, ThePirateBay, and RARBG. Then I started my own site in 2010 (ThumperDC.com and TechTools.NET). Now all of those sites redirect to our legit Windows forum, TheWindowsForum.com,” she explains. Over the past 12 years, Thumper’s torrents (mainly Windows software uploads) have spread far and wide. She has been uploading on The Pirate Bay since April 2010 and on that site alone has a confirmed 946 torrents, as the private user panel screenshot below shows. The Pirate Bay is obviously a very high-profile site but Thumper is a bit of a celebrity elsewhere too. More than nine years ago she joined 1337x and for the last eight has been a trusted moderator there. In the interim, Thumper was also an uploader at the now-defunct original KickassTorrents, but still continues over at that platform’s namesake, KATCR. Uploading and so many torrents is a big undertaking, especially over a large number of years. There’s also a bit of a stigma attached to software uploads because unlike movies and TV shows, they have the potential to contain a virus or malware. However, since reputations can be gone in a flash if an uploader lets something nefarious slip through the net, Thumper says that precautions are carried out in advance. Most uploaded software is obtained from friendly crackers (people who remove copy protection) before being run through a virtual machine and then scanned for viruses. Only then is it uploaded. This perhaps contributed to Thumper earning a “green skull” from The Pirate Bay team around 2011, which is a small logo next to a user name which informs potential downloaders that while releases aren’t guaranteed to be flawless, they are more trusted than others without. This is particularly important when one considers that people sometimes try to masquerade as Thumper in order to gain traction. We independently confirmed her status on one of the torrent sites she uploads to but most people don’t have that luxury so should proceed with caution when seeing her ‘brand’ online. “The Pirate Bay has a ton of fake uploads lately, even some of them are infected and uploaded by other users with our tag ‘Windows app name v1.0 [ThumperDC] or [TechTools] or [TheWindowsForum]’, for example,” Thumper explains. “1337x has other rules for new uploaders, you must apply for uploader status, then we review and decide if x_User is legit. People should always use torrent sites which are safe: 1337x, TPB, KATCR, RARBG, or TorrentGalaxy. And make sure to download from trusted uploaders.” Finally, one of the biggest questions is why someone like Thumper keeps releasing torrent after torrent, year after year. What’s in it for her? Each release does contain links to her own site (which now specializes in discussions and technical support for Windows software), so there’s obviously some benefit there. However, she insists that this isn’t the main motivation. “Sharing is caring,” she concludes, citing the years-old ‘pirate’ mantra. Kodi Wants to Beat Piracy With Legal Content and DRM. The group behind the popular Kodi software is not happy that their media player is often linked to piracy. holders would like Kodi to certain pirate add-ons, but the team doesn't believe that would be effective. Instead, they're inviting rightsholders to join their platform and are considering the addition of DRM to make that easier. Millions of people use Kodi as their main source of entertainment, often with help from add-ons that allow them to access pirated movies and TV- shows. As Kodi’s popularity has increased drastically over the past two years, so have complaints from copyright holders. While Kodi itself is a neutral platform, unauthorized add-ons give it a bad name. This is one of the reasons why the Kodi team is actively going after vendors who sell “fully loaded” pirate boxes and YouTubers who misuse their name to promote . Interestingly, the Kodi team itself didn’t help its case by putting up an FBI seizure notice last week, as an April Fools gag. The banner suggested that the site had been taken down by the US Department of Justice for copyright infringement. Downloads of the latest builds of the software were also blocked. Kodi’s April Fools gag. This week TorrentFreak spoke with several members of the Kodi team, operating under the XBMC Foundation, who made it clear that they want to cooperate with rightsholders instead of being accused of facilitating piracy. The team told us that copyright holders regularly approach them. Some are well informed and know that Kodi itself isn’t actively involved in anything piracy related. However, according to XBMC Foundation President Nathan Betzen, there are also those who are fooled by misleading media reports or YouTube videos. “There are rightsholders that know who we are and realize we are distinct from the 3rd party add-on crowd,” Betzen says. “And then there are the rights holders who have been successfully taken in by the propaganda, who write us very legal sounding letters because some random YouTuber or ‘’ described the author of a piracy add-on as a ‘Kodi developer’.” The Kodi team doesn’t mind being approached by people who are misinformed, as it gives them an opportunity to set the record straight. It has proven to be more challenging to find a way forward with movie studios and other content creators that are aware of Kodi’s position. These movie industry representatives sometimes ask Kodi to remove third-party repo installs and block certain pirate add-ons. However, according to XBMC Foundation’s Project lead Martijn Kaijser, this isn’t the direction Kodi wants to go in. “Our view on this is that [removing code] would not help a bit, because the code is open-source and others can easily revert it. Blocking add-ons won’t help since they would instantly change the addon and the block would be in vain,” Kaijser tells us. The Kodi team feels that pirates are leeching off their infrastructure and put the entire community at risk. But, instead of taking a repressive approach they would like to see more legal content providers join their platform. With an audience of millions of users, there is a lot of untapped potential on a platform that’s rapidly growing. To facilitate this process, the media player is currently considering whether to add support for DRM so that content providers can offer their videos in a protected environment. While some users may cringe at the thought, Kodi believes it’ll help to get rightsholders on board. “Our platform has a lot of potential and we are looking into attracting more legal and official content providers. Additionally, we’re looking into adding low-level DRM that would at least make it more feasible to gain trust from certain providers,” Kaijser tells TorrentFreak. Kodi addons. Although Kodi does go after sellers of pirate boxes, Betzen personally doesn’t believe that this is the answer. The best way to deal with the piracy issue is to offer more legal content through official add-ons. “We’d like to actually work with content providers to have official add-ons in our network. That’s much easier to do when we are proactively attempting to help them to fight copyright infringement,” Betzen says. There are already plenty of legal uses for Kodi, including the DVR system, support for legal sports streaming, and a variety of add-ons such as Crunchyroll, HDHomeRun, Plex and Twitch. However, getting some major content providers on board has proven to be quite a challenge thus far. Kaijser notes that rightsholders have been very reserved thus far. He tried to convince content providers to offer official add-ons, or even turn some community made ones into official ones, but hasn’t had much success. In a way, the repeated piracy discussions and news items are both a blessing and a curse for Kodi. They help to grow the platform at a rate most competitors could only dream of, while at the same time keeping rightsholders at bay. Time will tell if Kodi can turn this around. ‘First Pirated Ultra HD Blu-Ray Disk’ Appears Online. AACS 2.0 Cracked? A few hours ago a pirated copy of the "Smurfs 2" UHD Blu-Ray Disc appeared on the well known private torrent trackers UltraHDCLUB and IPT. The release suggests that the AACS 2.0 technology used to protect these discs may have been circumvented for the first time. However, without further details, it's probably wise not to jump to conclusions too quickly. While there is no shortage of pirated films on the Internet, Ultra-high-definition content is often hard to find. Not only are the file sizes enormous, but the protection is better than that deployed to regular content. UHD Blu-Ray Discs, for example, are protected with AACS 2.0 encryption which was long believed to unbreakable. A few hours ago, however, this claim was put in doubt. Out of nowhere, a cracked copy of a UHD Blu-Ray Disc surfaced on the HD-focused BitTorrent trackers UltraHCLUB and IPT. The torrent in question is a copy of the Smurfs 2 film and is tagged “The Smurfs 2 (2013) 2160p UHD Blu-ray HEVC Atmos 7.1-THRONE.” This suggests that AACS 2.0 may have been “cracked” although there are no further technical details provided at this point. UltraHDCLUB is proud of the release, though, and boasts of having the “First Ultra HD Blu-ray Disc in the NET!” Those who want to get their hands on a copy of the file have to be patient though. Provided that they have access to the private tracker, it will take a while to download the entire 53.30 GB disk. At the time of writing, there are still very few seeders available, which means that progress is slow. TorrentFreak reached out to both the uploader of the torrent and an admin at the site hoping to find out more, but thus far we have yet to hear back. From the details provided, the copy appears to be the real deal although not everyone agrees. TorrentFreak spoke to an expert at a well-known torrent distribution group who reviewed the media information and compared it to the retail UHD Blu-Ray Disc. While the audio seems to match, the Maximum Content Light Level and Maximum Frame-Average Light Level listed in the media info appear to be different, and the colors in the screenshots are off too. This means that it’s warranted to remain reserved when it comes to definitive “cracked” claims at this time. The potential ‘breakthrough’ release hasn’t gone unnoticed though, and in various discussion forums people are suggesting that AACS 2.0 must have been broken. Hundreds of downloaders have jumped on the release too, congratulating the uploader. “Great job! Congratulations to the person/team who achieved this awesome milestone. I’ve got nothing but love for you!” one downloader writes. “This is history in the making and I`m proud and glad to be able to participate and experience it first hand. This is so freakin amazing and it feels sort of unreal but yet it isn`t which is the best part,” another one notes. If the encryption has indeed been broken it will be bad news for AACS, the decryption licensing outfit that controls it. The company, founded by a group of movie studios and technology partners including Warner Bros, Disney, Microsoft and Intel, has put a lot of effort into making the technology secure. If more information becomes available, we will update the article accordingly. Update: After reviewing the full file our expert source believes that the release is indeed a copied UHD Blu-Ray Disc. Whether AACS 2.0 has been broken is still unclear. Update: Updated the article to add that the releases came out on both UltraHDClUB and IPT, both claiming it as an exclusive. Update: The Chinese trackers M-Team and CHDBits also posted the torrents around the same time. Reddit’s /r/Piracy is Deleting Almost 10 Years of History to Avoid Ban. Under pressure from Reddit's administrators over copyright issues, the site's largest forum dedicated to piracy discussion has opted for "The Nuclear Option". After voting by its contributors, all posts older than six months are now being deleted. That's almost 10 years of data, the vast majority of it completely legal. The negative effects are already being felt. With around a quarter of a billion monthly users, Reddit is one of the most important sites on the Internet. The site plays host to millions of live discussions on countless topics ranging from the mundane to obviously controversial. Recently we’ve reported on the troubles being faced by /r/piracy, Reddit’s most popular sub-Reddit focused on piracy discussion. In an article published mid-March 2019, we reported how the moderators of the forum were making best efforts to keep content on the right side of the law and within Reddit’s rules. Just a handful of days later, however, the moderators received notice from Reddit that they were receiving too many copyright complaints from rightsholders. For a sub-Reddit that has strict rules forbidding anyone posting links to infringing content, the notification came as a disappointment. While some complaints were legitimate (some people simply won’t abide by the rules and some posts do get missed), many were not. This placed the forum’s moderators between a rock and a hard place. According to some of the copyright notices filed with Reddit, simply posting an alleged pirate site homepage URL warranted a complaint, even when that URL didn’t link to any infringing content. We’ve seen the same kind of issues before, when copyright holders have made attempts to have site homepages delisted from Google, despite their content never appearing there. Further complicating the process is that the moderators of /r/piracy have no ability to respond to potentially false allegations. If a user makes a post that results in a copyright notice, only that user (or Reddit’s admins) are in a position to dispute the claim with the notice sender, so that rarely happens. Even if it does, nothing is made public. Meanwhile, the notices keep building up, despite best efforts and whether they’re valid or not. Even people simply posting names of releases are being flagged for copyright infringement, something that isn’t illegal in any form. As a result, those posts too are now being removed, as quickly as the mods can reach them. “I have begun unofficially removing release posts and it’s quite sad considering that a rather large bulk of our users look forward to them every day, I know I did,” moderator ‘ dysgraphical ‘ informs TF. “We have had days when releases were the highlight of the day filled with hundreds of comments of excited people discussing the film. This has all been scrubbed now. We recently had an April Fool’s ‘Avengers: Endgame’ release post hit r/all and while the community was happy to meme on being fooled, a few users were concerned that copyright holders might act on it and have it removed.” It’s nothing less than self-censorship in response to sloppy and/or fraudulent claims, but these are testing times. But the really big issue here relates to the huge archive of posts already present on /r/piracy – some ten years’ worth of discussions. Is there anything in there that could warrant a surprise complaint? Apparently so, since rightsholders have been digging up issues from the past and complaining to Reddit. This left the moderators of /r/piracy with a huge dilemma. Uncertain of what lay in the archives and only being in a strong position to be absolutely certain of the state of play more recently, they asked the community for input on the ‘Nuclear Option‘ – deleting every post older than six months old, just to be sure. After the votes were counted, those in favor of deleting the archives outnumbered those asking for preservation by ten to one. All that was left was to find a way to begin deleting history, around 9.5 years of posts. A script was created and put into motion and the purge began. “Given the speed, this might take weeks,” sa ys moderator ‘dbzer0’, a nine-year veteran of the sub-Reddit. It’s unclear when this sweeping process with be fully completed, but it’s hoped that it can keep the community alive. Not all of the moderators were in favor of the mass deletion since that, of course, deletes the community’s history too. “ The S crubbing [as the deletion process is now called] is just a poorly , rushed attempt to elongate the community’s lifespan on Reddit,” dysgraphical says. “We have already seen this performed in other subreddits in which mod teams have bent over backwards to please the administration by implementing their own set of stringent rules. These communities no longer exist.” But the vote was cast and the final decision appears to have been a democratic one rooted in self-preservation. It does raise interesting points, however . The recently highlighted situation shows that sub-Reddits devoted to controversial topics – especially those related to piracy – are at risk of being targeted. When they are, the copyright notice and counter-notice process is somewhat undermined. While users can be banned for repeat infringements, it’s trivial to open a new account. And when the notices start to pile up on Reddit – legitimately or not – whole communities can be banned, despite working above and beyond the requirements of the law . “The issue at hand is not that r/Piracy distributes copyrighted content, but rather that the discussion of digital piracy is no longer protected; it never was,” dysgraphical adds. “As copyright holders continue pushing the envelope, by claiming that the mention of streaming sites infringe their IP, Reddit will continue complying and effectively ban r/Piracy. Copyright holders on Reddit no longer need to dig deep to find infringing content, they can pick any thread or comment at random that loosely relates to their IP, and file a DMCA takedown notice.” To give a school analogy, it appears that if a few kids misbehave, get misinterpreted, or targeted incompetently, the whole class gets kept behind after school – before being permanently expelled. It’s effectively mass punishment based on the acts of a few – or the whims of bots. Finally, subscriptions to /r/piracy have always been on the increase and are now edging towards 370,000 subscribers but the ongoing purge is having a clear effect on traffic to the sub-Reddit, when the two unusual peaks (including the April 1 surge) are discounted. Reddit’s /r/piracy traffic stats. Whether the popular forum can fight back from this decline will remain to be seen but it’s clear that deleting most of its history is already causing pain. The big question is whether Reddit’s admins are taking note of this huge olive branch or whether they’ll still choose to chop down the whole tree regardless. Pirate Bay Just Made Streaming Illegal Downloads Infinitely Easier. The Pirate Bay doesn’t match Netflix for ease, but it just took one step closer. The portal, a popular source of copyrighted video files known as torrents, added support for a tool that lets viewers stream videos free in a . Called “Torrents Time,” the feature lets people click a “Stream it!” button to start watching the video they want to see, after downloading a plug-in. That removes steps that may discourage less tech-savvy consumers from trying out the free files of new movies and shows, despite being illegal. Typically, someone would need to install a BitTorrent client, download specific files and open and play them in a series of steps in order to watch a file. Torrents Time and similar programs still can’t match the quality of a paid service like Netflix, but their ease of use has lowered barriers to entry on piracy for consumers. Since a torrent is only as good as the file downloaded and the Internet connection delivering it, watching with Torrents Time or related service is subject to more trip-ups and buffers than a Netflix consumer would deal with. It also exposes a user to security worries like malicious software. But Netflix’s $10-a-month subscription can’t compete with the price of illegal material (free) nor the instant access to new and more content. A year ago, Netflix even called out Popcorn Time (a service similar to Torrents Time built by some of the same people) as one of its “biggest competitors,” noting that interest in the app outstripped that of Netflix in the Netherlands in the last half of 2013, based on Google trends. All-you-can-eat subscription services often tout themselves as copyright holders’ best weapon against piracy. Services like Netflix and Spotify have claimed strides against pirated content because they make it easy to watch at a low price.