The legislation was brought up again quite unexpectedly this week, despite massive opposition and public outrage that delayed it last year. But this time around there was little room for protest, as it was just a matter of hours before the Bill passed.

As is often the case when politicians decide on copyright-related matters, their very own actions with regard to copyright are being carefully scrutinized. This can lead to awkward situations, something Member of Parliament Melissa Lee found out herself this week.

Just hours before giving a speech in support of the three-strikes law which is supposed to protect the copyright holders, she sent out the following tweet:

So, while Lee was condemning today’s youth and their lack of respect for copyright, she more than likely infringed on the rights of several K-Pop musicians. After all, making a music compilation and handing it over to a friend is not allowed under New Zealand’s copyright law.

Surprised by the call-out, Lee defended herself by saying that the songs were downloaded legally and paid for. But unfortunately for her that doesn’t mean much. As the National Business Review points out, when a friend makes a copy of songs that were legally bought, the recipient of the ‘gift’ is still guilty of copyright infringement.

So it appears that Lee got her first strike already, and since the burden of proof is on the alleged infringer under the new legislation, it’s up to her to prove that she’s innocent. That’s only fair, right?

Although it’s easy to call Lee’s mistake out as hypocrisy, it might be even worse than that. What if she truly believes that copying a legally bought song for a friend is okay? That would mean that even legislators who vote on copyright legislation don’t fully grasp what they’re doing.

In her speech Lee said that it’s perfectly legal to share a DVD or music album with a friend. But does she know that it’s not that straightforward? The laws she helped to pass state that people can’t share a legally bought MP3 with someone, unless they share the entire device it is bought on.

Back to copyright school we say!

Source: Kiwi MP Called Out As Pirate After Passing Anti-Piracy Law

After having considered several scalable deployment options, BitTorrent turned out to be the only candidate that met their standards. “It was time for something completely different, something decentralized, something more like.. BitTorrent.. running inside of our datacenter to quickly copy files around,” Twitter engineer Larry Gadea explains.

With BitTorrent, Twitter hoped to distribute files faster and more efficiently, saving time and precious resources while improving the scalability of Twitter’s operation. Earlier this year the new BitTorrent-powered system was rolled out and didn’t fail to impress.

“Using the file-sharing protocol, we launched a side-project called Murder and after a few days (and especially nights) of nervous full-site tinkering, it turned a 40 minute deploy process into one that lasted just 12 seconds,” Gadea commented.

BitTorrent is 75 times faster when compared to the old server deployment system, reducing deployments across thousands of servers to just a few seconds. With BitTorrent, every server not only downloads the new files, but also becomes a distribution point that helps to spread it to others.

Larry Gadea, who says he’s an avid BitTorrent user himself with experience of downloading tons of Linux ISOs, named Twitter’s new deployment system ‘Murder’ after a flock of crows. The code is based on the BitTornado BitTorrent client and available to the public and licensed under the free software Apache License.

The BitTornado client was chosen as the base code for its openness, Gadea explained, so Twitter can redistribute their code to other developers without running into licensing issues.

It’s beginning to look like BitTorrent may become the standard for large-scale networks wanting to update their machines quickly and efficiently. With huge brands such as Facebook and Twitter adopting it, we can only expect that others will follow their lead.

Twitter’s Larry Gadea explains a bit more about the Murder setup in the presentation he gave at the Canadian University Software Engineering Conference earlier this year.

Article from: TorrentFreak.

Early February Twitter attributed a phishing attack to an unnamed torrent site script, blaming a torrent site developer for intentionally installing backdoors into his code. The backdoor was then allegedly used to steal passwords and hijack Twitter accounts.

A few weeks later Twitter itself called in the help of BitTorrent to optimize the site’s backend. With BitTorrent, Twitter is planning to distribute files faster and more efficiently, saving time and precious resources and improving the scalability of its operation.

It is great to see that Twitter recognizes the value of BitTorrent since many BitTorrent sites also appreciate and use Twitter’s service to communicate with followers. Last week, however, two torrent sites were suspended by Twitter without prior notice.

YourBitTorrent and TorrentSurf both ‘lost’ their accounts and followers. The reason cited by Twitter was ‘abuse’ but no further details were given. The owner of yourBitTorrent told TorrentFreak that he contacted Twitter over a week ago to find out more, but he hasn’t heard back from them yet.

Although it’s easy to jump to the conclusion that the sites have been suspended for copyright related issues, another plausible explanation is that the mass tweets of links to torrent files were seen as a violation of Twitter’s terms of service.

“If your updates consist mainly of links, and not personal updates,” say Twitter, your account could be suspended for spamming. Since both sites were doing just this, this mass posting might have triggered the suspension. If this is indeed the case, other accounts including nearly all popular news feeds are at risk as well.

It seems unlikely that simply being torrent-related makes an account a target for suspension. The account of @EZTV which also lists thousands of torrents, and the highly resourceful @isoHunt and @TorrentFreak are still up and running.

Article from: TorrentFreak.

To improve the deployment of files across their servers, Twitter is calling in the help of BitTorrent. With BitTorrent, Twitter is planning to distribute files faster and more efficiently, saving time and precious resources and improving the scalability of Twitter’s operation.

Twitter’s new project, codenamed ‘Murder’, will not use the bandwidth of Twitter users. Instead, it will transform the site’s servers into a large BitTorrent swarm that will distribute file updates using BitTorrent technology.

The setup is pretty straightforward. Murder uses a ’seeder’ server where the new files will be distributed to thousands of ‘peer’ servers.

Because all servers assist in the deployment of the files, it will only take a fraction of the time it would otherwise take when files are distributed from a central server. This server-to-server BitTorrent technology also explains the name ‘Murder’ which is used to describe a flock of crows.

The Murder project is developed by Twitter’s Larry Gadea and built based on the BitTornado BitTorrent client, which was the first client to implement web-seeding. The code is open to the public and licensed under the free software Apache License.

Eric Klinker, CEO of BitTorrent Inc. is excited about Twitter’s adoption of BitTorrent. “We are thrilled to collaborate with them on this and hope that more Web Monsters out there look to this and other applications of BitTorrent in solving some of the hard problems of the Internet,” he said.

“The distributed nature of BitTorrent means an operation that once took many dozens of minutes, now happens in less than a dozen seconds. These efficiencies will reduce maintenance windows, site downtime and exposure to security vulnerabilities,” Klinker added. Although Klinker speaks about “collaboration” with Twitter it is not clear what role BitTorrent Inc. will play in the Murder project.

At this point it is still unclear when Murder will be implemented or released to the public but Twitter is expected to release more details on the upcoming project in the weeks to come.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

Below is an excerpt of Twitters blog post revealing the threat.

It appears that for a number of years, a person has been creating torrent sites that require a login and password as well as creating forums set up for torrent site usage and then selling these purportedly well-crafted sites and forums to other people innocently looking to start a download site of their very own. However, these sites came with a little extra — security exploits and backdoors throughout the system. This person then waited for the forums and sites to get popular and then used those exploits to get access to the username, email address, and password of every person who had signed up. Additional exploits to gain admin root on forums that weren’t created by this person also appear to have been utilized; in some instances, the exploit involved redirecting attempts to access the forums to another site that would request log-in information. This information was then used to attempt to gain access to third party sites like Twitter.

So, the company blames ’someone’ of installing backdoors in a torrent site script that was sold to prospective torrent sites operators, something that has apparently gone unnoticed for years. The question that comes to mind immediately is, if this is such a serious and widespread threat, why doesn’t Twitter name the source or at least give some examples of affected sites?

All of the popular public torrent sites are custom built and cannot be the source of the exploit. From the information Twitter has made available it seems they could be blaming a private tracker script for the attack – most private trackers also operate forums which matches Twitter’s description of the sites involved.

There are quite a few private tracker scripts out there and the most established ones, such as TBDev and Gazelle for example, have been examined by untold numbers of experts and come free of charge – any suggestion that they could be involved in underhand activity is unthinkable. But there are also a few scripts that are created by middle-men whose reputations are less-easily tested.

Accusations of including back doors and exploits in tracker code are not new. The owner of Template Shares, a site that sells a heavily modified version of the TBDev BitTorrent tracker script, has been accused by several people of installing backdoors which provide access to the user databases of customers’ sites.

Template Shares is used by hundreds of smaller private BitTorrent trackers.

To warn the public, other online services and the operators of the affected torrent sites, it would be appropriate if Twitter gave out some more information. TorrentFreak will continue to look into this case and will post an update if we find out more.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.