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The Securities and Exchange Commission has charged eight celebrities with securities law violations in connection with their promotion of cryptocurrencies. The SEC announced the charges on Wednesday, which stemmed from an investigation of Justin Sun's companies Tron Foundation Limited, BitTorrent Foundation Ltd., and Rainberry Inc., according to Variety. Those companies promoted crypto securities BitTorrent (BTT) and Tronix (TRX). The eight facing charges are Lindsay Lohan, Ne-Yo, Lil Yachty, Soulja Boy, Jake Paul, Austin Mahone, Akon, and Kendra Lust.

Tron’s controversial CEO and chief marketeer Justin Sun has pledged $1 million to climate activist Greta Thunberg. In a tweet to Thunberg posted yesterday, Sun said: “As a young entrepreneur, I share Greta Thunberg’s passion to change the world. Crypto will contribute immensely on reducing carbon footprint by implementing decentralised settlement. I would like to personally commit USD$1 mil to Greta Thunberg’s initiative.” Thunberg, 16, began making headlines in August 2018 after organising a school strike outside the Swedish parliament to protest about the lack of progress being made on preventing climate change. Despite her age, she is quickly becoming...

Keeping private messages private may have just gotten a bit easier thanks to BitTorrent’s new messaging service. Known as Bleep, BitTorrent first announced the service last year, when it released alpha versions of its software . Yesterday, the company officially released versions for Android, iOS, Windows, and OS X. Bleep is hoping to distinguish itself from other messaging services such as Whatsapp, iMessage, and the Facebook app, by offering users better privacy and more control over their data . The service will allow users to sign up using only nicknames if they don't want the company to have access to...

Posted: December 20, 2014 BitTorrent Offers To Distribute ‘The Interview’ Online For Sony The Interview may get shown after all. After Sony Pictures Entertainment announced that a threat from a shadowy hacking group would cause the movie to be shelved, the online site BitTorrent has stepped up and offered to release it online. Sony’s move to scrap the release of The Interview after the threat from hackers — believed to be from North Korea — was met with widespread criticism. Even President Obama said he disagreed with the decision. “Sony’s a corporation. It suffered significant damage, there were threats against...

Police in Sweden carried out a raid in Stockholm today, seizing servers, computers, and other equipment. At the same time The Pirate Bay and several other torrent-related sites disappeared offline. Although no official statement has been made, TF sources confirm action against TPB. For many years The Pirate Bay has been sailing by the seat of its pants so any downtime is met with concern from its millions of users. This morning, for the first time in months, The Pirate Bay disappeared offline. A number of concerned users emailed TF for information but at that point technical issues seemed the...

ROME (RNS) Computer users in the Vatican apparently have an illegal taste for the German heavy metal band Scorpions, the coming-of-age dance film “Billy Elliot,” the television comedy series “Camp” — as well as more, ahem, adult content — according to information from Netherlands-based company TorrentFreak.TorrentFreak is a news site that focuses on file sharing and intellectual property issues, but may be best known for its occasional reports on the illegal peer-to-peer downloading of files.Video courtesy of thecultbox . via YouTube The Vatican is not the only place guilty of illegal downloads, based on data gathered by the company: the...

If you've downloaded even one movie, song or TV show using the BitTorrent file-sharing system, chances are, it didn't go unnoticed. A U.K. study has found that pretty much all files shared with the help of popular torrent sites like The Pirate Bay are monitored — mostly by large internet service companies likely acting on behalf of copyright enforcers or private corporations.

Anyone using file-sharing service BitTorrent to download the latest film or music release is likely to be monitored, UK-based researchers suggest. A Birmingham University study indicates that an illegal file-sharer downloading popular content would be logged by a monitoring firm within three hours. The team said it was "surprised" by the scale of the monitoring. Copyright holders could use the data to crack down on illegal downloads. The three-year research was carried out by a team of computer scientists who developed software that acted like a BitTorrent file-sharing client and logged all the connections made to it. BitTorrent is a...

The domain seizures by the United States authorities in recent days and upcoming legislation that could make similar takeovers even easier in the future, have inspired a group of enthusiasts to come up with a new, decentralized and BitTorrent-powered DNS system. This system will exchange DNS information through peer-to-peer transfers and will work with a new .p2p domain extension.

These days, Fung is still in Richmond and still fascinated by peer-to-peer technology. The record industry is still in a panic. But other things are different. The movie and television industries, for instance, have joined the music business in fear of wanton file sharing. And Fung is no longer watching from the sidelines. He's jumped into the fray and in the eyes of the entertainment industry has become one of its biggest problems -- a threat to be crushed..... Created by a Seattle programmer named Bram Cohen in 2002, BitTorrent was an ingenious piece of peer-to-peer software. Where its predecessors...

Excerpt - As many of you know, Revision3’s servers were brought down over the Memorial Day weekend by a denial of service attack. It’s an all too common occurrence these days. But this one wasn’t your normal cybercrime – there’s a chilling twist at the end. Here’s what happened, and why we’re even more concerned today, after it’s over, than we were on Saturday when it started. ~ snip ~ That’s what happened to us. Another device on the internet flooded one of our servers with an overdose of SYN packets, and it shut down – bringing the rest of...

Japan to strip Internet for illegal downloaders: report  TOKYO (AFP) — Japanese companies plan to cut off the Internet connection of anyone who illegally downloads files in one of the world's toughest measures against online piracy, a report said Saturday.Faced with mounting complaints from the music, movie and video-game industries, four associations representing Japan's Internet service providers have agreed to take drastic action, the Yomiuri Shimbun said.The newspaper, quoting unnamed sources, said service providers would send e-mails to people who repeatedly made illegal copies and terminate their connections if they did not stop.The Internet companies will set up a...

I have lumped these together as they are symptomatic of underlying interesting issues on corporations vs internet issues: The first is Verizon's definition of unlimited: New York State has given Verizon Wireless a million new reasons understand that the word “unlimited” when used in advertising should mean what it means elsewhere in polite society.The second is a Congressman's comments on Comcast's forging of reset commands to stop BitTorrent legal downloads: "Comcast has made a major mistake in attempting to hinder peer-to-peer file sharing as an aspect of its network management," Boucher said. "The inability of customers to (share files) significantly...

NEW YORK (AP) -- Comcast Corp. on Tuesday acknowledged "delaying" some subscriber Internet traffic, but said any roadblocks it puts up are temporary and intended to improve surfing for other users. The statement was a response to an Associated Press report last week that detailed how the nation's largest cable company was interfering with file sharing by some of its Internet subscribers. The AP also found that Comcast's computers masqueraded as those of its users to interrupt file-sharing connections. Internet watchdog groups denounced Comcast's actions, calling it an example of the kind of abuse that could be curbed with so-called...

BitTorrent: 2 Legit 2 Quit with 5,000 titles for just $3-4 each BitTorrent today announced the launch of the BitTorrent Entertainment Network, featuring a comprehensive library of downloadable digital entertainment content from 20th Century Fox, Lions Gate, MTV Networks, Paramount Pictures, Warner Bros. and, the latest studio on the bandwagon, MGM. The BitTorrent community can rent movies, purchase television shows and music videos, and even publish and share their own content to be displayed alongside titles from the world’s largest studios. “BitTorrent has the infrastructure, technology and established user base to significantly move the needle on digital distribution with quick,...

Swedish file-sharing website The Pirate Bay is planning to buy its own nation in an attempt to circumvent international copyright laws. The group has set up a campaign to raise money to buy Sealand, a former British naval platform in the North Sea that has been designated a 'micronation', and claims to be outside the jurisdiction of the UK or any other country. The Pirate Bay says it is the world's largest 'bit torrent tracker', and is a popular way of sharing music, films, software and other copyrighted material online. It has been under the scrutiny of authorities in Sweden...

Downloaded this last night and from the credits voiceover,it does appear to be the Aussie feed (as it was labeled). I have not yet watched the program - either this file or as broadvast by ABC. Anyone know what to look for to know if it's the uncut version?

(AP) LOS ANGELES -- A coalition of major recording companies sued the operators of the file-sharing program LimeWire for copyright infringement Friday, claiming the firm encourages users to trade music without permission. New York-based Lime Group LLC, its subsidiaries who designed and distribute LimeWire, and the corporation's top executives, are named in the federal court lawsuit, which was filed in the Southern District of New York, the Recording Industry Association of America said in a statement. Record labels owned by Sony BMG Music Entertainment, Vivendi's Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group and Britain's EMI Music are behind the complaint, which...

Louise: "No these are not my songs." They are however downloaded right onto her computer. Louise:"I was embarrassed when they gave me a print out of these songs." She got this printout because of lawyers. She also got this letter telling her she was being sued for copyright infringement.Parents, there are other popular file sharing programs you need to know about: Morpheus: morpheus.com Kazaa: www.kazaa.com Bearshare: www.bearshare.com Limewire: www.limewire.com Louise: "I was in shock..I was stunned." The letter is part of a music industry crackdown.Singers, songwriters and music companies tired of people downloading and burning copies of music without paying....

Opera has released to the public Opera 9 Technology Preview 2, a first look at the features and tools slated for the next release of this popular Internet browser. That said, this is still a technical beta, designed more for Web sites to make adjustments and for technical users to make comments. As for Opera 8, Opera is no longer a for-pay browser, joining Firefox and Netscape as free alternatives to Internet Explorer. Opera 9 Technology Preview 2 offers two big additions, plus several that put it in league with Firefox 1.5 and Internet Explorer 7 for XP SP2 Beta...