ARIN may not be well known to the wider public, but it provides a crucial service which affects the Internet at large.

One of the main tasks of the non-profit organization is to distribute crucial Internet number resources, including IPv4 addresses, IPv6 addresses, and AS numbers.

These numbers are not directly allocated to individual end-users. They typically go to large companies including Google and Amazon, Internet registrars, as well as ISPs such as AT&T, Comcast, Bell, and Rogers.

For several decades these companies have maintained a voluntary Whois database, keeping track of customers assigned a large block of IP-numbers. Not the average Joe’s Internet connection, but a large university, or a hosting provider, for example.

In a letter sent to the Canadian Government as part of the Statutory Review of the Copyright Act, ARIN stresses that the Whois database is an important copyright enforcement tool.

Note: the submission was not approced by ARIN’s CEO, see update below.

“When copyright infringing material or other illicit content is found online, Whois is often the first point of investigation of the source,” ARIN writes.

“Law enforcement agencies and private parties with a legal interest can access the Whois database either in accordance with the registrar’s policies, or under judicial order.”

Until recently, this Whois database was kept in place by ARIN through a “carrot” and “stick” approach. Companies would regularly come back to request new IP-addresses (carrot), and ARIN would only allocate this if the Whois database was properly maintained (stick).

This has worked fine for over thirty years, but the American non-profit fears that their “stick” may no longer be as effective now things are moving to IPv6.

Since the IPv4 address pool is exhausted, companies are moving to IPv6 addresses, which are widely available. This means that these companies may not have to return to ARIN for years.

Without this pressure, these companies may neglect the Whois database, the organization fears.

“ISPs and others will be able to request large blocks IPv6 numbers and may not need to return to ARIN for replenishment for several years. As a result, ARIN will no longer have a mechanism to require compliance with maintaining up to date records of IP dispersals,” the organization writes.

“As no other regulatory or other mechanisms exist that would require this information be updated and preserved, it is likely that many organizations will rarely or never do so.”

ARIN fears that without a proper Whois database, rogue players could “wreak havoc.” That will make it harder to investigate and stop copyright infringement, as well as other illegal activity.

As such, the organization is asking the Canadian Government to “require” companies and ISPs that receive large blocks of numbers to “maintain an up-to-date registry of the assignment of internet numbers.”

In addition, the Government shoulds take legislative or regulatory action to ensure that companies which can assign internet numbers to third parties have a legal duty to keep the Whois database up to date.

ARIN recommendations

This is the first time we’ve seen ARIN getting involved in copyright enforcement discussions at this level. It will be interesting to see how their request will be received.

Whether all 5,896 ARIN members stand behind the request is doubtful. Milton Mueller, a professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology School of Public Policy and a former ARIN advisory committee member, believes that it’s a bad idea to fragment these kinds of policies on a country-to-country basis.

Mueller also questions whether most ARIN members stand behind the submission, which was apparently sent in without consulting the organization’s broader base.

“I think ARIN’s community would be shocked to see its staff inviting national governments to regulate them without any discussion or vetting of this idea within the community,” he informed The Wire Report.

Copyright holders in the United States and abroad will likely welcome the proposal though. For them, Whois data has been a hot topic over the past several months.

In addition to the IP-address allocation data, rightsholders are also concerned about the domain name Whois data, which many companies obscured following the implementation of the GDPR, the EU’s new privacy regulation.

Update: ARIN’s CEO John Curran rejected the recommendations, which he never approved, according to a follow-up from The Wire Report.

We reached out to ARIN asking for further clarification. We assume that it will be retracted, but that has yet to be confirmed.

Update 2: ARIN informs TorrentFreak that it will “seek to amend” the submission “to accurately reflect ARIN’s position.”

—-

A copy of the American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN) Submission to the House of Commons Standing Committee on Industry, Science and Technology can be found here (pdf).

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and more. We also have VPN reviews, discounts, offers and coupons.

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By offering access to high quality movies and TV-shows, streaming site Flixtor.to has become the go-to site for many pirates.

Everything went relatively smoothly until Last November, when the popular site suddenly disappeared from the web.

Initially, it was unknown what caused the downtime but after a week the Flixtor team announced that the site had been taken out by an unexplained catastrophe.

This was a major disappointment to the platform’s users, especially those who just paid for VIP access. However, it was not the end. According to a temporary message posted on the site, everything would be rebuilt from scratch.

After more than a month had passed, the promised comeback arrived last weekend. Flixtor.to resurfaced and, at first glance, it looks pretty much the same as before. However, all the backend code had to be rewritten.

“Sorry it took so long but it was a lot of work to recover. The outside looks the same but everything under the hood had to be rewritten,” the Flixtor team writes in a public announcement.

Flixtor’s back

There’s still a lot of work yet to be done but a Beta version of the site is functional.

“We’re in BETA for the next few days. This means that we’re in the middle of updating and fixing things so expect some downtime every now and then,” the Flixtor team notes.

During the coming days and weeks, the site will be optimized. This includes adding to the content library, which isn’t complete just yet. According to Flixtor, the prime focus will be on rebuilding the TV-show library first.

VIP users are also reassured by the Flixtor team. They will all receive new login credentials which give them access to the same perks as before, including all videos in 1080p quality.

It’s still unclear what happened to the site last November. Flixtor is certainly one of the prime targets of the Hollywood studios, but there are no signs that the outage was caused by a coordinated enforcement effort.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and more. We also have VPN reviews, discounts, offers and coupons.

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Warning: This may contain spoilers.

As a huge Black Mirror fan, I was excited – extremely excited – to learn that Netflix would be presenting the latest installment of the series at the end of December.

Right on cue, Bandersnatch hit the streaming service and within minutes I’d left the office for the comfort of the living room. Firing it up on my four-year-old LG smart TV I was immediately frustrated. According to the video that began to play, my TV is too old and outdated to play the promised interactive feast.

This, I initially thought, was part of the usual mind games Black Mirror likes to play with its viewers. I was wrong. My TV really was incapable of playing Bandersnatch. Undeterred, I grabbed an Amazon Firestick and within 15 minutes had set up Netflix and was watching the show. Minor setup irritations aside, I was in the game – literally, and in more ways than one.

The story behind Bandersnatch is important to me and as a former ZX Spectrum programmer, the nostalgia was fantastic. The title was immediately exciting too.

Bandersnatch – along with Psyclapse – were two ‘megagames’ planned by long-defunct UK developer Imagine in the 1980s, neither of which came to fruition. Only adding to the fun was that the main character in Bandersnatch, young programmer Stefan Butler, shared the same surname as Imagine founder Mark Butler. No coincidence, of course.

From here, however, things went downhill – for me at least.

‘Playing’ Bandersnatch (or effectively choosing ‘yes’ or ‘no’ at various points) felt archaic. Aside from much better ‘graphics’, these choices felt little more advanced than those presented in early interactive video games such as Night Trap and Sewer Shark on the Sega CD / Mega-CD in the early 90s. Or (fans of Bandersnatch, please forgive me) the 1980s laserdisc game Dragon’s Lair, which admittedly only had one ending (Bandersnatch has five).

Nevertheless, desperate not to miss out on better things to come, my partner and I continued ‘playing’ Bandersnatch but sadly (and this is just my opinion) things didn’t improve.

While still fascinated by the details (even down to the ancient dk’Tronics addon Spectrum keyboard hidden away in one of the scenes), this didn’t feel like the groundbreaking adventure we’d been promised.

Ultimately, i’m desperately sad to say, the key emotion that developed in me while watching Bandersnatch was one of frustration, especially the seemingly endless looping back after ‘bad’ decisions. This felt like interactivity for the sake of it but the online hype meant that this movie was always going to be popular and, of course, a target for pirates.

But the big question remains: how it could be replicated outside Netflix?

Initially, several torrents appeared online featuring the default run through of the show, i.e the version of Bandersnatch that viewers would get if they didn’t make any decisions at all in the movie.

According to statistics gathered by TorrentFreak, this version is doing pretty ‘well’ on most torrent sites, even without any form of interactivity. There’s also a ‘full’ version containing in excess of five hours of footage – good luck enduring or making sense of that.

However, pirates always want something more – they want the full Netflix experience, probably without paying for the streaming service, if possible.

Notably though, there is still no ‘pirate’ fully-interactive version of Bandersnatch available publicly. This is interesting on a number of fronts. Firstly, pretty much everything gets pirated these days but apparently, perhaps for technical reasons, this is proving more difficult. In 2019, that is somewhat strange.

We’ve had the technology to do this – albeit much less seamlessly – since DVD chapters were invented. Interactive porn movies have been available for years and, albeit in a more primitive form, CD ROM-based titles dating back decades could’ve achieved something passably similar.

Pirates can decrypt DVDs, Blu-rays, defeat most DRM – including cracking the fiendish Denuvo – yet preparing a system to play through a few video clips in a user-selected order is either too difficult or, more likely, too time-consuming for the pirates at the top of the pyramid.

This has led to many interesting comments on torrent and discussion sites, many centered on how this problem can be solved. But perhaps more interestingly, there are others advising another course of action.

“For this one in particular, YOU NEED to experience it on Netflix,” the top commenter on a RARBG torrent writes.

“It’s not just a movie… You can even get the character to go crazy and start a kung-fu fight with his therapist and father, or even get the actual actor to have a mental breakdown during shooting… Amazing idea. It feels like you’re inside an old-school adventure game.”

Just to reiterate, this is a user of one of the most popular torrent sites, that indexes the majority of mainstream stuff that anyone could ever need (and has all of the Bandersnatch torrents available), advising people that they need to enjoy this on Netflix. A subscription service, no less.

Although one swallow does not a summer make, as Aristotle once said, the commenter is absolutely correct. If the viewer wants to have the full Bandersnatch experience right now, he or she is going to have to dig deep and give Netflix a few dollars for the privilege. For a big movie title, this is pretty much unprecedented.

While I’ve not been particularly complimentary about Bandersnatch as a package, one has to admire Netflix and Charlie Brooker and his team for having the guts to put something like this together. Not only have they produced something that seemingly the whole world is talking about (even if some didn’t enjoy it), they’ve created a movie experience that is currently unavailable for free.

And, let’s not forget, this is just the beginning. The Verge has a great article on other potential uses for a title like Bandersnatch, particularly that the ‘adventure’ choices made by viewers could be further leveraged to generate additional revenue streams.

I enjoyed chopping ‘my’ dad up, but it would be a shame for Netflix to do the same to this format. It’s only just beginning and the next few iterations, when they inevitably arrive, will surely be a lot better. And, indeed, even more difficult to pirate. For now at least.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and more. We also have VPN reviews, discounts, offers and coupons.

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LibreELEC 9.0 (Leia) Beta 2 has finally arrived after a long gestation period. Based upon Kodi v18 RC4, the 9.0 Beta 2 release contains many changes and refinements to user experience and a complete overhaul of the underlying OS core to improve stability and extend hardware support. Kodi v18 also brings new features like Kodi Retroplayer and DRM support that (equipped with an appropriate add-on) allows Kodi to unofficially stream content from services like Netflix and Amazon.

Compared to 9.0 Beta 1, major changes are:

• Updated to Kodi 18 RC4
• Updated to Linux Kernel 4.19.12
• a lot more updates and fixes, have a look at the detailed changelog

Compared to 8.2, major changes are:

Settings Add-on:

• Changeable SSH passwords!
• Default firewall (iptables) with simple configurations for Home/Public networks
• Updates are moved to their own menu, other options are cleaned up a little
• Safe Mode boot when Kodi experiences startup problems

Changeable SSH passwords and a default firewall configuration have been added to combat the increasing number of HTPC installs that can be found on the public internet. The increase is partly due to simple maths; our userbase has grown so the number of users inappropriately exposing their HTPC to the internet has also grown. The static password for libreelec is present on most/all password dictionary lists so it’s important we start encouraging users to change it (the first-run wizard will prompt when SSH is enabled).

More people are using VPN services for privacy without realising this exposes SSH/SMB/Web services. To combat this problem we have added simple firewall configurations for Home/Public networks; the Home configuration blocks inbound connections from non-private networks, e.g. traffic from the Internet to the public IP address used with the VPN connection.

As the Kodi piracy scene continues to decline we have seen an increase in users with outdated add-ons that cause problems during upgrades so “Safe Mode” counts Kodi startup crashes. After five startup failures it intervenes with a default (clean) configuration and prominent warning so users know there is a problem – but still have a working GUI to troubleshoot from.

 

Retroplayer:

Kodi v18 brings initial support for retro gaming and the ability to play hundreds of retro games directly from within Kodi. We provide a large number of emulator cores from our add-on repo, but no games (bring your own) although there are a couple of open source test game add-ons (2048 etc.) in our repo. In this first iteration of Kodi retro gaming support the user interface can be a little confusing and we still need to write-up some HOWTO guides for the wiki. Kodi developers are working on a game database (for Kodi v19) which will make the process of managing and using game ROMs easier in the future.

DVB Drivers:

We now offer a larger range of DVB drivers (depending on your platform) to choose from. The “DVB drivers from the latest kernel” option also includes the majority of Hauppage drivers which have been recently upstreamed into the kernel, which is great to see!

Rockchip:

Despite the 8.95.1 release number our Rockchip releases remain in an Alpha state with limited support. The Kodi version is updated but there are no significant video/audio improvements to the Rockchip 4.4 kernel codebase – and none planned. Our work on Rockchip support has refocussed onto the Linux 4.20 kernel to use the modern kernel frameworks needed for the next-generation Kodi video pipeline. This work is progressing nicely, but it means the 4.4 codebase “is what it is” until a future kernel bump.

New Devices:

Amlogic

• Khadas VIM(1) – requires a clean install if using current community images
• Libre Computer Le Potato

Rockchip

• 96rocks ROCK960
• ASUS Tinker Board
• Firefly ROC-RK3328-CC
• Khadas Edge
• PINE64 ROCK64
• PINE64 RockPro64
• Popcorn Hour RockBox
• Popcorn Hour Transformer
• Rockchip Sapphire Board
• Mqmaker MiQi

If you experience problems, please open an thread at our forum. You can also open an ticket at our issue tracker.

Downloads:

RPi 2/3 LibreELEC-RPi2.arm-8.95.002.img.gz (info)

RPi 0/1 LibreELEC-RPi.arm-8.95.002.img.gz (info)

Generic LibreELEC-Generic.x86_64-8.95.002.img.gz (info)

Odroid_C2 LibreELEC-Odroid_C2.arm-8.95.002.img.gz (info)

KVIM LibreELEC-KVIM.arm-8.95.002.img.gz (info)

LePotato LibreELEC-LePotato.arm-8.95.002.img.gz (info)

Slice LibreELEC-Slice.arm-8.95.002.img.gz (info)

Slice3 LibreELEC-Slice3.arm-8.95.002.img.gz (info)

WeTek_Core LibreELEC-WeTek_Core.arm-8.95.002.img.gz (info)

WeTek_Hub LibreELEC-WeTek_Hub.arm-8.95.002.img.gz (info)

Warning: Update at WP1 is broken if you use img.gz – please use .tar to update:

WeTek_Play LibreELEC-WeTek_Play.arm-8.95.002.tar (info)

WeTek_Play LibreELEC-WeTek_Play.arm-8.95.002.img.gz (info)

WeTek_Play_2 LibreELEC-WeTek_Play_2.arm-8.95.002.img.gz (info)

*** IMPORTANT ***

Rockchip images are not available via the USB/SD Creator App (we’re working on a fix)

Please download them manually!

Rockchip RK3328

Firefly ROC-RK3328-CC LibreELEC-RK3328.arm-8.90.011-roc-cc.img.gz (info)

Generic Rockchip Box LibreELEC-RK3328.arm-8.90.011-box.img.gz (info)

PINE64 ROCK64 / Popcorn Hour Transformer LibreELEC-RK3328.arm-8.90.011-rock64.img.gz (info)

Popcorn Hour RockBox LibreELEC-RK3328.arm-8.90.011-rockbox.img.gz (info)

MVR9 LibreELEC-RK3328.arm-8.90.011-box-trn9.img.gz (info)

Z28 LibreELEC-RK3328.arm-8.90.011-box-z28.img.gz (info)

Rockchip RK3399

96rocks ROCK960 LibreELEC-RK3399.arm-8.90.011-rock960.img.gz (info)

PINE64 RockPro64 LibreELEC-RK3399.arm-8.90.011-rockpro64.img.gz (info)

Rockchip Sapphire Board LibreELEC-RK3399.arm-8.90.011-sapphire.img.gz (info)

Rockchip RK3288

ASUS Tinker Board LibreELEC-TinkerBoard.arm-8.90.011-rk3288.img.gz (info)

mqmaker MiQi LibreELEC-MiQi.arm-8.90.011-rk3288.img.gz (info)

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