In response to a request from the Office of the US Trade Representative (USTR), the Entertainment Software Association has submitted a list of so-called ‘Notorious Markets’ that undermine the interactive gaming market in the United States.

The ESA represents some of the biggest names in video gaming. From Activision, EA, Nintendo, and Ubisoft, to Capcom, Microsoft, Konami, and Square Enix, the group acts as a voice for companies turning out billions of dollars worth of content. All are reportedly under multi-directional threat, from sites that facilitate direct copying to those who undermine business models and the actual gaming experience.

Linking and Hosting

According to the ESA, linking websites (those that link to content hosted on third-party cyberlocker-type sites) are a key threat.

“These sites typically generate revenue from user donations and/or online advertisements,” the ESA writes. “The following links sites are notable due to their heavy traffic, high volume of infringing video game file links that are indexed, and non-responsiveness to rights holder [takedown] notices.”

First up is a site that most gaming pirates won’t have heard of, which could prove a little counter-productive. P30Download.com is based in Iran, a country that’s rarely linked with a sympathetic attitude towards United States copyright enforcement.

According to the ESA, in August 2018 the platform made available more than 3,000 links to infringing content belonging to ESA members, of which just 2.64% were taken down. Hosted in Iran and published in Persian (not an obstacle for Google Translate), the site is most popular in its home territory and is Iran’s 25th most popular site.

Another site that’s off the radars of most casual pirates is DarkSoftware.net. According to the ESA, the platform indexed almost 4,800 new links in August and is enjoying an upsurge in traffic due to its focus on “circumventing the technical protection measures” in games consoles.

The ESA notes that DarkSoftware uses the “services of a U.S.-based content delivery network” but doesn’t mention CloudFlare by name. It doesn’t mention where the actual site or its owners are based either but publicly available information points to an address in Florida, which may or may not be legitimate.

Of course, linking sites cannot function if they have nothing to link to so it’s no surprise that file-hosting sites are high on the ESA’s list. Its main candidate is the fairly low profile Rapidu.net, which is popular in Poland and also uses Cloudflare, although the ESA again hesitates to name the platform.

1Fichier, on the other hand, is a site with a much greater following. Hosted in France, the site has a global rank of 1,093 and reportedly hosts at least 2,700 links to ESA member content. This cyberlocker-type site is reluctant to respond to takedown notices, with just 0.59% of content removed following complaint, the ESA notes.

ESA Members

ROMs

Given the recent furore surrounding classic gaming ROMs (1,2,3,4), it’s perhaps no surprise that ROMUniverse.com appears in the ESA’s submission to the USTR. Claiming a catalog of 60,000 ROMS serving 375,000 members, the ESA says the site has enjoyed “significant traffic increases” recently due to offering downloads for the latest video games consoles.

Interestingly, given the fact that the USTR’s report focuses on overseas sites, the ESA notes that ROMUniverse is hosted in the United States at Frontier Communications. Similar US-based hosting is provided by GoDaddy for ISOsLand.net, another platform on the ESA’s list.

Torrent Sites

Few submissions to the USTR would be complete without a complaint about The Pirate Bay, and this entry from the ESA is no different.

“Despite some recent downtime, this site continues to be a major source of infringing copies of ESA member company video games,” the ESA notes. “Over 2,200 infringing URLs were found on the site in August 2018. It currently operates with the assistance of the U.S.-based CDN referenced above,” the trade groups adds, without directly naming CloudFlare.

While The Pirate Bay is certainly the highest-profile torrent site, the ESA appears to have bigger problems with a site called PeerTorrents. In August, the group found 8,100 infringing downloads available via the site, which the ESA notes is similar in appearance to LimeTorrents.cc. The site also uses CloudFlare.

Private gaming servers

In this section of its report, the ESA highlights threats to “free-to-play” games that generate revenue from micro-transactions, advertising, and subscriptions. Unauthorized third-party ‘private’ servers allow users to play such games, bypassing the original revenue model and stopping publishers from monetizing their content.

“Establishing and maintaining unauthorized game servers often involves multiple acts of copyright infringement as well as the circumvention of technological protection measures,” the ESA notes, citing Warmane.com and Firestorm-servers.com (World of Warcraft) as culprits.

Cheats and other digital goods

Over the past year, lawsuits against those who maintain and distribute game cheating tools have been frequently reported (1,2,3) so similar complaints in the ESA’s filing are not unexpected.

Established in 2000, Unknowncheats.me heads the ESA’s list, offering up to 10,000 cheats for around 100 gaming titles while generating advertising revenue from its 2.4 million users. Fellow cheat site MPGH.net is said to offer “several hundred thousand” cheats to more than four million users while Iwantcheats.net and Artificialaiming.net service around 720,000 users between them.

Several other platforms are listed in the report as locations to purchase in-game items, CD keys, skins, accounts, and even CD keys, with others offering online subscriptions sourced in cheaper regions of the world and sold in the US.

“We would like to underscore our appreciation to the U.S. officials who drive and administer the out-of-cycle review of notorious markets,” the ESA says in its summing up.

“The resulting Notorious Markets List provides important insights that allow national and local policymakers, as well as law enforcement officials, to evaluate and fairly demand accountability from those marketplaces and the services that support them,” the trade group concludes.

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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One more day, with enough content to warrant a separate blog post – partly because people are still here for the most part, partly because of new stuff that’s been added to the agenda as we’ve gone along, and partly because of the topics that, despite our best efforts, managed to escape from previous days.

We began the day with a broad retrospective of the past year: for each person, what went well in the past twelve months, what could have been improved. As you might expect, we covered far too many topics to cover here, spanning as they did nearly every aspect of people, process and technology. However, it was a useful conversation that gave time to both be proud of the positive while reflecting on where we still need to focus more effort. We’ll work through and digest everything that was said and perhaps come back to it as a separate, future post, as the conversation will help shape where we go next.

Next up, lrusak took us through his experiences and presentation at both FOSDEM (Brussels) and Linaro Connect (Vancouver) this year. His talk was mainly aimed at shifting from vendor-specific or closed code (kernel and blob dependencies) to more universal, open source methods, specifically around windowing and rendering on embedded Linux (SoC) platforms such as Allwinner, Broadcom and Qualcomm. As well as simplifying our core code and removing the need for maintenance and use of platform-specific patches, this also has the potential to deliver performance advantages and broader platform coverage. Overall, there are some real benefits once we can tap into specific libraries via standardised kernel calls rather than depend on userspace code that’s in turn reliant on monolithic, all-purpose blobs that may include a whole load of code that simply isn’t needed for Kodi.

We discussed Kodi “remixes” – forks, feature branches, JeOS distributions, and similar variations – and how they link back to our trademark policy and support overheads: what’s allowed, what can we tolerate, what can we manage, how does it appear to our users. This is an area full of opinion and interpretation, rapidly wandering into genuine legal implications. While this is something we really don’t want to have to worry about, it’s something we must keep aware of, as historical experience has demonstrated. As such, we’ll be revisiting aspects of our practices to ensure that we protect Kodi while, at the same time, embracing the broader community where we can see that there’s positive intent and genuine common benefit.

lrusak then returned to the stage to give an update on LibreELEC. That team continues to streamline everything, reducing the maintenance overhead, slimming down the underlying OS overhead, and aligning the user experience more and more closely with core Kodi. He discussed some potential architectural changes that flow out of this goal: future platform support, what libraries could be removed and why (no longer supported or just not needed), what could perhaps be moved upstream so that it becomes part of Kodi and thus not some separate facet of LibreELEC.

And that’s it for day three. Thanks to everyone for their participation, and thanks to the entire community for making Kodi what it is.

One final comment as we close: we really need to offer very many thanks to Roza Zdravkova, who’s been invaluable as our local eyes throughout this DevCon. From helping with transport to pointing out where to go and what to do, she was fundamental to the event’s success. So, “thank you” from the team!

So… that’s it for DevCon 2018. Time to turn to a bit of hacking and development before all going our separate ways once more.

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Good morning/afternoon/evening/night (delete as appropriate – we’re a global community). The world has turned once more, the sun has crawled into the sky, and we’re back in the room.

Nate began the day with an update on the Foundation’s financial status: income, expenditure, bank balance, sponsorships and revenue sources. The good news is that we’re financially stable, but the bad is that we’re never going to be rich. Damn this volunteering thing, it’s almost like everyone does this for free. Oh, wait…

Next up, garbear took to the stage to talk about the upcoming (and long-anticipated!) RetroPlayer. This is already available in the 18.x “Leia” builds, so you can try it now if you like. As well as a demo to the team, the presentation covered how we’re addressing controller topology (including hubbing and mapping), user interface options, configuration, potential for user profiles, binary add-on repository structure, and some potential future features.

Martijn next took us through our current user statistics. Because we do no user tracking, it’s always been difficult to get any real numbers, so we’re reliant on partial data: Play Store active user counts, Microsoft app store figures, what we see hitting our repos for e.g. scraper or other add-on downloads. We probably have c. 80 million downloads and c. 30 million recently-active users across all platforms and versions – including some active installations on every release since 13.x “Gotham”. This presentation also led into a conversation about release management, specifically, the intended schedule for the upcoming 18.x “Leia” release plus very early timing plans for 19.x “M*”.

The next presentation was by kib, giving us an update on all things related to the Kodi infrastructure – build servers, download servers, web hosting, caching. He took us through upgrades to the Windows build system, wiki software upgrade, https implementation, the Kodi paste site, LXD containerisation, OS reinstallation and upgrades, changes to mirror up/down detection, CloudFlare, and more.

Finally, a1rwulf rounded out the day by talking about the Kodi databases: the basic architecture, current limitations, and potential changes that we need to consider as new features are introduced.

A shortened day today, with a couple of topics kicked into Sunday for a variety of reasons. Watch this space for an update on those, as we’ll add them in due course, either as an update to this post or as a separate one, depending on content.

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<blinks in the light>

What, a year already? Yup, twelve months have passed, we’re all a year older, the world is still mad, and we’re once again sitting in an overly-warm, windowless, anonymous conference room, discussing everyone’s favourite media software while wondering where the coffee is. Welcome to DevCon 2018, coming to you this year from Sofia/Со́фия, the capital city of the beautiful Balkan nation of Bulgaria.

So: Team Kodi Assemble!

We hit the ground running this morning. Mixed in with initial logistics, introductions, and the annual battle with AV and hotel wifi, keith led a conversation about github, and how we could perhaps better use it to track code and project issues. We currently use trac for bugs, which presents more than a few challenges to both casual users and the team; we could also potentially use github for bug reporting/allocation instead, and also use the associated project tracking to also keep better notes of e.g. press conversations, Foundation issues, and similar.

We continued into a conversation about conferences – which are most appropriate, how do we best cover them, what and where, how do we get most benefit. More later on this year’s conference experiences.

Martijn then talked about the move from Python 2 to Python 3: approach, milestones, timeline. Python 2 is EOL in 2020, so this is becoming a more urgent task. The intention is to combine this into the normal Kodi rolling release schedule, so expect a significant focus on Python 3 readiness and enforcement as we move past 18 (Leia) and on to 19 (M). If you’re an addon developer, specifically, then it’s time to pay attention to this as “later” is rapidly becoming “now” – everyone has had ten years to think about this, after all!

The big challenge is how we encourage developers to migrate while not inconveniencing or irritating users. This is a significant change, and some things are likely to break. Blog post here.

We next moved to conduct and standards – not because we believe there are specific problems, but more because it’s generally good practice to have some expectations regarding behaviour of team members and contributors: if you follow the news, you won’t have missed some of the headlines around what can happen when people go beyond constructive disagreement and move into personal attacks, particularly when social media or public discourse is involved. As such, we’re putting in place some clearer ground rules and management policies around our own behaviour, just as we have done around the standards we expect from our forum contributors.

The conversation then moved on to engagement and communication – how we keep people informed, updated, involved. Kodi is a big project, with very many moving parts, and nearly as many ways to interact. That’s not just about the code, but it’s Foundation stuff, user support, strategy, wiki, external conversations, release management: keeping on top of all of these is undoubtedly a challenge. This is very much an internal Team conversation, but one that we’ll continue to progress, as even orientation to the project can potentially be a barrier to new contributors.

Moving on, Martijn led a conversation around issue tracking – trac vs github. While we currently use an internal trac system, and it has some genuine benefits, it’s neither the most usable nor maintanable of systems. By contrast, hosting and managing the issues on (public) github means they’re more closely linked with code and commits, so we’d get some significant advantages there that should more than offset what we’d be missing. If we do make this change, which is likely, it won’t happen overnight, as we’ve much to decide: what to do with old (and maybe no-longer-valid) bug reports, what labelling/tagging structure we’d need, what systems we’d need to have in place to ensure that we receive “complete” reports going forward, and so on. More to come.

Related to this – because github is, in general, a more public platform than trac – we had a conversation about embracing this as a benefit and how we become more open. Again, Kodi is a hugely-complex project and is very daunting to a potential contributor: where to start? Who to talk to? How to get help? Who are all these people, anyway?? So, many thoughts: github conversations, GSoC experiences, public discussion channels, updated build/”getting started” documentation, code documentation/architecture. If you’re a potential developer and feel like you don’t know where to begin, please, contact a member of the team to help us address any concerns you have. We can always use some more help, particularly on the features and multiple platform support that everyone values so much.

Returning to a topic introduced earlier in the day, garbear, Razze and yol took the floor to report back on their attendance at VDD (Video Dev Days) earlier this month (also attended by Martijn and RomanVM). This was also touched on in a previous blog post. Sessions included AV1 CODEC development, including the dav1d decoder and rav1e encoder;  the x265 HEVC encoder; VLC 4.0 plans and features; a series of short “lightning talks” on various AV-related topics; and, of course, many networking opportunities across a common community of interest (website hosting and load balancing, request handling/download management, breakouts on FFMpeg, programming languages…). Useful bridges built with like-minded people, which is ultimately good for the whole open source multimedia landscape.

As the day started to draw to a close, mohit-0212, one of our 2018 GSoC students, gave a presentation on his project around episode intro/outro detection. The goal of this project is to improve the user experience by editing out the endless theme tunes and credits you get, particularly when binge-watching a box set. This involves searching for common scene transition points across multiple episodes of a series, and using hashing algorithms on the video stream to work out when the likely sections begin and end. In the first implementation, then, the detection is run and then the user is presented with a “skip” button as a the section begins. Fully-automated skipping would perhaps be a later addition, but more work is needed yet on the code, detection of “edge cases”, and UI, and similar.

Finally, natethomas and the other Foundation board members spent some time talking about the board responsibilities: who, what, how, why. The XBMC Foundation has a legal status, and thus there are ongoing administrative, legal and financial activities around our overall direction as a project, non-profit status, trademarks, incorporation status, revenues from sponsorship and donations, approval of expenditure, taxes, PR/press, GSoC admin, Foundation membership and bylaws, internal policies, and any formal legal communications as required.

And that’s it for day one. Time to head out into the fading evening light before reconvening in the morning.

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Back in 2004, when LimeWire was the file-sharing client of choice for millions of users, a new kid appeared on the block.

FrostWire was originally an open source fork of LimeWire distributed under the GNU General Public License.

In 2006, FrostWire added BitTorrent support and in 2011, as LimeWire drew its final breath under pressure from the RIAA, its Gnutella base was dropped completely in favor of BitTorrent.

Over the years, FrostWire became available on multiple platforms including Windows, macOS, Linux, and Android. However, a huge problem with their Android variant has now caused the FrostWire team to make a rather sad announcement.

The issues began back on September 18 when the FrostWire Android app was taken down from Google Play following a DMCA takedown request.

“In the notice, the company claimed their content was uploaded to the FrostWire app and provided screenshots of their content being played in the FrostWire Music Player,” the FrostWire team explains.

“Asking for reinstatement, we made it clear that it is technically impossible to upload any content to FrostWire. We explained that FrostWire is a tool, a BitTorrent client, a downloader for a distributed peer-to-peer network and that as such, it does not host, index, nor has the ability to control the content it is technically capable of downloading from third party sources.”

But despite a DMCA counter-notice to Google, the Internet giant stood its ground. Google refused to reinstate the Android app, a surprise decision given FrostWire’s reputation for staying within the law.

After almost eight successful years on the Google Play store, the FrostWire team says they have been left “dumbfounded” by what they say is an “unsubstantiated claim” from a single company.

Sadly, this unfortunate situation appears to be the straw that broke the camel’s back. Heavily reliant on their Android variant, the team indicate they will now move away from FrostWire.

“With over 80% of our user-base running on the Android platform, in a world where the majority of android installs occurs through a centralized app store monopoly, we don’t see a viable path forward. After 14 years the team is ready to move on to other passions and challenges,” they reveal.

Thanking users past and present for their support, the FrostWire team say that users should now take the opportunity to update their clients using FrostWire’s Github repository or its SourceForge page.

While this sounds like the beginning of the end for FrostWire, it isn’t the first time that the project has had a run-in with Google over its popular client.

In April 2015, FrostWire was temporarily removed from Google Play in a dispute over YouTube integration. Earlier that year, Amazon removed FrostWire citing copyright concerns.

This reliance on centralized and near monopoly app databases is clearly a big negative for applications like FrostWire. The team hopes that, moving into the future, Internet freedom will come to the forefront.

“We hope that in the end, a free, uncensored and decentralized internet will prevail,” the team concludes.

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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