The alleged owner and operator of FMovies and affiliated platforms, together considered the most visited pirate sites on the planet before they were recently shut down, has confessed and will be prosecuted in Vietnam. Phan Thành Công, 34, is said to have operated the site between 2016 and 2024. An accomplice, Nguyen Tuan Anh, also 34, allegedly uploaded 50,000 videos.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/31443410

Cock.li will shut down before becoming complicit in crimes against its own userbase by duress of any government or organization.

For nearly 11 years, cock.li has remained one of the only public e-mail providers to allow registration as anonymously as a library card. The fact that it's still possible to get an e-mail address as easy as 20 years ago is a fact widely *hated* by international governments; at least the parts of those governments which have dedicated countless resources to target our service, our team, our family, and our friends with illegal surveillance, bad-jacketing, organized disinformation, and much worse.

A combination of these illegal tactics have become so serious that the site is now in grave danger.

The only way it's been possible for cock.li to weather this and stay online is thanks to the dedication of our entire lives to this bit. Our small team of 3-5 people have had our lives permanently altered and our stability sacrificed so Internet users worldwide can more-or-less enjoy the comfort of being able to access e-mail without requiring a phone number or other surveillance document.

Despite the constant attacks on the service and our personal lives, no one directly involved has ever been paid in 11 years for their work on cock.li. The personal costs of this volunteer work add up over a lifetime, and as we get older we've slowly taken steps back to compensate, when we should have been stepping up.

Stepping up is exactly what's needed right now, and we're here to do it. These recent issues have forced us to take leave from our jobs to make time just to keep the wheels spinning. I hope you can understand that is why, for the first time ever, I'm asking you to donate directly to the people who make cock.li possible.

Your donation will make a real difference by telling us to use the money where it will help the most right now. We have a sizable war chest for legal expenses that has never once been used to pay us for our work. Problem is, if we can't make time to put that war chest to work, what good is it? We believe cannibalizing this fund to offset our lost time would put cock.li in a worse position, so by creating a new fund we can make it clear what we're doing while keeping our legal funds secure.

It shouldn't surprise you that the people who are so passionate about this service are not profiteers or business people. We are private, unpaid individuals who don't want to see one of the last great liberties of this Internet fall victim to the criminal and violent attempts to shut it down. If these critical threats force us to change the world to ensure e-mail remains recognized as a human right, we won't hesitate to do it.

We never once asked for personal donations specifically in the hopes that if this moment ever came, our userbase would appreciate that we were able to make it this long on passion alone, and trust that your donation will make the best possible impact.

There is much work to be done. I will keep you updated as much as I can. Thank you very much for your consideration.

Monero:  41fqXKYNEWuBDuqYczhoSiE1aUN9tCGdWYrfjynebuTM3tdE5UUHEfeZjZ3iZpgqY8LdYLk9h4As66UBC5mARL4z98PfUwB
Bitcoin: bc1qg9ehmfzusgfd6dvudll0qxkcl8c5q3sh8qnetr

~!~

In the 2022 film `COCKCON 2020 (2019)`[0], a 250MB encrypted file was hidden in a second video track of the 1080p release. You can download this film here[1]. I don't know if the encryption key will ever be released, but if it does, you'll want quick access to that file.

Furthermore, two more files are released today, 2024-11-12: ins10.luks[2] (555MB) and ins11.luks[3] (64MB). Please download these torrents and seed them as long as you can. Please consider your privacy when seeding.

[0]: https://vc.gg/film/cockcon-2020/
[1]: magnet:?xt=urn:btih:TBU2RE2ENTL6USAZVX7HH7V3TYMK2KVI&dn=COCKCON%202020%20(2019)%20(2022)%20%5B1080p%5D%20%5BOvO%5D&tr=https%3A%2F%2Fpub.tracker.aaathats3as.com%3A443%2Fannounce
[2]: magnet:?xt=urn:btih:RZ5PIPVCPPJC7JWIVU74V5JANJ4O3RXL&dn=ins10.luks&xl=581959680&tr=https%3A%2F%2Fpub.tracker.aaathats3as.com%3A443%2Fannounce
[3]: magnet:?xt=urn:btih:DX6I2QFYIBYZPCP5FPRBORTQVCM4NVRG&dn=ins11.luks&xl=67108864&tr=https%3A%2F%2Fpub.tracker.aaathats3as.com%3A443%2Fannounce

Is there a place to view the status of this service and or to view updates from it?

I currently have a load of pirated games and I'm considering moving my systems to Linux cuz Windows is ass. Would this make it difficult to run pirated games?

I have a couple of local copies of my media collection, but in case of my house burning down in a fire i would like to not have to rebuild my entire media collection. rsync.net offers some fairly reasonable storage prices (i guess there are many other good options as well).

Would you guys have any second thoughts on storing the entirety of your media collection on a remote server like that unencrypted?

BREIN has obtained a new blocking order in the Netherlands targeting TorrentGalaxy, one the world's most popular torrent sites. Internet provider Odido objected to the request, arguing that the Dutch anti-piracy group could have done more to target the problem closer to the source. The Rotterdam District Court found that the anti-piracy group can't be expected to do more than it's already done.

I want to know if there are any duplicated songs in my stored folder and get to remove the duplicate. I also wish to remove any remix if it's along with the original. For Spotify playlists, there's a site available but I want to do the same locally. Is there any music manager available?

I've told qbit to exclude those files and many other extensions from someone's helpful comment on here previously, but the stack keeps on grabbing and seeding them, which the latter I'm a little unhappy about sharing malware.

While all the boxes on my network have no sign of Windows to get exploited it does worry me about another family members arrr stack because there is a Windows laptop down there, but thankfully not used for media consumption.

Help?

edit: big thanks to kiszkot@feddit.nu for pointing me in line separators instead of comma separated exclusions!

Thought I'd copy the update from HDVinnie on what's going on with Blu.

I am still here for BLU. I am still here for the torrent realm. I am still here developing UNIT3D. I will continue to help as I always have.

I’m not good at this and will admit that off the rip. So bear with me. I know I have a lot of haters so it is what it is but this is my attempt to let everyone know the story.

As most know I started UNIT3D from scratch in 2016 after being a dev for xbtit and u232 for many years under a different name and other trackers. I grew tired of hard to manage and simply bad code. In 2017 BLU was born as the first UNIT3D based tracker. I have dedicated the last 8 years to BLU and UNIT3D. They mean a ton to me and the community has grown tremendously. I helped as many other failing torrent communities that needed help with code and porting so they could survive.

BLU was self run for the first 4 years of its life in which we then started to accept donations. We never begged with weekly pms, news, etc. The community was strong and we chugged along fine.

We have gone through server issues in past and recovered just fine. These things happen and with daily backups it’s not an issue which we were doing. Locally and remote to other staff. One staff resigned. Then the other. This was in 2024.

BLU was booming. Peer growth, user growth, content growth and all around community growth was exceptional. Yes we recently had a horror month event. Saying we brought in thousands and thousands from it is just false though. I won’t debate it in a public manner. The community was booming and we brought back the upload bot server.

Here lies the issue. I have been drained. I had personal things I can’t and won’t get into. We recently had ssd failures which is a normal situation would be fine. Wait for host to replace and load a backup along with all kernel and dependency tuning. When the one staff resigned that was managing the off server backups I failed as a sysops to retract it to another staff and turn my local copies back on. That is on me. I take full responsibility and apologize. I am crushed just as much as you guys. Those that really know and interact with me would know this.

That being said this irc post makes it seem like I just went awol and resigned with nothing but echoes. That is not the case. Yes I have stepped down. Why? Because after 8 years I failed with something I know like the back of my hand. Simple backups. Is my personal draining and life issues an excuse. No. But it is what it is. It cannot be undone. For this I don’t deserve to be at BLU at that level anymore.

I am working with staff. I have transferred control. I am working to help and make things right from the outside. I will continue to develop UNIT3D that BLU and dozens and dozens of other trackers rely on. Anyone that was invited to BLU if they bring it back will be reinstated. I am already working on building list to resend invites for staff to use. Donor statues will be reapplied. Will it happen overnight. No. But BLUs community is one of the strongest so please don’t hate. Bear with us. For those that feel you were robbed. That’s simply not true and it’s really sad to hear that. Feel free to email me.

Source

Google is facing criticism in Spain and Italy for alleged anti-piracy failures. The latest claim accuses Google of ignoring notices that aim to remove pirate IPTV providers from search results. So here's the thing: why would a company take down 10 billion URLs from search but suddenly start acting differently? The public labeling of Google as "grossly negligent" deserves context too; two weeks ago, Google's diligence prevented one of its accusers from deindexing its own website.

I'm wondering about what your piracy workflow looks like.

1. Where do you find what shows/films to watch?
2. Do you stream for convenience or download for superior quality?
3. Where do you store media?
4. What software are you using to watch it?
5. How do you keep track of your watchlist, which episode you already watched or where you left off in a movie?

I have Netflix and Disney+ (through family) and it already drives me crazy to remember where which show is available, download quality sucks, shows get delisted halfway through watching them. Sometimes multiple seasons even are across multiple streaming services. (I was very sad before I discovered there were more than 4 seasons of Adventure Time). I even want to pay for the production of good media, but streaming services make it a really hard sell 🤬

I know that the -arr suite with jellyfin is a pretty nice workflow, but I'm not into self hosting (yet).

Korean authorities have shut down the popular video piracy service TVWIKI, which had millions of users. A special unit of the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism arrested the alleged operator, who is also believed to be connected to other streaming platforms. These include OKTOON, which was also pulled offline, and piracy giant NoonooTV, which voluntarily threw in the towel last year.

Several major record labels are asking the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals for a rehearing en banc in their piracy lawsuit against Grande Communications. They argue that the court erred in holding that piracy damages should be calculated per album, rather than per song. They argue that this decision, which will lower the $47 million damages award, doesn't reflect the way that music is commercialized today.

It sounds like the new Pirate Bay series is a let down (although I have not seen it myself). But I do remember enjoying this documentary about the trio from 2013.

I have a Plex server running on Mac OSX. Whenever I want to add media, I remotely connect into the Mac, login to my private tracker, download the torrent, wait for it to finish, then update my Plex library.

I'm hopeful that there's an easier way. I'm imagining a way I can remotely tell the Plex server what I want to watch and it takes it from there. Does such a thing exist?

The other domains are still online, though z-library has yet to respond

Post edited, thank you @mbt2402 for correcting me