Tag Archive for ‘TorrentFreak’

Andy Maxwell, reporting for TorrentFreak:

The developers of Invidious, a privacy-respecting alternative front-end for YouTube, have received a cease-and-desist notice from YouTube’s legal department. The free and open source software, which provides a YouTube experience minus advertising and user tracking, has been instructed to shut down within seven days. As things stand, cooperation isn’t on the agenda. […]

The main problems apparent in Google’s cease and desist are straightforward; Invidious does not use YouTube’s API, and as a result, the project’s developers never agreed to any associated terms of service. As anyone who foolishly left their own instance open to the public will confirm, Invidious is effectively a proxy service, one with a penchant for bandwidth.

I’ve started using Invidious more over the past few months. Although I continue to pay for YouTube Premium for the ad-free experience on Apple TV, I would rather use Invidious on every device where I’m able to. I think of Invidious as a way to slowly ween myself off of YouTube content — much like I did with IFTTT and BirdSiteLive for Twitter.

I’m glad to see the developers behind the project are standing their ground. And luckily, because Invidious is open source, there isn’t really much Google can do to stop its development or prevent its distribution.

➝ Source: torrentfreak.com

Ernesto Van der Sar, writing for TorrentFreak:

Privacy-centered search engine DuckDuckGo has completely removed the search results for many popular pirates sites including The Pirate Bay, 1337x, and Fmovies. Several YouTube ripping services have disappeared, too and even the homepage of the open-source software youtube-mp3 is unfindable.

Lame.

Update 3/18/22: A spokesperson for DuckDuckGo, speaking with BetaNews:

After looking into this, our records indicate that YouTube-dl and The Pirate Bay were never removed from our search results when you searched for them directly by name or URL, which the vast majority of people do (it’s rare for people to use site operators or query operators in general). Most everyone searching for these sites were finding them without interruption.

We are having issues with our site: operator, and not just for these sites, but now at least the official site should be coming up for them when you use the site: operator for them. Some of the other sites routinely change domain names and have spotty availability, and so naturally come in and out of the index, but should be available as of now.

I originally wrote this on Friday and couldn’t get results from youtube-dl’s website or The Pirate Bay, regardless of whether I used the site: operator. I’m able to get results from both of them now. Perhaps this was simply a temporary issue without any intent to remove the aforementioned sites or maybe this is just a convenient excuse after they saw a bit of backlash from the removal.

➝ Source: torrentfreak.com

Ernesto Van der Sar, reporting for TorrentFreak:

Nintendo has filed a lawsuit against the alleged operator of the popular console ROM sites LoveROMS.com and LoveRETRO.co. The sites are among the most notorious online hubs for pirated games, according to Nintendo, and face millions of dollars in potential damages.

I understand Nintendo’s need to protect their intellectual property, but I wish that companies would just turn a blind eye to sites like this.

TorrentFreak:

TPB is back online today, more than seven weeks after its servers were raided . The notorious torrent site is operating from the familiar .se domain and it appears that data loss is minimal.

Set aside your opinions on the morality of piracy — it’s incredible that The Pirate Bay has lasted this long and has come back from as many government raids and takedowns as it has.

There are some clever folks at Netflix.

It’s a slippery slope.