Friday, March 3, 2023

TorrentFreak's Latest News

 

Pirate Bay Forum Suffers Extended Downtime After Hack
Ernesto Van der Sar, 03 Mar 12:35 PM

strandedThe Pirate Bay has had its fair share of technical issues over the past years, sometimes resulting in hours or even days of downtime.

When the notorious torrent site goes offline, the associated SuprBay forum usually remains online. This is helpful, as the forums have a dedicated page where outsiders can check the status of the main site.

More recently, the tables have been turned. At the time of writing The Pirate Bay is online but the forums are unreachable. People who try to access SuprBay get a connection timeout instead, which has been the case for several days now.

Dark Web Message

The Pirate Bay website doesn't have any information on the issue but on the dark web, the .onion domain shows a little more information.

"Moe is still playing with himself, but we are slowly getting things sorted," the brief notification reads.

suprbay

Hacked

The message doesn't reveal much but suggests that if Surpbay admin "Moe" takes action, the site will eventually make a full comeback. This is confirmed by fellow administrator Spud17, who explains that the server was compromised.

An outsider reportedly hacked and messed up the server but Spud17 says that user data was not compromised in the process. The main Pirate Bay site was unaffected by the whole ordeal.

The good news is that there are recent backups in place. This means that the forums can be brought back online with relative ease. According to the SuprBay team, that should take a week, or perhaps two.

From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

Huge Piracy Site Killed By Egypt Gets Sewn Back To Life Like Osiris
Andy Maxwell, 02 Mar 08:41 PM

broken-pieces1Mid-February, the Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment (ACE) announced that MyCima, one of the largest pirate streaming sites in the Middle East, had been shut down.

Reportedly operated from Alexandria and offering 12,000 movies and 26,000 TV series, MyCima enjoyed around 50 million visits per month.

Following an ACE referral, Egyptian authorities took action to shut the site down. MyCima's most popular domain – myciiima.autos – went offline along with around 70 others.

ACE thanked Egypt's Prime Minister and the Ministry of Internal Affairs for protecting intellectual property, while two new members of the ACE coalition – MENA-based OSN and MBC Group – were acknowledged for their work in shutting MyCima down.

Not Quite Dead Yet: MyCima Sewn Back Together

According to Egyptian mythology, Osiris was a much-loved king who was killed by Seth, his jealous brother, who chopped him up and scattered the 14 pieces all over Egypt. MyCima had many more pieces, notably around 70 domains. While 13 pieces of Osiris were found and sewn back together, one was never found. An important piece of MyCima was overlooked too.

In January 2023, myciiima.autos alone received more than 43.3m visits, making it the 10th most-visited domain in Egypt. Many other domains redirected in and out, among them mycimaa.tv. Domains redirecting to mycimaa.tv were numerous too – myciiima.bond, myciiima.boats, myciiima.makeup and myciiima.monster, among others.

At some point in January, Myciiima.autos redirected to mycimaa.tv and on February 2, 2023, myciiima.autos was updated and fell out of use. Also on February 2, a new domain was registered and connected to many existing domains. Wecima.tube appears to be MyCima's new home. Or one of them at least

MyCima? No. Wecima? Yeah

Given these and other connections not detailed here, there seems little doubt that WeCima is just MyCima with a new name and a new domain.

The site was already pretty glossy, so a new coat of paint probably wasn't needed. That being said, absolutely no effort has been made to portray this as a new platform.

wecima-tube

It's unclear why the site's operators are still in business, especially given the big shutdown announcements in February that received regional and international attention. The involvement of OSN and what this resurrection means for them is made especially clear on WeCima's front page.

Site Changes Pirated Content Policy

On WeCima's homepage, under the top row of movie and TV show cover images, is some Arabic text. It's been edited at least once, maybe twice, over the past week or so. The image below shows the notice in English, as it appeared a few days ago.

arabic osn gone wecima

Taken at face value, this clearly suggests that content owned by TV network OSN has been removed. That could be for any number of reasons, but the most obvious is that MyCima/WeCima are under the impression that removal either removes or reduces the risk of being targeted again.

Viewed from a different perspective, the site might be more concerned about local companies' content than content owned by companies located overseas. A little more weight is given to that theory with a more recent update to the site's main page.

wecima-no arabic

It appears that while OSN content still won't feature on the site, the same now holds true for all local content. This stated position is a far cry from the site being completely closed down and is almost certainly a big diversion from what the rest of the ACE coalition thought would happen.

But Will it Last?

After being chopped into pieces by Seth and sewn back together by Isis, Osiris lived for just a single day. His legacy, a son he conceived despite lacking a crucial body part, lived on. A single domain allowed WeCima to live on but the site is taking no chances.

Since wecima.tube was registered on February 2, 2023, the registrations have barely stopped. Domains including weciima.motorcycles and weciima.makeup are just two examples from a list of several dozen domains that are either active already and pointing at WeCima, or waiting for the right moment to do so.

Other resurrections may be happening elsewhere in Egypt too.

From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

 
 
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