Tag: piracy

Plex Will Start Cracking Down on Free Remote Streaming Access This Week

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Plex is starting to enforce its new rules, which prevent users from remotely accessing a personal media server without a subscription fee.

Previously, people outside of a server owner’s network could access the owner’s media library through Plex for free. Under the new rules announced in March, a server owner needs to have a Plex Pass subscription, which starts at $7 per month, to grant users remote access to their server. Alternatively, someone can remotely access another person’s Plex server by buying their own Plex Pass or a Remote Watch Pass, which is a subscription with fewer features than a Plex Pass and that Plex started selling in April for a $2 per month starting price.

Plex’s new rules took effect on April 29. According to a recent Plex forums post by a Plex employee that How-To Geek spotted today, the changes are rolling out this week, with a subscription being required for people using Plex’s Roku OS app for remote access. The Plex employee added:

This requirement change for remote streaming will come to all other Plex TV apps (Fire TV, Apple TV, Android TV, etc.) and any third-party clients using the API to offer remote streaming in 2026.

Plex started as a Mac port of the Xbox Media Center project in 2009 before evolving into a media server company and, more recently, a streaming service provider. Its new remote access rules will be a test for the company, which has been challenging long-time users with numerous changes over the past year, including a Plex Pass price hike, a foray into renting out officially licensed movies, and the introduction of social features and a mobile app redesign.

Plex has previously emphasized its need to keep up with “rising costs,” which include providing support for many devices and codecs. It has also said it needs money to implement new features, including an integration with Common Sense Media, a new “bespoke server management app” for managing server users, and “an open and documented API for server integrations,” including custom metadata agents,” per a March blog post.

In January 2024, TechCrunch reported that Plex was nearing profitability and raised $40 million in funding (Plex raised a $50 million growth equity round in 2021). Theoretically, the new remote access rules can also increase subscription revenue and help Plex’s backers see returns on their investments.

However, Plex’s evolution could isolate long-time users who have relied on Plex as a media server for years and those who aren’t interested in subscriptions, FAST (free ad-supported streaming TV) channels, or renting movies. Plex is unlikely to give up on its streaming business, though. In 2023, Scott Hancock, Plex’s then-VP of marketing, said that Plex had more people using its online streaming service than using its media server features since 2022. For people seeking software packages more squarely focused on media hosting, Plex alternatives, like Jellyfin, increasingly look attractive.

This story originally appeared on Ars Technica.

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Scharon Harding, Ars Technica

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November 27, 2025
China’s Latest Digital Headache for American Corporations: ‘Export-Only’ Piracy

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Digital pirates in China are getting more sophisticated and are blocking their services domestically to avoid local law enforcement, and U.S. copyright holders would like to speak to the manager.

The International Intellectual Property Alliance (IIPA), which represents various U.S. entertainment industries from Hollywood to gaming, is calling on China to do more to stop these operations, which have been dubbed ‘export-only’ piracy.

The IIPA called out the practice and named notable offenders in a submission last week to the U.S. Trade Representative. The submission was part of the Trade Representative’s annual review of China’s compliance with World Trade Organization (WTO) obligations, TorrentFreak reports.

“While significant piracy in China’s domestic market remains an enduring challenge, the exporting of pirated content, piracy services, and piracy devices (PDs) from China to foreign markets is a growing and equally troubling global trend,” the submission reads.

The report highlights several of the worst offenders, including the internet TV platform and privacy device exporter FlujoTV (formerly MagisTV), which targets Latin America; the app LokLok, serving Southeast Asia; and the website GIMY, popular in Taiwan.

The IIPA underscored how pirates are shifting tactics and searching for new loopholes to exploit. Another example provided by the group was the reskinning of video games.

“Instead of traditional methods that involve technical cracking of game software for complete duplication and distribution, game piracy in China is increasingly characterized by reskinning the original games with non-substantial revisions,” the report says. It added that the changes could be as simple as making slight adjustments to the games’ source code.

Additionally, the IIPA’s comments paint a picture of China’s copyright enforcement as slow, inconsistent, and bureaucratic. For example, even after initial sanctions against violators, rights holders often have to file new complaints for repeat offenses. E-commerce platforms usually only have to delist specific items, rather than shutting down entire shops. And geo-blocked services can operate completely under the radar.

“This allows China-based operations to evade enforcement action by simply geo-blocking their services from access within China or serving a different set of content to users accessing these services from within China,” the IIPA wrote.

The group is now calling for specific reforms to address the issue, including more resources and better coordination for the National Copyright Administration of China (NCAC), simpler complaint procedures, and clearer rules for user-uploaded content platforms.

They also want China to enforce its laws against all piracy operations run from the country, even if the services aren’t accessible locally, and to improve cross-border cooperation so geo-blocked piracy doesn’t slip through the cracks.

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Bruce Gil

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October 1, 2025
Taylor Swift Concert Terror Plot Was Thwarted by Key CIA Tip

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Pavel Durov, the founder and CEO of the communication app Telegram, was arrested in France on Saturday as part of an investigation into his and Telegram’s alleged failure to moderate illegal content on the platform, among other allegations. After being detained for four days, he was charged on Wednesday evening, barred from leaving France, and released on the condition of posting a €5 million ($5.5 million) bail and reporting to a French police station twice a week. The Paris prosecutor’s office said on Wednesday that Durov faces complicity charges related to child sexual abuse material and drug trafficking, as well charges for importing cryptology without prior declaration, and a “near-total absence” of cooperation with French authorities.

“Nudify” deepfake websites that generate images of people’s naked bodies without their consent have been incorporating mainstream single sign-on authentication systems into their websites, a WIRED investigation found. Discord and Apple are terminating some developers’ accounts over this usage.

Microsoft published research on Wednesday about a new multistage backdoor that the notorious Iranian hacking group APT 33 or Peach Sandstorm has been using to target victims in sectors including satellite, communications equipment, and oil and gas. And Google researchers found that suspected Russian hackers compromised Mongolian government websites between November 2023 and July 2024 and then infected vulnerable users who visited the sites with malware. Crucially, the attackers compromised targets using exploits that were identical or very similar to hacking tools created by the commercial spyware vendors NSO Group and Intellexa.

And there’s more. Each week, we round up the security and privacy news we didn’t cover in depth ourselves. Click the headlines to read the full stories. And stay safe out there.

The US Central Intelligence Agency provided Austrian law enforcement with crucial intelligence that led to the arrest of suspects who were allegedly plotting to attack Taylor Swift concerts in Austria at the beginning of the month. All three of the singer’s planned concerts were canceled at Vienna’s Ernst Happel Stadium because of the threat. CIA deputy director David Cohen said at the Insa intelligence conference on Wednesday, “Within my agency and others there were people who thought that was a really good day for Langley and not just the Swifties in my workforce.”

The central suspect is a 19-year-old Austrian of North Macedonian background who reportedly made a full confession. Austrian law enforcement also arrested an 18-year-old and a 17-year-old in relation to the plot. Cops also reportedly interrogated a 15-year-old. The plot was allegedly inspired by the Islamic State and included plans to attack fans outside the venue with knives or explosives. Earlier this month, Austrian interior minister Gerhard Karner said foreign intelligence agencies contributed to the investigation because Austrian law bars text message surveillance.

“They were plotting to kill a huge number, tens of thousands of people at this concert, including I am sure many Americans, and were quite advanced in this,” the CIA’s Cohen said at the conference. “The Austrians were able to make those arrests because the agency and our partners in the intelligence community provided them information about what this ISIS-connected group was planning to do.”

Hackers who may be backed by the Chinese government have been exploiting a recently patched vulnerability in network management virtualization software known as Versa Director to compromise at least four US-based internet service providers and steal authentication credentials used by their customers. Researchers from Lumen’s Black Lotus Labs, said on Thursday that the attacks began as early as June 12 and are likely still going on. Hackers exploit the Versa Director vulnerability to install remote access malware that Lumen dubbed allow “VersaMem.”

“Given the severity of the vulnerability, the implications of compromised Versa Director systems, and the time that has now elapsed to allow Versa customers to patch the vulnerability, Black Lotus Labs felt it was appropriate to release this information at this time,” the researchers wrote in a blog post. “Lumen Technologies shared threat intelligence to warn appropriate US government agencies of the emerging risks that could impact our nation’s strategic assets.”

The movie studio coalition known as the Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment said on Thursday that Hanoi police have investigated and taken down the Vietnam-based pirate streaming service Fmovies and its affiliates. The working group said it collaborated with law enforcement and provided information about Fmovies, which it called “the largest pirate streaming operation in the world.” The group added that Fmovies and its affiliate sites—which included bflixz, flixtorz, movies7, myflixer, and aniwave—had more than 6.7 billion visits between January 2023 and June 2024. The law enforcement operation also led to the takedown of video hosting provider Vidsrc.to and its affiliates because these services were allegedly “operated by the same suspects.” Hanoi police have arrested two men in connection with the case.

Following a digital attack against dozens of French museums during the Olympic Games earlier this month, the ransomware gang known as Brain Cipher has claimed responsibility for the hacks and is threatening to leak 300 GB of stolen data from the museums. Le Grand Palais and dozens of other French national museums and cultural organizations are overseen by Réunion des Musées Nationaux – Grand Palais and reportedly all use some shared digital infrastructure, which the attackers targeted.

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Lily Hay Newman

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August 31, 2024
Kim Dotcom, roguish face of 2010s online piracy, will finally be extradited to the US

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Kim Dotcom, the Megaupload founder and hard-partying face of early 2010s online piracy, is finally headed to the US. Reuters reports that New Zealand’s justice minister signed an extradition order on Thursday to end the entrepreneur’s nearly 13-year legal battle, paving the way for the German-born Dotcom to face charges from the US government.

“I considered all of the information carefully, and have decided that Mr Dotcom should be surrendered to the U.S. to face trial,” Goldsmith said in a statement. The decision came more than six years after a New Zealand court ruled Dotcom could be extradited to the US, paving the way for appeals that culminated in today’s decision.

YouTube / Kim Dotcom

Once the 13th most visited site online, the file-hosting site Megaupload was a hotbed for pirated content. In early 2012, American authorities charged Dotcom and six others with racketeering, copyright infringement, money laundering and copyright distribution. The US indictment claimed Megaupload cost copyright holders $500 million in damages while making $175 million from ads and premium subscriptions.

The raid on Dotcom’s Auckland mansion was dramatic fare among 2012’s relatively tame headlines. The New York Times reported at the time that when he saw the police, Dotcom barricaded himself inside, activating several electronic locks and waited in a safe room. When officers cut their way inside, they saw Dotcom standing near “a firearm that they said looked like a sawed-off shotgun.”

YouTube / Kim Dotcom

Dotcom (born Kim Schmitz) had several brushes with the law before that. He at least claimed to have spent three months in a Munich jail in 1994 for “breaking into Pentagon computers and observing real-time satellite photos of Saddam Hussein’s palaces.” Soon after, he received a suspended two-year sentence for a scam involving stolen phone card numbers.

In 2001, he was accused in the largest insider-trading case in German history. He reportedly fled Germany to escape those charges, was captured in Thailand, extradited (this week isn’t his first go-round) and convicted in 2002. At some point after that, he moved to New Zealand, holing up in a luxurious mansion.

You can see that mansion — and a taste of his larger-than-life persona — in his music video “Good Life.”

Justice Minister Paul Goldsmith signed the extradition order on Thursday and followed standard practice in giving Dotcom “a short period of time to consider and take advice” on his decision.

Dotcom, never one to mince words, posted a message on X that “the obedient US colony in the South Pacific just decided to extradite me for what users uploaded to Megaupload.”

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Will Shanklin

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August 15, 2024
The Pirate Party Survived Mutiny and Scandal. Now It’s Trying to Rewrite the Rules of the Web

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Outside the skatepark in Prague, on a scrubby patch of grass, Bartoš leans back into his deck chair as he tries to impress on me that Pirates are not your regular stiff politicians. From the campaign launch unfolding behind us, that’s pretty obvious. Yes, there are long speeches and polite rounds of applause. But there are also gangs of shirtless skateboarders, a blue-haired rapper, rainbow banners showing our solar-powered future, and references to the online forums where party members can vote on new policies or demand new leadership.

He disagrees that the broadening of the Pirates’ focus has diluted its identity. “We cannot be a single issue party,” he insists. Instead, he compares the Pirates’ evolution to Europe’s Greens, which started as a grassroots movement built around a single issue: the environment. Now the Greens are applying their original values to everything from housing to energy, as they sit in coalition governments in Germany, Luxembourg, Ireland, and Austria. Although the Pirates “don’t preach” like the Greens, he says, “we’re doing the same journey they did a while ago.”

The Czech branch demonstrates the Pirates’ potential—how an internet-first ideology can be woven into national politics—but it is also a microcosm of the party’s problems. Like other Pirates before it, the Czechs suffer from internal bickering, factionalism, and claims of sexual harassment. Former campaign manager Šárka Václavíková has spoken publicly about her decision to leave the party and her police complaint against a fellow party member for what she describes as stalking and psychological abuse. Over Zoom from her new home in Italy, she says sexual harassment of women was systemic before she left last year—a claim the party strongly denies. “Isolated incidents can, of course, happen, just as in society or any other party. However, if we had any information about such incidents, we would take immediate action,” party spokesperson Lucie Švehlíková told WIRED.

But Václavíková says she’s also disappointed with the direction of the party as a whole. “There are two factions in the Pirate Party,” she declares. There are the centrists, the people who want to appeal to everyone and are disowning the party’s Pirate Bay roots in the process. Václavíková says she identified with the other faction, whom she calls “the real pirates.” “For us,” she says, “the ideology of transparent policy and privacy, and also human rights, are more important than just gaining more power for our own profit.”

So far, Bartoš has prevented these issues from tearing the party apart. Part of why he has lasted so long, surviving a series of leadership challenges (including from Gregorová), is because he can clearly describe what makes the Pirates’ outlook different. Across Europe, other Pirates are still struggling to define what a better future—with more technology, not less—would actually look like. When I sign into a Zoom call with Tommy Klein, political adviser to the Pirates in Luxembourg, he is sitting in front of a poster emblazoned with the phrase “Save Our Internet.” When I ask how exactly the internet needs saving, he replies without enthusiasm that the poster is old. “It’s from the 2018 election,” he says.

Under Bartoš, however, the Czech Pirates have found a way to articulate a utopian vision of a technology-infused future that means more than just reducing Big Tech’s influence on the European internet. Like the Pirate Bureau 20 years ago, the Czech Pirates also have a bus—really more of a camper van—that carries illustrations of their message. There is a sun, with rays resembling internet nodes. Wind turbines and solar farms grow out of rolling pink hills. Slogans like “Girl Power” and “Tolerance” hover over people doing peace signs and smiling through heart-shaped glasses. In Bartoš, the original Pirate vision for an alternative technology-enabled future still lingers. “I believe that we can save the planet and society through technology,” he declares from his deck chair. Whether that optimism is still applicable, 20 years later, is up to the voters to decide.

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Morgan Meaker

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June 6, 2024
Makers of Switch emulator Yuzu quickly settle with Nintendo for $2.4 million

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Tropic Haze, the popular Yuzu Nintendo Switch emulator developer, appears to have agreed to settle Nintendo’s lawsuit against it. Less than a week after Nintendo filed the legal action, accusing the emulator’s creators of “piracy at a colossal scale,” a joint final judgment and permanent injunction filed Tuesday says Tropic Haze has agreed to pay the Mario maker $2.4 million, along with a long list of concessions.

Nintendo’s lawsuit claimed Tropic Haze violated the anti-circumvention and anti-trafficking provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). “Without Yuzu’s decryption of Nintendo’s encryption, unauthorized copies of games could not be played on PCs or Android devices,” the company wrote in its complaint. It described Yuzu as “software primarily designed to circumvent technological measures.”

Yuzu launched in 2018 as free, open-source software for Windows, Linux and Android. It could run countless copyrighted Switch games — including console sellers like The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom, Super Mario Odyssey and Super Mario Wonder. Reddit threads comparing Switch emulators praised Yuzu’s performance compared to rivals like Ryujinx. Yuzu introduces various bugs across different titles, but it can typically handle games at higher resolutions than the Switch, often with better frame rates, so long as your hardware is powerful enough.

A screenshot from Yuzu’s website, showing The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (Tropic Haze / Nintendo)

As part of an Exhibit A attached to the proposed joint settlement, Tropic Haze agreed to a series of accommodations. In addition to paying Nintendo $2.4 million, it must permanently refrain from “engaging in activities related to offering, marketing, distributing, or trafficking in Yuzu emulator or any similar software that circumvents Nintendo’s technical protection measures.”

Tropic Haze must also delete all circumvention devices, tools and Nintendo cryptographic keys used in the emulator and turn over all circumvention devices and modified Nintendo hardware. It even has to surrender the emulator’s web domain (including any variants or successors) to Nintendo. (The website is still live now, perhaps waiting for the judgment’s final a-okay.) Not abiding by the settlement’s agreements could land Tropic Haze in contempt of court, including punitive, coercive and monetary actions.

Although piracy is the top motive for many emulator users, the software can double as crucial tools for video game preservation — making rapid legal surrenders like Tropic Haze’s potentially problematic. Without emulators, Nintendo and other copyright holders could make games obsolete for future generations as older hardware eventually becomes more difficult to find.

Nintendo’s legal team is, of course, no stranger to aggressively enforcing copyrighted material. In recent years, the company went after Switch piracy websites, sued ROM-sharing website RomUniverse for $2 million and helped send hacker Gary Bowser to prison. Although it was Valve’s doing, Nintendo’s reputation indirectly got the Dolphin Wii and GameCube emulator blocked from Steam. It’s safe to say the Mario maker doesn’t share preservationists’ views on the crucial historical role emulators can play.

Despite the settlement, it appears unlikely the open-source Yuzu will disappear entirely. The emulator is still available on GitHub, where its entire codebase can be found.

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Will Shanklin

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March 4, 2024
Canadians still love to pirate music and video: report – National | Globalnews.ca
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I’ll admit it: If you go through the files on my computer, you’ll find songs that I downloaded from Napster and other illegal file-sharing sites. At the time — for me it was 2001-2003 — downloading songs illegally was seen as a goof, even harmless. How could a couple of downloaded tracks bother a multi-national record label or some millionaire rock stars?

That attitude was totally, utterly wrong, of course, and by the time I woke up to this reality, the recorded music industry was starting to spiral downwards. Fast. CD sales had begun to plummet and it became clear that piracy was one of the big contributing factors.

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My pirate ways were killed forever by iTunes. It was just easier to pay 99 cents/$1.29 for a high-quality audio file than endure terrible sounding, often incomplete, sometimes virus-ridden MP3s downloaded from god knows where. Who wanted the hassle of finding torrents and seeding sites with new material?

Then there was the issue of metadata, making sure that the songs were labelled correctly. Oftentimes, a torrented song would have the wrong title, spell the name of the artist wrong, or not include all the necessary tags. You have to then organize the songs somehow in your library. Besides being wrong and immoral, music piracy took too much work.

I’ve since amassed thousands of legal digital downloads. As I write this, iTunes tells me I have 79,640 items (564.5 gigs) in my library. Not all are paid-for downloads, of course. There are many, many CD rips along with other audio such as interviews, with much being associated with my work with The Ongoing History of New Music.

When streaming started to take off in Canada around 2010, most believed that this would be the end of music piracy. Why would you bother to steal something when you could: (a) pay a modest monthly fee and have all the music you could possibly want; and (b) sign up for the free tier on Spotify and for the price of having to listen to a few ads, pay nothing at all for all the music in the universe?

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Piracy was conquered. Except it wasn’t. And Canadians are still stealing stuff.

According to the most recent report by the International Intellectual Property Alliance (IIPA), a group that represents the interests of not just the recorded music industry, but TV, movies, videogame publishers, and more, we Canadians are thieves. At 241 pages, it’s a long report, but it can be summarized in this statement: “It is nearly impossible to overstate the magnitude of the piracy problem in Canada.”
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Drawing from information in a report from the Canadian Internet Registration Authority (which administers all the .ca domains, among other things), Canadians are some of the worst when it comes to pilfering American copyrighted works. We already watch a lot of TV and movies and listen to plenty of music, but the reports contend that the real numbers are higher due to people consuming pirated content.

I quote: “Evidence persists, however, that the digital marketplace for copyrighted content in Canada continues to face challenges in realizing its full potential due to competition from illicit online sources. In 2022, 22.4% of Canadians accessed pirate services.”

Nearly a quarter of us? Wow.

We’re doing a lot of stream-ripping, apparently. This involves using software to record the stream of a YouTube video or songs streamed from Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon, or any other DSP (Digital Streaming Provider). “Dozens of websites, software programs, and apps offering stream-ripping services find an eager marketplace in Canada,” says the report.

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It continues: “Use of peer-to-peer (P2P) sites remains high, with BitTorrent indexing sites including Rarbg, The Pirate Bay, and 1337x popular in Canada. Cyberlocker sites, such as Mega, Uptobox, GoFile, and Rapidgator, are also a common way to illicitly access recorded music.”

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Theft of music is a big issue, but video piracy is where the majority of the action is. The report says that we’re “actively involved” in all the different ways we can get around digital locks and technological protection measures.

Pirate IPTV (Internet Protocol Television) services — sometimes seen advertised on light poles at intersections — have plenty of customers. And chances are you know a guy who knows a guy who can fix you up with more free TV than you can handle with a special set-top box. Just Google “IPTV Canada” and watch what comes up. I’ve even seen these boxes for sale in retail stores.

More from the report: “Mimicking the look and feel of legitimate streaming services, infringing streaming websites continue to overtake P2P sites as a highly popular destination for Canadians seeking premium content in both English and French. … Canadian piracy operators remain involved in the coding and development of infringing add-ons and Android application packages (APKs) that enable subscription piracy services and mass-market [set-top boxes] to access streaming services without authorization.

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“Few resources are dedicated to prosecutions of piracy cases; prosecutors generally lack specialized training in prosecuting such offenses, and too often dismiss the file or plead the cases out, resulting in weak penalties.”

So what’s being done? The IIPA believes that the RCMP is too busy to investigate the situation. Local police forces also have their hands full with day-to-day policing. There have been a few crackdowns here and there, but nothing to really dent the pirate market. The IIPA is demanding more federal funding to fight piracy, the creation of specialized groups to pursue illegal IPTV sites/sellers, and is encouraging Canadian officials to work together with their American counterparts.

And you thought that Canadians were so nice and law-abiding.

—

Alan Cross is a broadcaster with Q107 and 102.1 the Edge and a commentator for Global News.

Subscribe to Alan’s Ongoing History of New Music Podcast now on Apple Podcast or Google Play
&copy 2023 Global News, a division of Corus Entertainment Inc.

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Alan Cross

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February 12, 2023