4Shared Wins Court Case To Overcome Piracy Blockade

Popular file-hosting service 4shared has won a court case against the South Korean authorities who placed the site on a national piracy blocklist. While 4shared's users occasionally host pirated files, the court concludes that it can't be seen as a service that is setup specifically to facilitate copyright infringement. "We think it is a good result. It's the first time we tried disputing in court with a state Internet censorship body," 4shared's Mike Wilson tells TorrentFreak. "We believe that 4shared does enough to protect intellectual property and disabling access to our service for an entire country is not lawful," he adds.

Plausibly deniable piracy

[fph il quozientatore]

I was thinking that it should be possible to set up a file sharing system that supports plausible deniability for downloading pirated material. Let us suppose, for simplicity, that the system only allows sharing 10MB files, and that some of them are legal and some are not. Each time an user wants to upload a new 10MB file, they do not publish the file itself, but the XOR of the file and a pre-esisting 10MB chunk. In this way, each time you want to download a file, you have to download two 10MB chunks from t

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[rmdingler]

Workarounds that leave plausible deniability are like the cover story you have ready in your head for when the police pull you over.

Despite your imagined impenetrable logic and Jedi nerves, your explanation will be delivered with much less sense and cool than you imagine, to a seasoned roadside interviewer.

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[mwvdlee]

if you download a chunk that belongs to both ubuntu_16.04_amd64.iso and pirates_of_the_caribbean_XXX_subtitle.mkv, who can prove that you were interested in the second?

You downloading the "ubuntu_16.04_amd64_iso_XOR_pirates_of_the_caribbean_XXX_subtitle_mkv" file as well should be sufficient proof.

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[Anonymous Coward]

It's been done [wikipedia.org], unfortunately the bootstrap servers are dead

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[fph il quozientatore]

Very interesting, thanks for the link!

They also block pr0n

[Anonymous Coward]

South Korea also blocks (or attempts to block) all tube/stream pr0n sites