Today around 14:50 GMT the popular german moviez site "kino.to" went down. Press is reporting about the arrest of 13 individuals and is charging them for the foundation of a criminal association. While the website was target of numerous hacker attacks in the past, and i haven't found reliable sources to confirm that it was actually a official intervention (and btw no SPIEGEL ONLINE is really not a reliable source for me), it seems that it was an official act.
However a short kino.to-requiem and future outlook on the warez scene. kino.to was a phenomena: It was longer present than any other warez site i have ever seen, usually this pages do not last long because - hey - the contain WAREZ! But due to a nice loophole in law kino.to was not responsible for the hosting of the actual contents. In fact there was a redundant variety of hosters, which shared a specific content.
Most of them i.e. megavideo have premium systems to pay the server bills. Furthermore kino.to provided a respectable stability: over the years it evolved into the casual warez plattform and yet did not go down. Super casual idiots could use kino.to without any problem, because it was easy to find. But kino.to was like a raised middle finger to all german or even international copyright laws. So it was clear that someday this would happen.
As I wish it would go this way, we can not say this right now. There are a few options:
I really hope warez will become a hacker-domain again... but i dont think it will. It will also nice to see whether the so called "hacktivists" will respond in some way, because SONY is kinda all hacked out atm I guess.
PS: Dear german police: iso-8859-15 is bad and so are layout tables! (But this might be an indirect confirmation, that it was made by officials)
PPS: Ah.. and there is still child pornography out there, I guess harmless porn-free warez sites just make better headlines.
PPPS: Angela Merkel received the "Presidential Medal of Freedom" today... unrelated irony?!
http://t.co/XlRx9sPy #tadaa 5 days ago
http://t.co/A5ntL8YC #tadaa 5 days ago