Tech

IPTV: how this Chinese piracy service has quietly taken up residence in the United States

Taiwanese authorities have discovered that the servers of a large Chinese platform for streaming pirated content are located on American soil.

Three friends exult in front of a TV / Credit: 123rf

The director of UnblockTech, a Chinese maker of pirated content streaming boxes, has been arrested by Taiwanese authorities. If its lockdown makes it impossible to access this very popular service from China or Taiwan, it remains available elsewhere. Indeed, the company’s servers are mainly based in the United States.

The UBox, UnblockTech’s IPTV box equips nearly a third of homes in the Republic of China. It provides access to thousands of hours of content from 72 legal streaming services. After having long shown complacency towards pirates, Taipei began to crack down shortly after the Tokyo Olympics.

Hollywood complains about Chinese hackers, but the servers are located in the United States

Driven by complaints from Hollywood studios, and by scandals associating public figures with illegal streaming, the authorities have arrested the head of this large IPTV service for “massive copyright infringement”. He is accused of having obtained copyrighted films and television programs and having illegally “restreamed” them through servers hosted abroad, in the United States, in this case. This is a bit of a stain, when we know that Washington wants to be irreproachable in the fight against piracy and frequently publishes long lists of sites that break the law.

The “punch” operations carried out in Taiwan have had no almost no echo in the land of Uncle Sam, yet the first to be affected by content theft. According to Torrent Freak in fact, “the network resources enabling mass piracy in Taiwan and of which the American rights holders complain are directly linked to companies in the United States”, Cloudflare and FDCServers, in this case. Ironically enough, if the UBox services are no longer accessible from Chinese IPs, they are still active on US addresses.

Source : Torrent Freak

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