Pirates of the Amazon. You must see this...

Ouch! The so-called Pirates of the Amazon have released a Firefox add-on which automatically searches the infamous torrent site The Pirate Bay for CDs & DVDs you're currently viewing on Amazon.com.

Here's a regular Amazon page, i.e. without the add-on:

Here's the same page with the add-on:

A quick run with Wireshark reveals that the add-on issues the following HTTP request to thepiratebay.org:

GET /s/?q=%22Twilight_of_the_Thunder_God%22&audio=on&searchTitle=on&page=0&orderby=7

This is a simple invokation of their search engine, which generates this page (not displayed by the browser, but parsed by the add-on):











Based on this, the add-on knows that the product is indeed available on the Pirate Bay. It then embeds the "Download 4 free" image in the original Amazon page (it's quite likely that Greasemonkey is used for this).

The image is linked to the first torrent file on the page, i.e. the one with the highest number of seeders.

Nice and simple. Any questions?

The Pirates of the Amazon website is currently down, but they have proven their point. No hacking involved, just clever use of Firefox extensions...

PS: don't ask me for the add-on. This stuff is certainly illegal and is simply demonstrated for informational purposes. My point is: we need multiple legal offers that are simple, non-intrusive and reasonably priced. I believe Amazon is going in the right direction (as explained in yesterday's post) but piracy is here to stay. Right or wrong, that's the way it is.