After the ephemeral success of Popcorn Time, several versions appeared that tried to continue their legacy, even using the same name to further confuse users. Since then anti-piracy organizations have directed their anger against these versions (also known as forks), although so far they have not achieved great results. The key is that Popcorn Time allows us to watch movies without downloading them, using P2P technology to avoid the use of a central server. However, an action taken yesterday has managed to render one of these versions unusable.
The server, the weak link
In particular, it is the version hosted on the domain Time4Popcorn.eu, which a few hours ago not only stopped being accessible, but even the program itself stopped working. How is that possible? Lets start by the beginning. It all started when EURID, the domain registration company, suspended it because it had suspicions that the information used to register the domain was inaccurate; everything indicates that the company was sneaky and it has requested the contact details from the domain owners, suspending it until then, a perhaps somewhat extreme measure. So developers have had no choice but to change domain, time4popcorn.com.
Therefore, the program was not available for a few hours although this has already been fixed thanks to the new domain. But why did it stop working for users who already had it downloaded? The problem is that, although Popcorn Time accesses movie files through P2P, the user interface (the list of available movies, for example) is obtained through the web server; when deleting the server, the interface could not load and the program was disabled. It is surprising that a project that focused on the impossibility of being stopped has fallen so easily for relying on a central server for such a basic function. However, the developers are aware of this and assure that the next version 5.0 will avoid this method. Meanwhile, all apps are being updated to access the new domain.
Source | TorrentFreak
