Influential technology blog TechCrunch appears to be promoting time4popcorn, which is a fork of Popcorn Time that is considered “dangerous” to download, as it could potentially open up your entire machine to hackers.
Popcorn Time lets anyone stream their favourite TV shows and films through torrents, making the service a big headache for Hollywood as shutting down Bittorrent swarms is essentially impossible. The question as to whether this pressure from piracy is good at pushing for new business models is for another time, but with a pretty UI, Popcorn Time is a piracy-fuelled NetFlix competitor that should have the industry worried. And they are.
After pressure from the MPAA, the original creators of Popcorn Time left the project, but being open source, new developers have taken over the reigns and development continues, both with the mainline software and a number of forks, just as with any other popular open source project.
One of these forks has been created by a shady bunch of individuals, and worryingly pulls all its HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files from a central server. This may be a bug, but otherwise the software is almost identical to the mainline software, and more worryingly this could mean that popcorn4time users can be traced. Even worse, the HTML, CSS, and JS can be changed at any moment, meaning that users running the software may find themselves with malicious code remotely installed onto their computers, which could then do everything from steal personal details to wipe hard drives.
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