It’s been a year since mininova started and they finally reached the no1 spot of all torrent sites. There has an ongoing battle for the first place over the past three months between torrentspy, the piratebay and mininova. However it seems that mininova is definitely going to take the lead. If you take a look [...]
Because I sometimes implicitly assume that everybody is completely familiar with the BitTorrent jargon. I decided to make a little BitTorrent dictionary to explain some of the nerdy stuff. I hope this hope this is useful to some of you.
Torrentspy, one of the biggest BitTorrent search engines, filed a “motion to dismiss” the lawsuit initiated by the MPAA a month ago. Torrentspy is accused of “supporting” copyright infringement. However, torrentspy reacted to these accusations saying that everything they do, Google can do to… and even better.
Germany just agreed on a new law that makes it possible to put downloaders behind bars for two years. This is if you use the movie for personal use, commercial downloaders face up to five years in prison. Germany is considered to be one of the leading filesharing counties in Europe so this law will [...]
Two days ago we reported that NiteShdw, one of the MPAA’s latest targets, was planning to settle the case without too much damage. However, the MPAA is not willing yo cooperate and demands at least $10.000 from the owner of the relatively small BitTorrent site. NiteShdw’s admin says: Ongoing discussions with the MPAA’s lawyers are [...]
Michael Geist’s interpretation of a recent study on how downloading affects the music bussiness caused quite some controversy. Geist concluded from the study that filesharing does not hurt the record industry. P2Pnet interviewed Geist, they discuss several p2p related issues and it seems that Geist is a fan of BitTorrent. Dr Michael Geist has become [...]
tvRSS just released some extra features that makes it easier to find the latest episodes of your favorite TV-show. They optimized their search options, and support “search based rss feeds”. This makes it easy for anyone to create a personalized TV-torrent feed. This means you can have all your favorite TV-torrents in one feed.
The CRIA (Canadian Record Industry Association) did a study on the effects of downloading on record sales. Interestingly enough, they found that downloaders buy more music that non-downloaders. Michael Geist went through the complete study report and concluded: In summary, CRIA’s own research now concludes that P2P downloading constitutes less than one-third of the music [...]
It’s almost a month after the MPAA targeted 5 of the bigger torrent sites. In the meanwhile Isohunt has been planning to fight the MPAA and is currently raising money to do so. Niteshdw on the other hand doesn’t have the money to fight and tries to settle without taking too much damage. The official [...]
Torrents are great, they are the best way to share large files with your friends, or even with people you don’t know at all. But surprisingly enough, not many people create torrents when they need to share something. I have “a lot of” friends who know how to download torrents, but when they need to send me their latest 200MB vacation picture collection, they ask me to “get on msn”.
Always funny to see how people get here. Here are some highlights of the past day.
Amazon S3, short for “simple storage service” is a cheap way to store and download data from anywhere on the web. Storing data is cheap, $0.15 per GB a Month, and downloading data costs $0.20 per GB. Sounds like a great service, S3 allows you to uload files as big as 5GB. And the greatest [...]
Podtropoplis is the leading Ipod torrent site. Like they say “its grown from camp to village to bustling metropolis in no time”. Ipod formatted torrents are getting more and more popular every day, so there sure is a market for these content specific sites. Podtropolis is providing the service for a while now and its [...]
People who think that anti-piracy campaigns are something new are wrong. Back in 1992 they had their own DRM, if you tried to “copy a floppy” back then, you were presented with a 10 minute pro-copyright / anti-piracy lecture by the SPA. Read More at WikiPedia The rap:, by MC Hart Did I hear you [...]
Torrentspy, one of the biggest torrent sites out there “lost” their TV and Movie directory. This obviously makes it harder for people to browse through the torrent listing and find the files they want. The categories in question are replaced by a more general “video” directory. And categories like DVD-screener, Telecine and Cam are totally gone.
The Dutch pubic TV broadcasting channels (omroep.nl) are going share TV shows using BitTorrent. The deal was announced earlier today on a workshop on P2P TV. They are going to experiment with the new “social” BitTorrent client called Tribler. Johan Pauwelse (tribler) and William Valkenburg (omroep.nl) shaking hands Johan Pauwelse, one of Triblers developers said [...]
Peer to Peer traffic is increasing according to Cachelogics David Ferguson. Ferguson presented some interesting data during a workshop on P2P TV hosted by Creative Commons earlier today. Tim Kuik, head of Brein, the Dutch anti-piracy organization that took down 6 BitTorrent sites earlier this week listened carefully.
You probably never expected it but even George Bush has his personal torrent site. The rumor is that he got interested in BitTorrent when Bono gave him a new Ipod. George likes to “shuffle the shuffle” and calls it “pretty high tech stuff”. Check out George and his Ipod Bush: Beach Boys, Beatles, let’s see, [...]
Azureus just released a brand new version. Azureus is still SourceForge’s most active project, and in the top 3 of most downloaded utilities. There are no new gadgets, primarily bugfixes and performance improvements. including: Encryption bug fix Faster crash recovery hashing Reduced the # of windows popping up at once on first run after installation [...]
Tribler is a new BitTorrent client that adds a social layer on top of the regular features. Tribler allows you to create groups, friends and it supports tags and profiles. The official release of this Social BitTorrent client is tomorrow, but everyone is free to grab a test version from tribler.org. This first version is [...]
Allpeers is a revolutionary Firefox extension that let you share pictures, music and videos within Firefox. There’s no public BETA yet, but Rocketboom went to Prague to get some answers and a demonstration of how it works. It’s clearly not vaporware. To put it simple, Allpeers combines BitTorrent, buddy lists, tagging and easy sharing in [...]
Two weeks ago the deal between PeerFactor and the uTorrent developer Ludvig Strigeus caused quite some controversy in the p2p and BitTorrent scene. This is mainly because PeerFactor is known for their Peer-against-Peer and other anti-piracy work. However, they take another route now. focusing on improving legitimate filesharing techniques. Today p2pnet’s Alex H did an [...]
Brein, the Dutch anti-piracy organization has taken down 6 dutch torrentsites. Among these sites is Dutchnova, a torrentsite with 25.000 members. Brein gave the sites a choice: admit you infringe copyright and give us all the information about your members or we will sue you. These threatening and intimidating talk seems to work, although Brein [...]
Thanks to Petter Nilsson, a candidate of the Swedish TV show Toppkandidaterna (Top candidates), the Piratebay just won over 6000$. Petter Nilsson said earlier that he would donate over 6000$ (20% of the total prize money) to ThePiratebay if he won. The contestants of the show had to pretend they were a politician and convince [...]
Star Wreck, a movie directed by Timo Vuorensola backed up by a crew of independent film makers became a great success thanks to BitTorrent. The Star Trek parody, released under a Creative Commons lisence has been downloaded millions of times. The movie became Finland’s most popular movie within just a couple of months, and is [...]
Filesharing technologies like BitTorrent have a bad name to most people who are not using it. Take the BBC Newsnight report for example, or the MPAA rallies. However these enemies are at the same time BitTorrent’s greatest fans, and the ones who can make or save a lot of money with it. Today, legal implementations [...]
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Bitcomet, one of the most popular BitTorrent clients decided to follow Azureus and uTorrent by implementing PE/MSE encryption in its latest release. Bitcomet was the first BitTorrent client that supported protocol header encryption, the switch to the new encryption method means that the three biggest torrent clients out there are using compatible encryption methods, good [...]
Last week we had a story on the long-lost Penn and Teller videogame Desert Bus. The goal of the game is to drive a Bus through the desert from Tucson, Arizona to Las Vegas in real-time, without scenery, while the bus slightly veers to the right. It seems that a lot of people downloaded the [...]
And yet another uTorrent release. Version 1.5 has a couple of new features, some changes and a few bugfixes. Rss support is optimized and has some new configuration options. The controversial Protocol Encryption has been implemented, and last but not least, a new “easter egg”. Easter Egg: Go to the About screen and press the [...]
Allpeers is a revolutionary Firefox extension that makes it possible to share pictures, music and video’s within Firefox. According to Red Herring allpeers has received a first round of funding from two venture capital firms that backed Skype. Red Herring:“AllPeers co-founder and CEO Cedric Maloux declined to disclose the amount of funding from Mangrove Capital [...]
Ross Cohen, chief technology at BitTorrent inc. and BitTorrent founder Bram Cohen’s brother “has left the building” according to gigaom. Apparently they couldn’t get along anymore. What I heard was that there was some nudging by brother and Bit Torrent founder, Bram Cohen. I popped an email to the company’s director of communications, Lily Lin, [...]
last night the Oscar winners were announced
Bram Cohen, the founder of BitTorrent will be at the next Python Convention (PyCon), and python is taking questions. They can’t guarantee that any of your questions will be asked, but they will doubtless be helpful to the interviewer (Steve Holden). If you want to suggest any questions for Bram (Python related), you can add [...]
Here’s an analysis of the popularity/market-share of the various TV release groups. The sample data was taken from all the eztv releases since June 5, 2005 up to today March 6, 2006. This totals 1728 releases. Below is a pie graph showing the market share of the 15 most popular release groups. Market Share (cte) [...]
With the uprise of digital cinema, movie companies are looking into different ways to distribute digital movies. One of the best alternatives is obviously BitTorrent. Using BitTorrent to distribute digital movies will reduce distribution costs to nearly 0$.
I just bumped into a video of some guy singing about torrents, rips, and ISO’s. The vocals could be better but he knows how to stroke the keys. The video is subtitled for those of you who are not really familiar with all the terms. The plottwist is brilliant.
PeerFactor and the uTorrent developer Ludvig Strigeus signed a six months experimental agreement. Their goal is to develop “new content distribution applications on the Web”. This is interesting because Peerfactor is known for their Peer-against-Peer and other anti-piracy work.
The Big Four record labels are fighting tooth and nail to kill the French decision to make it legal to share music and movies online. MPs, who’ve already voted once on the matter, will debate it again next week and if they confirm the earlier decision, turning it into law, France will become the first [...]
The Matrix ASCII is probably the oldest torrent out there. This text version of the original Matrix movie is now seeded for almost 778 days (with a short break in between). If you didn’t see it yet you should definitely check out this movie or one of the smaller samples. And keep it seeded.
Ronnie Apteker, a dotcom millionaire, one of the founders of South Africa’s largest corporate ISP, a movie producer, and sometimes a stand up comedian talks about his love for BitTorrent and e-mule. Finally someone from the other side who writes something positive about BitTorrent. Ronnie writes: So what is the nature of all this traffic? [...]
BitTorrent inc. is planning a video download website to distribute movies online. According to BitTorrent’s spokesman Lily Lin her company is currently negotiating with several content owners. This move is not really a big surprise after the announced collaboration with the MPAA and a british cable company. BitTorrent co-founder and President Ashwin Navin states: “We [...]
Desert bus is probably one of the best games ever. Unfortunately the game was never released, until now. 11 years after the planned release date Waxy is hosting a torrent for this mythical game. The game is part of a long-lost Penn and Teller videogame. The goal of the game is pretty straightforward. You have [...]
In Friday’s edition of BBC’s newsnight, BitTorrent is portrayed as the new evil that helps terrorists and pedophiles to do their “job” without being noticed. In a dramatic 4 minute report the public is led to believe that BitTorrent is a threat to (inter)national security. Unbelievable, see for yourself.
The latest news from around the web, not covered on the frontpage
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Below are TorrentFreak's most discussed articles of the past month. Join the discussion if you like.
Left Quote“The Pirate Bay has been one of the most important movements in Sweden for freedom of speech, working against corruption and censorship.
Peter Sunde Left Quote
A selection of some TorrentFreak's classics dug up from our archives.
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