CBC interviewed Gary Fung, the man behind Isohunt.com. Isohunt was recently sued by the MPAA, but planned to fight back. Gary is glad his voice is heard: I’m glad CBC gave me the opportunity to voice our stance, what we do and why the MPAA is after us. Media distributions are converging and decentralizing at [...]
The largest BitTorrent tracker on the net just got raided. The Swedish police took their servers to check whether they actually commit a crime or not. This is obviously a huge setback for BitTorrent pirates “safe haven”.
Hot on the heels of news that Sweden’s ThePirateBay.org is down comes MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) disinformation release, complete with a fantasy picture. And you know what they say about pictures. click to enlarge “The operators of The Pirate Bay have publicly ridiculed copyright holders and taunted law enforcement for years claiming immunity [...]
Ashwin Navin from BitTorrent inc. announced at the Cannes film festival that BitTorrent is working out deals with various Chinese movie and TV-companies. Navin hopes commercial distribution of movies and TV-shows in China will be up by the end of 2006. Navin said: “They’ve (Chinese movie and TV-companies) been very receptive. Everyone knows what BitTorrent [...]
BitTorrent is working on a new and improved version that will incorporate superseeding by cachelogics servers. This means that the content will be copied to cachelogic servers to dramatically increase the download speeds. Currently, “regular” BitTorrent is traffic is suffering from throttling ISP’s that claim that BitTorrent traffic is cluttering their pipes. However, this new [...]
Torrentspy is suing the MPAA because an alleged hacker, hired by the MPAA, retrieved private information from the BitTorrent indexer.
A bug in the popular torrentbits tracker code makes it extremely easy to increase your ratio on most private torrent sites. With HTTP analyser and Firefox you can increase your upload/download ratio pretty easy. Leeching without being recognized as a leecher. I guess you were expecting a link here? Too bad. People who want to [...]
Mininova now has over 400 million torrent downloads, nearly 16 months after it’s launch. Currently, mininova is the most popular torrent site, leaving the piratebay and torrentspy behind. At this very moment they’re even more popular than suprnova in the “old days“. And they continue to grow with over a million downloads per day.
More great examples of “legal” BitTorrent sites. Filesharing goes beyond piracy. Movies PublicDomainMovies StarWreck (star trek parody) Cactuses Star Wars Revelations “TV”-Shows MariposaHD (first HDTV show) NerdTV (TV for Nerds) The Scene Marcus hates his job Stageside Tech-TV — Legal Torrents * Games, Music and Software * Movies and Videos
BitTorrent is often associated with piracy and copyright theft. However, it’s not all bad. Check out these less controversial sites using BitTorrent.
Jon Newton at P2PNet.net is facing a libel suit. The details on the case remain unknown however. Well, curiosity got the better of me, so I went to the Province of British Coloumbia to search through their Court Services Online. It would appear that the plaintiff in this is Sharman Networks. Yes, Sharman Networks who [...]
BitTorrent is believed to be one of the fairest P2P protocols. The built in tit-for-tat mechanism makes sure that you get what you give. But there are several ways to cheat and exploit BitTorrent in order to increase your download speed. But how vulnerable is BitTorrent? Nikitas Liogkas, Robert Nelson, Eddie Kohler, Lixia Zhang from [...]
I will be spending the next 10 days on a deserted island, far away from any connection to the www. I’ve scheduled a couple of posts so there will be “a little action” while I’m gone. Hang in there, I will be back. Ernesto. — update 25-05 still on vacation. I rushed some posts from [...]
Trojan/Erazer-A is a new trojan that spreads through P2P networks. Apart from infecting your pc with malware and disabling anti-virus applications, it also actively deletes music, video’s and pictures from “shared folders’, used by p2p applications.
TIOTI, short for “tape it off the internet”, is about to enter the BETA stage. The first invites will be sent on May 25. We have a preview of some of the TIOTI goodness. Sign up for invites now. What is TIOTI? It’s a revolutionary approach to socialize and optimize your TV-torrent experience. TIOTI combines [...]
Burger King and Myspace join forces. They will start selling episodes of the popular TV-Show “24″. The first episodes of season 1 and 5 will be for free, just to warm the customers up, the other episodes will cost for $1.99 per download. They will advertise with the popular slogan: “Have it your way”. However, [...]
John Naughton wrote a great column about the announced cooperation between Warner and BitTorrent earlier this week. It’s a good thing that Hollywood is embracing BitTorrent, but not like this. The great thing about BitTorrent is that it has really important legitimate uses – ones that do not infringe copyright. If you want to distribute [...]
A couple of weeks ago we reported that BitTorrent.org is still indexing a lot of copyrighted material. Although they made a deal with the MPAA to ban illegal content, their policies do not differ from sites like Mininova or Torrentspy. BitTorrent spokeswoman Lily Lin confirmed to TorrentFreak Our MPAA arrangement is strictly about taking down [...]
The Piratebay is having some issues with their site at the moment. The tracker is unreachable at times, and the seed / leech info is not showing. The solution is: 1. Be patient, and wait till the tracker connects. 2. Don’t pay attention to the seed / leech info, just try the torrent to be [...]
Meet Lucky and Flo, the MPAA’s DVD sniffing dogs. They can’t tell if the DVD’s are illegal (yet), but they do smell if packages contain DVD’s. The two black Labradors are the newest tool in the MPAA’s rather unsuccesful “war on piracy”.
Snarf-it.org, the torrent site built on the remains of the Suprnovaforums is back. New owner, same torrents. snarf-it.org is now back online with it’s 300k torrent database and clean easy to use interface, no popups or sell out ads there. That however is the last time you will see any information from ourselves promoting it [...]
Ktorrent, a popular BitTorrent client for Linux now supports encryption. This makes Ktorrent the first alternative to Azureus for Linux users who suffer from throttling ISP’s. Protocol header encryption makes it harder for traffic shaping devices to recognize BitTorrent traffic, and should recover your bandwidth. Get Ktorrent over here.
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The Hong Kong movie industry won a case against four local ISP’s, making BitTorrent pirates easy targets. ISP’s must identify their customers if they download illegal material. According to Hong Kong Cable TV the ISP’s have three weeks to comply. The movie companies demanded the user info belonging to 49 IP addresses, but it’s likely [...]
Titaniumtorrents is a tracker dedicated to E3 video game media. Trailers, previews, interviews and more. Most of the trailers are in high def. Check it out
Warner Bros will announce today that it plans to sell movies and TV-shows online. They are going to use BitTorrent to distribute their content, again a huge step forward for BitTorrent.
Tribler, the “social” BitTorrent client is developing a personalized, tag-based navigation system for wikipedia multimedia content. By introducing a tag-based, BitTorrent enabled, wikipedia browser it is possible to add multimedia content to wikipedia. So the idea is: sharing knowledge, but also bandwidth. The p2p wikipedia browser makes it possible to add large multimedia files to [...]
Suprnova.org, once the biggest and most popular BitTorrent site on the net is for sale. Suprnova went offline 19 december 2004 and returned in 2005 as a P2P news site. Currently Suprnova still has pagerank 6 generating quite a lot of traffic. A year after the closedown, Sloncek, the brain behind the legendary torrent site [...]
The Queen Mother Hospital’s (Margate, UK) server was down for two days because it was stuffed with illegal music, movie and software downloads. While the server was down X-rays had to be processed using film. The sysadmin tried to regenerate some of the most vital data from the server, but some essential data had to [...]
Movie producer Steven Soderbergh said he is going to use BitTorrent to distrubute a short High Def movie. Soderbergh discussed the possibilities BitTorrent has for Hollywood together with the MPAA’s Dean Garfield and Ashwin Navin from BitTorrent at the Tribeca Film Festival. This is not the big breakthrough, but it’s a step in the right [...]
National Australia Bank and St George accidentally advertised on The Piratebay. The Bank first denied to advertise on world’s largest BitTorrent tracker, but later admitted the “mistake”. Last Friday a spokesman from NAB said: “I can say without a shadow of a doubt that we are definitely not advertising on that site. We are very [...]
The movie industry lost 6.1 billion according to a recent study by the MPAA, 75% higher than they expected. So it seems like the MPAA is losing “the war on piracy”. In the US alone the movie studio’s lost 1.3 billion in 2005. And it is even worse, these figures only account for the losses [...]
Slyck interviewed BitTorrent CEO Ashwin Navin. They talk about the future of BitTorrent, their cooperation with the MPAA, Azureus & uTorrent and a lot more. The edited Slyck version can be found here. — Tom: So what do you think one of the biggest misperceptions is from what you read, from what we were talking [...]
Times are changing. It’s just a matter of time before Hollywood’s first blockbuster will have its premiere online and in theatres at the same time. And BitTorrent will probably play a significant role in this “culture shock”. A great example of a successful BitTorrent release is the movie Star Wreck. This indie movie was released [...]
Jamendo is the number one source for free, creative commons licensed music. The site is growing rapidly, since the article we did on Jamendo three months ago it doubled its content, and it is certainly not the end. Jamendo recently reached the 1000 albums mark.
Bitcomet is trying to get to V1.0 as soon as possible. While the popular BitTorrent client only released 4 new versions in 2005 (0.57 – 0.60), it now releases three “brand new” versions in one month.
The idea is simple, Apple will include a torrent client in OS X. You will save Apple a lot of bandwidth by helping to distribute their software updates. Your reward: free goodies from the Itunes store. brilliant!. It’s a perfect example how both companies and users can benefit from BitTorrent. You will donate a little [...]
Opera released a 9.0 public beta version last week. The new and improved Opera browser now supports .torrent downloads. The question is: Do we really need BitTorrent support in a browser? First a quick review of Opera‘s BitTorrent support: Opening torrents If you click on a .torrent file, a window pops up asking you where [...]
The latest news from around the web, not covered on the frontpage
For years the RIAA has tried to convince the world that piracy is killing musicians. Supported...
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A coalition of 70 groups, including Reddit and WordPress, are asking Congress to stop working on...
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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.
Continuing a long-standing New Year's tradition, we present an up-to-date list of the world's most visited...
Privacy is important on the Internet, and BitTorrent users are certainly not excluded. Already, hundreds of...
With anti-piracy outfits and dubious law-firms policing BitTorrent swarms at an increasing rate, many Bittorrent users...
With the entertainment industries lobbying for increased powers to spy on BitTorrent users, many downloaders are...
BitTorrent can be fun, as long as you get decent speeds. Not satisfied with your current...