Allpeers is a revolutionary Firefox extension that let you share pictures, music and videos within Firefox. The extension makes it possible to share pictures, music and video’s within Firefox. The extension is currently in the Beta-testing phase. Dmitri Popov, one of the Allpeers Beta testers wrote a reviewed the extension om NewsForge. He concludes: there [...]
Piratebay’s hosting company PRQ had demanded the return of both paperwork and computer equipment seized by police However the Stockholm District Court ruled that they stay with the police a little longer, and prosecutor HÃ¥kan Roswall defended this by comparing The Piratebay and the Bureau of Piracy (PiratbyrÃ¥n) with terrorists.
A Swedish company is offering insurance against p2p lawsuits and fines. And it’s pretty cheap actually, just $19 US Dollars per year. So if you get in trouble with the MPAA or the RIAA, your insurance company will handle the bills for you. Now this is a great idea. And on top of paying your [...]
The police will not return the Piratebay servers that were raided last month. The servers were seized after the US government threatened Sweden According to the local, Internet hosting company PRQ had demanded the return of both paperwork and computer equipment seized by police, saying that the material had no significance for the investigation and [...]
The Grokster decision made filesharing companies vulnerable. The court ruled that they can be sued if they encourage people to share copyrighted material was a great victory for Hollywood, and was believed to be the end of filesharing by some. But now, one year later, peer-to-peer technologies flourish more than ever. P2P traffic is rapidly [...]
BitTorrent inc. is developing a video download website to distribute movies online. They are still negotiating with several movie studio’s, but today they selected GNi to “host” their online Video Store. GNi signed an agreement with BitTorrent Inc., to provide an IP transit Internet address for streaming videos at one gigabit per second. GNi’s Service [...]
Warner Bros is using a Guba, company specializing in online pornography searches, to sell its DRM-loaded Warner movies and TV online. “You may well know that some of the best porn gets circulated on newsgroups,” says Supervert. But, “You need a news reader, and often you miss some of the best posts, or you end [...]
Is the MPAA is losing the “war on piracy”? Hollywood lost 6.1 billion according to reasearch by the MPAA, 75% higher than they expected. Although The DVD sniffin Dogs “Lucky and Flo” help a little bit, the pirates are on the loose. The MPAA claimes “major victories” in their war against piracy but if you [...]
BitTorrent can be fun, as long as you get decent speeds. Not satisfied with your current speeds? These suggestions might help to optimize your download pleasure
Sealand is on fire. The self-proclaimed safe haven for everything that’s forbidden elsewhere suffered from a fire, probably caused by a generator. Firefighters attacked the fire from a ship, but it is unknown if they succeeded and what the damage is. Sealand and it’s hosting company havenco have no regulations concerning copyright, patents, libel, restrictions [...]
A month ago Torrentspy sued the MPAA because an alleged hacker, hired by the MPAA, retrieved private information from the BitTorrent indexer. But according to Cnet Robert Anderson (the hacker) is now helping Torrentspy to fight the MPAA. Among the claims by Valence Media (Torrentspy) is that as part of its attempt to gather information [...]
BitTorrent just released version 4.20. The new version gives ISP’s a “customer friendly” alternative to manage the increasing bandwidth need that is caused by BitTorrent traffic; caching traffic instead of throttling or shaping. In an attempt to decrease the bandwidth generated by BitTorrent traffic, ISP’s started to shape and throttle BitTorrent traffic on their networks. [...]
The IFPI announced a new round of lawsuits last May, but once again it is shown that their threats sort little effect. Pirates are not easily scared and p2p traffic continues to grow. Ipoque studied survey anonymized date supplied by some large German network operators and concludes: Illegal P2P file sharing has had tremendous effects [...]
Limewire, one of the most popular filesharing applications just released V 4.12 and announced that limewire will support .torrent downloads in the near future.
Hollywood, The MPAA and the US government demanded action from the Swedish government. If Sweden decided not to give in to their wishes the US would impose trade sanctions.
Say what you will about those dry-land pirates created by the entertainment cartels, but they’re driving a number of cottage industries. There’s a whole slew of companies trying to dream up ways to stop people from freely using CDs and DVDs they’ve bought and paid for, and let’s not forget all those high-priced lawyers getting [...]
Today Mininova announced that they banned 3652 spam/scammers. Fake files, “free stuff”, and poker deals; Torrent sites are a great tool to spam and scam “innocent Pirates”. Some time after we started mininova there were a few people that thought that uploading spam torrents would be a good idea to advertise their “GET A FREE [...]
Sab but true. What’s next? What were they actually looking for? *** For those of you who haven’t followed the Swedish news, a quite funny (or tragic) thing has surfaced: Apparently, on several different occasions, MPAAs Swedish lawyers hired a private eye to stalk me! This must’ve been very entertaining for the poor Tex Murphy [...]
I came across an awful “top torrent site” list yesterday so I decided to make my own. So Here it is, TorrentFreak’s one and only top torrent sites + firefox search plugins, June 2006. No Login required.
Teeth Are Not for Biting, Hands Are Not for Hitting, Feet Are Not for Kicking, and Words Are Not for Hurting. It’s all about ethics. Filesharing is also ILLEGAL, just like murder. If you share files, you are a pirate! Educate the childeren, it’s not too late! Check out the latest part in the X [...]
The rumor that the MPAA pressured Sweden to take down the Piratebay is not new, but there’s finally some proof. Here’s a letter that the MPAA sent to Sweden’s state secretary this March. Clearly the complaints that we filed on behalf of our members in 2004 and 2005 with the Police in Stockholm and Gothenborg [...]
The Pirate leaders are quite talkative today. First the US Pirate leader, now the leader of Sweden’s piratpartiet.
Newnova.org, the torrent site based on the famous suprnova.org code is gone. Suprnova.org’s successor launched in October 2005, but they never came near the popularity of suprnova, or the other big players in the torrent scene. Both the newnova site and forums now point to David Stanley’s freelance website design. It is likely that this [...]
Two weeks ago, in the aftermath of the Piratebay raid, the US equivalent of the Swedish pirate party “piratpartiet” was founded.
The rumor goes that Apple is currently working out a deal with some major players in the movie bussiness to start a movie download store. According to an article in Variety Apple CEO Steve Jobs wants the movies to be $9.99, but the Studio’s are giving him a hard time: Studios have resisted Jobs’ initial [...]
Sweden again. The Filesharing debate continues, and the Pirate’s vote might be an important one in the upcoming election. Justice minister Thomas Bodström is flirting openly with filesharers, while the Pirate Party is getting bigger and bigger. Lars Ilshammar, an information-technology historian who recently suggested Sweden to impose a fee similar to the one proposed [...]
BitTorrent offers free high-res movie downloads of “The Duke City Shootout Film” Festival. All 42 movies will be available for free. The 7th annual Duke City Shootout starts June 21st, fresh movies will be added on a daily basis. But there’s more, all previous winners of “the world’s strangest little film festival” are available at [...]
Could this be our future? Stop the MPAA and RIAA before it’s too late. Support the battle! Donate and send a letter (or more) to Congress. Could this be our future? Stop the MPAA and RIAA before it’s too late. Support the battle! Donate and send a letter (or more) to Congress.
Apparently, Sweden’s crime rate is so low it can afford to allocate national police resources to the MPAA.
The Dutch court ruled that the MP3 search engine “zoekmp3.nl” is infringing copyright. This is a remarkable ruling, since none of the files that the search engine is linking to are actually hosted at zoekmp3′s servers. Initially the lower court decided that it was not illegal to link to illegal files, however, the appeal court [...]
Vistatorrent.com received the well known “cease and desist” letter from Microsoft. Apparently they are still planning to take down the internet. Although the demand for Microsoft’s second Vista Beta is extremely high, Microsoft refused to release a torrent. They stated: There are legal and privacy issues which unfortunately make that not an option for Microsoft [...]
It looks like The Piratebay is back home again. The Piratebay had to move because the Swedish police raided their servers. But, after a short stay in The Netherlands the torrent tracker returned to their provider “PRQ” in Sweden. At least, that’s what the ip info tells us. Another point of interest is the “reverse [...]
In a previous article I pointed to the article in Wired with some tips and tricks to watch the world cup online. But it seems that quite a lot of people still have problems watching world cup streams online. Don’t worry, there’s another p2p world cup stream player, and it’s easier to use. People from [...]
Sweden may add charges to broadband subscriptions to, “compensate music and film companies for the downloading of their work, while legalizing the downloading of copyright-protected material,” The Local quotes justice minister Thomas Bodström as saying. And in the process, it might drop the ban on file sharing, it states, going on: “Bodström told Sydsvenskan that [...]
75% of the young voters in Sweden support filesharing, even if it’s illegal, according to a recent survey. This indicates that filesharing is going to be a hot topic in the coming elections. Over 75 percent of those asked said it was OK to download illegally from the Internet, said the survey. These figures indicate [...]
The demand for Microsoft’s second Vista Beta is so high that they have to limit the bandwidth to prevent the internet from collapsing (not my words). However, they can’t release it over BitTorrent for some vague reason. At least, according to a chat Chris Pirillo had with MS Mindshare Manager Aaron Coldiron. Coldiron said: We [...]
Breaking File-sharing, Copyright and Privacy News
Newsnight interviewed Dan Glickman (MPAA) and John Perry Barlow (EFF), to hear what they got to say about each other. It’s pretty amusing. Barlow was the songwriter of “The Grateful Dead”, advising its fans to share. He’s also a co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Here’s what Barlow has to say about the MPAA: “These [...]
Wired published an article on how to watch the World Cup on your PC. Over 750million people watch the World Cup on TV, but the article can be useful in case your TV breaks down, or if you’re stuck behind your desk.
The Football World Cup started yesterday in Germany. The MPAA has a great sense of timing and announced yesterday that they “hired” the footie legend Pelé, to score a goal against piracy. Pelé, the Brazilian legend, worked with the MPAA before in 2004, when his very own movie “pele forever” was pirated and distributed among [...]
The US now has its very own Pirate Party. The party is founded by Brent Allison, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Georgia, inspired by the Swedish pirate party “piratpartiet”. The pirate party has three issues on its agenda, one of these is to reform copyright law: The official aim of the copyright system [...]
P2Pnet owner Jon Newton and four anonymous commenters are facing a libel suit filed by Sharman Networks and Kazaa CEO Nikki Hemming. Apparently they were quite upset by the words of some anonymous commenters in a P2Pnet post on swimming pool incident. It sounds absurd, but it’s true. As if Kazaa isn’t evil enough as [...]
The PocketPacket project (or PPP) is a simple idea aimed at taking p2p sharing to street level, while putting out the word on open source and free culture. Anyone who’s used bit torrent has taken something and given it pack to people they will never meet. PPP is all about simplifying, and personalizing that act. [...]
Online media outlets like Google Video and Youtube have become extremely popular over the last year. However, they miss one thing.. BitTorrent. But that’s about to change. A (small) team of dedicated designers and coders is working on a huge project. Their aim is to scrape every online media file (audio and video), index these [...]
A lot of fuss these days about The Piratebay raid, but nobody ever mentioned anything about seedler.org. Seedler, another BitTorrent site hosted at PRQ, has been taken down as collateral damage. No word from them ever since… Seedler started their BitTorrent site about a year ago and became quite popular within the next few months, [...]
WizBit is a BitTorrent client for symbian S60 smartphones, using python. WizBit is not fully functional yet but David Hulbert, the developer of the Mobile BitTorrent client is planning to release the first major release on July 7.
Fredrik Neij from the piratebay held a speech at the successful pirate demonstration yesterday. He responded to the Piratebay raid stating: “AntipiratbyrÃ¥n, Bush, Bodström, or whoever gave the order for this pathetic attempt at an attack , give it up, and stop messing with the internet! It’s a battle you will not win!”. Full speech: [...]
Rasmus Fleischer form the Swedish pro-piracy organization PiratbyrÃ¥n gave a talk at the Reboot8 conference., he discussed copyright issues and PiratbyrÃ¥n thoughts and vision. The Reboot8 conference is “a journey into the interconnectedness of creation, participation, values, openness, decentralization, collaboration, complexity, technology, p2p, humanities, connectedness and many more areas”. The Grey Commons Intro There has [...]
The Piratebay moved their servers to the Netherlands and is (almost) fully functional. They changed the title of the BitTorrent tracker to “The Police Bay”.
The Swedish Pirate Party and PiratbyrÃ¥n are organizing a protest demonstration in Stockholm and Göteborg on Sathurday (tomorrow). The protests are starting at at 3pm (Stockholm) and 4.30pm (Göteborg) local time. Marcin de Kaminski from PiratbyrÃ¥n stated: “This is no longer about just a raid on the Pirate Bay, but has become a major justice [...]
The website of the Swedish police was forced to go offline after a DOS attack. Although it is still unclear who initiated the attacks, the link between this incident and the raid on the Pirate Bay seems obvious.
Hollywood’s MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) has filed lawsuits against 22 web sites it says allow people to download movies without authorization. The sites – in New York, Delaware, Massachusetts, Florida and Texas – include allmoviedownloads.com; Flixks.net; freedvddirect.com; mykazaa.com; and, unlimiteddownloads.com. They typically charge a subscription fee of anywhere from $20 for a three [...]
The Piratebay was raided by the Swedish police yesterday. Today we read that the site will be back within two days, what reminds me of the trick they pulled off last year. In May 2005 all major media outlets reported that The Piratebay was taken down by Swedish anti-piracy organisations. However, that was a hoax, [...]
Even more news...
Freedom of speech is a highly valued commodity, but should people be allowed to say whatever...
An anti-piracy system present in all official Blu-ray players since 2012 has received a fresh update...
One of the main reasons why people turn to piracy is the lack of legal alternatives....
Last year an Internet user known as El Nomeo leaked version 3.70 of Sony’s Playstation3 SDK...
Carrier-Grade Network Address Translation is a network mechanism through which many Internet subscribers can share the...
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.
More than a year ago TorrentFreak took a look at a selection of the web’s VPN...
Continuing a long-standing New Year's tradition, today we present an up-to-date list of the world's most-visited...
Last month it became apparent that not all VPN providers live up to their marketing after...
Privacy is important on the Internet, and BitTorrent users are certainly not excluded. Already, hundreds of...
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...