For the first time, a ‘cracked’ Blu-Ray movie has been uploaded to BitTorrent. And no, it’s not that ‘Vivid’ title that the TWiT hosts seem to be oh so familiar with. It’s just the opposite. The first Blu-Ray movie on BitTorrent is the children’s animation flick, Ice Age 2.
The Pirate Bay is removing the Ads for Bitroll and Torrent101, two malicious BitTorrent clients. These clients promise ‘high speeds downloads’, but all they do is install malware, and hijack your browser.
Last year the Dutch tried to tax all MP3 players, but that proposal didn’t make it into law. But not to worry, they have other brilliant ideas. Earlier this week, Dutch politicians suggested that it might be a good idea to tax Internet traffic, and use this money to compensate the music industry. This, under the condition that DRM is abandoned, and people can’t be charged for downloads. Say what?
A large Polish pay-torrent site by the name of Torrenty.org recklessly exposed the IP addresses of its users, most of whom are thought to be sharing copyrighted files.
The MPAA, RIAA and several anti-piracy organizations are constantly trying to trap people into downloading fake torrents. These torrents are hosted on trackers that are setup to collect IP addresses of all the ‘pirates’ who try to download these files.
The Business Software Alliance, an organisation similar to the RIAA, is reportedly monitoring BitTorrent traffic in the UK. The software trade group that represents major vendors like Adobe, Microsoft and Symantec has contacted UK ISP Pipex with harvested IP addresses of its customers.
This week’s most popular DVDrips distributed over BitTorrent.
Charlie is back!!! Still recovering, but at least he gave it a try… Here’s TorrentPod episode 22.
Digital Life America, a unit of the Solutions Research Group, has found that out of the 32 million Americans who have downloaded at least 1 movie from the Internet, 80 percent have done so over P2P.
BitTorrent president and co-founder Ashwin Navin said in an interview yesterday that third-party products like the recently announced ‘Netgear Entertainment Box’, together with the upcoming BitTorrent Video Store, have the potential to knock out competitive products that Apple and Microsoft are currently developing.
Gottfrid “Anakata” and Peter “Brokep” from the Pirate Bay took place in Computer Swedens “hot seat” this week, where the readers asked them questions (Swedish) about their income, copyright infringement, Sealand and more. We translated the interview for all The Pirate Bay fans outside Sweden.
The Pirate Bay, one of the most popular BitTorrent sites on the Internet, posted some interesting stats. At the moment 53 .torrent files are downloaded from The Pirate Bay every second, which adds up to 4,579,200 torrents a day.
The self-acclaimed guru of IPTV, Mark Cuban claims that P2P, and more specifically, BitTorrent is doomed. Apparently, “conflicting clients”, lack of knowledge, limited Internet plans, and “bandwidth premiums” are going to be jointly responsible for the death of BitTorrent.
The popular BitTorrent search engine Isohunt is back online, a week after its ISP decided to pull the plug.
The Pirate Bay, Torrentspy and mininova have entered the top 200 most popular websites on the Internet. The recent boost in traffic was caused by the downtime that Isohunt, another popular BitTorrent site is currently suffering.
Grooveshark is yet another attempt by a company to legalise the sharing of copyrighted music online. The upcoming service will be completely web based, and make use of Peer-to-Peer technology for the distribution of content.
Torrent101 and Bitroll are two relatively new BitTorrent clients that can seriously damage your computer. The worst thing about it is that popular sites like Torrentspy, Torrentscan, and even The Pirate Bay display ads for them.
One of the most popular and prolific filesharing news sites, p2pnet.net is up for sale. In a post on the site, Canadian owner Jon writes that he no longer has the time and money to run p2pnet.net. We were lucky enough to get an exclusive interview with him.
This week’s most popular DVDrips distributed over BitTorrent.
His Royal Highness Prince Michael of Sealand said in an interview with ‘CBC The Hour’ that buying Sealand is probably a good way to circumvent international copyright law, but that he won’t sell sealand to the Pirate Bay.
We had the chance to talk to Bram Cohen, the inventor of BitTorrent and the co-founder if BitTorrent Inc. He goes into detail about the recent the acquisition of uTorrent, how to deal with encrypting ISPs, a streamable version of BitTorrent, BitTorrent’s arrangement with the MPAA, and much more.
The Pirate Bay has made its intentions of purchasing a country quite clear. Apparently, negotiations with Sealand are still under way. But they aren’t just looking at Sealand, but a number of other ‘micronations’ as well.
Isohunt.com, one of the most popular BitTorrent search engines was taken offline by its ISP. The takedown is most likely related to the lawsuit initiated by the MPAA last year.
BitThief, the BitTorrent client that downloads torrents without uploading is spying on its users. Apparently the client is not only cheating on the BitTorrent community, it could also be a potential risk for the leechers that use the client.
I am proud to announce TorrentFreak’s new look. It should be running smoothly, but feel free to drop a comment if you catch a bug.
The HD-DVD has been cracked, and high definition content is now being distributed freely over BitTorrent. We all knew this would happen sooner or later, looks it was “sooner”. The first HD-DVD to be uploaded to BitTorrent is Serenity, the Firefly movie.
BitTorrent is hot, Poker is hot, so a combination of both should be a guaranteed success.
Aye, Me hearties, we have a forum now. It will be officially ‘launched’ next week, together with our beautiful redesign, but I’m sending out some invites to the people who can’t wait. Interested in a sneak peak? Drop me a line.
This week’s most popular DVDrips distributed over BitTorrent.
BitTorrent Inc president and co-founder, Ashwin Navin says that iTunes’ DRM is “a time bomb waiting to happen,” and that it will inspire people to pirate content. The irony is that his company is about to launch a video store that heavily implements Microsoft’s Windows DRM.
TorrentFreak is proud to present TorrentPod episode 21.
The Pirate Bay together with the ACFI have worked out a plan to buy the micronation of Sealand. Future citizens of this country can look forward to high speed Internet and the absence of copyright laws.
It is no secret that the MPAA and other anti-piracy organizations track down alleged pirates by uploading fake torrents. Up until now it was always unclear where those files came from, and how to identify them.
It turns out that Wal-Mart is running targeted banner campaigns on The Pirate Bay to promote their DVDs. They hereby contribute to the estimated $75,000 in ad revenues the Pirate Bay generates every month.
BitTorrent continues to expand beyond the computer. Today, the Taiwanese company IAdea announced that BitTorrent optimized microprocessors will become available soon. This makes it relatively easy to add BitTorrent support to other consumer electronics devices.
The 45 minute talk by Bloomberg including the iPhone introduction has been uploaded to BitTorrent. Instead of loading up Apple’s servers and taking them down like last year, it would be smarter to download the torrent.
In a recent interview with the UK’s Sunday Times, Gottfrid Svartholm, one of the co-founders of The Pirate Bay calls the MPAA a bunch of “rabid, obsessed lunatics.”
Mininova, one of the most popular BitTorrent search engines just passed the 1 billion torrent downloads mark. We had the chance to do an exclusive interview with Niek, one of the founders of mininova.
BitTornado developer John Hoffman, better known as Shad0w, decided to ban BitComet users from accessing his client. Shad0w says that BitComet is gaming the system and stealing precious bandwidth, which results in slower speeds for all non-Bitcomet users.
Episode 1 of the highly anticipated 6th season of “24″ has been leaked onto BitTorrent, even Jack Bauer couldn’t stop it. For those unlucky chaps who don’t know, 24 is the wildly popular TV show that has fans the world over dying for each new episode.
A Dutch judge ruled that ISP ‘KPN’ has to hand over the name and address of the admin of dutchtorrent.org to the Piracy watchdog BREIN. Dutchtorrent.org is one of the smaller BitTorrent sites, hosted on a private ADSL connection.
This week’s most popular DVDrips distributed over BitTorrent.
TorrentFreak is proud to present TorrentPod episode 20 … have fun..
There are many ways to remotely initiate BitTorrent downloads, but most are complicated and require tweaking. Here’s an easy way to remotely download torrents with only an instant messaging application and a BitTorrent client.
BitThief is a BitTorrent client developed by the Computer Engineering and Networks Laboratory in Zurich that manages to download torrents without uploading. Overall the downloads rates are a bit slower than with other clients, but on well-seeded torrents the performance of BitThief is comparable to any other client.
BitTyrant is a new “selfish” BitTorrent client based on Azureus. The developers claim that it speeds up downloads by up to 70% by connecting to the peers that have high upload speeds, and peers that give you the best send / receive ratio.
Torrentspy ended 2006 as the most popular BitTorrent site in terms of traffic. Mininova settled in second place this year. Last year’s winner, The Pirate bay, ended up in third place.
In a recent interview with InfoWorld, the co-founder of BitTorrent Inc, Ashwin Navin made an interesting statement, one we just couldn’t help but question. He says BitTorrent.com filters out illegal content.
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...
RUTracker, Russia’s largest BitTorrent tracker, has been dealing with the effects of a DDoS attack over...
A coalition of 70 groups, including Reddit and WordPress, are asking Congress to stop working on...
In the aftermath of the MegaUpload shutdown, file-hosting sites continue to change their services. After Uploaded.to,...
In the wake of the Megaupload raids and attacks on domains in the US and elsewhere,...
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...