TorrentFreak

The notorious Pirate Bay BitTorrent tracker has reached yet another milestone as it serves more than 12 million peers. The site is also throwing down a challenge: They want every Pirate Bay peer to tell a friend - and get 20 million on the tracker soon.

A few days ago we reported that one of the star witnesses in The Pirate Bay case was hired by Warner Bros., one of the plaintiffs in the Pirate Bay case. Fishy at least, but it gets even worse. It now turns out that the job at Warner Bros is only temporary, and after 6 months he will return to his police job.

Last year TorrentFreak covered the TV-Shows application which allowed the user to subscribe to TV shows using BitTorrent. Some people are reporting that the app isn’t working for them so for those that don’t mind working at a solution, here is a tutorial to achieve the same, using freely available tools.

The top 10 most downloaded DVDrips on BitTorrent, “The Bank Job” tops the chart this week.

A large BitTorrent tracker dealing only in documentaries has been shutdown after an anti-piracy company wrongfully identified content being tracked by the site. The 150,000 member site, which has had just “one mildly upset” copyright-related email in 4 years of operation, is moving to a new host.

After a sneak peak and trial run last month, the what.cd team has finally made a semi-public release of the Gazelle tracker and site software, by doing its first large scale roll-out on its own site.

Data collected by the BitTorrent client Azureus shows that Comcast might only be the tip of the iceberg when it comes to BitTorrent throttling ISPs. Early findings show that customers from quite a few other Internet service providers experience an unusually high amount of TCP-resets.

The bassist and vocalist of the band Biohazard says that people who ’steal’ media by downloading it are “scumbags” and you better know that if he catches you doing it, he will happily “kick the shit out of you”. But the real problem, he says, are BitTorrent sites.

Thousands of private BitTorrent trackers using the popular TBDev code are vulnerable to hostile takeover. According to a security researcher, a successful execution of the exploit could result in the attacker gaining admin rights to the tracker. However, knowledge and a little care can mitigate the effects.

Police officer Jim Keyzer, the leader and key witness in the Pirate Bay investigation was recently employed by Warner Bros, one of the plaintiffs in the ongoing case against the Pirate Bay four. Undoubtedly, this will seriously hurt the credibility of the ongoing court case.

The filesharing documentary Steal This Film has been a great success. Yet, despite millions of downloads and a lot of support from the P2P community, they admit they haven’t yet covered the costs of producing STF II. There is hope though.