Google is a great tool to compare the popularity of searches in a similar niche. When the number of people searching for something goes up, it is often a sign of increased popularity. We take a look at the search volume for three popular BitTorrent clients, how this changed over time, and how it differs worldwide.
In June we wrote about TorrentRelay, a site which enabled anyone with a web-enabled device to download torrent without a BitTorrent client. A few months later, the site has evolved quite a bit. We take a look at the new site and the range of useful features that were added by the developer.
Indiana Gregg has become a well known name around the net, mainly for her contradictory, and self-obsessed rants regarding piracy. The Scottish singer and her producer husband are now going to try and cash in on that ‘net notoriety’ with a new site they claim will help the artists; the name, Kerchoonz.com
Today, Comcast officially announced a 250 GB cap, while threatening to disconnect users who exceed this limit more than once. Comcast is taking the heat once again, but they are not the only ISP that limits its users. Other ISPs, Qwest being one of them, have exactly the same policy – and the same threats.
After four years of operation, the private torrent site AradiTracker has been closed down by the administrators. After surviving ISP troubles exactly one year ago, fresh legal action against the site forced it to close yesterday and it is very unlikely to return.
The upcoming trial against ‘The Pirate Bay Four’ has been delayed and at its earliest will begin at the end of this year – maybe even next year. Stockholm District Court initially said that the trial would start by the end of the summer, but gathering damage claims and serving summons took longer than expected.
Some months back, Project Gazelle was launched. It was an attempt to build a new and improved BitTorrent tracker script. The ultimate goal is to produce a new framework for private torrent sites, faster than the common TB source, while being more secure from a code point of view, easier to modify, and more flexible.
Most people know Limewire as the application that can be used to download music for free, but earlier this year, the Limewire team opened up their very own music store. Starting at $0.27, the Limewire store offers high quality, DRM-free MP3s, and today they added 1.2 million tracks to their library.
Much to the disappointment of more than 100,000 users, Latvia’s largest BitTorrent tracker has been shut down by the authorities. Following a joint operation by Lativa’s Economic Police and a local IFPI-affiliated anti-piracy agency, two administrators were placed under arrest.
It might not come as a surprise when we tell you that the RIAA wants to turn the Internet into a virtual police state. Still, it’s quite scary to see what their “future Internet” would look like. Let’s take a closer look at the RIAA’s suggestions for the Anti-Piracy Trade Agreement Wishlist (ACTA).
Steve Knightley is one half of ‘Show of Hands’, an award-winning acoustic and folk duo from the UK. Steve says he is thankful to the people that pirate the band’s music and go out of their way to promote the band. In fact, he says the band utterly depends on them.
TV shows are by far the most wanted files via BitTorrent, and according to some, it’s fast becoming the modern day TiVo. But what are all those people downloading?
Over the last year, UK residents accused of sharing games like Dream Pinball have been threatened by lawyers Davenport Lyons. Stuck in a trap of not having enough money to defend themselves, many choose to pay compensation demands – guilty or not – fearful of a much bigger punishment if things go bad. Now a UK IP lawyer says he will defend as many people as he can – for free.
The top 10 most downloaded DVDrips on BitTorrent, “Deception” tops the chart this week.
P4P is touted as the new and improved P2P. The technology has the potential to lower bandwidth costs for ISPs and speed up downloads for P4P enabled filesharing clients. There is a dark side to this new technology though. The strong anti-piracy connections are fuel for conspiracy theorists, and Net Neutrality might be at stake.
TinySong is an easy to use website where users can search for music and share tracks with friends via a direct link. The website is linked to Grooveshark, a P2P powered music service, that allows users to manage and store their entire music library “in the cloud”.
Noel Gallagher from the 50 million-selling band Oasis has been chatting about piracy on the UK’s Radio 1. He jokes about mainstream journalists asking him about non-existent leaks from the new album and encourages everyone to download the music of rival bands. Overall, he’s pragmatic and upbeat, looking forward to filling his swimming pool with mineral water.
Yesterday, the FCC ruled that Comcast’s network management practices that specifically targeted BitTorrent users, were unfair. The ruling is a small victory for Net Neutrality, but it wont stop ISPs from going after the heavy bandwidth users, not at all.
This week, alleged game pirates in the UK have been condemned to the ruination of huge fines and misery. Well, not quite. See, if defendants don’t turn up in court, it’s easy to get a default judgment and huge damages because no-one contests the evidence. So what’s the truth and what evidence do the lawyers really have?
The Pirate Bay has decided to fight the decision of an Italian judge after it ordered ISPs to block access to the popular tracker. The blocks didn’t prove particularly effective as traffic from Italy only increased but nevertheless, The Pirate Bay is determined to reverse the decision.
While the British government puts huge amounts of pressure on ISPs to clamp down on file-sharers, it is doing some pirating of its very own. It seems that Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s own website is in serious breach of copyright, as it is based on a ripped-off Wordpress theme.
This week, close to two million people have downloaded the Olympics opening ceremony, which makes it the most pirated TV-show of the week – again. The International Olympic Committee is not too happy about it, and they are urging the Swedish government to take on The Pirate Bay.
In an official letter to the Swedish Minister of Justice Beatrice Ask, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) has asked for “assistance” from the Swedish government with preventing video clips from the Olympics in Beijing to be shared on The Pirate Bay. The Pirate Bay, however, does not plan to take anything down, and renamed their tracker to The Beijing Bay.
The team behind the Shareaza client have recently had a tough time, having been the victim of a music industry conspiracy to steal their brand name and destroy goodwill. Undeterred they are fighting back and today proudly announce the development of a brand new filesharing client with BitTorrent support – Project Panthera.
The top 10 most downloaded DVDrips on BitTorrent, “What Happens in Vegas” tops the chart this week.
In part one of our look into the anti-piracy efforts at universities, we saw that Missouri S&T used a simple home grown system, ignoring the favorites of the entertainment industry. In part two, we look at Ohio University, Texas A&M University, Tulane University and others that do use one of the methods preferred by the RIAA and MPAA.
BitTorrent’s popularity is increasing with new sites seemingly launched every day. Usniff is one such site, offering a fast real-time torrent search engine where users can search four of the most popular BitTorrent sites.
If you can’t beat pirates, join them. This is Playlouder’s philosophy, a music download service that allows subscribers to download music from BitTorrent and other filesharing networks, while reimbursing the copyright owners. The concept sure is interesting, but the current setup is naive, flawed and doomed to fail.
U2 manager Paul McGuinness, who wants file-sharers to be disconnected from the Internet, has something else to complain about today. Four songs from U2′s upcoming album ‘No Line On The Horizon’ have been leaked online after Bono played them too loudly on his stereo – and a fan recorded them.
Last Friday, Italian ISPs started to prevent their customers from accessing the Pirate Bay. Strangely enough, Pirate Bay traffic is not redirected to Italian authorities, but to the IFPI, the infamous anti-piracy lobby of the music industry. Pirate Bay’s Peter Sunde is not happy, and says it’s a scandal.
Following the decision in Italy to block access to The Pirate Bay comes the inevitable announcement. Has the world’s largest BitTorrent tracker faded away in the face of media industry pressure? Hardly. Traffic from Italy to the ‘bay has actually increased this week and the site has jumped 10 places on Alexa in Italy.
It has been something of a David and Goliath battle, but the first skirmishes in the war on file sharing are over. While the RIAA jubilantly claimed success last year, it is another case that has has now silenced the RIAA, as it avoids drawing attention to the case it never had.
Prosecutors in a German state have announced they will refuse to entertain the majority of file-sharing lawsuits in future. It appears that only commercial-scale copyright infringers will be pursued, with those sharing under 3000 music tracks and 200 movies dropping under the prosecution radar.
Electronic Arts, the publisher of the upcoming massively multiplayer online role-playing game Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning, has chosen BitTorrent for the distribution of the closed Beta client. Included in the documentation is a recommendation to use a TorrentFreak ‘speed up’ guide.
Privacy has always been a major concern for BitTorrent users and there are only a few ways to remain anonymous. By using a secure connection, as the new TorrentPrivacy tool offers, you can bypass almost every firewall or traffic shaping application, while making sure that nobody can see what you’re downloading.
A vulnerability described as ‘critical’ has been discovered in versions of uTorrent and the official BitTorrent client. The ‘buffer overflow’ vulnerability can be exploited to compromise a user’s computer for the execution of arbitrary code. It is suggested that users should immediately update to uTorrent version 1.8 RC7 or higher. There is currently no fix for the official client.
The opening ceremony of the 2008 summer Olympics, co-directed by Zhang Yimou, was a truly spectacular event. Not everyone had the chance to watch it live, but that’s where BitTorrent comes in. The broadcast of the Olympics opening ceremony has been downloaded more than a million times already, and the download counters go up every day.
Under the College Opportunity and Affordability Act, colleges and universities that get federal funding have to come up with ways to deal with “Campus-based Digital Theft Prevention”. The bill doesn’t give specific methods, and universities can come up with their own methods, as Missouri S&T has done with their P2P quiz.
The existence of a prototype management system for anti-piracy company ‘Logistep’ was revealed at the weekend. The online system called ‘Logistep Data Management Tool’, was located at eparken.com but since the revelations the site has been taken down. It is still available in limited form via Google’s cache.
The top 10 most downloaded DVDrips on BitTorrent, “The Scorpion King 2: Rise of a Warrior” tops the chart this week.
After months of hard work and more than six months since their previous stable release, the uTorrent team has released version 1.8 of their BitTorrent client, with significant improvements and updates. Adding to the excitement, we were told that a public Alpha of the Mac version will be released in the next few weeks.
The Pirate Bay has been “censored” in Italy following an urgent decree from a deputy public prosecutor. Pirate Bay’s IPs and the domain name are inaccessible, as they are blocked by ISPs all over the country. Whether these blocks will be very effective, however, is doubtful, since The Pirate Bay has already announced several countermeasures.
A new BitTorrent site has appeared which will allow scammers and spammers to infect its users with spyware, malware and viruses. An admin of TrafficLoader.com says that no bad torrents will ever be removed from the site and is inviting people to upload malicious software to infect torrent users.
In the past, parallels between narcotics enforcement and copyright enforcement may have been drawn, but in one country parallels are out of the window, as copyright and trademark enforcement will now be treated as drug trafficking.
For those who haven’t noticed, it’s a special day today. 080808 is not only the day the Olympics start, it is also the name of a new experimental art project that’s being released on BitTorrent trackers near you, uncensored.
The popular cross-platform BitTorrent client, Transmission, just released a new version. Along with other enhancements it now comes bundled with Clutch, enabling users to remotely control their torrents from any web browser.
BitTorrent Inc., founded by Bram Cohen, the inventor of the BitTorrent protocol, is firing 12 of its 55 employees. The company, which also develops the popular BitTorrent client uTorrent, had been struggling to make money from their download store, which is one of the causes of the layoffs.
After it was ruled that a hacker who obtained unauthorized emails from TorrentSpy on behalf of the MPAA did not technically intercept them under the WireTap Act, the EFF has filed a friend-of-the-court brief. EFF describes the recent decision as a “dangerous attempt to circumvent privacy laws,” and wants to see it overturned.
After a month of downtime, TextBook Torrents makes its return, right on time, as the first semester starts in just a few weeks. The BitTorrent tracker, dedicated to sharing knowledge in the form of textbooks, was pulled offline by Dreamhost early July because the hosting company received a takedown request.
Configuring your BitTorrent client is essential if you want to enjoy optimal download speeds. In our quest to help users get the most out of BitTorrent, we asked one of the uTorrent developers how we can speed up our downloads.
TV shows are by far the most wanted files via BitTorrent, and according to some, it’s fast becoming the modern day TiVo. But what are all those people downloading?
Mac users missing the community spirit they enjoyed at BrokenStones are on an urgent mission to save an endangered manatee-like sea mammal which lives almost entirely on sea cabbage. But that will have to wait. There’s a brand new Gazelle-based Mac tracker in town – and it promises to be fun. We take a look.
The top 10 most downloaded DVDrips on BitTorrent, “Hancock” tops the chart this week.
The deals between ISPs and anti-piracy organizations are a worrying trend. In just a few months entertainment industry representatives managed to convince ISPs and governments that they should have the right to accuse and warn Internet subscribers, without solid proof. The question that remains unanswered is whether these warnings will have any effect.
One of the big breakthrough acts of the last year has joined the increasing ranks of artists who don’t mind if people share their music. Duffy, the million-selling 24 year-old vocalist and winner of this year’s MOJO Song of the Year Award has been downloading for a couple of years. “It’s amazing,” she said.
Comcast must feel it’s being attacked by all sides. It’s been hit by lawsuits, investigated by the FCC, and roundly criticised everywhere else. It has brought the issue of traffic shaping to the forefront of people’s minds, and into public discussion. Aiming to highlight ISP’s and their shaping, the EFF has released a new tool for users to test their connection’s integrity.
MediaDefender and parent company ArtistDirect have had some serious setbacks recently. Last September they suffered a huge security breach when internal emails and a phone call were leaked to BitTorrent. They received even more bad press recently for DDoSsing Revision3. As a result, MediaDefender’s parent company stock dropped from $2.00 down to just 16 cents.
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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
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