RSS can be a real time saver for BitTorrent enthusiasts. Rather than manually trawling many torrent sites hunting for material, most will agree it’s much more convenient for the content to come to the user. This is exactly what you can achieve by using RSS and these ten handy tips.
In this episode we go out on the streets in San Francisco to ask people how they feel about internet piracy. We also talk about new style of in-video ads, another ISP being sued, fanedits not liked by studios, and we give away a free t-shirt
An amendment designed to protect Internet users from the anti-piracy lobby has been rejected by President Sarkozy of the European Council. The rejection goes against the will of the European Parliament, where 88% of the members already voted in favor of the amendment, which was originally destined to protect file-sharers from Internet disconnection under the ’3 strikes’ framework.
A week ago today, customers of the ISP Orange across the UK and France found that they could no longer access The Pirate Bay. Many of them fired off emails to the service provider, worried that Orange was censoring their access to the Internet. Now, a week later, Orange have answered officially – its customers should have no further difficulty accessing the world’s largest tracker.
After Atari received some bad press recently for mistakenly accusing an elderly couple of pirating one of its games, the company has now stopped the anti-piracy campaign in question. The “witch-hunt”, carried out by the UK law firm Davenport Lyons on behalf of Atari, based on spreadsheets full of IPs gathered by a company named Logistep, continues to lose credibility.
Until today, uTorrent – the client of choice for most BitTorrent users – was only available on Windows PCs. Now, after years of waiting, Mac users finally have the chance to try uTorrent, to see for themselves how it fares against the competition.
In February 2008, a Danish court ordered the ISP Tele2 to block its customers from accessing The Pirate Bay. The controversial ruling was under appeal but today, in a move which will delight the IFPI, the High Court upheld the decision to force the ISP to stop its customers from accessing the world’s largest BitTorrent tracker.
TV shows are by far the most wanted files on BitTorrent, and according to some, it’s becoming the modern day TiVo. But what are all those people downloading?
In the fall of 2003, a group of friends from Sweden decided to launch a BitTorrent tracker named ‘The Pirate Bay’. Today, roughly 5 years after this historic day, the founders of the site are celebrities in Sweden, and rockstars on the Internet.
The Pirate Bay isn’t new to the experience of being blocked by European ISPs. Now, according to many customers of the ISP Orange, it has been impossible to access the site for the last five days, unless they route their traffic through a proxy. Are Orange really taking the bold step of censoring the world’s largest tracker?
The iPhone is a superb gadget and of course, we all know that BitTorrent is a very special tool, so why not combine the two? With the uTorrent WebAPP for iPhone you can monitor, search and add torrents to your PC client wherever you are, making handling torrents on the move easier than ever before.
Earlier in November, South Africa’s recording industry body RiSA took action against the country’s largest BitTorrent and NZB sites. BitFarm and Newshost looked to be in peril but a lawyer experienced in dealing with RiSA stepped up to help them. Now it appears that a negotiated settlement could be on the horizon.
The top 10 most downloaded movies on BitTorrent, “The Dark Knight” tops the chart for the second week in a row, followed by “Tropic Thunder”.
This year, several companies launched advertising programs targeted at the millions of users of Limewire and other Gnutella or eD2k based filesharing applications. The boundary between advertisement and plain old spam is completely disappearing, especially with the recently launched service ‘PeerMatrix’.
Fanedits are fan-created versions of officially available movies. Fans spend huge amounts of time with sophisticated software to add, cut or alter scenes to improve the original or simply create different versions of a movie. Fanedit.org is the largest such community in the world and the MPAA has, in the words of the admin, just ‘castrated’ the site.
Running a BitTorrent site can be quite costly. Most of the larger sites need over a dozen servers to keep everything running smoothly. There are some scalable alternatives for BitTorrent startups though. Two relatively unknown meta-search engines have taken a different route by using Google’s App Engine, which provides optimal scalability, for free.
In October 2007, while most tech media attention was focused on the OiNK raid, another large site got police attention. TV-Links, which linked to videos on YouTube-like sites was raided and shutdown, with the admin arrested. A year later, we catch up with the ex-admin of TV-Links for the entire story.
Making a torrent properly is one of the most overlooked aspects in torrenting. Most users of bittorrent only create the .torrent files occasionally, if at all, and others make bad choices and mistakes, which can antagonise people, or make torrents slow to propagate, and lead to an early death.
Soulseek is one the greatest music sharing communities that most of the world has never heard of. Covering all genres, Soulseek is an active network specializing in electronic music, where many of the members are musicians themselves. The music industry, however, sees the filesharing application as a threat, and will go after Soulseek in court.
Seven Hollywood studios including Paramount, Sony, Twentieth Century Fox, Universal, Warner Bros and Disney have teamed up to sue iiNet, Australia’s third largest ISP. iiNet is accused of doing little to stop its subscribers from sharing copyright works via BitTorrent. The ISP denies the accusations.
Overreaching corporate claims are nothing new, certainly when it comes to copyright. Toyota vastly over-reached recently, requesting all images containing their products be removed from a wallpaper site, citing copyright issues. Finally, Toyota responds.
BitTorrent’s popularity is on the rise in India, and with a massive increase in broadband subscribers just around the corner, it is the number one growth market for BitTorrent sites. With a population of over 1.1 billion people and only 4.5 million broadband subscribers, there is huge amount of untapped potential.
Mininova, one of the leading BitTorrent sites, is testing a new technology which allows content producers to include subtle ads in their videos. By providing more opportunities to monetize free content, Mininova hopes to attract even more premium publishers.
After going after thousands accused of sharing video games in the UK, lawyers Davenport Lyons are now branching out into other areas. This week sees them start going after those it accuses of sharing the movie “Army Fuckers”, hardcore gay porn featuring ‘farm boys’ and Gestapo officers. Accusing the wrong people this time could prove very costly indeed.
TV shows are by far the most wanted files on BitTorrent, and according to some, it’s becoming the modern day TiVo. But what are all those people downloading?
Mininova, the leading BitTorrent search engine, has been offline for most of the day. Inevitably, BitTorrent addicts having been getting nervous, worrying about what is happening at the same time as they long for their daily fix. We have good news for them, the wait is almost over and when the site returns it will do so, fully prepared for the future.
Amassing over a million downloads in under seven days, ‘The Dark Knight’ is by far the most pirated movie of this week. Earlier this year, Cam and DVD-screener versions of the latest in the Batman series already found their way onto the Internet, making this blockbuster the most pirated movie of 2008.
In this episode we talk about Obama’s victory speech getting torrented, Quantum of Solace getting pirated, Finnish kids admitting to downloading, The Pirate Bay tracking 25 million peers and of course TV-show statistics.
A hacker has successfully changed the nameservers of the popular BitTorrent meta-search engine Torrentz.com. For a few hours the site was replaced with an Adbrite ad, and a link to a warez forum. To top it off, the hacker then contacted the Torrentz admin to brag about his hacking abilities.
Only a few days before the largest BitTorrent tracker will celebrate its 5th anniversary, the Pirate Bay reached a new milestone. The site now tracks 25 million peers, which is more than the entire populations of Sweden, Norway, Finland, Iceland and Denmark combined.
Canada has its first conviction under the controversial Bill C-59. A man has been found guilty of ‘camming’ the movie ‘Sweeney Todd’ in Calgary on its opening day. The 21 year-old was given a $1,495 fine and placed on probation for a year. During this time he is also excluded from all theaters and is forbidden to possess any video recording equipment, even that on a cellphone. He avoids jail.
Motoring giant Toyota is normally ahead of the curve when it comes to technology. The company is known for innovations like the Synergy Drive in the Prius, as well as long term reliability. However, if you take pride in your Toyota, and have it as a wallpaper on your system, Toyota doesn’t want you sharing.
French record labels have received the green light to sue four US-based companies that develop P2P applications, including the BitTorrent client Vuze, Limewire and Morpheus. Shareaza is the fourth application, for which the labels are going after the open source development platform SourceForge.
The chief executive of UK anti-piracy FAST says the chances of a completely voluntary agreement between rights holders and ISPs to tackle file-sharing is “unlikely”. John Lovelock, boss at the Federation Against Software Theft goes on to imply that what his outfit would really like is file-sharers’ names and addresses on demand, with no need for a court order. This would be “gold plating” he said.
TorrentValley, one of the larger BitTorrent sites with millions of visitors each month, has been shut down by Bulgarian authorities. The site’s servers were seized by a Cyber Crime Unit, which acted based upon evidence provided by the Bulgarian music industry.
A recently published survey on the ‘criminal’ habits among 15 year old Finns has revealed that more than two thirds of the youngsters have used file-sharing applications to downloaded copyrighted material. Online piracy was by far the most prevalent form of ‘criminal behavior’ among Finnish youth.
Exactly three years ago, November 12, 2005, TorrentFreak first saw the light of day. Since then we have published 1,788 articles, while our readers wrote 88,987 comments. It’s been a great ride so far, thanks to all of you…
TV shows are by far the most wanted files on BitTorrent, and according to some, it’s becoming the modern day TiVo. But what are all those people downloading?
Hitting US theaters this week, the latest Bond movie ‘Quantum of Solace’ has already been released in the UK. However, despite searching the bags of paying customers, monitoring movie audiences with Bond-style night vision goggles and proffering misinformation, the industry has failed to stop the movie leaking to the Internet.
Last week TorrentFreak reported that South Africa’s answer to the RIAA had taken down the country’s largest torrent site and an affiliated Usenet NZB site. According to the lawyer representing the sites for free, the recording industry had no standing to make a complaint. Furthermore, the actions of the sites’ host were unconstitutional. Both sites, BitFarm and NewsHost, are coming back online.
The top 10 most downloaded movies on BitTorrent, “Traitor” tops the chart this week followed by WALL-E and Step Brothers.
In 2006, isoHunt was one of the first BitTorrent sites to get caught up in a legal battle with the MPAA. In a guest post for TorrentFreak, Fung gives his view on this copyfight, the right and wrong of the current copyright system, and how it’s abused by lobbyists for the wrong reasons.
Ashwin Navin, former president and co-founder of BitTorrent Inc. has left the company after four years. Thus far, the company hasn’t been a great success, but the BitTorrent protocol is more alive than ever. Now he can talk more freely, we ask Ashwin about his view on the future of BitTorrent, piracy and online media.
China is not new to censoring the Internet, but up until now, BitTorrent sites have never been blocked. Recently however, several reports came in from China, indicating that popular BitTorrent sites such as Mininova, isoHunt and The Pirate Bay had been hijacked. The sites became inaccessible, instead redirecting to the leading Chinese search engine Baidu.
Edging ever closer to becoming law, France’s “three-strikes” proposals have received support in the French Senate which voted overwhelmingly in favor for these draconian measures to deal with piracy. Now, a new report suggests that online piracy has become something of a ‘national sport’ in France.
Within 24 hours of president-elect Barack Obama delivering his victory speech to the hundreds of thousands of people gathered in Chicago, another hundred thousand gathered in a BitTorrent swarm, to download a copy of the historic event.
Although many stories about anti-piracy activity seem to come out of the United States, Europe, Canada and Australia, operations are certainly not limited to these countries. Today, news is filtering through that South Africa’s biggest BitTorrent and Usenet NZB sites have been taken down by the recording industry.
A little later than expected, but the second episode of TorrentFreak TV has finally arrived. The show is still in Beta, so comments and suggestions are welcome.
A man described as an “anti-piracy hero” has been gunned down in Thailand. Kasim Cha Tong, a former director of the MPA and anti-piracy campaigner for the IFPI, died by a single shot from a sawn-off shotgun. The killer escaped. Police are investigating the possibility that this was an assassination.
TV shows are by far the most wanted files on BitTorrent, and according to some, it’s becoming the modern day TiVo. But what are all those people downloading?
Torrentz.com, the largest BitTorrent meta-search engine on the Internet, is currently dealing with a hostile attempt to take over the site’s domain name. The admin of Torrentz has posted a message to all its users to inform them about the situation, and is optimistic that the issue will be resolved soon.
November 4, 2008, election day in the United States. As votes are cast right across America to determine who will become the 44th president, we take a look at where the sympathies of some of the key anti-piracy and filesharing figures lie, with a particular interest in RIAA CEO Mitch Bainwol, who is a keen John McCain supporter.
BitTorrent is the main distribution method for TV-shows online. Despite the availability of legitimate streaming sites, millions of people prefer to download their favorite TV-shows using torrents instead. ShowInsider is a new project that reveals the latest TV piracy trends.
In September a Spanish court decided that the eDonkey indexing site Sharemula operated legally, indicating that linking to copyright infringing material is permitted under the law. Now that decision has been reinforced as a court decides that a torrent site previously shutdown by the police, also operated legally.
Today, VIPeers has launched a new and totally free BitTorrent hosting service. With VIPeers, everyone can easily share large files up to 5 GB with as many people as they wish, without having to seed it themselves. The service can be best described as a mashup between one-click hosting sites like Rapidshare and BitTorrent.
Led by the IFPI, the music industry has continued its European tour to convince governments and ISPs to implement a ’3 strikes’ model to deal with alleged file-sharers. However, recently leaked comments from politicians indicate that chances for Denmark to adopt the scheme are now dead.
The top 10 most downloaded movies on BitTorrent, “Tropic Thunder” tops the chart this week followed by WALL-E and The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian.
Open wireless networks have served as a successful defense strategy for several alleged filesharers, as it is often impossible for content owners to prove that the person they accuse, has actually distributed the files they claim they did. Unfortunately, for the customers of the UK ISP Karoo, running open WiFi might also get them disconnected – even if it’s unintentional.
The Pirate Bay has reached yet another milestone. Today, they track more than 20 million unique peers for the first time since the site was launched. It is estimated that the Pirate Bay tracks more than half of all BitTorrent users at any given point in time.
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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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