Yes, The Pirate Bay is down at the moment. No, not everywhere. Every time The Pirate Bay suffers a few minutes for downtime, thousands of people start to worry that something awful has happened to their beloved site. Luckily, this is usually not the case. When the site’s not responding…
Earlier this week, file-sharing related news was dominated by a set of stats compiled by Musicmetric. The company said that in the first six months of 2012 it monitored 405 million music releases downloaded using BitTorrent. But while huge piracy levels are regularly touted by recording labels, completely legal BitTorrent…
Downloading files via BitTorrent is about as public as file-sharing gets, and it's safe to say that most popular BitTorrent swarms are being monitored one way or the other. To protect the privacy of its users BitTorrent Inc. therefore decided to randomize the peer-id uTorrent users display to other peers…
The Congressional International Anti-Piracy Caucus has just released its 2012 International Piracy Watch List. In addition to countries such as China, Russia and Ukraine, this year Italy and Switzerland make fresh appearances in the list. Both countries are accused of not doing enough to combat online infringement with the latter…
The dispute between file-hosting service Hotfile and Warner Bros, where the latter is accused of taking down content they don’t hold the copyrights to, is heating up. The court has accepted a brief filed by the EFF who argue that the automated takedown requests of the movie company represent a…
It is looking increasingly unlikely that the world's largest entertainment companies will be able to recover any significant amount of money from the individuals convicted in the Pirate Bay trial. After a movie studio moved last month to have Pirate Bay co-founder Fredrik Neij made bankrupt, former Pirate Bay financier…
Millions of BitTorrent users are unknowingly DDoSing websites because 'publishers' of popular torrents mistakenly add website URLs as trackers. The DDoSes drag websites down and their operators have very few options to mitigate these 'attacks'. But, thanks to a new BitTorrent protocol enhancement this is about to change. This week…
In an unprecedented data breach, tens of thousands of usernames and passwords from large private BitTorrent tracker RevTT have been leaked onto the Internet. The attackers, who call themselves Afghanistan Hackers, leaked the user/pass combinations via The Pirate Bay. The initial response from RevTT was to censor all discussion of…