Now things are back on track as Alec has teamed up with a new designer Miles Lorry to revitalize the newly and slightly renamed ‘appDowner’. Available in beta “soon”, appDowner will be compatible with iPhone 3.0 devices, so what’s the deal?

“The concept of appDowner has changed slightly, from being a simple ’smart’ BitTorrent application to a full on App Store replacement,” explains Alec.

“No longer will you have to remember and type in the URL to your torrent file, simply click the “Store” tab on appDowner, and you’ll be brought to a beautiful interface designed by Miles (which isn’t quite ready to be shown off yet, but he assures us that it will be very, very soon!) which will allow you to search and find the apps you’re looking for.”

Unlike the official App Store, there will no iTunes-like approval process to get your own applications onto the appDowner store, with Alec promising that submissions to the system will be accepted within a week.

While BitTorrent is employed to serve apps to the user, the appDowner torrent client can also be used for non-appDowner downloads too

When released in beta, appDowner should become available via Cydia/Icy.

Stay tuned for updates

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

He was heavily attacked by industry lawyers Danowsky, Pontén and Wadsted who did everything they could to discredit and slander his reputation. When Wallis was asked whether he wanted to be reimbursed for travel expenses etc, he light-heartedly suggested sending some flowers to his wife.

His statement was picked up by the large audience listening in to the live audio from the trial and flowers soon began arriving at the Wallis’ house.

Roger’s wife, Görel Wallis, wasn’t surprised by her husband’s whim in court:

“We have been married for 38 years. He proposed half an hour after we met and I said maybe. After a day, he had convinced me”, she said.

At a local flower store in Stockholm they had received 100 orders by 20.30 last night. Owner Kristian Skald said that two nearby stores had received an equal amount of orders.

“Last delivery was 33 bouquets Thursday night. There will be more to come on Friday,” the owner of the flower shop commented.

Today, Friday, the couple celebrates their wedding day anniversary and on Saturday it’s Görel’s birthday. Roger Wallis feels she is worth all the flowers she gets.

“She was very worried before the trial. They questioned my competence and that made her very sad. She hadn’t slept for two days,” Roger said.

A web page has been set up that collects what has been given so far, complete with an ever-growing stack of CDs that show how many sales the music-industry has lost by slandering the Professor.

Thus far, in an amazing show of generosity from a section of society labeled by the music industry as ‘thieves’, more than 4100 Euros worth of flowers, chocolate and gifts have been sent to the couple.

The Wallis’ soon ran out of vases for the flowers but Görel knows that sharing is caring and will distribute the flowers to all residents in their apartment building.

“We will make sure it will be beautiful here.”

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

Amongst other things, Anthony from antbag.com makes WordPress themes – he gives them away for free but if someone wants to donate, they can. His work is released under Creative Commons 3.0 license, which means that if someone wants to use a theme ‘as is’ or modified in some way, they are required to credit him. A link in the footer of every theme he creates points back to Anthony’s site – this is the minimum attribution he expects, which is pretty damn reasonable.

So imagine Anthony’s surprise when he discovered that his NetWorker theme for WordPress had been used by the British government without honoring the Creative Commons license. The theme has been heavily modified, including the removal of all links back to his site, but Anthony has been able to verify from the source files that Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s own website is in fact built on NetWorker.

It is clear that Brown’s site indeed uses the Anthony’s theme – violating the Creative Commons license. Not only was the link to the the original removed, Brown’s site should have also made their version available under a similar license – share alike.

Still, the site even claims it is protected by Crown Copyright – a quick look at the CSS for the theme should dispel that myth.

Anthony sent an email to the company who developed the site who claimed that although they did some testing on the NetWorker theme, they then rebuilt it from scratch. Unfortunately, according to Anthony “they failed to remove the credits in the CSS file that named the theme ‘NetWorker’ or to change the theme folder which is named ‘NetWorker-10′ (Networker version 1.0).”

There is a campaign running in the UK right now featuring “Knock-Off Nigel” along with cringe-worthy videos depicting this fictitious character as some kind of social outcast.

One would think that Mr Brown would avoid the sort of behavior that could easily make him the star of the next campaign but if it’s good enough for the MPAA, it must be good enough for him.

Update: We were contacted by Dave Smith, Managing Director of New Media Maze, the creators of the Number 10 site. He has a full statement on this issue which is available here, but in summary, here is his explanation, in his own words:

1. The only file that was drawn upon from AntÂ’s theme was the CSS file, a fact that we have never denied.

4. Therefore we have abided by the license of AntÂ’s work and are not guilty of ‘ripping off’ anyone’s work.

For his part, Anthony doesn’t wish to prolong the conflict. Click here for an update from him.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

It all began last year when, having released his album “Guidelines For An Emerging Century”, Mr.Suitcase received a payment from Stim, the Swedish Performing Rights Society. Included in it was a refund from the tax that is put on all recordable media in Sweden. Whenever CDRs, mp3-players or similar items are sold, an extra fee of 0,04 crowns/megabyte is added and later paid back to the artists.

“First, I got a bit put off by receiving the money because to me, that kind of arbitrary hand-out of alms is a ridiculous system,” Mr.Suitcase said. “Then I thought, why not see it as an opportunity and earmark the money for something creative. And since the money came from piracy, I had to use it for more piracy, right?”

With the money, Mr.Suitcase bought old used effect boxes and began experimenting. Without knowing where it would take him, he started sending fragments and loops from other people’s songs through the effects.

“I’ve always been fascinated by cut-and-paste aesthetics. I grew up with artists like The Future Sound of London and Saint Etienne who layered samples and combined the bits and pieces to create something brand new, something that became more than just the sum of the elements.”

He says the project “got completely out of control” when friends started to drop by the studio to record new instruments and vocals over the samples. In the end, he had an album’s worth of new songs, although they all were rooted in someone else’s work.

“As the project grew, I lost count of how many original songs that were used in it. Nearly a hundred, I’d guess. It’s very diverse, from Prince to The Rice Twins, from Ashanti to Zongamin. In the end, I realized it wasn’t a mixtape or mash-up but it wasn’t an album either. I decided the tracks were all frauds, called it a wrap and posted it on The Pirate Bay.”

Mr.Suitcase thinks artists should be more relaxed about non-commercial use of their work. Since the world went digital, he feels the availability is a natural consequence that should be embraced rather than hopelessly opposed.

“The way Internet works, there’s no reason to argue for or against file sharing. We can just conclude here and now that file sharing ‘is’. For me, I’m very attached to the idea that the top-down structure of producers and consumers has turned into a blur, and that anything created isn’t only there to be experienced but can also be a building-block for new creations. It’s fantastic! I was absolutely thrilled when techno producer The Field used one of my recordings for his brilliant track ‘Istedgade’.”

“To me, ‘Frauds’ is a statement. There’s so much negativity in the debate. ‘File sharing means artists can’t…’, ‘File sharing means nobody will ever…’ I think it’s the opposite, I think the beautiful aspect of the digital era is that anything recorded can be remixed, tweaked and modified.”

Mr.Suitcase’s album “Frauds” can be downloaded via BitTorrent at mrsuitcase.se.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

OiNK was considered by many to be the finest BitTorrent music tracker the world has ever seen. Tracking only the finest recordings from virtually every musical genre, beautifully labeled and cataloged releases were its trademark, created by people who thrived under some of the harshest releasing rules the torrent community had ever seen. Nothing less than the highest quality was good enough for OiNK.

Then the IFPI huffed and puffed and blew down the little pigs home and they had ‘won’.

Not quite. Did the entire OiNK indexed music library disappear? Did the releasers all see the error of their ways and stop releasing there and then? Did all the ex-members give up sharing? No, of course not.

OiNK didn’t carry any content, its users did. Taking out the OiNK site didn’t remove a single song from any of OiNK’s users libraries and they are taking their collections with them as they migrate to other sites, ready to share another day.

TorrentFreak has been listening to some interesting comments from some specialist music trackers (such as those on this list) who are not only getting record numbers of signups in the last few days but are also delighted to welcome talented OiNK releasers who seem really keen to share.

One admin told us: “Since the shutdown of OiNK we’re getting a spike in new memberships, at least 6 times more. Normally some of these can be bad members who do not share or are making trouble in the forum but I am happy to say that many come from OiNK and they are behaving like gentlemen (and ladies!)”

He continued: “We have an uploader application form on our tracker and we ask a few questions to the guy, then we make a decision if he is reliable etc before we give him releasing rights. On a regular day that list has many applications from novices with no experience (which can be trouble!). Now we get many OiNK members asking to release in this one week. They have amazing collections and make a 100% perfect release each time. It’s a great boost for our community.”

TorrentFreak spoke with the admins of three genre-dedicated music trackers who all confirmed that they picked up lots of ex-OiNK members and offers to release this week. This could be the tip of a very, very large iceberg – OiNK covered just about every genre imaginable and all of those sharers were made homeless after the raid – many of them for up to 10 minutes – but immediately settled in elsewhere, ready to share again.

The Pink Palace may be closed, but the beats go on and on as some of the best sharers in the world spread their wings to trackers far and wide. Maybe pigs can fly after all.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

According to its homepage, Packet Garden is ‘an experimental artwork that seeks to provide an alternative and accessible approach to visualising daily internet use’ and I would agree, this is a good description.

This open-source software which is available in Windows, Linux and OS X flavors, can capture data concerning your daily BitTorrent, eMule, LimeWire, Soulseek, HTTP, FTP and IRC transfers and use them to ‘grow’ a 3D digital ‘garden’ you can explore. Indeed, any type of internet traffic can be used to develop your creation, including online gaming and email.

Packet Garden does this by remembering the servers you visit, their location and the sort of data you are accessing and converting it into a 3D landscape. Your uploads create hills on the landscape while downloads carve valleys, their respective heights and depths governed by the amounts of data you send or receive. Where they appear on your map is down to the geographic location of the servers you visit.

To brighten up the world, PacketGarden (PG) is able to grow virtual plants, relating to the protocols it detects being used on your network. Visiting a website will result in the growth of an ‘HTTP Plant’ while sharing via BitTorrent or eMule will cause some ‘P2P Plants’ to appear. PG can only detect protocols based on their developer-assigned ports so if you use non-standard ports, some tweaking of the configuration is needed. The good news is that even if you don’t configure the exact ports, the software is still able to generate landscapes albeit in a less creative way.

Each time you generate a unique world based on your day’s internet activities, it’s saved so that over time you can see how your worlds develop as your bandwidth usage habits change. Users worried about privacy have nothing to fear as the software is free from both adware and spyware and your personal information is kept on your own machine and is never available to others.

Why not install it and post pictures of your world in the comments? First prize to the person who grows the most beautiful BitTorrent plant!

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

From from first thing this morning, things started to look very bad indeed for P2P. Indications that operations against P2P had started came when it was reported that the RIAA had started an amnesty program for file-sharers;

"In a stunning turnabout, the R.I.A.A. has announced a new amnesty program for computer users who have shared and/or downloaded copyrighted files illegally. The new program, christened 'Files for Free HD Time', works like this: you go to a special website setup by the R.I.A.A. where you can upload any previously illegally downloaded files. In other words: give them back and avoid prosecution. Plus, for every 12 files you put back, you will be rewarded with certificates for 120 Free HD Radio minutes which can be used in any city where HD Radio is now operating"

Anyone with half a brain could see that this was not an amnesty but an IP harvesting operation. Everyone visiting that site would upload copyright stuff straight to the RIAA’s server. Little more than sitting ducks, so sad. We mourn those losses.

Then reports came in that the Australian Government were subsidising a hardware filtering scheme, knocking out even encrypted P2P traffic. The statement said;

"..we are taking the opportunity to meet the needs of intellectual property owners. 'Peer-to-peer' technology is primarily used for copyright infringement, so proactive blocking will not affect legitimate Australian internet users"

Just when it was feared that things simply couldn’t get worse, two completely unexpected attacks were launched by the FBI and MPAA on Scene release news sites, despite both being hosted outside US jurisdiction. Releaselog.net was ordered to shut within 5 days by the FBI and Hypoh.com felt the long arm of the MPAA on their collar, finding out in the most awful of ways that They Could Click, But Not Hide. Things were collapsing quickly.

Usenet darlings Binsearch.info took an almost fatal blow to the search engines when the MAFIAA moved in on them.

The bad boys from Britain, UKNova decided to stop anyone without a UK TV licence using their site. By this time, nerves were at breaking point.

But then, just when it seemed that P2P Armageddon had arrived, a little spec appeared on the horizon, getting bigger and bigger and bigger. And there it was in all its glory, the galleon of the PirateBay it’s sails painted in beautiful colors. A deal had been struck to further fortify the ‘Bay – a collaboration with one of the world’s most loved dictators, North Korea’s Kim Jong-Il.

After all this, P2P has survived……until next April 1st……stay tuned

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

Xtorrent, the new BitTorrent client for Mac OS X, just rolled out of the beta phase. In September, we reviewed the first public beta, which initially looked like a promising application. However, issues like the problematic libtransmission library, and the intrusive shareware policy make this client a lot less attractive.

The first major drawback of Xtorrent is that it is not free, which is extremely unusual and awkward for a BitTorrent client. In addition, Xtorrent has a very intrusive shareware policy. If you do not register the application, a floating window that you cannot close gets stuck on your screen, and searches randomly start to fail. To make things even worse, it seems like the application throttles the available bandwidth to 10kbps after an hour of usage.

The second drawback is that Xtorrent’s core is made up of the libtransmission library. This library is known to hammer trackers, and is banned from an increasing number of them, which makes Xtorrent useless for members of Oink, for example.

If you decide to buy Xtorrent you’re mostly paying for the (stunningly) beautiful user-interface, not because its download speeds are the best or because it is the lightest BitTorrent client available for the Mac. Azureus still leads by a wide margin in download speeds, and Transmission is hands down the lightest BitTorrent client for the Mac.

Xtorrent looks good, it integrates well with iTunes, has iPod support and subscribes to RSS feeds. But to be completely honest, it just doesn’t seem like it’s worth the money. Perhaps that’s just because I’m a Windows user. Paying for software just isn’t in my blood.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

According to Tony, the first 2 hours of every Saturday and Sunday morning at the local flea market always proved the most exciting. “We’d take 60 cases of CDRs down in the van and as soon as we got there a crowd would swarm around us. We had no competition and it was obvious the punters had no other suppliers. Inside 30 minutes, 90% of the stock would be gone with some customers taking 2 or 3 cases each, presumably to sell on. After 3 hours we were cleared out and on our way home, always with huge amounts of money.”

By 2001, Tony was renting a factory unit and employing 3 people to operate duplicators 24 hours a day, 7 days a week but although business was lively right up to 2004, profits were being squeezed every year. Forced to increase the amount of media burnt each week to make up for the shortfall in profit, it became clear that the business was in trouble – demand was falling dramatically.

“In 2005 we shut down the factory unit” said Tony, “we just couldn’t keep going on that scale, nobody was buying anything in quantity anymore. So we closed up and moved back into a bedroom at home with my wife and her sister operating the burners, something they hadn’t done in years. They weren’t happy.”

Tony used to enjoy the finer things in life – a beautiful house, high performance cars, exotic foreign holidays, up-market restaurants and fine wine. I met him by chance, wearing overalls and sitting on a forklift truck, working in a factory manufacturing boxes. Sipping on a mug of tea he explained “We got to the point where we just couldn’t make ends meet anymore, I couldn’t even keep a couple of dozen burners going so that was that. I had to get a job and so did my wife. She’s gone back to hairdressing and i’ve come back to what I was doing before – warehouse work. We’ve moved to a smaller house and i’ve had to get a sensible car. Things have changed quite a lot.”

Tony is very clear about why his rags to riches story has gone back to rags again. “File-sharing, P2P – call it what you like. When you asked a customer why he wasn’t buying anything, 9 times out of 10 it was ‘BitTorrent this, LimeWire that’. Add that to the fact that huge numbers of PC users have burners and fast broadband and its obvious why I had to get out and earn a living another way. We had it good for a while but I don’t think those days are coming back.”

P2P is a very powerful machine and although Tony could see that his operation was feeling its effects, he admits that he sat back and did nothing about it and consequently, his business has paid the ultimate price. Other industries affected by P2P should take note: Don’t be a Tony. Overhaul your business model. Quickly.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

Another feature unique to Xtorrent is Autodownload. Suppose you have a folder full of .torrents, you can have Xtorrent monitor it and download them all. I have Autodownload monitoring my Desktop. Since that’s my where all my files from Safari are downloaded to, Xtorrent automatically adds them and clears up my Desktop!

The user-interface is beautiful, just like that of Acquisition, David’s P2P application. Other than the UI, there are some other similarities to Acquisition as well. For one, the “Download” and “iTunes” preference panes looks exactly the same. You can have Xtorrent automatically import any video and audio files you download directly into iTunes. This is one feature all of us Acquisition users are already accustomed to and love.

Xtorrent is in its first beta, so don’t fret about any bugs you may come across, instead report them and help get Xtorrent ready for the prime time. The fact is, this hardly seems like beta software. Everything is polished and works well. You can’t expect any less from one of the most talented developers on the Mac platform. Newsfire, Inquisitor, Acquisition, and now Xtorrent is all the proof anyone needs.

Overall, Xtorrent is just a pleasure to use. Everything “just works.”

Stay tuned for an interview with David Watanabe, the developer of Xtorrent.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.