Presumably, the mUI will work like the existing WebUI, with the exception that it’ll be a lot more light-weight, which it has to be in order to support mobile browsers. The mUI will allow you to monitor and control the torrents running on your desktop PC from your mobile phone, wherever you are. You can expect us to do a detailed review of its features and usability when it’s live.

For now, it looks like the mobile UI will only support the Windows version of uTorrent, as the Mac version isn’t out yet and doesn’t even have basic WebUI support it.

The uTorrent mUI has not been developed by BitTorrent Inc and isn’t official. The developer, mofle, is just a fan and user of uTorrent. See his forum post and the continuing discussion for more info.

Official site: utorrentmui.com

Source: uTorrent Mobile UI Goes Live Tomorrow

We first spotted it on mininova, when a reader tipped us off. It has also shown up on several other BitTorrent sites such as The Pirate Bay, whose admins have refused to take down any of the “Deathly Hallows” torrents, despite admirable efforts by J.K. Rowling’s publishers.

According to the reader, who chose to remain anonymous, the torrent contains a PDF of the first ten chapters and a text file with a message calling for assistance in transcribing the book from the photos:

We are looking for help in finishing the book. With enough people it goes quickly. Please contact harry7pottah@hush.com to get in contact with us. No skills beyond reading and writing are required and help would be greatly appreciated.

It seems rather ludicrous that this is happening mere days before the book’s release. Why bother typing out the entire book from photos when it will hit bookshops all over the world in less than a week? The only plausible reason seems to be a trait of rabid fanboyism only seen among Harry Potter readers and users of Apple’s Macintosh computers.

But it looks like some people aren’t even ready to believe the book has actually been leaked! MTV blogger Jennifer Vineyard claims that the book’s a fake:

First of all, there are multiple versions that contradict one another. One table of contents, for instance, calls chapter 10 “Kreacher’s Tale,” while another table of contents calls the same chapter “The Reflection in the Mirror.”

We will only know whether the leaked photographs are photoshopped or not when the book is released a few days from now, but for argument’s sake I’m going to point out that “The Reflection in the Mirror” is the 10th chapter in a fake fan fiction torrent of the book that has been floating around the Internet for days, if not weeks. In the leaked photographs, the 10th chapter is “Kreacher’s Tale”. It looks like the MTV guys have been downloading torrents. For research purposes, of course.

update: chapters 11-21 are transcribed.

update: all chapters are transcribed.

Source: Harry Potter Fans Transcribe Book from Photos

We first got wind of this when two torrents of the book appeared on Demonoid.com. They became immensely popular with over a 1000 leechers and seeders each. But after some time were removed by either the uploader, or more likely, the moderators, in a move to avoid the attention of bloodthirsty publishers.

Not surprisingly, both those torrents spread over to mininova and several other sites and are still going strong (update: mininova removed the torrents). One of the torrents only has the first 495 pages of the book, whereas the second is the complete book.

Over the past couple of weeks, numerous torrents have surfaced online claiming to be the 7th and last Harry Potter book. They are all fakes. Fan fiction. This one, on the other hand, is the real thing. Someone has managed to get their hands on the American edition of the book and has photographed each page of the book and uploaded it to BitTorrent.

The main complaint that’s coming up in comment threads on these sites is that the quality isn’t great. You can just barely manage to read each page. And as some downloaders promptly noted, a few pages cannot be read at all without editing the images in Photoshop.

Die-hard fans of the series will undoubtedly rush to grab a copy of the torrent for themselves. But anybody else would really have to see whether reading the book a week before the rest of the world is worth risking their eyesight and brains, squinting to make out what happens when Harry confronts He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named for the last time.

If you’re the type of person who likes spoilers, check out this page.

Source: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows leaked to BitTorrent

The worm, W32/Impard-A, is a highly sophisticated program with multi-lingual support that can effectively spread itself, delete and send other, rival malware present on the computer back to its creator, and utilise BitTorrent in achieving its goal.

Like most such malware, W32/Impard-A is controlled over IRC. Richard Cohen, a security expert with Sophos, said:

It’s controlled by a remote user over IRC, and is capable of sending itself via AIM and MSN, storing itself as a file called IMG009.jpg-www.imagehosting.com inside a zip file called C:RECYCLERmyphoto.zip, and then sending this zip with a message that promises pictures, written in the same language as the infected computer. This sort of social engineering tries to maximize the chance that recipients will believe it to be legitimate and open the attachment, though this is shot in the foot somewhat by the fact that many of the the phrases have been cut off abruptly.

I have personally seen the messages generated by this worm, when a Yahoo! Messenger-using friend of mine asked me to visit some obscure URL to look at her photos. She uploads all her photographs to Facebook, so I became suspicious right away. It turns out, this worm is so versatile, it can hijack just about every popular IM client and use the signed in account to spread to its contacts. What’s very interesting, though, is how the worm utilises BitTorrent.

Once running on the host computer, the worm searches for the BitTorrent mainline client executable (bittorrent.exe). If it finds the file, it opens up a torrent and, after downloading a copy of itself to a specific location on your hard disk, starts seeding it.

This is the first reported instance of malware making use of BitTorrent to achieve its creators’ ends. If you think about it, it makes perfect sense. Why should the malware author waste bandwidth downloading his worm to thousands of Windows computers around the globe, when he can make his army of zombified ones redistribute it for him, free of cost?

Source: Windows Worm Uses BitTorrent to Propagate

Announced by Steve Jobs in his keynote at WWDC ’07, Leopard is the fifth iteration of the Unix-based operating system. It is the “feature-complete” release and is not expected to change much before it goes on sale in October of this year. New features include, among others, a new version of the Finder, the Mac file manager, a new unified interface, Time Machine, a backup application heavy on eye-candy, and Spaces, an integrated virtual desktops implementation.

Creative Commons picture by M. Caimary.

The developer preview was handed out to attendees of the Apple developer conference almost two weeks ago. Normally, one would start to see torrents for such a thing appear hours, if not minutes, after it is handed out. It seems Apple developers aren’t as quick on the uptake as our Windows-using friends. The Vista RTM (Release to Manufacturing) was uploaded even before news sites had the chance to write about Microsoft pushing out its first non-beta release of Windows Vista.

Titled “Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard 9A466 WWDC ’07″ or “The New Big Cat”, Mac OS 10.5 can be found on almost every torrent site on the web. But before our Mac-using friends rush to download a copy for themselves, it’s best we mention that this is beta software, and even if no new features are going to be added to it, the OS is reportedly buggy and requires work. We recommend you hold out till its release in October and buy yourself a copy. It’s cheap.

Source: Mac OS X Leopard Leaked to BitTorrent

Up until now, we weren’t completely sure if this was going to be the YouTube killer that TPB fans everywhere have been talking about. But a statement published today on The Pirate Bay Blog outright confirms it:

“YES – we’re going to do a video streaming site. It’s true. It’s in the works being done right now and as usual we put a bit of Pirate Bay mentality behind every project we do.”

And it’s exactly that “Pirate Bay mentality” that, in our opinion, is going to make this site a winner. Think YouTube without Google constantly pulling down copyrighted videos.

Some clever TorrentFreak readers and TPB fans managed to locate the URL of the upcoming YouTube competitor. It is: thevideobay.org. All you can see on the site is a plain page with two lines of text:

only open for beta- and dev-testers.
some is live, most is not. we will open for public when done.

Stay tuned!

Source: The Pirate Bay to Launch YouTube Competitor

The MPAA has removed Forest Blog from their site. The Director of Application Development replied with the following e-mail:

The material has been removed from our Web server.

• No Web links were ever provided to the blog.
• The blog was never assigned a domain name.
• The blog was never advertised to the public in any way.
• The material on the server was a proof of concept awaiting approval to move into production.
• The blog was only ever used for testing purposes.
• Should we have decided to make the move to production, then we would have paid the 25 Pounds that would have authorized us to run a version of the blog without the logos and links.

Sounds innocent, doesn’t it? And it might even be considered an honest mistake, if the MPAA wasn’t on a rampage, suing everybody in sight for copyright violations. The question that arose last time was, how can an organisation that’s only goal is to rid the world of piracy go ahead and illegally use someone else’s copyrighted work? Would someone who downloads a movie from one of the MPAA’s studios be able to get away by saying they were only “testing” the movie, and that they put it up on the Internet, but provided no links to it? Ever heard of Google? Patrick Robin, too, makes a similar comparison:

Whilst that all sounds fair enough but I doubt I’d get away with pirating a few movies providing I didn’t advertise it and only used them for testing purposes. hmmm!

Source: MPAA: We Were Only Testing Forest Blog

BitFox is still in the very early stages of development, and not currently available for download. The only way you can install it is from SVN. BitFox makes use of Libtorrent, the open source C++ BitTorrent library that aims to be CPU and memory efficient.

The extension, just like Firefox, is cross-platform and open source. Joshua Hendo, the developer, notes that BitFox has only been tested on Windows and Linux. He also asks anyone interested in contributing to the project to join the bitfox-extension mailing list on Google Groups.

Source: BitFox Adds BitTorrent Support to Firefox

The main goal of MonoTorrent (at the time, BitSharp) was to create a set of BitTorrent client libraries that worked with Mono. Jonathan Allen for InfoQ writes that the libraries work with Microsoft’s proprietary .NET platform as well. “While Mono was the primary target, all of the libraries also work with Microsoft’s version of the .NET platform. The libraries should also be accessible by other CLS-compliant languages such as VB, IronPython, and Ruby.Net,” writes Allen.

Since Mono is an open source, cross-platform implementation of .NET, a very robust and light BitTorrent client could be created with MonoTorrent that works on all three major OSes; Linux, Mac OS X and Windows. The developer ran some tests and found that MonoTorrent utilises less than 1/4th the RAM Azureus does.

MonoTorrent has recently received a major update. Here’s a list of what’s been added:

• uPnP support, so that you don’t have to manually create the port mapping in your router.
• Disk writes are now fully asynchronous, and download speed is automatically throttled if it exceeds the rate at which your harddisk can write.
• Upload and download speed calculations have been “improved drastically”.
• There are other minor improvements, including enhanced download performance.

Miguel de Icaza, the developer of Mono and the GNOME Linux desktop environment, is quite pleased with MonoTorrent, but says it really needs a GUI. “The library these days is quite mature and the command line client works well, but we really ought to have a Gnome UI,” wrote Icaza in his weblog.

Source: MonoTorrent Beta 2 Released

Aufero is everything you’d want in a media centre. Here’s a list of features.

It lets you:

• manage any existing media you have.
• create a “wish list” of videos you would like to watch, and then have those videos automatically downloaded once they become available.
• view trailers, reviews and previews, and download torrents related to them.
• manually download torrents you feed it.
• seamlessly playback videos in an array of formats on your Xbox 360 (not just WMVs).
• receive “subtle notifications” on your screen after something on your wish list has been found, downloaded, unpacked, indexed and moved into your library.
• receive e-mail notifications of relevant events when you’re not in front of your TV.
• Lastly, Aufero is simple to use and tries to increase the “wife appeal” by making it easy for less tech-savvy people to make use of.

Best of all, it sounds like the developer is planning to release Aufero under an open source license. I think Microsoft should be thanking him, because he’s just created a worthy Windows-based competitor to the AppleTV. Sadly, there’s almost no chance of that happening. For his own “protection”, the developer isn’t disclosing anything about himself, not even his name. All we know is that he (or she?) is Dutch.

Aufero is not yet available for download, as it’s in the early alpha testing phase. If you look at some of the screenshots, this is made obvious by the current UI, which is rather unpolished. But the developer stresses that it’s not complete yet.



Source: Integrating BitTorrent in Vista Media Centre

]]> http://torrentfreak.com/integrating-bittorrent-in-vista-media-centre/feed/ 8 http://torrentfreak.com/mpaa-steals-code-violates-linkware-license/ http://torrentfreak.com/mpaa-steals-code-violates-linkware-license/#comments Sat, 17 Feb 2007 10:33:19 +0000 Smaran http://torrentfreak.com/mpaa-steals-code-violates-linkware-license/ Source: MPAA Steals Code, Violates Linkware License
]]> Patrick Robin, a 29 year old web developer from South England, is the developer of an ASP-based blogging platform called Forest Blog. He distributes it freely under a linkware license, asking that anyone who uses it merely link back to his site where Forest Blog is offered for download. If someone wants to remove the links back to his site, they must purchase a license. A personal license costs 10 Pounds and a commercial one costs 25.

Amazingly, the MPAA seem to think they’re above “formalities” like licenses and such. The MPAA blog, located at www.mpaa.org/blog_default.asp (currently down – pic), was using Patrick’s Forest Blog software, but had been completely stripped of his name, and links back to his site. He only found about it accidentally when he happened to visit the MPAA site.

Clearly, there seems to be a lack of concern by the MPAA of others’ copyrighted works. Therefore, is it unsurprising that their customers seem to have the same attitude towards their movies?

According to Patrick, it isn’t something new to find his blogging software being used like this. What he finds really odd is that an organisation whose goal is to “protect” copyrighted creative works has no qualms in, essentially, stealing other people’s work. The MPAA still haven’t replied to a letter he sent them about the illegal use of his blogging software.

Source: MPAA Steals Code, Violates Linkware License

]]> http://torrentfreak.com/mpaa-steals-code-violates-linkware-license/feed/ 108 http://torrentfreak.com/subscribe-to-tv-shows-with-torrent-episode-downloader/ http://torrentfreak.com/subscribe-to-tv-shows-with-torrent-episode-downloader/#comments Thu, 15 Feb 2007 12:56:05 +0000 Smaran http://torrentfreak.com/subscribe-to-tv-shows-with-torrent-episode-downloader/ Source: Subscribe to TV Shows with Torrent Episode Downloader
]]> Torrent Episode Downloader simplifies the process of locating and downloading torrents of your favourite TV shows to a great extent. All you have to do is launch the application and hit the “New show” button. Once you choose which show you want to subscribe to, Ted will go out and grab the torrents of the latest episodes and drop them in a folder of your choice. I have it set to download the torrents to my Desktop.

Once a torrent is downloaded, Ted will automatically launch it in your default BitTorrent client, in my case, Transmission. If your BitTorrent client has the option to delete the original torrent once it has been imported, the whole process can be made very clean, with no traces or files left behind.

The simplicity of Ted is reminiscent of LimeWire, the P2P application that made downloading mp3s easier than surfing the web. The only problem is that you need to have a BitTorrent client installed. I’m guessing that the Opera browser with its built-in BitTorrent functionality would do. Ubuntu users might have it the best, since the OS comes with a version of the mainline client pre-installed.

Ted is not yet perfect, and still needs some work. Something funny I noticed was that while setting it up, it asked me whether I wanted it to start minimised in the system tray. Mac OS X doesn’t have a system tray! It’s quite obvious that Ted was originally written for Windows.

Torrent Episode Downloader (Ted) is completely free and open source, and can be downloaded from the official site.

Source: Subscribe to TV Shows with Torrent Episode Downloader

]]> http://torrentfreak.com/subscribe-to-tv-shows-with-torrent-episode-downloader/feed/ 10 http://torrentfreak.com/the-pirate-bay-featured-in-vanity-fair/ http://torrentfreak.com/the-pirate-bay-featured-in-vanity-fair/#comments Tue, 13 Feb 2007 10:11:54 +0000 Smaran http://torrentfreak.com/the-pirate-bay-featured-in-vanity-fair/ Source: The Pirate Bay, Featured in Vanity Fair
]]> The article titled “Pirates of the Multiplex” discusses the new age of sharing movies over the Internet with the help of technologies like BitTorrent. The author describes his experience with UKNova, a torrent site of which he was a member. It allowed him to view old British TV shows and any number of movies. He says, it “changed [his] life.”

He then goes on to talk about one of the most popular torrent sites of them all, The Pirate Bay. While talking about the Neij & Gottfrid, the owners of the site, the author doesn’t make them out to be something they’re not. His description is honest. And yet, the The Pirate Bay pair come out looking cool.

If Svartholm and Neij’s experience sounds like something out of a generic mid-90s cyber-thriller, neither of them is exactly leading-man material. Neij, a 28-year-old who is the more gregarious of the pair, is a scruffy, impish type who regards his outlaw status with wry detachment; Svartholm is a sad-eyed 22-year-old with wispy hair and near-translucent skin that positively scream out “Dungeons and Dragons Master.”

So, when did server admins turn into superstars? Well, it’s been a long time coming. The Pirate Bay is possibly one of the most well known sites on the Internet. And even though “mininova” was one of the most googled words of 2006, The Pirate Bay is better known to the press. The site’s name personifies BitTorrent and movie “piracy” better than anything else can ever hope to. And each attempt to take them down only makes them more popular.

The Vanity Fair piece is lengthy and covers a lot of things, including the MPAA’s struggle to stamp out piracy, the increasing losses of Hollywood, and how the “heartfelt testimony of of Ben Affleck, a man who was paid $12.5 million to star in Gigli,” didn’t help one bit. It’s definitely worth a read.

Source: The Pirate Bay, Featured in Vanity Fair

]]> http://torrentfreak.com/the-pirate-bay-featured-in-vanity-fair/feed/ 21 http://torrentfreak.com/xtorrent-public-beta-3-adds-rss-support/ http://torrentfreak.com/xtorrent-public-beta-3-adds-rss-support/#comments Sat, 10 Feb 2007 17:34:04 +0000 Smaran http://torrentfreak.com/xtorrent-public-beta-3-adds-rss-support/ Xtorrent, the popular Mac BitTorrent client, is now underway. New features that have been added in this release include RSS (torrentcast) support. A limited pre-release sale has also begun.

Source: Xtorrent Public Beta 3 Adds RSS Support

]]> We first wrote about Xtorrent in September of last year while it was still in private beta, then went on to review the first public beta.

Since then, a lot has changed. As expected, a lot of bugs have been stomped out and the overall performance of the app has been improved. Significant new features include a redesigned swarm column, drag-and-drop support, the ability to browse the file structure of torrents, RSS (torrentcast) support and multi-tracker support.

The most prominent new feature Xtorrent has gained is an in-built RSS catcher. This makes it easy for users to subscribe to BitTorrent feeds right inside the application, instead of having to use a separate RSS reader and then manually (or automatically, depending on your ‘autodownload’ settings) add the torrents to Xtorrent.

Many people seem to be outraged at the fact of paying for a BitTorrent client, but it seems Xtorrent has a lot going for it. Other than Azureus, it’s the only Mac BitTorrent client that can subscribe to RSS feeds, and the only one that can do so without a plug-in. It’s also the only stable client for the Mac with in-built search. BitRocket was the first to implement this, but is still very buggy and crashes often.

David Watanabe, the developer of Xtorrent, says that the first non-beta release is “on the horizon” and that he expects to release it within the next few weeks. The third public beta is pretty stable and doesn’t seem to have any bugs, but Watanabe nevertheless warns that there might “likely [be] undiscovered bugs.” He is currently offering Xtorrent at a discounted pre-release price of $15.89. Once 1.0 is released, the price will go up to $18.99.

Note: Xtorrent is free to use for now, and doesn’t require a license. But despite the fact that it’s a useful app with a sexy UI, it has yet to replace Transmission (beta) as my primary BitTorrent client. I have a soft spot for FOSS.





Source: Xtorrent Public Beta 3 Adds RSS Support

]]> http://torrentfreak.com/xtorrent-public-beta-3-adds-rss-support/feed/ 16 http://torrentfreak.com/drag-and-drop-torrent-creation-on-the-mac/ http://torrentfreak.com/drag-and-drop-torrent-creation-on-the-mac/#comments Thu, 08 Feb 2007 19:02:25 +0000 Smaran http://torrentfreak.com/drag-and-drop-torrent-creation-on-the-mac/ Source: Drag-and-Drop Torrent Creation on the Mac
]]> Until now, there have only been two three ways of creating a torrent on the Mac. The first was to use the mainline BitTorrent client, the second option was Azureus, the Java-based BitTorrent client, and the third was Tomato Torrent.

The problem with the mainline client is that it’s not a Universal application, so running it on an Intel Mac is like watching cheese ferment. There is a Universal beta, but is still very buggy and refuses to close, you have to force quit it. And Azureus is a memory hog, partly because it’s written in Java and partly because it’s such a feature-full application.

So, there is a need for a lighter alternative. Well, we’ve found an alternative, and it’s as light as it gets. A developer by the name of Wojtek has released a widget that makes creating torrents as easy as dragging and dropping a file or folder onto your Dashboard. It’s called CreateTorrent and is really simple to use.

The only thing you need to do once you’ve downloaded and installed it on your Dashboard is add an announce (tracker) URL. Just flip it around and you’ll see three input boxes: Announce URL, Port and Output Filename. The only one you need to change is the Announce URL, ie. a tracker address. Mininova compiles a list of “frequently used” public and private trackers that you can use. Most people just use The Pirate Bay’s tracker:

http://tpb.tracker.thepiratebay.org/announce

Initially, the widget just refused to work. But then, I wanted to find out what exactly was wrong and opened it with Azureus instead of Transmission, the client I normally use. Turns out, it was an issue with libtransmission, the core library of the two BitTorrent clients I tried to seed the torrent with, Transmission and Acquisition. When I opened the torrent with Azureus, it just worked.

Download the torrent I made with CreateTorrent: Noite de Carnaval by Code (.torrent).

Source: Drag-and-Drop Torrent Creation on the Mac

]]> http://torrentfreak.com/drag-and-drop-torrent-creation-on-the-mac/feed/ 28 http://torrentfreak.com/create-torrents-out-of-youtube-videos/ http://torrentfreak.com/create-torrents-out-of-youtube-videos/#comments Wed, 07 Feb 2007 10:30:31 +0000 Smaran http://torrentfreak.com/create-torrents-out-of-youtube-videos/ announced that it now allows users to download videos from the various video sites it scrapes, including YouTube, Google Video and Metacafé, over BitTorrent.

Source: Create Torrents out of YouTube Videos

]]> Once you point Hey!Watch in the direction of a YouTube video you want to download, it will get it, encode it in a format of your choice, and act as a super seeder for the first 12 hours, after which, the user and anyone else who has downloaded the video, can continue to share it with others.

Hey!Watch has really simplified the whole process of sharing a video over BitTorrent. Once you enter the YouTube URL on the site, it’ll fetch the video and create a torrent out of it. The only catch is that you must be using a BitTorrent client like Azureus or BitTornado, that supports the webseeding protocol.

How legal the service Hey!Watch offers is has yet to be questioned, but I doubt scraping video sharing sites like YouTube and offering videos for download, normally or over BitTorrent, is in accordance with those sites’ terms of service agreements. A while ago, Michael Arrington at TechCrunch was sent a cease and desist letter for putting up a YouTube download tool on his site.

The problem with Hey!Watch is that after you encode a certain number of videos, it asks you to upgrade your account, which costs, at a minimum, $4.99 a month. Free accounts are limited to 10 encodings per month, and all videos can’t be longer than 10 minutes. I guess I can see how something like this might be useful, but personally, I’d much rather just use the VideoDownloader Firefox extension or an application like PodTube. Everything doesn’t need BitTorrent.

Source: Create Torrents out of YouTube Videos

]]> http://torrentfreak.com/create-torrents-out-of-youtube-videos/feed/ 15 http://torrentfreak.com/secureix-offers-anonymous-bittorrent-downloads/ http://torrentfreak.com/secureix-offers-anonymous-bittorrent-downloads/#comments Sun, 04 Feb 2007 19:27:52 +0000 Smaran http://torrentfreak.com/secureix-offers-anonymous-bittorrent-downloads/ Source: SecureIX Offers Anonymous BitTorrent Downloads
]]> SecureIX launched last year with almost no hype surrounding it. Even we only came to know of it recently. Why something so seemingly important went unnoticed, is unknown.

Update: SecureIX shut down but BTGuard is a great alternative.

What SecureIX offers is a whole package of ‘secure services’. An IMAP/POP SSL-enabled e-mail account with PGP encryption and 1 GB storage, Usenet newsgroup access, and an encrypted VPN service. All of this free for personal use.

Instructions to set up VPN access are sent to the e-mail address you get when you sign up with SecureIX. That way, there’s definitely no chance of anyone intercepting e-mails from the site to you.

A passage on the site talks about how SecureIX provides added piracy:

As soon as you connect to our VPN server your computer is assigned a new IP address, an IP address that is owned by us, not your ISP. Unless you are using one of our static IP packages there are no records that link a single user to the IP address. The IP address is shared by many users. Remote servers on the Internet that try to identify you by your IP address will fail.

What I don’t understand is why a company would give away a service like this for free. Although, the site reserves the right to change their policy in the future, their “current plans are to always provide a free service.”

But how safe is this free service? After all, they also offer Business VPN for a price, so it is a commercial service. And even if your ISP doesn’t have your data, it’s almost assured that SecureIX does, as you’re using their servers to tunnel. In this way, they’re taking over from your ISP. Great idea, but who knows if we can trust SecureIX any more than our ISPs?

Where SecureIX could really come in handy is if your ISP is blocking encrypted BitTorrent transfers. In Canada, Rogers is throttling all BitTorrent connections, encrypted or otherwise. BroadbandReports.com writes, “Rogers has updated Cisco traffic-shaping hardware to perform more sophisticated deep packet inspection to again limit BitTorrent bandwidth consumption. Some users are using VPN software SecureIX to get around the new traffic shaping efforts, with mixed results.”

Source: SecureIX Offers Anonymous BitTorrent Downloads



]]> http://torrentfreak.com/secureix-offers-anonymous-bittorrent-downloads/feed/ 61 http://torrentfreak.com/jurassic-park-4-script-leaked-onto-bittorrent/ http://torrentfreak.com/jurassic-park-4-script-leaked-onto-bittorrent/#comments Fri, 02 Feb 2007 21:58:26 +0000 Smaran http://torrentfreak.com/jurassic-park-4-script-leaked-onto-bittorrent/ Source: Jurassic Park 4 Script Leaked onto BitTorrent
]]> Possibly the most popular film of the early nineties, Jurassic Park made more money at the box office than any film before it, and was only topped only by Titanic some years later. This was before the Internet, in 1993. 14 years later and the script to the fourth sequel has been leaked and uploaded to BitTorrent.

The script was uploaded to a popular semiprivate BitTorrent tracker by a certain “xbadwolfx” 6 days ago. He claims that it is the original copy, and that he has “friends in the company”, but reminds downloaders that the production team might have made slight changes to it after the time of his receiving it.

What’s interesting is that one of the concept images xbadwolfx uploaded to the torrent site displays the title of the movie as “Jurassic Park: New Dawn”, while another image says “Jurassic Park IV”. Both these images don’t match the title of the script, which is “Dawn of Extinction: Jurassic Park”. Also, one of the concept images has the year “2006″ printed on it.

Despite those discrepancies, the script itself seems to be legitimate. According to the uploader, it is confirmed that all the original Jurassic Park (1) characters are back. What’s yet to be seen is whether Hollywood will actually go ahead and make this movie.

We’re not linking to the torrent for obvious reasons. Although, it’s rather easy to find.

Update: Turns out, the script’s a fake. I guess we should have taken a hint when we found three different titles for the movie. Thanks to Icaterus for letting us know.

Source: Jurassic Park 4 Script Leaked onto BitTorrent

]]> http://torrentfreak.com/jurassic-park-4-script-leaked-onto-bittorrent/feed/ 47 http://torrentfreak.com/the-first-blu-ray-movie-on-bittorrent/ http://torrentfreak.com/the-first-blu-ray-movie-on-bittorrent/#comments Wed, 31 Jan 2007 19:32:12 +0000 Smaran http://torrentfreak.com/the-first-blu-ray-movie-on-bittorrent/ oh so familiar with. It's just the opposite. The first Blu-Ray movie on BitTorrent is the children's animation flick, Ice Age 2.

Source: The First Blu-Ray Movie on BitTorrent

]]> Who said toddlers don’t need their hi-def BitTorrent fix? Lesson learnt: It’s not always the porn industry leading the way. Children’s movies and animation films are possibly just as popular, albeit with a younger audience.

We recently reported on the first HD-DVD movie to be leaked onto BitTorrent. Now, the first Blu-Ray title has gone up. Once again, the private BitTorrent tracker, HDBits.org, is where the action’s at. The site lead the way by playing host to the first HD-DVD torrent. Now they can also take credit for serving up the first Blu-Ray torrent.

Slightly larger than the HD-DVD movie, the Ice Age 2 Blu-ray torrent is some 22 GBs. The first HD-DVD torrent, Serenity, was 19.6 GBs.

Here’s a screenshot of the torrent, courtesy of HDTV Blogger.



Source: The First Blu-Ray Movie on BitTorrent

]]> http://torrentfreak.com/the-first-blu-ray-movie-on-bittorrent/feed/ 50 http://torrentfreak.com/torrent-site-carelessly-exposes-user-information/ http://torrentfreak.com/torrent-site-carelessly-exposes-user-information/#comments Tue, 30 Jan 2007 07:16:26 +0000 Smaran http://torrentfreak.com/torrent-site-carelessly-exposes-user-information/ Source: Torrent Site Carelessly Exposes User Information
]]> A few days ago, the admins of an unnamed “open” BitTorrent tracker noticed their traffic spike from about 200 announces per second and 220,000 peers to an astonishing 570 announces per second and 480,000 peers. What happened? It turns out that Torrenty.org started to use the tracker for their torrents.

What Torrenty.org did is simply change the the IP address of their tracker (tracker.torrenty.org) to the open tracker’s IP address. They’re reasons for doing so remain unknown.

Apparently, in all their torrents they were still using the hostname “tracker.torrenty.org” in the HTTP header. That means that all torrents originating from the site could easily be tracked, something a torrent site hosting illegal torrents might not necessarily want happening. The author of the ‘Stories from an Opentracker‘ blog and admin of the open tracker in question writes:

The fun part is, a quick look at the torrenty.org website shows us that they in fact serve warez-torrents and take money for that. Now they provided us with a complete list of IP-addresses of their customers and an easy way to distinguish their customers from all other requests by checking the HTTP-header. If we would be some kind of copyright-prosecutor, which we are totally not, now would be the time to send some letters to customers of torrenty.org.

Whether the site was aiding in the illegal sharing of copyright files is besides the point. What’s really shocking is that a site can be so careless about protecting its users privacy and anonymity.

The open tracker guys e-mailed Torrenty.org, but their e-mail bounced. A day later traffic from Torrenty.org fell sharply. It looks like they’ve stopped using the open tracker. I’m not sure if the fact that Torrenty.org (Google Cache) is unavailable has anything to do with it, but all of this seems exceptionally peculiar.



Source: Torrent Site Carelessly Exposes User Information

]]> http://torrentfreak.com/torrent-site-carelessly-exposes-user-information/feed/ 6 http://torrentfreak.com/bsa-monitoring-bittorrent-traffic/ http://torrentfreak.com/bsa-monitoring-bittorrent-traffic/#comments Sat, 27 Jan 2007 20:39:26 +0000 Smaran http://torrentfreak.com/bsa-monitoring-bittorrent-traffic/ Source: BSA Monitoring BitTorrent Traffic
]]> Usually, it’s packet-shaping ISPs that users have to watch out for. But this time it’s an ‘anti-piracy gang’, as we like to call them. The BSA, like the RIAA and MPAA, is known for its aggressive tactics. Last year, the group targeted small businesses suspected of using pirated software with their “Bust Your Boss!” campaign. They offered rewards of up to $200,000 to anyone willing to turn in their employer.

Apparently, the BSA watches all traffic going in and out from a specific ISP, in this case Pipex, and logs all the IPs that are uploading and downloading files over BitTorrent. Then letters are sent, first to the ISP, and if it co-operates, to the customer. The ISP has a legal obligation to give the BSA or any other such organisation the e-mail address of the customer whose IP was provided. If the ISP decides not to give up its customer’s information, it is held liable for “contributory infringement”.

What’s really scary is that the e-mail sent to Pipex from the BSA contains extremely detailed information on users’ activity and includes not only IP addresses, but the protocol, the file that was downloaded, the exact file name and the DNS address of the connection with the date/time stamp.

Here’s an excerpt of the e-mail sent to Pipex.

The Business Software Alliance has determined that the connection listed below, which appears to be using an Internet account under your control, is using a P2P network seen below to offer unlicensed copies of copyrighted computer programs published by the BSA’s member companies.

And a quote from Pipex’s e-mail to its customer.

We have received a complaint regarding an allegation of Copyright Infringement.

We were supplied an IP address of the system that was sharing the alleged copyrighted material, which we traced to your PIPEX ADSL account.

As I am sure you are aware, this breaches our Acceptable Use Policy, (http://www.pipex.net/legal/aup/ ) and many copyright laws, namely the Berne Convention.

Is the BSA changing its tactics? Are we going to see yet another organisation packet sniff data and stalk people? Let’s hope not.

Source: BSA Monitoring BitTorrent Traffic

]]> http://torrentfreak.com/bsa-monitoring-bittorrent-traffic/feed/ 23 http://torrentfreak.com/more-than-25-million-americans-pirate-movies/ http://torrentfreak.com/more-than-25-million-americans-pirate-movies/#comments Thu, 25 Jan 2007 18:17:10 +0000 Smaran http://torrentfreak.com/more-than-25-million-americans-pirate-movies/ Source: More Than 25 Million Americans Pirate Movies
]]> According to the group, 25.6 million Americans have illegally downloaded a full-length movie from the Internet. That’s 18 percent of the total US online population.

2,600 Americans took part in the study via telephone and on the web. The study found that users basically don’t believe or care that movie studios are losing money when someone illegally downloads a movie. Interestingly, 78 percent of the people found stealing a DVD from a store to be a “serious offence”, but only 40 percent considered downloading a movie to be just as bad.

Director of the study, Kaan Yigit said in a statement that the movie industry was suffering from the “Robin Hood effect” due to the large profits it makes. “There is a Robin Hood effect — most people perceive celebrities and studios to be rich already and as a result don’t think of movie downloading as a big deal,” he said.

Just as we noted in a recent piece, the study found that unless a legal offering is competitive enough, users are not going to stop downloading pirated movies. “The current crop of ‘download to own’ movie services and the new ones coming into the market will need to offer greater flexibility of use, selection and low prices to convert the current users to their services — otherwise file-sharing will continue to thrive,” said Yigit.

Here’s a direct link to the press release. (PDF)

Source: More Than 25 Million Americans Pirate Movies

]]> http://torrentfreak.com/more-than-25-million-americans-pirate-movies/feed/ 24 http://torrentfreak.com/mark-cuban-bittorrent-is-doomed/ http://torrentfreak.com/mark-cuban-bittorrent-is-doomed/#comments Tue, 23 Jan 2007 21:49:29 +0000 Smaran http://torrentfreak.com/mark-cuban-bittorrent-is-doomed/ Mark Cuban claims that P2P, and more specifically, BitTorrent is doomed. Apparently, "conflicting clients", lack of knowledge, limited Internet plans, and "bandwidth premiums" are going to be jointly responsible for the death of BitTorrent.

Source: Mark Cuban: BitTorrent is Doomed

]]> So, here’s Cuban’s argument. He believes that from the business standpoint, BitTorrent and other peer-to-peer technologies are great. They save massive amounts of bandwidth and help efficiently distribute large media files, possibly even speeding up transfers. We agree with everything up ’til here.

But now he goes on to say that although content creators can profit from BitTorrent, users are getting screwed. Why? Here are his reasons.

Conflicting Clients

End Users don’t understand how P2P works

The P2P model of seeding is a HUGE problem for those [...] with bandwidth constraints or per bit or per minute costs

There is a misconception that there is bandwidth savings for the end user

On conflicting clients he says, “When multiple clients are installed on a PC, not only does that create confusion among users, its a ‘last installed, first in charge’ approach. THat approach and lack of respect for other clients will lead to user configuration problems.”

Okay, number one, if you’re referring to file associations, ie. the most recently installed app is associated with the file type, then this “problem” is not limited to BitTorrent clients. Everything from graphic editors (Photoshop, Gimp) to music management applications (iTunes, WinAmp) do this. Secondly, if this causes confusion among users, then how do millions of people manage to get their music into iTunes and sync it to their iPods without accidentally having their mp3s added to the Windows Media Player library? This “lack of respect” isn’t so much about BitTorrent client developers trying to steal users from their competitors, as it is about how operating systems function today.

Onto point two. “End Users dont understand how P2P works, and once they do, they get concerned about giving up bandwidth.”

I hear BitTorrent transfers make up about one third of all traffic on the Internet these days. It seems rather likely that end users do in fact understand how P2P works. And unless their other online activities are hindered by BitTorrent or P2P, I don’t see users really having a problem with the uploads. Most don’t even bother uploading once their file has been download, and since the majority of users download torrents from public trackers, they aren’t forced to either.

Mark’s third point, “The P2P model of seeding is a HUGE problem for those using wireless broadband with bandwidth constraints or per bit or per minute costs. People are going to wake up and find that they owe Verizon, Sprint, whoever a lot more than they ever thought possible because they installed a client on their Laptops. That could lead to these networks blocking the protocol.”

Point three actually makes sense. The real problem here is miscommunication. In developing countries like India, ISPs milk customers for money by charging them for every MB downloaded, and in some cases, for every minute spent online. Some ISPs (Sify, for one) even lie about unlimited plans and have per-day limits (eg. 200 MB), which, if exceeded, cause the number of days the plan is valid for (usually a month) to be reduced every time the download limit is excedded. Someone I know actually ran up a bill of several hundred dollars because he thought he was on an unlimited plan, whereas in reality his ISP hadn’t processed his request to change plans. But as BitTorrent and P2P grow in popularity, users are quickly starting to demand ‘unlimited’ plans. If you look at the trend, ISPs are more likely to cash in on the P2P phenomenon and offer unlimited plans for a premium than start blocking protocols. And although per-bit and per-minute plans are widespread in developing countries, I don’t know how much of a problem they are to European, Australian and North American users.

Cuban’s last point is, “There is a misconception that there is bandwidth savings for the end user. If you want to download a 1gb size file, 1gb of data will be delivered to your PC. There is no savings of bandwidth on the client side. In fact, the client is charged a bandwidth premium because after they have received the entire file, they are asked to particpate in the peering by delivering parts of the file to other users.”

Guess what, the end user doesn’t care if he’s uploading bits while downloading. Unlike hosting providers, the user incurs no cost from constantly uploading data. It doesn’t matter, as long as he can go about his other activities. And unless he’s on a per-bit or per-minute plan, no “bandwidth premiums” are going to be charged to him. Also, no one is asking the user to “participate in the peering” (or simply, seed) once his download is complete. That is only a requirement of select private trackers.

When it comes to utilising BitTorrent in business, as part of a content store, I think Cuban’s looking at it the wrong way. When the various BitTorrent stores (BitTorrent.com, Zudeo.com) are up and running, content creators are not going to be getting a free ride. Users are not going to pay the same price they do at conventional stores like the iTunes Store and Amazon Unbox. Why should they? They’re acting as servers for content creators and are distributing content for no charge at all. But since money isn’t being deducted from their bank accounts, and seeding a torrent is not really affecting their web browsing, users are okay with uploading.

Keep in mind, this business model will only work if the rates at BitTorrent-powered content stores are significantly lower than conventional ones. In other words, users aren’t just going to let themselves be ripped off. If they feel they’re getting a raw deal, they’ll head straight to “illegal” torrent sites like The Pirate Bay and Isohunt. In fact, that’s what users are doing right now!

I’m open to the possibility that I’m dead wrong. I don’t know, maybe Cuban is right. Maybe BitTorrent is in fact doomed, and the video streaming technologies he pioneered with Broadcast.com in the 90s will make a major comeback. I mean, who uses BitTorrent these days? Just a bunch of pirates, soon to be exiled to metal platform in the middle of the North Sea. Right? Right.

What do you think? Are the days of P2P over? Is the the balkanisation of BitTorrent imminent?

Creative Commons photograph by kk+.

Source: Mark Cuban: BitTorrent is Doomed

]]> http://torrentfreak.com/mark-cuban-bittorrent-is-doomed/feed/ 104 http://torrentfreak.com/grooveshark-to-offer-legal-p2p-alternative/ http://torrentfreak.com/grooveshark-to-offer-legal-p2p-alternative/#comments Sun, 21 Jan 2007 19:48:21 +0000 Smaran http://torrentfreak.com/grooveshark-to-offer-legal-p2p-alternative/ Source: Grooveshark to Offer Legal P2P Alternative
]]> Despite the fact that Grooveshark will heavily rely on P2P, it will still be a commercial service. Songs themselves won’t be exchanged for free. Users will be charged 99¢ per song, but since they’re also uploading files to others, they will get “rewards” in return. In other words, free songs.

Grooveshark’s business model is somewhat like the reward system that everyone thought Apple might implement with iTunes, if they integrated BitTorrent in Leopard, and the iTunes Store. Users buy and download songs & movies over BitTorrent from the iTunes Store and get free iTunes gift cards or points for uploading.

To me, this sounds like a “better” iTunes, especially if the songs are not infected with any kind of DRM, which Grooveshark says they will not. But will it be enough to convert all the people who share songs over “illegal” P2P networks like Gnutella? Maybe not, but I believe if users are given a sensible and competitive legal alternative, a decent amount will switch. And Grooveshark seems competitive on paper.

When it comes to the crunch, many services just fail to deliver. Remember Spiral Frog, anyone? What ever happened to it? It succeeded in getting not only the blogosphere and social news sites all excited about it, but also mainstream news agencies like the BBC. It was going to irradicate illegal music swapping. Then it was found out that the songs were going to be laden with Windows DRM and force users to keep going back to the website and watching ads to stop their songs from locking up. All hope of it becoming successful died then and there. Let’s hope the same doesn’t happen with Grooveshark.

Source: Grooveshark to Offer Legal P2P Alternative

]]> http://torrentfreak.com/grooveshark-to-offer-legal-p2p-alternative/feed/ 10 http://torrentfreak.com/filesharing-news-site-p2pnetnet-up-for-sale/ http://torrentfreak.com/filesharing-news-site-p2pnetnet-up-for-sale/#comments Fri, 19 Jan 2007 19:38:56 +0000 Smaran http://torrentfreak.com/filesharing-news-site-p2pnetnet-up-for-sale/ Source: Filesharing News Site p2pnet.net up for Sale
]]> Basically, Jon has decided that it is no longer feasible for him to continue running p2pnet.net. The main reason behind this seems to be the lack of advertisers. Most of his previous ones have been sued out of business by the MPAA/RIAA. And Google Adsense banned him for generating “spurious clicks” (aka cheating). He says he’s innocent, and we believe him, but Google won’t budge. They say they’re protecting their advertisers.

Jon seems to be out of options. He’s decided that it’s time to sell the site. On his site, he says that he is “looking for offers starting at $30,000.” Can you really put a price on years of hard work? I don’t know. $30,000 seemed outrageous to me initially, but after thinking about it, I’m not sure. What really got to me was the fact that if the site isn’t bought, he’s going to take it offline. To do that would be a crying shame. Even though people have offered Jon free hosting, he’s made up his mind. The only other option would be for his readers to pool together enough funds and make sure that even if Jon stops writing, the archives remain online.

We decided the best thing would be to talk to Jon himself about his decesion. He was gracious enough to take a few minutes to tell us all about it.

TF: In our minds, p2pnet.net is one of the top 3 filesharing news sites. Why quit the race while you’re in the lead?

Jon: I’m not quitting. This is all about keeping p2pnet online. Getting to this point means I’m already substantially in debt and I just can’t go any further by myself. I need help and if selling the site to keep it online is the only way I can get it, then that’s the way it’ll have to be. If I can somehow get $20,000 Canadian without selling, I’ll be able to hang in for another five months or so. I’ve had several offers for hosting, so I wouldn’t have to worry about that. I’d also try and find someone to take on the tech end, and someone else to look after advertising. In addition, I and a friend on the island recently started up a purely commercial offline project which has zero to do with the Net, p2p or anything else even vaguely like it. So far it’s cost us about $500 so it’s not capital intensive either : ) It’ll be a couple of months before we know if it’s going to take off but if it does, it may well provide funding for p2pnet.

TF: The founders of the popular filesharing application, Kazaa filed a lawsuit against your site last year. Is this one of the things that made you decide to sell?

Jon: Not even nearly. A domain name is a piece of property which can be bought and sold. It isn’t a legal entity like a company which carries with it all of its debts and obligations. If you bought a TV from someone who happened to be in a lawsuit, that doesn’t make you party to, or liable for, the suit. The parties in my case are: JON NEWTON, INTERSERVER, INC., JOHN DOE, JANE DOE, RICHARD ROE and JANE ROE. They don’t include p2pnet.net.

TF: All TorrentFreak posts are published under a Creative Commons license. You often republish our posts on p2pnet.net, and we’re very grateful for this, because in our minds it doesn’t matter if we make a buck off each reader, P2P news is about getting the message out. Don’t you agree?

Jon: I do indeed. Absolutely. Torrentfreak does so well because it’s needed. It fills a gap. Sites like ours are about disseminating good information and unspinning spin —– getting the message out quickly and accurately. We’re not here to beat each other by getting something out ‘first’. I’ve always believed that’s for the lamescream offline media, and people who think like them. We’re here to tell our friends what’s really happening as soon as possible and in as many outlets as possible. We want others to spread the information ASAP.

TF: On your site, you say that you intend to “continue talking” to your reader base. What are your plans for the future and where can people find you once p2pnet.net is sold?

Jon: You know that saying about the Fat Lady? Well, she hasn’t sung yet : ) At this point in time, I’m not thinking much further ahead than the next month or two. If I can survive that, and $20K would do it, I’m pretty sure I’d be able to survive the rest. This isn’t about dying, it’s about changing. I also have another site called p2pnet.ca, which I haven’t even looked at since well before Christmas. If I end up having to sell p2pnet.net, I still have p2pnet.ca and my approach to that would be a bit different: It wouldn’t be full time, and it wouldn’t carry ads. I’d concentrate on my main areas of interest and forget about posting ‘other’ news like what’s happening with Bill and the Boyz, and with iRule Jobs.

TF: Lastly, who do you think is most likely to buy your site? A large Internet portal? Or a blog network like Weblogs, Inc? Personally, I think p2pnet.net would be a great addition to their network, since their P2P blog was shut down last year. They also have the backing of AOL, if they ever needed a team of ferocious lawyers.

Jon: I really don’t mind who gets involved, or whether they’re the owner or an investor. I know this sounds arrogant, but I believe losing p2pnet would be a serious blow to freedom of speech online. There aren’t many dissenting voices and we can’t afford to lose even one. So Big or Small, as long as it helps me to keep p2pnet online.

TF: Thanks, and all the best!

Jon: Cheers!

Source: Filesharing News Site p2pnet.net up for Sale

]]> http://torrentfreak.com/filesharing-news-site-p2pnetnet-up-for-sale/feed/ 4 http://torrentfreak.com/possible-locations-for-the-new-the-pirate-bay-hq/ http://torrentfreak.com/possible-locations-for-the-new-the-pirate-bay-hq/#comments Wed, 17 Jan 2007 10:55:05 +0000 Smaran http://torrentfreak.com/possible-locations-for-the-new-the-pirate-bay-hq/ Source: Possible Locations for the New The Pirate Bay HQ
]]> You’ve heard of Sealand, and maybe even Ladonia, but what about Isla Montuosa, Ile de Caille, Geraldo-Pedro & Ronde Island? Those are all candidates for the next “Pirate Island”. Check out descriptions of a few potential pirate havens below.

Sealand
The one country most likely to be bought by The Pirate Bay is Sealand. The micronation is currently owned by the Bates family, who claimed the 5920 sq. ft. platform as their own in 1967. The so-called “country” is located only 10 kilometres off the coast of Suffolk, England, accessible only by boat and helicopter.

---

Ladonia
The country second in line is Ladonia, another micronation. Located southwest of Sweden, Ladonia seems to be the most convenient option for the TPB guys, as their current HQ is in Sweden. Ladonia is basically a tiny patch of land on which a few sculptures stand. The story behind it is a long and confusing one. In 1996, Lars Vilks, the artist who “owns” Ladonia proclaimed it a sovereign nation after a long-drawn court battle to safeguard his supposedly illegally built sculptures.

---

Isla Montuosa
According to the BuySealand wiki, Isla Montuosa is a remote island located near Panama in Central America. It is another possible location for The Pirate Bay’s server farm, and also the largest of the top three. Isla Montuosa spans a whooping 227 acres. Unfortunately, most of the island is covered in trees, and it would be a shame if TPB would have to indulge in mass-deforestation. Also, it seems the island has no infrastructure at all at this point. That would make setting up an server farm extremely difficult. They’d need electricity and water first!



Other possible countries or islands The Pirate Bay might buy include Chris Pinnacle Island in the Philippines, Ernst-Thälmann Island in Germany, Ronde Island in the Caribbean, the Geraldo and Pedro Islands in Brazil, Great Hans Lollik & Little Hans Lollik, part of the US Virgin Islands and Ile de Caille in Grenada.

What do you think? Which of the various micronations and islands is most suitable for The Pirate Bay to buy? In my opinion, Sealand seems perfect since it already has high-speed Internet access. And what better place for a bunch of pirates than on the high seas?

Source: Possible Locations for the New The Pirate Bay HQ

]]> http://torrentfreak.com/possible-locations-for-the-new-the-pirate-bay-hq/feed/ 49 http://torrentfreak.com/first-hd-dvd-movie-leaked-onto-bittorrent/ http://torrentfreak.com/first-hd-dvd-movie-leaked-onto-bittorrent/#comments Sun, 14 Jan 2007 19:21:07 +0000 Smaran http://torrentfreak.com/first-hd-dvd-movie-leaked-onto-bittorrent/ Serenity, the Firefly movie.

Source: First HD-DVD Movie Leaked Onto BitTorrent

]]> It hasn’t even been a month since the HD-DVD ripper, BackupHDDVD was released and we’re already seeing high definition feature films pop up on torrent sites. Other than Serenity, it is rumoured that HD-DVDs of the movies Batman Begins, Chronicles of Riddick, 12 Monkeys and King Kong have been decrypted and consequently shown up on torrent sites. Yesterday, a handful of hackers figured out how to extract the unique volume key from HD-DVDs.

According to HDTV Blogger, the torrent is “a 19.6GB file in native EVO format that should play on PowerDVD and WinDVD with HD DVD playback.” Apparently, he got a “very, very nasty email” after posting about the first HD-DVD torrent. It seems the anonymous mailer was upset at the fact that he was bringing unnecessary attention to the P2P community. Looks like his plan just backfired.

The anonymous mailer also claims that HDTV Blogger is violating the BitTorrent site’s copyright by posting a screenshot of the site. “By posting that screencap you have violated the copyright of the tracker by posting an image and text that is own by them. You should remove the screencap before legal action is taken upon you.” – is this guy for real?



Images courtesy of HDTV Blogger.

Source: First HD-DVD Movie Leaked Onto BitTorrent

]]> http://torrentfreak.com/first-hd-dvd-movie-leaked-onto-bittorrent/feed/ 130 http://torrentfreak.com/bittorrent-inc-itunes-drm-inspires-people-to-pirate-content/ http://torrentfreak.com/bittorrent-inc-itunes-drm-inspires-people-to-pirate-content/#comments Fri, 12 Jan 2007 19:04:07 +0000 Smaran http://torrentfreak.com/bittorrent-inc-itunes-drm-inspires-people-to-pirate-content/ Source: BitTorrent Inc: iTunes DRM Inspires People to Pirate Content
]]> It’s not just iTunes, but every other restrictive DRM ecosystem. According to Navin, the same holds true for the protection enforced by the Zune Marketplace, if it achieves a considerable amount of market share. The reason he didn’t mention Microsoft’s PlaysForSure DRM could be because it allows users to transfer songs to devices from more than one manufacturer.

Speaking on a panel at the International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) , Navin said that Apple’s Fairplay and Microsoft’s new Zune DRM were too restrictive because content encoded in these proprietary formats locks users into a single ecosystem. What if a user wants to purchase a device produced by another manufacturer? All the content he has already purchased will be incompatible. This will cause the person to pirate the content he has already bought, possibly more than once. “The lock-in you get from iTunes [or Zune] is great when you love the device you got from either one of those vendors,” he said. “But if you don’t, the amount you’ve invested [in purchasing media files] is worthless,” he said

Is it Navin’s place to criticise DRM when his own company is about to launch a video store that is going to offer content “infected” with Microsoft’s platform-dependent Windows DRM? To be fair, BitTorrent Inc says that if they had it their way, content on their upcoming video store would be completely free of DRM. Apparently, it was the content producers who were adamant about it.

This isn’t the first time Navin has made a controversial statement. Last month, he was quoted saying that his company’s site, BitTorrent.com doesn’t index illegal torrents, something we proved was clearly not the case.

Source: BitTorrent Inc: iTunes DRM Inspires People to Pirate Content

]]> http://torrentfreak.com/bittorrent-inc-itunes-drm-inspires-people-to-pirate-content/feed/ 12 http://torrentfreak.com/download-iphone-bittorrent/ http://torrentfreak.com/download-iphone-bittorrent/#comments Wed, 10 Jan 2007 00:07:06 +0000 Smaran http://torrentfreak.com/download-macworld-2007-keynote-on-bittorrent/ Source: Download the iPhone Introduction on BitTorrent
]]> We aren’t going to give away anything, since some people prefer to watch the presentation themselves. But if you haven’t heard the news already, which is extremely unlikely, it’s BIG!

The Quicktime servers are crippled right now, good thing we still have BitTorrent. Note that this is not the official video.

MacWorld 2007 iPhone introduction (.asf)

And if you just can’t get enough, check out the The Complete Apple Keynote Collection, courtesy of The Pirate Bay.

Source: Download the iPhone Introduction on BitTorrent

]]> http://torrentfreak.com/download-iphone-bittorrent/feed/ 3 http://torrentfreak.com/tpb-the-mpaa-are-rabid-obsessed-lunatics/ http://torrentfreak.com/tpb-the-mpaa-are-rabid-obsessed-lunatics/#comments Mon, 08 Jan 2007 18:28:46 +0000 Smaran http://torrentfreak.com/tpb-the-mpaa-are-rabid-obsessed-lunatics/ Source: TPB: The MPAA are “rabid, obsessed lunatics”
]]> The Sunday Times article titled “Yo ho ho , buccanerds give studios a broadside” is all about The Pirate Bay, its founders, the problems it’s faced and how it all started. If you’re wondering how it did, the two co-founders first met in 2001 at the HAL (Hackers at Large) conference in the Netherlands. The rest is a Wikipedia entry (as opposed to the long-outmoded history).

Svartholm talks about how The Pirate Bay, and other BitTorrent sites’ popularity is a clear indication of “civil disobedience against the current copyright legislation, on a huge scale.”

But the real highlight of the interview is his opinion on how publishers are afraid, due to lack of knowledge about BitTorrent and filesharing, of how their content is being stolen. He says, “Some publishers are afraid — out of ignorance — but even though they are wrong I can respect that. Some, however, like the MPAA can most accurately be described as rabid, obsessed lunatics.”

Rabid, obsessed lunatics? I’m not sure too many people would disagree. In the past few years, the MPAA have single-handedly done some of the most outrageous things to prevent their movies from being “stolen”. They’ve sued a company for pre-loading legally purchased movie DVDs onto iPods, Stalked Svartholm, bred anti-piracy, DVD-sniffing dogs and banned Americans from inviting more than a certain number of people over to watch movies on a larger-than-29″ screen Home Theatre system. Oh wait, that last one didn’t happen. What’s really sad is that if they did actually do something like that, it wouldn’t surprise anyone!

Creative Commons photograph by David Wise.

Source: TPB: The MPAA are “rabid, obsessed lunatics”

]]> http://torrentfreak.com/tpb-the-mpaa-are-rabid-obsessed-lunatics/feed/ 26 http://torrentfreak.com/24-season-6-leaked-on-bittorrent/ http://torrentfreak.com/24-season-6-leaked-on-bittorrent/#comments Sat, 06 Jan 2007 17:11:47 +0000 Smaran http://torrentfreak.com/24-season-6-leaked-on-bittorrent/ Source: 24 Season 6 Leaked on BitTorrent
]]> The leak is the work of AsiaTeam, a Spanish language group known to regularly upload TV shows and movies to BitTorrent. Several commenters on mininova are convinced that these are “the real thing” and not fakes. A contact who says she downloaded the torrent just confirmed that it is in fact 100% real.

From the screenshots (1, 2, 3) posted on mininova, it seems the AsiaTeam guys have not only episode 1, but the entire Season 6 Premiere DVD that will be released on January 16th. This DVD contains the the first 4 episodes (screenshot) of 24 season 6, and a preview of episode 5.

And just to spice things up, here’s an exclusive:



Even though my colleague at TorrentFreak tells me it is completely normal in the world of BitTorrent for TV shows to be leaked, I am amazed that something like this could happen.

In July 2005, the pilot episodes of 5 upcoming TV series were leaked onto BitTorrent. Although many believed that it was ABC themselves who had leaked the episodes to get the hype going, it is unlikely that a mainstream content producer would do such a thing. Many upcoming episodes of the TV series Prison Break, among others, have been routinely leaked onto the Internet, and in particular, BitTorrent.

We can’t link to the torrent for obvious reasons, but it’s not hard to find.

update: episode 2, 3 and 4 are out

Source: 24 Season 6 Leaked on BitTorrent

]]> http://torrentfreak.com/24-season-6-leaked-on-bittorrent/feed/ 102 http://torrentfreak.com/a-simple-way-to-remotely-download-torrents-on-the-mac/ http://torrentfreak.com/a-simple-way-to-remotely-download-torrents-on-the-mac/#comments Thu, 04 Jan 2007 16:47:47 +0000 Smaran http://torrentfreak.com/a-simple-way-to-remotely-download-torrents-on-the-mac/ Source: A Simple Way to Remotely Download Torrents on the Mac
]]> The most common way to remotely download torrents is via a WebUI. On the Mac, the only BitTorrent client with a WebUI is Azureus, and that’s via a plug-in. Most people would find it confusing to open up ports in their software firewall to configure the plug-in, and TorrentFlux is strictly for über geeks. Thanks to a bit of clever thinking on the part of Ruairi, a contributor to macosxhints.com, you won’t have to bother with any advanced settings or run the PHP-based TorrentFlux on your web server.

Here’s what you need to do:

• You will need to have either Adium or iChat+Chax installed. Both Adium and the Chax plug-in for iChat are free.
• Set up a new iChat account (or any other kind of account — except Gtalk — for Adium). This will be logged in on your home machine.
• Then add the new account you’ve created as a buddy on your normal account, which you’ll use at work, school or wherever.
• In iChat > Preferences > Chax (or Adium > Preferences > File Transfer) set it to automatically accept file transfers, and specify a directory, even Desktop will do. I recommend you use Adium, since it gives you the extra option of accepting file transfers only from your contacts.

• Now set up either Transmission (Beta), Azureus or Xtorrent to watch that directory for torrent files.


That’s it, you’re done. Now whenever you send your IM account that’s logged in at home a torrent file, it’ll automatically start downloading it! A simple, yet effective solution.

Have you already tried this, and has it worked for you?

Source: A Simple Way to Remotely Download Torrents on the Mac

]]> http://torrentfreak.com/a-simple-way-to-remotely-download-torrents-on-the-mac/feed/ 36 http://torrentfreak.com/bittyrant-the-selfish-bittorrent-client/ http://torrentfreak.com/bittyrant-the-selfish-bittorrent-client/#comments Wed, 03 Jan 2007 13:51:56 +0000 Smaran http://torrentfreak.com/bittyrant-the-selfish-bittorrent-client/ Source: BitTyrant: The “Selfish” BitTorrent Client
]]> BitTyrant is based on the Azureus 2.5 code. While inspecting the contents of the application I noticed that even though its icon is different from Azureus’, it is still named “Azureus.icns”.

BitTyrant is selfish because it focuses on the optimal speed for the individual, although it might hurt the overall performance of the entire swarm. The key idea is: selecting peers that give you the best overall download speed. This is done by adding two features to the client.

1. It connects to peers that give you the the most data back. So invest a small amount of upload speed, and get the most back.
2. It connects to peers with the best upload speed.

Selfishness might work for a single person, but if everybody starts to use BitTyrant, performance will decrease. So, as the makers of the client put it: “When all peers behave selfishly, average performance degrades for all peers, even those with high capacity.”

It is clear that BitTyrant will optimize the speed for a single user if only a few use the client, but the makers of the client also found that peers with less bandwidth available will be worse of. In their research paper we read:

“We found that BitTyrant improves performance for all peers that use it. Nevertheless, in practice, BitTyrant will hurt the performance of individual swarms as high capacity peers reach a point of diminishing returns and are incented to either withhold their upload contribution or invest it in other swarms. Low capacity peers do not enjoy such a luxury. As the majority of peers have low capacity, they will see degraded performance compared to BitTorrent today.”

Just like Azureus, BitTyrant is cross-platform due to the nature of Java, the platform independent language it’s coded in. Linux, Mac OSX, and Windows versions of the client can be downloaded from the BitTyrant homepage, but I don’t recommend that you do.

Source: BitTyrant: The “Selfish” BitTorrent Client

]]> http://torrentfreak.com/bittyrant-the-selfish-bittorrent-client/feed/ 49 http://torrentfreak.com/bittorrent-inc-we-dont-index-illegal-torrents/ http://torrentfreak.com/bittorrent-inc-we-dont-index-illegal-torrents/#comments Mon, 01 Jan 2007 18:23:11 +0000 Smaran http://torrentfreak.com/bittorrent-inc-we-dont-index-illegal-torrents/ Source: BitTorrent Inc: We Don’t Index Illegal Torrents
]]> Published today, InfoWorld’s interview with Mr. Navin is about BitTorrent Inc’s new relationship with Hollywood as they try and build a content delivery system using BitTorrent, and DRM (we’re pissed about the latter). When asked about the illegal torrents that BitTorrent.com indexes and if the company was planning to remove them, Ashwin Navin said, “Absolutely. BitTorrent.com is filtered so that we will not surface links for unlicensed content.”

It’s interesting how BitTorrent Inc’s focus has shifted to include DRM and be restricted to only legal content. The initial goal of BitTorrent.com was to index all the various movies, music, TV shows and other files available over BitTorrent. Wired News reported in 2005 on the upcoming launch of the site that was going to be “an advertising-supported search engine dedicated to cataloging and indexing the thousands of movies, music tracks, software programs and other files for download.”

We recently wrote about how BitTorrent.com was helping game developers distribute demos. In that article we profiled the strategy game Disciples II: Dark Prophecy. It was only a demo. But if you type “Disciples” into the search box on BitTorrent.com, you’ll find both the demo and a pirated version of the full game. Or try searching for “Prison Break” and see what you find. Each one of the 29 results you get is a copyrighted file. How exactly do these “filters” work?

How does BitTorrent.com get all this illegal content? It obviously doesn’t have an active uploading community like The Pirate Bay or Torrentspy. Instead, it indexes other torrent sites like The Pirate Bay, Meganova, Torrent Portal and TorrentReactor.

So, our question is, How is BitTorrent.com different from any other so-called illegal torrent site that indexes copyrighted content? Btmon.com does exactly the same thing! Sure, BitTorrent.com’s frontpage is full of game demos, legal music downloads and movie trailers, but one little search query away is just about every popular movie, TV show, music album and computer game.

In our minds, and according to US law, what BitTorrent.com is doing is not illegal. The DMCA clearly states that websites are only required to take down files if the copyright holder or a representative files a complaint. But why does the MPAA sue sites like Isohunt and Torrentspy (who also respect the DCMA), while they’re in bed with BitTorrent?


Dan Glickman (MPAA) and Bram Cohen (BitTorrent)

Source: BitTorrent Inc: We Don’t Index Illegal Torrents

]]> http://torrentfreak.com/bittorrent-inc-we-dont-index-illegal-torrents/feed/ 25 http://torrentfreak.com/disciples-ii-dark-prophecy-on-bittorrentcom/ http://torrentfreak.com/disciples-ii-dark-prophecy-on-bittorrentcom/#comments Fri, 29 Dec 2006 18:14:46 +0000 Smaran http://torrentfreak.com/disciples-ii-dark-prophecy-on-bittorrentcom/ Source: Disciples II: Dark Prophecy on BitTorrent.com
]]> The demo of Disciples II: Dark Prophecy seems to be available exclusively on BitTorrent. Even the official site says, “Demo: None available yet, please check again later.”

It’s interesting how companies are starting to realise the potential of BitTorrent as a promotional platform for their content. Distributing demos of games is a great way to build up hype around an upcoming, or even slightly old (Disciples II, for example) title, and what better way to do it than share it over BitTorrent?

From BitTorrent.com:

Disciples II: Dark Prophecy returns gamers to the magical realm of the Sacred Lands where four races – the Empire, the Mountain Clans, the Legions of the Damned and the Undead Hordes – continue the battle for the destiny of their Gods. A decade after the First Great War, the final prophecy continues to unfold. Deep within the crevices of the Sacred Lands, the Chosen One has emerged, fated to bring salvation to some and destruction to others. Braced with renewed faith and newfound conviction, each race must once again take up the sword for the sake of their people and the glory of their God.

As a kid, I used to be a total strategy game buff. I not only played all the RTSes like Command & Conquer and Age of Empires, but also many turn-based ones like Age of Wonders and Disciples. Even though I only had the demo of Disciples I: Sacred Lands, me and this friend were crazy about it and spent more hours on it than is healthy. So when I finally got my hands on Disciples II, I played it constantly for days, until I finished the game.

Disciples II: Dark Prophecy is truly one of my favourite games, and I highly recommend it to anyone remotely interested in strategy games. The only drawback is that it’s Windows-only. Check out some screenshots below.

Download Disciplies II: Dark Prophecy on BitTorrent.com (torrent)



Source: Disciples II: Dark Prophecy on BitTorrent.com

]]> http://torrentfreak.com/disciples-ii-dark-prophecy-on-bittorrentcom/feed/ 1 http://torrentfreak.com/faster-uploads-key-to-improving-bittorrent-efficiency/ http://torrentfreak.com/faster-uploads-key-to-improving-bittorrent-efficiency/#comments Wed, 27 Dec 2006 19:33:58 +0000 Smaran http://torrentfreak.com/faster-uploads-key-to-improving-bittorrent-efficiency/ Source: Faster Uploads Key to Improving BitTorrent Efficiency
]]> Until recently, Internet usage has been a one-way street. People accessed web pages and downloaded pictures, music and videos. The need to upload significant amounts of data was limited to e-mail attachments and files sent over IM. This has all changed.

Web 2.0 is interactive by nature. People are not only consuming content, they’re creating it too. From uploading photos and videos to sites like Flickr and YouTube to downloading files over BitTorrent and sharing them on P2P networks, traffic flow on the Internet is now bi-directional.

The problem is that most ISPs seem to be completely unaware of this phenomenon. Upload speeds offered are many times less than download speeds. Most ISPs in the U.S. provide largely asymmetric connections, upload speeds are on average 15 times slower than download speeds. Strange since the country seems to be the epicenter of the Web 2.0 boom.

Slow upload speeds directly affect BitTorrent transfers. If users aren’t able to upload bits as fast as they download them, a torrent requires more seeders than leechers to stay healthy. And for there to be enough seeders, a significant number of users have to have already downloaded the file. That’s why the speed at which you download a newly created torrent is normally much slower than a HTTP transfer. The speed of the BitTorrent swarm will always max out on the combined upload speed.

Also, because BitTorrent is a fair trade protocol, what you give is what you get. The more you upload, the more you’ll be able to download from others. So, for example, If you had to choose between a 1Mbit up – 1Mbit down connection and a 0.5Mbit up – 2Mbit down connection, the first option would be a better choice.

The Internet is slowly moving away from central servers that store data, towards P2P powered services like BitTorrent where content is dispersed over a large number of users. ISPs need to understand this and realize that users are soon going to start demanding symmetric connections, with upload speeds equaling downloads. After all, TIME Magazine’s person of the year is “You”. And there wouldn’t be a “You” without YouTube and other such services that allow us to get online and express ourselves.

Creative Commons photograph by Micha Niskin.

Source: Faster Uploads Key to Improving BitTorrent Efficiency

]]> http://torrentfreak.com/faster-uploads-key-to-improving-bittorrent-efficiency/feed/ 28 http://torrentfreak.com/illegal-video-downloads-surpass-legal-alternatives-5-to-1/ http://torrentfreak.com/illegal-video-downloads-surpass-legal-alternatives-5-to-1/#comments Tue, 26 Dec 2006 11:29:57 +0000 Smaran http://torrentfreak.com/illegal-video-downloads-surpass-legal-alternatives-5-to-1/ Source: Illegal Video Downloads Surpass Legal Alternatives 5 to 1
]]> The research carried out by the group shows that 8 percent of all U.S. households (6 million) illegally downloaded at least 1 copyrighted video from a P2P network in the past 3 months, whereas only 2 percent of U.S. households purchased a video legally.

Legal video downloads took place largely on Apple’s iTunes Store with 9 in 10 downloads occurring on that site, followed by Vongo (5 percent), Movielink (3 percent) and less than 1 percent for CinemaNow.

It’s hardly surprising that almost 60 percent of all illegally downloaded video files were “adult-oriented”. TV shows were the second most popular at 20 percent, and only 5 percent were “mainstream movie content”. With regards to legal video downloads, sixty-two percent were TV shows, 24 percent were music videos and 6 percent were movies.

Russ Crupnick, the vice president of the NDP Group wants the movie industry to take the issue of illegal video downloads seriously, even though only a fraction of the video downloads were feature films, and the percentage of legal movie downloads was higher than that of illegal ones. “Even though right now the majority of downloaded video content is adult-film content, the amount of intellectual property stolen from mainstream movie studios, networks, and record labels will continue to rise, unless strong and sustained action is taken to prevent piracy,” he says.

Source: Illegal Video Downloads Surpass Legal Alternatives 5 to 1

]]> http://torrentfreak.com/illegal-video-downloads-surpass-legal-alternatives-5-to-1/feed/ 23 http://torrentfreak.com/mininova-launches-new-site-design/ http://torrentfreak.com/mininova-launches-new-site-design/#comments Thu, 21 Dec 2006 18:22:46 +0000 Smaran http://torrentfreak.com/mininova-launches-new-site-design/ Source: Mininova Launches New Site Design
]]> The site had become so popular that it became unbearably slow to navigate. People can now stop complaining. If you visit the site, you’ll notice it’s now blazing fast, amazingly so.

Mininova has been beta testing a previous version of this design for a almost a year now, so it’s nice to finally see it go live.

In October, we reported that the beta version of the redesign wasn’t fully functional. In particular, the advanced search seemed to be having some problems. This has since been fixed. Apparently, the entire search backend of the site has been rewritten, and now searches will be better and faster.

According to the mininova blog, with the new version, some extra functionality has been added, and existing features have been made easier to use. A “Jump to Category” option now lets you jump directly to different sections of the site.

Mininova founder Niek told us that there could still be some small problems, such as 500 errors, but these will be straightened out as soon as possible. They will add some extra memory modules this Saturday, and the site should be running smoothly by then.

We think that the new layout is a lot easier to understand and navigate, but some say it lacks the sleekness of the previous design. What is your opinion of the new design? Is it better than the previous one?



Source: Mininova Launches New Site Design

]]> http://torrentfreak.com/mininova-launches-new-site-design/feed/ 11 http://torrentfreak.com/azureus-partners-with-the-bbc-to-sell-tv-shows/ http://torrentfreak.com/azureus-partners-with-the-bbc-to-sell-tv-shows/#comments Tue, 19 Dec 2006 11:05:34 +0000 Smaran http://torrentfreak.com/azureus-partners-with-the-bbc-to-sell-tv-shows/ Source: Azureus Partners with the BBC to Sell TV Shows
]]> Zudeo is Azureus’ new video sharing website and content store. It implements many ‘Web 2.0′ features like the ability to rate content, leave comments, share torrents and links to submit content to popular social bookmarking sites like digg.

The BBC will sell the following shows on Zudeo:

Red Dwarf, Strange, Invasion Earth, Little Britain, Doctor Who, Fawlty Towers, Coupling, Keeping Up Appearances, League of Gentlemen and Ideal.

Ironically, British customers will not be able to purchase any of the shows as they will only be available to U.S. customers. The rest of the world is going to have to wait for now. One of the BBC’s most popular shows, The Office is missing from the list.

The Zudeo site has also lost the ‘beta’ tag and seems to be ready for the primetime. I had the chance to use the Mac OS X client (still in beta). It is polished, light, launches quickly and really seems like a ready product. The content store looks similar to the iTunes Store and is relatively easy to navigate. The Zudeo client is different from the normal Azureus app, although it has the same name. It also appears to no longer be Open Source, we were unable to find the source code of it on Sourceforge. The last recorded entry in the changelog is 2.5.0.0.




Source: Azureus Partners with the BBC to Sell TV Shows

]]> http://torrentfreak.com/azureus-partners-with-the-bbc-to-sell-tv-shows/feed/ 23 http://torrentfreak.com/mininova-the-9th-most-googled-word-in-2006/ http://torrentfreak.com/mininova-the-9th-most-googled-word-in-2006/#comments Tue, 19 Dec 2006 07:59:43 +0000 Smaran http://torrentfreak.com/mininova-the-9th-most-googled-word-in-2006/ Source: ‘Mininova’ the 9th Most Googled Word in 2006
]]> The year-end Zeitgeist is a collection of data, trends and search patterns that reflect the activity on Google’s search engine in the past year. A look at this year’s top 10 queries reveals the following terms:

1. bebo
2. myspace
3. world cup
4. metacafe
5. radioblog
6. wikipedia
7. video
8. rebelde
9. mininova
10. wiki

As you can see, ‘mininova’ was the 9th most searched for word on Google this year. There could be many reasons behind this, but the most obvious seems to be the fact that most people, including myself, initially type in ‘mininova.com’, but then realise that the site at that URL is not what we were looking for, and head to Google to find the real mininova located at mininova.org.

That’s definitely not the sole reason though, mininova has been steadily growing and is ranked among the top 3 BitTorrent sites along with The Pirate Bay and Torrentspy. In March of this year, mininova was leading the race, but in May we published an Alexa traffic rank comparing the three sites which put Torrentspy in the lead. Shortly after that, mininova passed 400 million downloads mark.

It’s quite obvious that more and more people are starting to use BitTorrent. Getting ranked as one of the most queried words on Google is possibly one of the highest honours any website can receive. It indicates that more than just a small niche of people are out there searching for it. We at TorrentFreak believe that mininova has become popular by word of mouth, more than anything.

Source: ‘Mininova’ the 9th Most Googled Word in 2006

]]> http://torrentfreak.com/mininova-the-9th-most-googled-word-in-2006/feed/ 12 http://torrentfreak.com/geotorrentorg-distributes-free-satellite-imagery/ http://torrentfreak.com/geotorrentorg-distributes-free-satellite-imagery/#comments Sun, 17 Dec 2006 18:24:36 +0000 Smaran http://torrentfreak.com/geotorrentorg-distributes-free-satellite-imagery/ Source: geoTorrent.org Distributes Free Satellite Imagery
]]> geoTorrent.org is just over a year old and currently has 35 live torrents. They can be filtered by continent and health (dead/alive). Apparently, 25 terabytes of data have been transferred via the site.

The torrents aren’t just made up of normal images, they’re either JPEG 2000 or ECW files. To read the data, you would need a GIS application like ER Viewer.

These files contain a lot of data and high resolution images, which makes them exceptionally large. The largest torrent on the site is just above 87 GB. Distributing them over standard web protocols like HTTP and FTP would border on the impossible, it would not be feasible. This is where BitTorrent comes in, and suddenly, the impossible becomes possible. The founder of geoTorrent.org, Richard Orchard writes in a forum post:

Using traditional means, electronic distribution of datasets this size is economically expensive and practically inefficient. If a single file is 5 GB in size, and 1000 people want to download it, 5 terabytes of information needs to be served. If there were 100 high demand files, this would equate to 500,000 gigabytes!”

Orchard says he sees his platform as proof that P2P technologies like BitTorrent aren’t just used to illegally transfer copyrighted content. “There is a lot of talk in the press about the evils of peer-to-peer technology. However, GeoTorrent demonstrates the benefits a practical, workable use of peer-to-peer technology. Without this technology the distribution of large datasets would not be viable.”

This isn’t the first time that BitTorrent has been used to distribute such data. NASA too uses BitTorrent for their ‘Visible Earth’ project, a massive library of high resolution images of the earth.

Source: geoTorrent.org Distributes Free Satellite Imagery

]]> http://torrentfreak.com/geotorrentorg-distributes-free-satellite-imagery/feed/ 12 http://torrentfreak.com/more-than-half-of-australia-downloads-tv-shows-over-bittorrent/ http://torrentfreak.com/more-than-half-of-australia-downloads-tv-shows-over-bittorrent/#comments Thu, 14 Dec 2006 18:39:24 +0000 Smaran http://torrentfreak.com/more-than-half-of-australia-downloads-tv-shows-over-bittorrent/ Source: More Than Half of Australia Downloads TV Shows Over BitTorrent
]]> The study was conducted by University of Sydney honours student, Adam Zuchetti. Questionnaires were made available on local TV websites. The survey received an enthusiastic response and almost 800 TV fans took part.

According to Zuchetti, people don’t want to watch TV shows when networks air them, they want to be able to do so on their own time. He says, “people want more ways to access shows.” And since there are already other ways of getting TV shows, people resort to them. “I can now get everything I want from channel BitTorrent, so the commercial networks are going to get what’s coming to them’ — that is typical of what people are saying,” Zuchetti says.

21% of the people questioned said that downloads now make up the bulk of their TV viewing and 53% of them said that they are prepared to pay for content they download. Zuchetti recommends that TV networks give customers 2 options, free downloads of shows with advertising or paid downloads without any ads.

Since these statistics were collected over the past few months, it isn’t surprising that LOST was revealed as the most downloaded show. It was followed by Veronica Mars, House, Prison Break and Dr Who.

According to Free TV Australia, the fact that so many people are downloading TV shows is not affecting network ratings. Viewing levels are on the rise and went up 0.7 this year in Australian cities.

Source: More Than Half of Australia Downloads TV Shows Over BitTorrent

]]> http://torrentfreak.com/more-than-half-of-australia-downloads-tv-shows-over-bittorrent/feed/ 37 http://torrentfreak.com/the-pirate-bay-piratbyran-against-net-censorship/ http://torrentfreak.com/the-pirate-bay-piratbyran-against-net-censorship/#comments Tue, 12 Dec 2006 11:45:31 +0000 Smaran http://torrentfreak.com/the-pirate-bay-piratbyran-stand-up-for-allofmp3/ its site.

Source: The Pirate Bay, Piratbyrån take a stand against Net Censorship

]]> On Friday (the 8th), Perspektiv made a press release (Swedish link) saying that after talks with the IFPI it had decided to block AllofMP3. It seems The Pirate Bay has taken this personally and decided to completely block all of Perspektiv’s customers from accessing its site.

The Pirate Bay admins, working closely with Sweden’s pro-piracy organisation, PiratbyrÃ¥n are also encouraging other torrent sites to block the ISP. They have created a campaign page and published some PHP code that site admins can use to cut off Perspektiv customers. A message on the campaign page requests that all sites that decide to block Perspektiv let PiratbyrÃ¥n know by e-mailing them.

Here is a loose translation of The Pirate Bay’s Swedish press release:

As one of the largest websites in Sweden we will not sit silently and watch some of our basic rights be restricted. If we want a working and good society even on the Internet we must stand up for one another and show courage when it is needed.

After careful consideration, we have for the first time ever, decided to block an ISP because of their management. The ISP *Perspektiv Bredband* is a very controversial enterprise – in the way that they have shown to put the unrealistic ideas of some powerful media-companies over their own customers freedom of information – something which in our eyes is comparable with dictatorialness and censorship.

*Perspektiv Bredband* has every right in the world to block whichever site they want on their own net. And their customers have every right in the world to change to a new ISP which does not take upon itself the task of ensuring collective conscience.

Do you have any opinions on this? Call Perspektiv Bredband’s support line on 075-555-0030!”

Source: The Pirate Bay, Piratbyrån take a stand against Net Censorship

]]> http://torrentfreak.com/the-pirate-bay-piratbyran-against-net-censorship/feed/ 11