TorrentFreak » Smaran

Alchemist Author Pirates His Own Books

Smaran — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 14:07:17 +0000

Coelho’s view is that letting people swap digital copies of his books for free increases sales. In a keynote speech (embedded below) at the Digital, Life, Design conference in Munich he talked about how uploading the Russian translation of “The Alchemist” made his sales in Russia go from around 1,000 per year to 100,000, then a million and more. He said:

In 2001, I sold 10,000 hard copies. And everyone was puzzled. We came from zero, from 1000, to 10,000. And then the next year we were over 100,000. [...]

I thought that this is fantastic. You give to the reader the possibility of reading your books and choosing whether to buy it or not. [...]

So, I went to BitTorrent and I got all my pirate editions… And I created a site called The Pirate Coelho.

He’s convinced â€” and rightly so â€” that letting people download free copies of his books helps sales. For him the problem is getting around copyright laws that require him to get the permission of his translators if he wants to share copies of his books in other languages.

So is Coelho just seeding torrents of his books? That’s just the beginning. He took it one step further and, as quoted above, set up a Wordpress blog, Pirate Coelho, where he posts links to free copies of his books on filesharing networks, FTP sites, and so on. He says it had a direct impact on sales:

Believe it or not, the sales of the book increased a lot thanks to the Pirate Coelho site…

In his speech he talks about how the Internet is changing language and books, and how online “piracy” and BitTorrent have helped him not only be more widely read, but also sell more books! It’s a must watch.

Via P2P-Blog

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

The Pirate Bay Dashboard Widget for the Mac

Smaran — Sun, 02 Dec 2007 21:27:00 +0000

The widget, pictured below, can be set to display the top torrents in the Audio, Video, Applications, Games, and Other categories on The Pirate Bay.

Brokep, one of the site’s admins, released the widget in a post on the Pirate Bay blog. He also mentioned the opening up of the site in the near future, with the release of a public API. This will make it easy for developers to use data from the pirate bay in widgets like this, or other applications.

For those who haven’t seen it yet, BBC’s technology lifestyle program Click had an item on The Pirate Bay and interviewed Brokep (Peter) and TiAMO (Fredrik) in their natural habitat.

They once again stick it to the movie and music cartels, with Brokep commenting on the morality of downloading copyrighted content: “I don’t care, that’s the big thing, I don’t care. If I want it, I take it, ’cause I can. It might be moral to some people but I think it’s up to me to decide.” You can watch the full show over here.

Download The Pirate Bay Top 10 Dashboard widget (92kb ZIP)

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

OinkPlus Adds Music Discovery to BitTorrent Sites

Smaran — Sun, 11 Nov 2007 21:44:35 +0000

Indieana, a former OiNK member had been working on a greasemonkey script that would pull data, links and song previews from around the web and add it to pages on OiNK. Unfortunately OiNK is no more, but the good news is that the script has now been modified to work with Mininova, The Pirate Bay, STmusic, FunkyTorrents what.cd, Libble, and, of course, Waffles.

OinkPlus displays a list of similar artists, a link to other torrents from that artist on the BitTorrent site you’re on, the artist/band’s bio, a Last.fm player, and, if available, a MySpace player. The script also displays links to the artist’s presence on Wikipedia, Amazon, Hype Machine, Pandora, and so on.

The extra data loads beneath the regular content on the .torrent download pages and integrates very well into the style of each of the compatible sites. Personally I find the script very useful to preview tracks from artists and to discover new music. Below is an example of what it looks like on The Pirate Bay.

Indieana told TorrentFreak that in future versions it will be possible to disable certain features or block the use of OinkPlus on certain sites.

Music discovery is an essential part of private torrent sites. Although OinkPlus was originally developed exclusively for OiNK, after the site was taken down by the BPI and the IFPI, its author decided to go all-out and support not only the most popular private torrent sites, but some of the most popular public ones too.

You can download the script here. You’ll need the Greasemonkey extension for Firefox. If you use Safari on the Mac, check out GreaseKit (formerly Creammonkey).

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

The Pirate Bay blocked in Turkey

Smaran — Mon, 17 Sep 2007 15:23:29 +0000

If it’s any consolation, The Pirate Bay is not alone in being blocked. In March, YouTube was banned for hosting videos that insulted the founder of modern Turkey. To the relief of many Turks, the ban only lasted two days, as Google promptly pulled down the videos. And last month, WordPress.com was blocked because some of its users were charged with defamation of a Turkish author.

The first we heard of the Pirate Bay block was two days ago, when Cenk, a long-time reader of TorrentFreak from Turkey, e-mailed in to let us know that The Pirate Bay was no longer accessible in his country. Cenk states that since last Monday, government has shut down all access to thepiratebay.org. However, the press has said nothing on the matter. “I did not hear about thepiratebay.org getting sued or anything and even there was no news on the newspaper or anywhere,” he wrote.

We asked the TPB guys if they knew anything about this. According to them, it has been blocked “for over a year.” They’re “not sure if it’s the whole country or just the major ISPs,” but “there was some court ruling over it.” That court ruling, we’ve discovered, has ordered TÃ¼rk Telekom, Turkey’s largest ISP, to block The Pirate Bay, though why exactly is still unknown to both the site’s admins and users of the site in Turkey.

There is a comical irony to this all, given that Turkey is the home of some of the most famous real life pirates history has seen, those of the Barbary coast. One can only guess that they have yet to set sail in the intertubes.

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

Television Studios Embrace BitTorrent

Smaran — Tue, 07 Aug 2007 16:50:22 +0000

An unusually large number of pre-air TV shows have been appearing on BitTorrent sites months and, in some cases, several months before their scheduled air dates. Many of those leaks appear to be inside jobs, and TV executives are starting to realise that leaking shows to BitTorrent can help promote them.

In a recent interview for the Seattle Post, I speculated that it seemed likely that TV executives and writers were purposefully leaking their yet-to-air shows to BitTorrent to build up hype and an audience. It looks like I wasn’t too far off.

An anonymous Warner Brothers Television executive has admitted he helped leak the pilot of “Pushing Daisies“, an upcoming TV show. His reason? He wanted to make sure the show “got out there,” and wanted to “help the cause.” The executive didn’t upload it himself; he got his neighbour’s kid to do it. And the kid was delighted to, because it pushed up his ratio on some private network.

You might think, as I did, that someone made this story up. Turns out, the executive used his work e-mail ID (yep, @warnerbros.com or whatever) when he contacted Rick Ellis of AllyourTV.com. When asked about what made him leak the pilot, he replied:

I just thought it was a good idea. Even though [...] I don’t have any direct stake in the show, it’s a really great project. It’s tough to describe, though, and while it makes great sense once you’ve seen it, it’s one of those shows that will only work if people do tune in at least once.

Which, by the way, is one of the reasons that ABC and Warners are promoting the show in all sorts of venues. The pilot has been screened at everything from auditions for ABC reality shows to Comic-Con. We all believe in the show. And if I can do something that might in some small way helpâ€¦I can live with that.

One last thingâ€¦some of this is also about building pressure with the network. I don’t think anyone here involved with “Traveler” was exactly thrilled with the treatment ABC gave the show. But it didn’t really have any champions inside either company. And I suppose all of us are hoping that this show gets the support it deserves.

Further evidence of TV studios embracing BitTorrent can be found in an interview with Jenji Kohan, the creator of ‘Weeds‘. The third season of Weeds was leaked around a month before it was to be aired on TV. Although another week is left before season three is broadcast to the world, hundreds of thousands of people from around the globe have already downloaded and watched episodes of it. And what does Kohan think of this? She’s glad her show’s gaining a larger audience: “Revenue aside, I don’t expect to get rich on Weeds,” she told Advertising Age jubilantly. “I’m excited it’s out there. Showtime is great, but it does have a limited audience.”

‘Weeds’ and ‘Pushing Daises’ aren’t the most popular of shows. The first has a relatively small following and the latter has yet to gain one. But both are mainstream, television shows, not podcasts. Kevin Rose being ‘cool’ with fans torrenting Diggnation a week before it’s released to non-subscribers and a primetime TV show’s creator doing the same are two vastly different notions, with the second having a significantly greater impact on traditional broadcast TV.

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

Xtorrent Gets New UI, Selective Downloading

Smaran — Fri, 03 Aug 2007 17:06:18 +0000

Xtorrent, it seems, has come a long way since we last reviewed it after its 1.0 release. Since then, it has received quite a few updates, adding Leopard compatibility, UI tweaks, and more.

David Watanabe, the developer, has now released Xtorrent 1.1 (beta). Here’s what’s new:

Interface changes
Xtorrent has gotten what the developer calls a “newly refreshed user interface”. New, sleeker-looking toolbar buttons that resemble those in the Leopard Finder, including a number of other interface tweaks have been added.

Selective Downloading
What was one of the most requested features, followed by encryption, is the ability to pick and choose which files you want to download from inside a torrent. Xtorrent finally lets you do this. Up until recently, Azureus was the only Mac BitTorrent client that could do this. Transmission added the feature a few weeks ago.

File Prioritisation
You can now tell Xtorrent which files in a torrent you want to give more priority to and have downloaded first. This was another oft-requested feature, according to Watanabe.

Xtorrent is quickly becoming the uTorrent of the Macintosh. Not uTorrent Mac, which we gave you a preview of, but the Mac equiavalent of uTorrent Windows. It’s light, has many important features and has a pretty UI. The only difference is that Xtorrent is shareware and uTorrent is not. But it’s widely known that the Mac community is a lot more open to shareware than most Windows users.

Unfortunately, Xtorrent still has its drawbacks. Its intrusive shareware policy is still very much there, rearing its ugly head at people without licenses. And some popular private trackers explicitly ban Xtorrent from connecting to torrents and downloading them. OiNK, possibly the most exclusive private BitTorrent site, whose invites are highly sought after, and till they banned the practise, were auctioned off on eBay for ridiculous amounts of dough, has banned Xtorrent. Here’s the message OiNK users who try to download with Xtorrent get:

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

Uploader Slips Harry Potter Spoilers into “Evan Almighty” DVDrip

Smaran — Wed, 25 Jul 2007 14:28:23 +0000

The person responsible for this highly amusing surprise is Len over at netgraffiti.tk. He’s taken it one step further from posting spoilers on web pages and has managed to add some to a DVDrip of the movie “Evan Almighty”.

You might be of the opinion that it serves those nasty Harry Potter-reading pirates right. But this doesn’t have anything to with “piracy”. Fans of the book are so upset that Len’s done this, they’re posting death threats on his site. Here’s one:

Go f*** yourself

Len, if you don’t like this world and what we do, then go slit your fucking wrists rather than spoiling a perfectly good film and shocking little kids.

P.S. I work as a butcher.

Drastic, for sure. But it shows you how much people love J.K. Rowling’s books and how far they’re willing to go in order to ensure they aren’t “spoiled” before they read the book. Possibly fearing such a backlash after the leak, Rowling posted a message on her website, requesting fans not to spoil the book for others. She didn’t seem to care that people were downloading it illegally, though.

I’d like to ask everyone who calls themselves a Potter fan to help preserve the secrecy of the plot for all those who are looking forward to reading the book at the same time on publication day.

Here’s a clip from the “Evan Almighty” DVDrip with the spoilers in it. Blind dragons and book 7 spoilers ahead. Don’t say we didn’t warn you.

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

uTorrent Mobile UI Goes Live Tomorrow

Smaran — Tue, 24 Jul 2007 08:50:51 +0000

Opera Mini, for those of you who don’t know, runs on a very wide range of GPRS and WAP-enabled cellphones, including the Motorola Razr and Nokia’s older models, like the 3120. But from what we hear, the interface should work on bundled mobile browses as well.

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

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

Harry Potter Fans Transcribe Book from Photos

Smaran — Wed, 18 Jul 2007 15:16:15 +0000

A torrent containing a text PDF file of the first ten chapters of “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows” has started to appear on torrent sites all over the web.

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.

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

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows leaked to BitTorrent

Smaran — Tue, 17 Jul 2007 04:27:37 +0000

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.

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

Windows Worm Uses BitTorrent to Propagate

Smaran — Tue, 26 Jun 2007 20:19:45 +0000

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?

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

Mac OS X Leopard Leaked to BitTorrent

Smaran — Thu, 21 Jun 2007 10:40:27 +0000

One year ago, we wrote about the first Leopard preview being leaked onto torrent sites. That release lacked the “secret features” that were to be announced sometime this year. As it goes with OS releases, Leopard was repeatedly delayed, and now, one year later, the feature-complete developer preview has been released and, consequently, leaked to BitTorrent.

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.

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

The Pirate Bay to Launch YouTube Competitor

Smaran — Fri, 18 May 2007 14:30:46 +0000

Some believed the video site might evolve from the idea that is Playble.com â€” a free music site started by Brokep of The Pirate Bay and the Swedish rock band Lamont â€” that aims at compensating artists directly and cutting out record companies. But Pirate Bay admin Brokep has put that rumour to rest.

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!

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

MPAA: We Were Only Testing Forest Blog

Smaran — Wed, 28 Feb 2007 12:08:19 +0000

Earlier this month, we wrote about how the MPAA has used Patrick Robin’s blogging software and violated the linkware license that it is distributed under by removing Robin’s name and all links back to his site. The organisation has replied with a list of excuses, hoping at least one might stick.

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!

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

BitFox Adds BitTorrent Support to Firefox

Smaran — Sat, 24 Feb 2007 15:40:12 +0000

The aim of BitFox is to make downloading a torrent as easy as downloading a file over HTTP or FTP, right inside your browser. With a large, and ever increasing marketshare, Firefox is the perfect place to introduce new users to the wonders of BitTorrent. Many novice users find the process of downloading and configuring a separate piece of software just to download a certain file complicated.

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.

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

MonoTorrent Beta 2 Released

Smaran — Wed, 21 Feb 2007 10:52:57 +0000

Mono, if you didn’t already know, is an open source implementation of Microsoft’s .NET set of frameworks, on which applications can be built.

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.

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

Integrating BitTorrent in Vista Media Centre

Smaran — Mon, 19 Feb 2007 16:03:11 +0000

Whatever faithful Mac/Linux users like me might say, there’s no denying that Windows XP is the most widely used operating system, and it’s only inevitable that Vista will inherit the thrown from its ageing predecessor. Therefore, the most important platform for any BitTorrent developer is Windows. And what better way for BitTorrent to take on mainstream media stores like iTunes than to nestle itself right in the middle of what will be the most widely used media centre software? If there’s one thing that can give the AppleTV a run for its money, it’s a BitTorrent media centre.

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.

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

MPAA Steals Code, Violates Linkware License

Smaran — Sat, 17 Feb 2007 10:33:19 +0000

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.

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

Subscribe to TV Shows with Torrent Episode Downloader

Smaran — Thu, 15 Feb 2007 12:56:05 +0000

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.

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

The Pirate Bay, Featured in Vanity Fair

Smaran — Tue, 13 Feb 2007 10:11:54 +0000

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.

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