TorrentFreak

A few days ago an Italian court ordered all ISPs to block subscriber access to BTjunkie, leaving hundreds of thousands of Italians with the task of finding a new torrent site. Or perhaps not? Just hours after the news was made public, a brand new and ad-free proxy site was launched. The site allows Italians to browse an uncensored web and access BTjunkie, as well as another popular blocked site, The Pirate Bay.

Yesterday both the Swedish Pirate Party and The Pirate Bay disappeared from the Internet causing concern among their users. While they have both now returned, it appears that the Party downtime was caused by the unauthorized use of their servers “for commercial purposes”, something which is expressly forbidden.

One of the founders of the world’s largest music-dedicated private torrent site has quit. WhatMan, sysop at What.CD, the spiritual successor to the now-defunct and legendary OiNK BitTorrent tracker, says that having spare time is a luxury of the past. With some major achievements behind him, he will long be remembered in the BitTorrent community.

IsoHunt has continued with its legal battle against Hollywood. The site has filed its reply brief at the U.S. Court of Appeals in which it hints that Google, not isoHunt, is the largest BitTorrent search engine on the Internet. Through the appeal, isoHunt hopes to reverse the permanent injunction which ordered it to filter its search results, and obtain a jury trial instead of a summary judgment.

The Internet is filled with thousands of BitTorrent sites which all search through databases containing millions of torrent files. Today these sites are joined by a new one – BTDigg. However, unlike more traditional torrent search engines, BTDigg searches through files that are found on BitTorrent’s DHT network, which is rather unique. According to the site’s founders this is a much needed step to further decentralize BitTorrent.

TorrentReactor.net, listed among the ten most popular torrent sites on the Internet, has won a WIPO domain dispute against the owner of TorrentReactor.com. The latter domain was owned by Craig Pratka, a New York resident who used the domain to drive up revenues at a ‘dubious’ affiliate program. The decision ends a long domain name battle that started back in 2008.

It isn’t often that a new torrent site comes along and actually manages to impress, but Torrent Butler is certainly one worthy of note. The site offers a wide range of movies, presented in a way that’s quite refreshing and unique. Born out of frustration with “authorized” movie download sites, Torrent Butler may both frighten and inspire the MPAA’s major movie studios.