The indie game makers of Greenheart Games have just pulled the ultimate prank on game pirates. When they released their Game Dev Tycoon yesterday, they also uploaded a “cracked” copy of the simulator on a well-known BitTorrent site. Soon after thousands of people downloaded the cracked copy, not knowing that it was modified to present them with a rather ironic piracy challenge.
The top 10 most downloaded movies on BitTorrent are in again, ‘Jack Reacher’ tops the chart this week, followed by ‘The Last Stand’. ‘Iron Man 3′ completes the top three.
They say that politics takes time. Yet, history doesn’t show any political movement spreading and succeeding as fast as the Pirate Party movement. Will it maintain its accelerated speed, or slow down to follow the tracks of history?
As bandwidth gets more plentiful, the thirst for better quality video increases alongside. By now most people are aware that screen resolutions are important in terms of image definition, but there are important issues surrounding how that pixel density is presented as a moving image. Frame rates help to make a video nice and smooth and a recent development has the seen some of the smoothest video around hitting BitTorrent networks.
The Pirate Party in Iceland seem to have booked a major victory in Iceland’s parliamentary election today, scoring 5.1% of the total vote. It’s a truly remarkable achievement for a party that’s only a few months old, and also the first time that a Pirate party anywhere in the world has been democratically chosen in a national parliament. One of the main goals of the Pirates will be to fight increased censorship and protect freedom of speech.
After banning several of the largest file-hosting sites and Usenet providers, PayPal is now taking aim at a VPN/proxy service. The payment processor has just cut off the BitTorrent proxy provider GT Guard and frozen the company’s funds. In an email PayPal’s Brand Risk Management department explains that GT Guard’s affiliation with BitTorrent is the reason for the drastic actions.
Earlier this month Finland’s largest ever Internet piracy case ended with four men being found guilty of copyright infringement and two being exonerated. The case involved a so-called ‘topsite’ called Angel Falls and had an interesting twist. During the trial it was revealed that evidence gathered by a local anti-piracy group and the IFPI was also handed to a “senior MPAA executive” who tampered with the evidence before handing it to the police.
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Below are TorrentFreak's most discussed articles of the past month. Join the discussion if you like.
Left Quote“The Pirate Bay has been one of the most important movements in Sweden for freedom of speech, working against corruption and censorship.
Peter Sunde Left Quote
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