TorrentFreak

uTorrent parent company BitTorrent Inc. just announced that the BitTorrent Mainline client and uTorrent have hit the milestone of 150 million monthly users. Together both clients increased their user base by more than 50 percent compared to last year, and the end of this surge is not yet in sight.

BitTorrent is a great way to share large files with friends, family or even complete strangers, but it’s not always as convenient as it should be. Even though BitTorrent is more than a decade old there’s no site where users can simply dump torrents and get a fancy URL in return, so they can share with others. Until now that is, because the newly launched Tors.in just filled that gap.

New data published by the Canadian broadband management company Sandvine reveals that on the average day Netflix and BitTorrent are responsible for 40 percent of all Internet traffic in North America. During peak hours Netflix accounts for a third of all download traffic, while BitTorrent is credited for nearly half of all upload traffic during the busiest time of the day.

Most people are familiar with Apple’s Mac vs. PC advertising campaign that ran from 2006 to 2010. However, there’s a BitTorrent spin-off to this series of ads that, until today, hasn’t seen the light of day. Produced a few years ago for BitTorrent Inc, the BitTorrent vs. iTunes campaign shows BitTorrent’s superiority of Apple’s iTunes store.

A new report published by Northwestern University and Telefónica Research discovered some BitTorrent trends worth sharing. During a 2-year period the researchers monitored an unprecedented sample of 500,000 people in 169 countries. Aside from showing that BitTorrent users download more and more data, the report also finds that large ISPs including Comcast are actually making money off BitTorrent traffic.

Researchers from the Tribler project at Delft University of Technology are proposing a new set of rules that should significantly improve the download speeds of many BitTorrent users. The new “Superior Seeding Standard” implemented in the latest release of the Tribler BitTorrent client is inspired by the ratio-enforcement policies at private tracker communities, but doesn’t discriminate against people with low bandwidth connections.

When Bram Cohen first revealed BitTorrent on a public message board on July 2nd 2001, he never imagined it would quickly become one of the main generators of Internet traffic. Now, exactly a decade later, BitTorrent is used by hundreds of million of people worldwide. To celebrate BitTorrent’s 10th anniversary, Bram Cohen joins us to look back at the past and ahead to the future.