TorrentFreak

The top 10 most downloaded movies on BitTorrent, “Outlander” tops the chart this week, followed by “Sex Drive” and “Changeling”.

Many torrent sites come and go, but few are as large or enduring as Mininova. Today, the BitTorrent giant celebrates its 4th birthday, after the first public version of the site went live in January 2005. For those who work hard to fulfill their dreams, from little acorns, mighty oak trees grow.

The top 10 most downloaded movies on BitTorrent, “RocknRolla” tops the chart this week, followed by “Max Payne”.

The first four episodes of the new 24 season have made their way onto BitTorrent, just hours before the official TV premiere. Jack Bauer fans have had to wait a while for this one. Season 7 was originally scheduled to be aired early 2008, but was postponed for a year because of the writers strike. The wait is finally over.

Coda.fm is a new music torrent indexer that looks surprisingly good for a torrent site, and one that combines great design and functionality like we’ve never seen before. Yet another great way to discover new music – if only the RIAA approved.

Microsoft ran into major bandwidth problems when they released the latest Beta of Windows 7 to the public. The company decided to delay the release while they added some more servers, citing “very heavy traffic”. If they had only used BitTorrent, this heavy traffic would have actually speeded up distribution, instead of slowing it down.

Silence is Sexy, a Dutch band that previously released its album through Mininova’s content distribution platform, has been picked as one of the nominees for the Interactive Award 2009. The award is given to the best concept which utilizes the Internet to promote music and engage fans.

An increasing number of musicians are experimenting with giving away their music for free on BitTorrent. This trend has led to the formation of a new Netlabel, CXCR6, which specifically targets the BitTorrent community with new album releases. We got in touch with its founder about his motivation to promote free music.

Netgear has just announced its Internet TV Player, a set-top box that allows users to play content from video streaming sites like YouTube, directly on their TV. Perhaps of more interest is the device’s built-in BitTorrent client, which makes it an ideal TV-torrent player as well.

The BitTorrent popularity surge is still underway, with more users discovering that it’s the fastest way to transfer large files online. One of the most frequently visited torrent sites, Mininova, has seen the number of torrent downloads double from 3.5 billion to 7 billion during 2008, and this download rate is still increasing.

A new trojan popped up at several torrent sites a few weeks ago, one that blocks access to The Pirate Bay and Mininova, while informing its victims that “downloading is wrong.” The trojan edits the hosts file on Windows machines, and redirects the BitTorrent sites to localhost, making them impossible to load.