TorrentFreak

The UK Government has discovered that BitTorrent is the cheapest and most effective method of sharing large files with the public. As part of the UK Prime Minister’s transparency initiative, the Treasury has today released several torrents with details on how the Government spends the public’s money.

A recently published paper found that it is relatively easy to expose BitTorrent’s biggest content providers. The researchers were able to identify 70% of the initial seeds of publicly available torrent files that were uploaded to The Pirate Bay, something that might peek the interest of the entertainment industry.

BitTorrent is undoubtedly the most efficient way to share large files on the Internet. The key to BitTorrent’s widespread adoption can nevertheless not be exclusively attributed to its technical superiority. Much of BitTorrent’s success lies in the fact that it is web-based, easy to monetize and indexed by Google.

Millions of people use BitTorrent to share files every day, but only a small percentage actually understand how BitTorrent works and appreciate why it is such an efficient way to share large files. A simplified but insightful visualization helps to shed some light on the inner workings of the BitTorrent client.

BitTorrent’s future might look grim to some, as torrent sites increasingly draw the short straw in legal cases brought on by copyright holders. But even if all torrent sites on the net were shut down tomorrow, the sharing wont stop. People could simply switch to P2P-powered torrent search engines.

With 2009 nearing its end, we take a look at the most-pirated movie titles across various categories. Aside from the usual suspects such as Star Trek and Transformers, the list also includes a few surprising entries, and some notable absentees.

uTorrent – the client of choice for most western BitTorrent users – has added the option to stream video files while downloading. With this new functionality, BitTorrent Inc. hopes to provide the ‘point-click-watch’ experience people have grown used to from their usage of streaming sites such as YouTube.