TorrentFreak has had pretty much the same look since January 2007 when our friend Rosano completed the current design. In the two and a half years that have since passed we’ve had some great times with the current theme, but we think the time has come to move on. Since we’re no design gurus ourselves, we need some professional help.

What we want:

We’re looking for a new pinkish Wordpress theme loosely based on the current design.

Who we want:

A creative designer with Wordpress experience and a decent size portfolio.

What you’ll get:

Cash, and the option to promote yourself in the footer of the wonderful site you will create.

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Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

Last year we reported that the RIAA’s website had suffered an XSS attack and just a couple of days ago we revealed how the MPAA site was vulnerable to an XSS attack too, one which left it embarrassingly displaying torrents from The Pirate Bay.

Now it is the RIAA’s turn (again) to suffer the same fate. Vektor, who also discovered the MPAA site exploit, told TorrentFreak that he had managed to find a security hole in RIAA.com too. He demonstrated this by using an iframe – an HTML element which makes it possible to embed an HTML document inside another HTML document – TorrentFreak for example.

As with the MPAA site exploit, Vektor explains that his work on the RIAA site is a proof of concept and should be taken as a joke.

We’re sure the RIAA and MPAA coders will be laughing heartily as they try to plug these holes.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

An iTunes feed is available here, and a regular RSS feed here.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

As always, we’re looking forward to your commentary.

For questions or suggestions, feel free to contact the crew at tv@torrentfreak.com. We encourage contributions from viewers!

An iTunes feed is available here, and a regular RSS feed here.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

We welcome Stacia as our new host.

For questions, comments or suggestions, feel free to contact the crew at tv@torrentfreak.com. We encourage contributions from viewers!

An iTunes feed is available here, and a regular RSS feed here.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

Ernesto

It is hard to pick one article out of the hundreds of posts we have done. The BuckCherry article is definitely one of the most enjoyable articles of 2008. The band issued a press-release complaining about the early leak of their album, but with a little bit of research we found out that it was actually the manager of the band who had uploaded it onto various BitTorrent sites.

Enigmax

When Ernesto’s Top 10 Most Pirated Games 2008 article went mainstream, culminating in the BBC using TorrentFreak as a source, it was a proud moment. But i’d like to say a special thanks to international megapopstar entrepreneur extraordinaire and established anti-piracy writer Indiana Gregg, for her contribution to TorrentFreak. Unintentionally the best laugh of the year, with heaps of good old fashioned Interwebs drama on top.

Ben

My favorite story of the year has to be the near bankruptcy of MediaDefender, a year after we reported on the release of their emails. Shoddy enforcement techniques, and a spot of DDoSing have put their share price in the toilet. To paraphrase MediaDefender’s Randy Saaf, “They’re f*cked”.

TorrentFreak’s Most-Read Articles of 2008

Below are the 10 most read articles. The ‘RIAA’ hack leads with well over 300,000 views, followed by the Pirates of the Amazon add-on article we posted only a few weeks ago. We’d love to hear what your favorite article was of course, so feel free to drop a comment.

1. RIAA Website Wiped Clean by “Hackers”

2. Firefox Pirates Take Over Amazon

3. The BitTorrent Legend Returns: I Am aXXo

4. Top 10 Most Pirated Games of 2008

5. Test: Does Your ISP Slow Down BitTorrent Traffic?

6. Spore: Most Pirated Game Ever Thanks to DRM

7. Don’t Humiliate Yourself Complaining to The Pirate Bay

8. Pirated by iTunes, Artist Turns to BitTorrent

9. How a BitTorrent Tracker Owner Hides from the MPAA/RIAA

10. The Pirate Bay Interrogations

That’s it for 2008. Happy 2009 to you all!

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

Initially, I started to write up a few ‘tips and tricks’ type articles, complemented by the occasional news item. Right from the start, TorrentFreak got some decent traffic thanks to the community on Digg.com, which was a real motivator to continue blogging. Over time, TorrentFreak developed into a more serious news outlet, more and more articles were unique and the quality of writing improved.

As the popularity of BitTorrent grew, so did TorrentFreak’s traffic, and with that came the opportunity to meet some great characters, including most of the people who run the BitTorrent sites I love to write about. A few months after TorrentFreak was born, I became we. Smaran was the first writer to join the blog, and although he stopped contributing in 2006, he played his part in the evolution of TorrentFreak.

Running a blog like TorrentFreak is an impossible talk for one person, and I was more than happy when Enigmax (Andy) joined me in early 2006. For almost two years now, Enigmax and I have been running the daily operations at TorrentFreak, and together we spend most of our free time writing articles. Unlike some people think, TorrentFreak is not a professional operation, that is, Enigmax and I both have full-time jobs aside. TorrentFreak is a hobby project, and we write because we are passionate about BitTorrent and file-sharing, not because we need to, in a job sense.

Although we would love to, it would be impossible to mention everyone who has contributed to TorrentFreak. We’ve had several guest writers and received thousands of tips from readers – they have all contributed to the site in some way or another. Besides Enigmax and myself, Ben Jones is the third regular on TorrentFreak. Although he prefers to do research instead of writing, his contributions can’t be missed.

At TorrentFreak we don’t see ourselves as journalists. We are P2P enthusiasts, who love to document how the Internet, and BitTorrent in particular, is changing how we interact with online media. We also write extensively on how the world, and the law, reacts to this (re)evolution. We write about things that interest us, and hope that others are interested in them too.

We write because it’s our passion. Cnet UK did a piece on us today, and Nate Lanxon sums us up nicely: “The rise of blogging has been fueled less by money, and more by the desire to write about subjects people truly care about. And in the world of news, that often means writing at ungodly hours, for ungodly hours on end.”

Of course, we won’t stop here and we hope to bring you many more articles in the future. Even though our time is limited, we aim to publish at least one article each and every day. In a way our limited time is also a quality check. It’s not that hard to publish 4 or 5 articles a day, but if you only have time for one, you’ll have to make sure it’s unique, and worth it. Of course we are always open to contributions from readers, or aspiring bloggers who want to help out.

We have some pretty exciting plans for the future which we will will announce soon, and a redesign is being worked on as well. Writing for TorrentFreak has been a a great endeavor thus far, most of all thanks to you, our readers We’re here to stay, and hope the next three years will be as much fun as the first.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

Hardware troubles caused the downtime, normally not that big of a problem if the people at Softlayer weren’t that incompetent. It took them 12 hours to find out that the motherboard died, and another 12 to reinstall the OS. At the time of writing we still don’t have our data back. So, we took our backups and moved out of there, let’s hope everything holds up.

Forums are down for now, will be fixed within 24 hours

We will move to a better and more stable server in a few hours, without any significant downtime hopefully

update: The “you can click but you can’t hide” image was supposed to be a joke. I linked it to the new IP. 50 worrying emails and an hour later I took it down.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

Happy New Year!

The quotes…

The MPAA after they were caught infringing the copyright of Patrick Robin’s blogging software “Forest Blog”:

“The blog was only ever used for testing purposes.”

BitTorrent Inc. co-founder Ashwin Navin on iTunes DRM:

“iTunes DRM Inspires People to Pirate Content.”

The Pirate Bay’s Gottfrid Svartholm about his favorite anti-piracy organization:

“The MPAA can most accurately be described as rabid, obsessed lunatics.”

Mediadefender CEO Randy Saaf when we found out about Miivi:

“This is really fucked.”

Mark Cuban to Bram Cohen, in a rant about the new BitTorrent movie store:

“But where are they ? Not just the customers Bram. The content? I searched for Prison Break. Lots of torrents. None of them Legal. Is this what Fox had in mind when they signed up with you?”

President Basescu (Romanian President) on copyright infringement:

“Piracy helped the young generation discover computers. It helped Romanians improve their creative capacity in the IT industry, which has become famous around the world … Ten years ago, it was an investment in Romania’s friendship with Microsoft and with Bill Gates.”

Shaw, Canadian ISP gives advise on how to configure BitTorrent:

“Set the KB/s LAN max upload speed [0:unlimited] value to 1.”

MPAA’s Dean Garfield about Pirate Party politicians:

“There’s nothing about what the Pirate Bay does or what the Pirate Party does that is legitimate.”

P2P virus to its victims:

“Ah, I see you are using P2P again……if you don’t stop within 0.5 seconds, i’m going to kill you!”

Scener about Feds that try to stop the Scene:

“No matter how hard the Feds try to stop the scene there are always people smarter than them out there. What they should be doing is leaving us to it and catching pedophiles, rapists and psychopathic killers rather than wasting resources on a few geeks.”

The Pirate Bay about the Caribbean pirate Jack Sparrow:

“Hollywood is trying to ridicule us pirates by portraying us as crazy but sympathetic adventurers. Not far from the truth, but in the 21st century real pirates are riding other torrents than that of the ocean”

BitTorrent admin about Leaseweb:

“It looks like we’re not going to be very safe anymore on Leaseweb, we are putting backups in place on another location, just in case.”

Demonoid explains why they were offline for almost a week, and moved from The Netherlands to Canada:

“We had a system problem which will force us to restore everything from backup. The disks are pretty much empty right now and until we are able to upload the backup and set up everything up, we have to close down.”

IsoHunt’s Gary to Brokep from The Pirate Bay:

“You are either illiterate and don’t check the frontpage of sites you are pointing fingers at, or you are a communist. Or both. What makes you think you have rights to content you didn’t produce? People’s rights vs. copyright holders’ rights? Please. I will laugh at you when you are marked a terrorist and US armies hunt you down. Not that I like the whole anti-terrorist thing from the US but I digress.”

Marnie stern about her BitTorrent addiction:

“Since I’ve been here I have downloaded…I mean I feel I’m going to jail, well, I discovered the torrent, but I feel I’ve downloaded, I would say, honestly 40 or 50 movies, which I hear isn’t that bad, you know, for jail. But I mean, because I’ve pretty much been staying in the studio and a little bit with Zach [Hill], I have all of this time to just sit….”

MPA to “Christmas” movie Pirates:

“We can say this to all the pirates out there: you’d better watch out, you’d better not try”

Pirate Bay admin Brokep on US politics:

“The US government is losing popularity every day in Europe, and people don’t want to see us give in to them.”

NiN’s Trent Reznor about OiNK after it was raided:

“I’ll admit I had an account there and frequented it quite often. At the end of the day, what made OiNK a great place was that it was like the world’s greatest record store. Pretty much anything you could ever imagine, it was there, and it was there in the format you wanted.”

TorrentSpy’s Justing Bunnel on the power of the entertainment industry:

“Unfortunately many companies use their power and influence to halt and punish innovations they cannot think of ways to make money with. The monopolies tried to stop the VHS, DVD, and MP3 player, but thankfully failed when they took it to Court. Now Imagine for a second all the amazing products they did manage to squash…”

Dave Peters, frontman of “Throwdown” on supporting musicians:

“If you wanna really support a band, “steal” their album….help bury the label….and buy a tshirt when you show up at their show and sing every word.”

“A former music buyer writes to the CRIA:

“The music industry itself needs to recognize that they are to blame for sagging record sales. For years, they have been marketing recycled crap, and people are getting tired of it.”

Comcast to its customers:

“Comcast does not block access to any applications, including BitTorrent.”

(but we do slow it down)

Researchers on the effect of filesharing on CD sales:

“We estimate that the effect of one additional P2P download per month is to increase music purchasing by 0.44 CDs per year.”

Noël St-Hilaire, head of copyright theft investigations of the Canadian police on piracy:

“Piracy for personal use is no longer targeted. It is too easy to copy these days and we do not know how to stop it,” he added.

TorrentFreak council in an open letter to the Dutch anti-piracy organization BREIN:

“Your “news release” is peppered with inaccurate information, calculated to mislead and intimidate the millions of legitimate users of the many peer-to-peer filesharing services that are in common use throughout the world.”

50 Cent on filesharing:

“What is important for the music industry to understand is that this really doesn’t hurt the artists.”

Eric Wilkinson, the producer of the independent film “The Man from Earth”, wrote an email to RLSlog in which he thanks them for the free promotion they gave him:

“In the future, I will not complain about file sharing. When I make my next picture, I just may upload the movie on the net myself!”

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

Thank you for all the concerned and supportive e-mails we received. We could still have some downtime later today, but let’s hope we’ve had the worst of it.

Thanks for waiting.

update: A few minutes ago we received an anonymous e-mail from a “Harry Potter” fan who threatened to take down TorrentFreak if we didn’t remove our article about the leak of of “Deathly Hallows” (apparently afraid of spoilers, feel free to laugh).

He claims (with an army of Potter fanboys) to be responsible for the “attack” on our servers. Of course we don’t negotiate with terrorists! Besides that, I doubt that he’s really behind it.

update: On a sidenote, J.K. Rowling’s lawyers asked us to take down our Harry Potter leak article. Pretty strange because it is just a news post mainstream media like The New York Times, CNET, The Washington Post and Wall Street Journal also posted articles about the leak after we broke the news.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

For people who can’t read, or people who like podcasts.. ;)

Enjoy, and feel free to leave a (audio) comment if you have something to say to Charlie, or if you want to comment on the show in general. There’s more good stuff from Charlie over at pod2peer.com.

You can listen to the show using the on-site player, download the mp3 directly, or grab the .torrent. Here’s the RSS feed , and the BitTorrent RSS feed for the show.

[audio:http://media.switchpod.com/users/pod2peer/TorrentPod014.mp3]

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

For people who can’t read, or people who like podcasts.. ;)

Enjoy, and feel free to leave a (audio) comment if you have something to say to Charlie, or if you want to comment on the show in general. There’s more good stuff from Charlie over at pod2peer.com.

You can listen to the show using the on-site player, download the mp3 directly, or grab the .torrent. Here’s the RSS feed for the show.

Intro by Wafeek

[audio:http://media.switchpod.com/users/pod2peer/TorrentPod013.mp3]

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

For people who can’t read, or people who like podcasts.. ;)

Enjoy, and feel free to leave a (audio) comment if you have something to say to Charlie, or if you want to comment on the show in general. There’s more good stuff from Charlie over at pod2peer.com.

You can listen to the show using the on-site player, download the mp3 directly, or grab the .torrent. Here’s the RSS feed for the show.

[audio:http://media.switchpod.com/users/pod2peer/TorrentPod012.mp3]

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

No music, crappy sound, but great stories ;)

Enjoy, and feel free to leave a (audio) comment if you have something to say to Charlie, or if you want to comment on the show in general. There’s more good stuff from Charlie over at pod2peer.com.

You can listen to the show using the on-site player, download the mp3 directly, or grab the .torrent. Here’s the RSS feed for the show.

[audio:http://media.switchpod.com/users/pod2peer/TorrentPod011.mp3]

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

Welcome to TorrentPod, the official pod/net/web- cast of TorrentFreak.com.

Enjoy, and feel free to leave a (audio) comment if you have something to say to Charlie, or if you want to comment on the show in general. There’s more good stuff from Charlie over at pod2peer.com.

You can listen to the show using the on-site player, download the mp3 directly, or grab the .torrent. Here’s the RSS feed for the show.

[audio:http://media.switchpod.com/users/pod2peer/TorrentPod010.mp3]

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

Welcome to TorrentPod, the official pod/net/web- cast of TorrentFreak.com.

Enjoy, and feel free to leave a (audio) comment if you have something to say to Charlie, or if you want to comment on the show in general. There’s more good stuff from Charlie over at pod2peer.com.

You can listen to the show using the on-site player, download the mp3 directly, or grab the .torrent. Here’s the RSS feed for the show.

[audio:http://media.switchpod.com/users/pod2peer/TorrentPod009.mp3]

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

can you open two BitTorrent apps together

Well, you probably can, but even more intriguing… do you know any

secret BitTorrent websites

Well, I don’t. But since they’re secret. And another search, probably related

which is the best paid torrent site

Some people have too much money. But let’s go on with a more basic question

is torrentspy legal

And the Cheaters of course

hack bit torrent to increase share ratio
cheat upload speed BitTorrent
hack seeds torrent connect only

But there are still some good people out there

How do I speed up my BitTorrent upload?

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.