The mania surrounding “Lost” continues. It has emerged that the series finale now holds the record of being the most downloaded TV show in the history of TV. The final two episodes, within 20 hours of appearing online, were downloaded some 900,000 times. Quite a bit, yes. → Read More
Hope you didn’t download The Hurt Locker with BitTorrent because it looks like the film’s producers may be coming after you. They’re looking at a multi-million dollar copyright infringement lawsuit that would target “tens of thousands” of users. Let’s discuss this for a moment. → Read More
Call me crazy, but wasn’t the point of Avatar to go see it in 3D on the big screen? Otherwise, why bother? Be that as it may, Avatar is on track to hold the distinction of being the most pirated Blu-ray release of all time. Nice job, guys! → Read More
Still using BitTorrent? Using a Mac? Want to try out a leaked beta of Microsoft Office 2011? Clearly you see where I’m going with this. → Read More
We haven’t really progressed beyond the year 2004, have we? With respect to copyright news, I mean. The latest: the “US Copyright Group” has filed suit against 20,000 BitTorrent users, with a cool 30,000 lawsuits now pending. If you total all the various different “Hollywood” (you know what I mean) lawsuits, that means that 80,000 Americans now face some sort of traffic-lawsuit. → Read More
Warner Bros. UK is offering an internship to “IT literate” students that requires them to spy on fellow file-sharers. The intern will have to maintain accounts on private BitTorrent sites, as well as procure new accounts, in order to supply Warner Bros. UK with information on how that whole “world” works. Not a bad idea from Warner’s perspective. → Read More
Hollywood (the movie studios, the record labels, etc.) sure does have a knack for causing its own problems. You’ll recall that it’s en vogue to call copyright infringers “pirates,” which is an insult to legitimate pirates like William Kidd and Henry Morgan. Just because you can fire up uTorrent doesn’t mean you can take on a Spanish Armada. But, whatever, it’s simply easier for Hollywood and its… → Read More
Something’s wrong with uTorrent, the de facto Windows BitTorrent client. The client’s implementation of uTP has drawn the ire of certain private BitTorrent sites, saying that it favors uTorrent clients above all others. That’s not good for the “BitTorrent community,” as it were. → Read More
Credit to Ring of Honor, the professional wrestling promotion, for embracing the Internet era. The promotion has launched a new download store that makes its extensive video library only a $10 download away. A legal download, mind you. It’s all a fan could ever ask for. → Read More
Comcast, Time Warner Cable, and Cox are busy funding some new, super-duper anti-BitTorrent technology called BitStalker. The difference between it and other anti-BitTorrent systems is that it’s said to be accurate. That’s a huge development, actually. → Read More
There’s a bit of a controversy in the BitTorrent community, friends. Two rather prominent, so-called private trackers, whose names I will not mention “just because,” have announced that they will be banning Vuze, the former Azureus, one of the elder statesmen of the BitTorrent protocol. Say what you will about the direction Vuze took—I hated it—but there isn’t a more powerful torrent… → Read More
Hey, something’s happening in China vis-à-vis piracy! The country’s State Administration of Radio, Film and Television (SARFT) has been fiddling with downloads there for the past few days, and people are complaining that they’re not about to access the content they were once able to. → Read More
Pretty big news to share with y’all today: The Pirate Bay is no more. Well, “no more” in the sense that the site’s admins have decided to kill the tracker once and for all. The site will continue to serve the BitTorrent community, but will instead rely upon trackerless technology, such as DHT and PEX. → Read More
Apologies for the headline, but it was too appropriate to resist. It seems that there is a feature of uTorrent 2.0 now in beta that automatically detects network congestion and self-limits bandwidth to lessen it. This might provide some much-needed relief to ISPs that feel a disproportionate amount of traffic is P2P. I’m not sure whether to call this self-policing action capitulation or… → Read More
Hey, remember Hulu.com? It was a Web site that sort of came out of nowhere, and offered streaming TV shows from NBC and other networks. It was ad-supported, and free. People liked it. And then, one day, in October, 2009, a completely bonkers TV executive all but killed it with one sentence: “It’s time to start getting paid for broadcast content online.” → Read More
More news about The Pirate Bay to bore you all! (Seriously, it’s not like people are still talking about the old Suprnova or Torrentspy anymore, yet the TPB has stuck around.) Some time ago, a Dutch court ordered TPB to delete a number of torrents and block Dutch IP addresses from being able to visit the site. Using a sledgehammer on a thumbtack, yes. Then TPB protested, as it does all the time… → Read More
I think we’ve all had our fill of The Pirate Bay stories, but here’s one more in the interest of killing five minutes. The site moved its servers from Sweden to Ukraine last week, and rather than have its servers being stored in some random server farm, they’re being stored in a former NATO nuclear bunker. So we think, at least. → Read More
What’s wrong with sites like Hulu? Well nothing, per se, except for the fact that they can’t be used anywhere outside of the Unites States. As if other countries don’t want to watch… um, really great shows like “Extreme Makeover” and “The [American] Office”! Perhaps that’s why, then, BitTorrent site EZTV has seen traffic double, mainly from non-American IPs, in the past year? For… → Read More
At ease, soldiers. The Pirate Bay is back in the Google search index. I understand this was eating at your very soul for some time now. → Read More
The Pirate Bay just can’t catch a break these days. I won’t bore you with the past, but today’s juicy gossip is: Google has removed The Pirate Bay from its search index because of a DMCA complaint! → Read More
Lost in all the Apple hoopla yesterday: the company that wanted to buy The Pirate Bay was just thrown off the Swedish stock exchange. Still think the deal is going down? → Read More
Social this, social that. Looks like everything is being socialized these days—but not the American health care system, zing!—so it only makes sense for someone to try to socialize BitTorrent. It doesn’t hurt when that “someone” is the people behind IsoHunt, who just launched Hexagon.cc, a message board/social network hybrid built around sharing content. → Read More
It’s not even a story any more that Apple loves to reject Apps from the App Store. Today’s entry in the Big Book of App Rejections is µMonitor, an App that monitors µTorrent that you have running on your PC. Apple rejected it because “this category of applications is often used for the purpose of infringing third party rights.” → Read More
It’s not even a story any more that Apple loves to reject Apps from the App Store. Today’s entry in the Big Book of App Rejections is µMonitor, an App that monitors µTorrent that you have running on your PC. Apple rejected it because “his category of applications is often used for the purpose of infringing third party rights.” → Read More
Years from now, when the history of BitTorrent-related Internet piracy is written, there will have to be at least one chapter devoted to The Pirate Bay. It showed up just as the likes of Suprnova and LokiTorrent were being shut down, and quickly became the go-to place for, shall we say, the less savvy BitTorrent user. It also became a symbol of the copyright reform movement, though the site’s… → Read More
Oh, God. Well, it looks like Global Gaming Foundation X, the company that wanted to buy The Pirate Bay, has approved the acquisition. All the financing is in place (the deal will be financed by GGF itself, which means that nobody else wanted anything to do with the deal), and GGF is ready to roll, officially. Total price: 60 million Swedish kroner, or about $8.3 million. In the immortal words of… → Read More
Scratch one Web site off that “alternative to The Pirate Bay” list. Mininova has been ordered by a Dutch court to remove all links to copyrighted items from its servers, or face fines to the tune of €5 million. You get the feeling that the era of BitTorrent as we know it is about to end, don’t you? → Read More
You need only one word to describe The Pirate Bay. It comes from the Ancient Greek, is six letters long, and entered the English language in 1884, some 120 years before the Web site’s founding. When The Pirate Bay starts to compare its struggles to those of Western Europe during World War II—you know, the struggle against Nazi Germany—only one word is needed. That word is hubris, and… → Read More
You know how on the Internet, after something particularly stupid happens, someone says, “I lol’d”? Well, I lol’d after reading the following two sentences: “There is uncertainty surrounding the purchase of file-sharing website The Pirate Bay (TPB) by Swedish-based Global Gaming Factory (GGF). Trading in GGF shares has been suspended and there are reports that the firm’s… → Read More
This goes to show you just how quickly someone will replace The Pirate Bay if it ever goes “legit.” As you’re probably aware, someone downloaded every single torrent fie hosted on TPB’s servers; that torrent file was the uploaded back to TPB, where it’s now being seeded from hundreds of sources. What’s new is that someone took that copy of TPB and uploaded it to another Web site, creating, in… → Read More
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