Items tagged with Torrent
Sometimes it's easy to feel like game developers are only interested in our dollars with microtransactions and remasters of old games selling for as much as new and current games. Then something comes along that makes you think some devs really do care more about players and the games themselves than money. Normally game developers get angry and let loose the legal hounds when their hard work turns up as a free download on sites like The Pirate Bay, but not Acid Wizard Studio. These guys put their own game on The Pirate Bay and told people to download it and play it if they can't afford the game. Acid Wizard Studio said in The Pirate Bay description for their game that it was completely free,...
Read more...
HBO's wildly popular Game of Thrones just recently concluded its fifth season, which ranks as the most popular in the series to date in terms of viewership, both through official channels and via piracy. Speaking of the latter, the season finale set a new record in piracy with 1.5 million downloads in just eight hours. That number is expected to balloon to 10 million in the coming days. It's not really a surprise that the finale of attracted so many illegal downloads -- while this represents more than any previous seasons, breaking unsavory records like this one is nothing unusual when it comes to Game of Thrones. The series has built up a rabid fan base in its five seasons, and piracy is something...
Read more...
In a recent Spanish interview, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings offered a rather controversial perspective on content piracy via the Internet. In the interview, Hastings stated that while a great many may consider piracy to be a problem, the truth is that it has served a purpose in helping to create a public that is savvy about viewing best-quality content on demand via the Internet. Spain has long been a particularly sharp thorn in the paw of producers and distributors of entertainment products, with a raging culture of Internet file-sharing piracy borne of a dearth of good legal alternatives. Despite this, Hastings thinks Netflix's upcoming Spain launch will be one of the company's most successful...
Read more...
Popular torrent site The Pirate Bay (TPB) may be down, but not necessarily out. Or more precisely, not out for good. The site was taken offline following a raid by Swedish police in which authorities seized personal computers, servers, and other electronic equipment. Now, two weeks later, the always-defiant crew behind the site has given a signal that TPB is on its way back. According to TorrentFreak, TPB's nameservers were updated this morning to new ones controlled by their domain name registrar binero.se. Furthermore, the main domain has started pointing to a different IP address than before, which is now connected to a server hosted in Moldova. When you visit TPB, all you'll...
Read more...
A raid conducted in Sweden last week resulted in the shutting down of The Pirate Bay. Since then, other websites have stepped up to carry the crown, but the current crew behind The Pirate Bay has been silent on the entire matter – that is until now “We were not that surprised by the raid. That is something that is a part of this game. We couldn’t care less really,” said Mr 10100100000 to TorrentFreak via an encrypted channel. “We have however taken this opportunity to give ourselves a break. How long are we supposed to keep going? To what end? We were a bit curious to see how the public would react,” Mr 10100100000 added. The Pirate Bay has lasted for more than a decade and, until recently,...
Read more...
One of the most frustrating things on earth is being censored, and if there's one group that likes to be vocal in battling such things, it's The Pirate Bay. Censorship can come in many forms, however, such as restricting what you can say in public, or which websites you can visit. TPB might not be able to take care of the former, but it is able to remedy the latter, and has, with "PirateBrowser". PirateBrowser, built-upon Firefox (v23, at the moment), is designed strictly for those who have governments that censor the parts of the Web to its citizens. TPB lists North Korea, Iran, UK, Netherlands, Belgium, Finland, Denmark, Italy and Ireland as affected countries, but there are of course more...
Read more...
Just saying the word "BitTorrent" makes those at record labels and movie studios cringe, but honestly, it's not always used for nefarious purposes. The Internet Archive, which is a non-profit digital library built to enable "universal access to all knowledge," is making over one million pieces of archived content available to the world via the BitTorrent protocol. That's right -- 1,000,000 files freely available on P2P networks. The Internet Archive offers permanent storage of and free public access to collections of digitized materials, including websites, music, moving images, and over 2 million public-domain books. Today all of the archives' live music concerts, the Prelinger movie collection,...
Read more...
When an advance copy of Crysis 2 leaked to the Internet a full month before the game's scheduled release, Crytek and Electronic Arts (EA) were understandably miffed and, as it turns out, justified in their fears of mass piracy. As 2011 comes to a close, Crysis 2 holds rank as the most pirated game of the year on any platform, according to data released by TorrentFreak. Crysis 2 was illegally download on the PC platform 3,920,000 times, 'beating out' Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 with 3,650,000 illegal downloads. Numbers like these don't bode well for PC gamers and will only serve to encourage even more draconian DRM measures than we've seen in the past. Credit: Torrentfreak.com Given the ease...
Read more...
Tech savvy students living in the UK have an opportunity to pull in a pretty respectable part-time income and move up from dining on Ramen Noodles to fast food joints. All they have to do is snitch on their fellow classmates as part of Warner Bros.'s anti-piracy efforts.It's actually a little more involved in that and the qualifying candidate will have to possess a bit of IT know-how. The job description reads as follows:During the 12 month internship, duties will include: monitoring local Internet forums and IRC for pirated WB and NBCU content and in order to gather information on pirate sites, pirate groups and other pirate activities; finding new and maintaining existing accounts on private...
Read more...
It's been some time since we've heard from Iomega, but it's good to see the company is still looking out for its customers. Today, said outfit has announced a smattering of new features for its popular StorCenter ix2 NAS, making the purchase you've already made that much more valuable. And if you didn't take the hint, all of the new functionality is being provided gratis.In short, here's what has been added:Remote Access: ix2 users can now connect to their pictures, videos and other files from anywhere in the world - as though they were sitting at their workstation or home computer. The process is simple: enter a personalized web address into any browser and the user will be easily and securely...
Read more...
According to BitTorrent news site, TorrentFreak, at any given moment, nearly half of all active BitTorrent users are downloading pirated TV shows. TorrentFreak estimates that one of the most popular TV shows, Lost, garners "close to 10 million downloads per episode." According to the Nielsen TV ratings for last week, the two-hour series finale of Lost had 12.3 million broadcast TV viewers. This means that almost as many people are downloading the show as are watching it when it originally airs."People are getting used to on-demand content. They simply want to watch their favorite shows whenever they want, wherever they want. To give some more insight into this growing phenomenon, and because...
Read more...
Comcast customers are still waiting for the nation’s largest broadband provider to make good on their promise to stop throttling BitTorrent traffic according to a recent survey:The Max Planck Institute tested the connections of 788 Comcast customers, 494 (62%) experienced a slowdown of BitTorrent traffic. Comcast is not alone though, well over 50% of the Cox subscribers that participated in the study were also throttled. The good news is, other ISPs don’t seem to restrict BitTorrent traffic on a wide scale.Ben Scott, policy director of Free Press, said in a response: “Consumers have no reason left to trust their cable company. This independent study confirms that Comcast is still blocking its...
Read more...
Potential throttling of BitTorrent traffic by major ISPs, such as Comcast and AT&T, means that your Internet access could be affected. It's not just the downloading of illegal movies and applications that utilizes BitTorrent traffic; there is plenty of legitimate BitTorrent traffic out there as well, such as Valve's Steam game distribution platform. Some legitimate Steam users have reported interference from ISPs.While the government investigates and contemplates enacting net neutrally legislation, what is a broadband user to do? Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems have created a couple of tools for detecting if an ISP is manipulating BitTorrent traffic. They call...
Read more...
The MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) has won a default judgment against Valence Media's download site Torrentspy. The judgment is handy for figuring out exactly how much all those free movies everyone's downloading are worth. According to a federal judge, $110 million dollars ought to about cover it. In 2006 TorrentSpy was more popular than any other BitTorrent site, but this changed quickly in August 2007, when a federal judge ordered TorrentSpy to log all user data. The judge ruled that TorrentSpy had to monitor its users in order to create detailed logs of their activities, and hand these over to the MPAA.In a response to this decision - and to ensure the privacy of their users...
Read more...
The end of an era may be upon us as yet another major BitTorrent site has closed down:Friends of TorrentSpy,We have decided on our own, not due to any court order or agreement, to bring the Torrentspy.com search engine to an end and thus we permanently closed down worldwide on March 24, 2008.The legal climate in the USA for copyright, privacy of search requests, and links to torrent files in search results is simply too hostile. We spent the last two years, and hundreds of thousands of dollars, defending the rights of our users and ourselves.Ultimately the Court demanded actions that in our view were inconsistent with our privacy policy, traditional court rules, and International law; therefore,...
Read more...
Ah yes, the good news is they are collaborating. The bad news is ... wait for it ... The deal comes as BitTorrent, which became known for developing software technology widely used to illegally share files, is trying to reinvent itself. The companies are in talks to collaborate on ways to run BitTorrent's technology more smoothly on Comcast's broadband network, and allow Comcast to transport video files more effectively over its own network in the future, said Tony Warner, Comcast's chief technology officer. Comcast and BitTorrent have been at odds since the cable operator said it was delaying traffic from BitTorrent at peak times. Legislators and some advocacy groups argued that Comcast's efforts...
Read more...
It'll be a cold day in ... well, you know where before this happens in the U.S. Or will it? Following closely on the heels of Norway, Canada's public broadcasting service is adopting DRM-free BitTorrent distribution for a major prime-time show.On March 24, CBC will use BitTorrent to distribute this year's broadcast of Canada's Next Great Prime Minister. This will make Canada the first country in North America to release high-quality, DRM-free copies of a prime-time show using the popular P2P file-sharing technology.Canada's Next Great Prime Minister, an annual competition in which young adults propose ways to improve the country in hopes of winning 50,000 Canadian dollars, attracted more...
Read more...
Nine Inch Nails has released its new album, Ghosts I-IV, online and in a somewhat Radiohead-eque way. You'll recall Radiohead released its In Rainbows album with "you" naming the price. Nine Inch Nails doesn't go quite that far, but it's still the sort of experimentation more bands should be trying with digital distribution becoming more popular.Nine Inch Nails has just released the first volume of their new album “Ghosts” on BitTorrent sites as a free download. The band encourages its fans to share the album with friends, post it on websites and play it on podcasts.In the release notes the band writes: “Now that we’re no longer constrained by a record label, we’ve decided to personally upload...
Read more...
Comcast has drawn a lot of attention to itself since it decided to throttle BitTorrent traffic, and most of it negative. Customers complained to anyone who would listen, and one of those was the FCC and another may just be House Internet Subcommittee Chair, (D) Rep. Ed Markey:“This time, the Federal Communications Commission will depart its headquarters just off the National Mall in Washington and head north to a courtroom on Harvard Law School's campus in Cambridge, Mass. (The FCC wouldn't comment on why the site was selected, but Boston is the home turf of Democratic Rep. Ed Markey, who chairs a House Internet subcommittee.)The hearing, which will be open to the public on a first-come,...
Read more...
Proposed legislation in Great Britain would compel Internet Service Providers to cut off Internet access to downloaders who access copyrighted material. Users suspected of wrongly downloading films or music will receive a warning e-mail for the first offence, a suspension for the second infringement and the termination of their internet contract if caught a third time, under the most likely option to emerge from discussions about the new law.Broadband companies who fail to enforce the “three-strikes” regime would be prosecuted and suspected customers’ details could be made available to the courts. The Government has yet to decide if information on offenders should be shared between ISPs.But...
Read more...
If you are a user in the United States, you can no longer use TorrentSpy. However, that's not necessarily a bad thing as the site had been ordered to start tracking users. Citing privacy, TorrentSpy now gives an error message if a user with a U.S. IP address tries to search. US users of the popular Torrent search site TorrentSpy can use the site no more—at least not for now. TorrentSpy has begun to block all searches by US visitors, instead redirecting search requests to a page with the headline "TorrentSpy Acts to Protect Privacy." The page says that TorrentSpy has chosen to block US visitors because of an "uncertain legal climate in the US regarding user privacy and an apparently...
Read more...
Today Comcast today responded to reports by the blog Torrentfreak, which we posted a few days ago. In that article, it was reported that users were experiencing slowdowns and even dropped transfers, and that Comcast was the culprit. Over the past few days, these claims have been widely circulated throughout the Web. But when I spoke to Comcast spokesman Charlie Douglas earlier today, he flat-out denied that the company was filtering or "shaping" any traffic on its network. He said the company doesn't actively look at the applications or content that its customers download over the network. But Comcast does reserve the right to cut off service to customers who abuse the network by using...
Read more...
