Items tagged with Torrent
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,...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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,...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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Comcast users who have recently reported that their download speeds have dropped and/or their inability to seed has started making waves, after all, Comcast is a major player in the broadband arena.It is no surprise then, that Comcast is now officially doing something about piracy: they’re throttling BitTorrent activity on their own network. “ISPs have been throttling BitTorrent traffic for almost two years now. Most ISPs simply limit the available bandwidth for BitTorrent traffic, but Comcast takes it one step further, and prevents their customers from seeding. And Comcast is not alone in this, Canadian ISPs Cogeco and Rogers use similar methods on a smaller scale.Unfortunately, these more...
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Most people hear the word BitTorrent and immediately think piracy, but there are legitimate uses for the technology according to a group of TorrentSpy founders who are now founding a new company, FileRights. The goal of FileRights is to allow companies who feel their content is being distributed in a fashion that isn't beneficial to them to sign up and report the files which would hopefully be removed quickly. "FileRights was started by some of the same people that run the Torrentspy search engine and who are fighting a copyright lawsuit brought by the major motion picture studios regarding the issue of whether dot torrent files manifested in search results, which can be used by site visitors...
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New Hardware Offloaded BIT Torrent Client Built into Killer NIC Killer NIC's Network Processing Unit can now download files while you game Austin, Texas (PRWEB) March 20, 2007 -- Bigfoot Networks, Inc., a research and development company, today introduced FN Torrent, a hardware offloaded peer-to-peer file sharing application that allows users to download files with zero impact to CPU utilization. With FN Torrent, gamers have the power to download the torrents they want without impacting their online game play. "The introduction of FN Torrent allows gamers to benefit from the full potential of the Killer's Flexible Network Architecture (FNA)," said Harlan Beverly, co-founder...
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BitTorrent, the peer to peer file sharing giant, is launching a download service that offers licensed, legitimate versions of TV and movie downloads. Cue the mass hysteria. The San Francisco-based company is betting that at least one-third of the 135 million people who have downloaded the BitTorrent software will be willing to pay for high-quality legitimate content rather than take their chances with pirated fare. "The vast majority of our audience just loves digital content," Ashwin Navin, president and co-founder of BitTorrent, told The Associated Press. "Now we have to program for that audience and create a better experience for that content...
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