torrents

The torrent-downloading site The Pirate Bay announced last week in a blog post that the Swedish authorities had launched a new criminal investigation into its activities.

"The Swedish district attorney Fredrik Ingblad initiated a new investigation into The Pirate Bay back in 2010," the blog said. "Information has been leaked to us every now and then by multiple sources, almost on a regular basis."

Today, the torrent news site TorrentFreak confirmed that the Swedish police were looking into The Pirate Bay. Apparently, authorities requested that the Swedish hosting company Binero, where The Pirate Bay is registered, … Read more

If you go to The Pirate Bay's Web site, you'll now see the words "The Magnet Bay." As of tomorrow, the popular Swedish torrent tracker will no longer be offering users torrent files, but instead will be posting magnet links.

On its blog today, the Pirate Bay wrote that even though this "marks the end of an era," users should not notice much of a difference.

"It shouldn't make much of a difference for the average user. At most it will take a few more seconds before a torrent shows the size … Read more

Can The Pirate Bay exist without torrents? The future of the Swedish torrent tracker arrives on the last day of February, which is when the site administrators have announced that they will be phasing out torrents in favor of magnet links.

Although it sounds like The Pirate Bay will be closing, the move is designed to ensure that the site continues on. A magnet link is like a torrent container, but instead of using the name of the torrent to identify itself, it relies on a hash code that uniquely identifies the torrent. Basically, it's a torrent that's … Read more

For people who want the shortest path from a Web site to their torrent client, the new add-on uTorrent Control (download) puts basic torrent-managing tools directly in your browser.

It lets you add, remove, and pause torrents; check download status; and monitor download speeds. You can sync it with the desktop client or with uTorrent Remote, and use it to launch the Web remote at remote.utorrent.com. The add-on installs as a toolbar on Firefox and Internet Explorer; on Chrome, it appears as a button.

It also has a sponsored search engine component, which is easy enough to ignore. … Read more

What if you took the decentralized, distributed theory that powers torrent technology and applied it to live streaming?

That question, or one similar to it, is what BitTorrent inventor Bram Cohen must've asked himself a few years ago. The answer is BitTorrent Live, and it's currently working its way through a series of weekly real-world tests at the BitTorrent headquarters in San Francisco.

BitTorrent Live is a live-streaming technology that leverages the bandwidth of everybody watching the stream to lighten the stream's network load. It could be applied to everything from family weddings to corporate conference calls … Read more

LAS VEGAS--A phalanx of deals involving the commanding general of torrent protocols, BitTorrent, and next-generation hardware marched into CES 2012 today, the unofficial Day Zero of the show. BitTorrent also announced that more than 150 million people used sibling programs BitTorrent and uTorrent last month, making them by far the most popular torrent clients around.

Following up on the announcement from CES 2011 that it would partner with hardware manufacturers to ship their devices with torrent support built in, BitTorrent revealed four companies based in Europe, Russia, and Asia that have prepared new hardware that automatically works with the current BitTorrent program. BitTorrent-certified devices from these companies will carry the BitTorrent logo. … Read more

Do you pray to the god of file sharing? If so, you might want to move to Sweden. The Church of Kopimism--a group with roots in file sharing and the notion that everything should be free--is now an official religion there.

Kopimism is the brainchild of philosophy student Isak Gerson, who founded the church in 2010 to protect his beliefs that copying and sharing information is a good thing. (If Kopimism has a Ten Commandments equivalent, I'm guessing "Thou shall not steal" didn't make the cut.)

Before you dispute Kopimism as hogwash, there are some things to consider. According to TorrentFreak, the movement has a couple thousand followers, and the number is expected to rise with its official status. … Read more

The TorrentFreak blog has outed the RIAA and U.S. Department of Homeland Security as harboring downloaders of pirated songs by hip hop artists and crime-based TV shows, but the RIAA denies it.

TorrentFreak said it used the YouHaveDownloaded.com site to find instances of IP addresses within the RIAA and the DHS linked to downloads of copyrighted content from BitTorrent.

Six RIAA IP addresses were linked to downloads of music by Jay-Z ("American Gangster") and Kanye West ("My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy"), as well as the first five seasons of "Dexter," a "… Read more

Louis Szekely, the comedian better known as Louis C.K., has declared that his experiment selling an online video with no copy-protection restrictions is a success.

In the four days after putting "Louis C.K. Live at the Beacon Theater" for sale at $5, the stand-up comedian has made a profit of about $200,000 so far, he said in a statement yesterday. As a result, he said, he hopes all his future work will be distributed the same way.

Today's online entertainment world is a largely bipolar. On the one hand is legally sanctioned content that'… Read more