With the popular Bittorrent indexing site The Pirate Bay preparing to go all in on magnet links on the site, users have asked themselves why the operators of the site go through those troubles in first place. The core reason for the site operators is bandwidth and to a lesser extend storage space. Replacing torrent [...]

Users of the popular Bittorrent indexing website BTJunkie who try to access the site’s content in a web browser are not seeing the usual site layout, but a goodbye message instead. The message states that the site operators have decided to close down the service voluntarily after more than seven years of operation. No reason [...]

One of the reasons for the success of the file sharing application Limewire was that it offered everything that one needed to get started. The program came with built-in options to search for and download files. All you had to do was to key in names that you were interested in, wait for the search [...]

What would you say about a service that monitors and records a huge percentage of worldwide torrent traffic and makes it available in a public database? The idea behind You Have Downloaded is fairly simple. The service monitors world wide torrent traffic and adds all information that it finds to a database. The developers of [...]

You may come upon torrents that you’d like to download when you are out of house. Maybe you are at a friend’s house, at work, or in a foreign country. The problem that you’ll encounter is always the same. How do you get the torrent from the computer to your home computer running uTorrent? You [...]

If you have followed uTorrent’s development closely in past weeks you have probably asked yourself if the developers would ever stop releasing release candidate versions of uTorrent 3.1. The developers went through ten release candidate builds before they released the final version of uTorrent 3.1 yesterday. Another update was rushed on the same day to [...]

If you have been to the uTorrent website these days you may have noticed an advertisement for uTorrent Plus placed prominently on the site. But even if you have not visited the main site recently, you may have spotted the uTorrent Plus application in the client itself. So what’s uTorrent Plus, and how does it [...]

Paulus just emailed me to let me know about a new version of uTorrent that had been released as a first release candidate recently. The developers of the Bittorrent client have added several new features and technologies to the popular distribution software. Two of the new technologies that got added are Bittorrent DNA and uTorrent [...]

After what felt like an eternity, the final version of the popular lightweight Bittorrent client uTorrent 3 has been released today. The final version is build 25406 and existing users should see update notifications when they start their client on their system, or by manually checking for updates by selecting Help > Check for Updates. [...]

The new Bittorrent related service Fetch.io has been in the news ever since it was mentioned over at Torrentfreak two days ago. Fetch.io acts as a middleman by downloading torrents to their servers. The files that are downloaded this way are automatically transcoded into mp4 and Flash video formats before they become available for streaming, [...]

Recent stats from the Sandvines Global internet Phenomenon report show that Netflix accounts for more web traffic in North America than bit torrents. While this is a good thing for Hollywood, it might backfire due to the ISPS recent trend to cap bandwidth in order to stop piracy. The report shows that Netflix accounts for [...]

Everyone knows the risks of working on an open Wi-Fi connection. Everything can be stolen from your security to your bandwidth. But the courts in the US have been historically unaware of the implications of an open Wi Fi connection. Finally, though, there appears to be one judge that understands that an IP connection does [...]

The experimental online service BurnBit can be used to create torrents out of any file that is hosted on the Internet. That’s interesting for webmasters who want to reduce the bandwidth usage of their server. BurnBit ensures that users who download the file get it delivered from the web server and at the same time [...]

It felt like aeons but the developers of uTorrent have finally published the first beta version of version 3 of the popular Bittorrent client. The beta is offered as a 32-bit and 64-bit version for the Windows operating system. The developers state that the 64-bit version “may be considerably buggier than the 32-bit release”, most [...]

Google search suggestions displays the most likely search terms in the search form once the user begins typing. Sometimes it is enough to enter one letter and hit the tab key to complete the suggestion. This can save some time and offer search options that the user may have otherwise not have thought of. One [...]

It’s been on ongoing story and has produced the first ruling on file-sharing in the UK where Judge Birss said back in December 2010, ”The term used by those sections of the Act is ‘authorising’ and the difference may be very important if the allegation is about unauthorised use of an Internet router by third parties”.  Now the [...]

British law firm ACS Law has already come under fire this year after hackers broke into their computer system and stole copies of documentation of letters and demands for recompense to people who had been accused by them of illegal file-sharing. Now the firm has been dealt a further blow with a judge rejecting their [...]

The New York District Court has ordered LimeWire to shutdown immediately by disabling functionality in the software client that allows users to share copyrighted materials in the P2P client. Users who visit LimeWire’s website are greeted with a legal notice detailing that “LimeWire is under a court-ordered injunction to stop distributing and supporting its file-sharing [...]

A web based extensions framework has been integrated into developer versions of uTorrent some time ago, offering the prospect to extend the basic functionality of the Bittorrent client in the future. Apps for uTorrent are currently only available in the latest developer releases of the p2p client. The first version with integrated apps was uTorrent [...]

The Bitorrent client uTorrent has made a huge leap forward today with the release of the first public uTorrent 3.0 alpha build. This continues the release policy of the developers who have always offered access to both stable and development builds of the popular torrent downloader. The latest stable version offered on the uTorrent homepage [...]

If you have visited a Bittorrent website or torrent search engine lately you might have come upon magnet links that were offered on the torrent download pages. Chance is the magnet link did not really bother you since the torrent link was offered as well on the download page so that it could be downloaded [...]

The uTorrent team has released a first alpha preview version (utorrent 2.2 beta 19640) codenamed Griffin that integrates a web-based extensions framework into the Bittorrent client. These apps, which only consist of HTML and JavaScript, are displayed using the existing browser that was extended for this new functionality. This in theory should make it easy [...]

Desktop torrent search engines seem to have grown in popularity over the last six months or so. Torrent Magnifier actually originated as a meta torrent search engine on the web which is still available. The developer’s must have made the decision to create a software for their torrent search engine to increase the popularity and [...]

If you are one of the Piratebay users who fear that the popular torrent website is going downhill after their acquirement a while ago you might appreciate what one Piratebay user did. The anonymous user dumped all Piratebay torrents and created one big 21.3 Gigabyte torrent file containing all Piratebay torrents up to the moment [...]

Using a portable version of uTorrent can be beneficial or necessary in several situations. It is for example easier to put a portable version of the Bittorrent client on a removable device so that it can be used on different computer systems without having to worry about settings and paths. Another reason could be to [...]

uTorrent is one of the most popular Bittorrent clients. It is small, lightweight and offers a good performance out of the box. The currently active branches of uTorrent is version 1.8x which is receiving regular updates from the developers. The first uTorrent 2.0 Beta hit the forum a few days ago. This version is currently [...]

The recent sale of the popular torrent hosting website The Piratebay to Swedish company Global Gaming Factory was a surprise to the userbase of the website. Many feared that this change of ownership would spell doom for the website. It was not clear back then what the new owners were planning and operations turned back [...]

We had to check the date on the story that was posted on Techcrunch this morning which basically stated that Swedish software company Global Gaming Factory X bought The Piratebay for 60 million Swedish crowns. It is rare that websites like The Piratebay get bought off, they usually cease to exist either by legal pressure [...]

News portals and sites on the Internet have reported in length about the trial against the founders of the online Torrent portal and tracker The Pirate Bay. Several of the charges brought forth against the founders had to be dropped during the trial. It did come as a surprise to many that the Pirate Bay [...]

Port forwarding is not something that needs to be configured on most computer systems. It basically describes the concept of forwarding connections to a specific local computer system. Usually a computer router, firewall or other hardware device that is managing or controlling traffic is involved in the process and needs to be configured to forward [...]

Peer to peer networks are often associated with the dark side of the Internet as they became widely known for containing large amounts of copyrighted files accessible to anyone with the right client software. File sharing on standard p2p networks like Bittorrent is not anonymous as IPs are visible once a connection has been established. [...]

Torrent websites come in two shapes on the Internet. Public sites like The Piratebay can be accessed by anyone while private torrent sites can only be accessed by those with user accounts. What makes this difficulty is that most private torrent sites are closed for registration most of the time and only open up registrations [...]

Torrents are a regular part of a geeks life. Whether it is downloading ISO images, your favorite non-licensed anime, or large-scale backups, torrents are a simple way to manage massive downloads. But how do you manage torrents in Linux? There are a number of possible clients, some command-line and some full-on graphical clients. The torrent [...]

How do you test if a download accelerator is really working? One way would be to download the same files twice. Once with the download accelerator enabled and once without. While this is surely not the most scientific method of testing it should provide enough data to come to a conclusion. The uTorrent Download Accelerator [...]

Piracy in gaming is huge. The earliest form of illegal practices in computer gaming I can remember is a person buying a game and giving it to a friend to copy in exchange for a copy of his game. Gaming companies wised up to that and today most PC games come with some kind of [...]

Now that the US elections are over and the results are out, it’s worthwhile looking at how the winners fare with technology. Everyone knows that Barack Obama actively used the Internet while campaigning but what are his views on other things technology related? Most notably, how do the new guys plan to tackle issues like [...]

Ever so often, the people in charge try to get tough with those who break the law. Sometimes, the ‘bad guys’ get away but more often than not, they get caught. And that’s exactly what happened to Torrentvalley.com yesterday. Torrentvalley is different from other BitTorrent services in that it’s not a file tracker like Pirate [...]

LimeWire is a popular P2P client which uses the Gnutella network. Unfortunately, it limits the amount of ultrapeers to whom connections can be made, in effect reducing the amount of search results and the number of people from whom downloads can be made. LimeWire only removes these limitations if its Pro version is bought at [...]

Ever since the RIAA and other big guns decided to pull up people for illegal file-sharing of copyrighted material, the news has been full of cases involving these crimes. From individuals to site owners providing links to copyrighted content, it seems no one is safe. I don’t intend to start a debate on whether or [...]

PeerGuardian is an IP (Internet Protocol) blocker for Windows which is highly popular in the file sharing community but also with security and privacy interested users. The software works by providing access to lists that contain IPs and IP ranges that are coming from organizations, companies, websites and individuals that invade the user’s privacy, serve [...]

As far as file-sharing protocols go, BitTorrent has emerged as one of the leading P2P technologies being used. μTorrent is one of the most popular BitTorrent apps around, largely because of its small size and ease of use. While μTorrent used to be an independent client, it has since been taken over by BitTorrent Inc. [...]

For many years now, Rapidshare has been the file-hosting site of choice. Rapidshare’s popularity is primarily due to the fact that it is one of the first sites of its kind that ever appeared on the Internet. Rapidshare is not without its disappointments, the major one being that there is no way for you to [...]

Ever since BitTorrent first appeared on the scene, it has become one of the most popular file-sharing methods around. BitTorrent is fast because each file is split into very small chunks and can be downloaded from complete and partially downloaded files. This protocol is especially popular for new releases. The service has its pros and [...]

I’m not really into a streaming solution for videos that are available as torrents because I prefer to download the video to have the option to play it whenever I like and not in the instant it starts playing during the download. It could be however an interesting option to preview the video before downloading [...]

It was the big talk two month ago when British ISP Virgin Media send out it’s first warning letters to users they suspected to be sharing files online that they did not have the rights of. Yesterday the news hit the Internet websites that six major Internet Service Providers from the United Kingdom have agreed [...]

TV Shows are one of the most popular media that get downloaded from Bittorrent. It’s very handy for viewing missed episodes of a favorite tv show or to view tv shows in their original language and not the translated version that fails to catch the spirit of the original show. I don’t want to talk [...]

Back in 2007 the team that developed the popular Java Bittorrent client Azureus created the content distribution plattform Vuze and integrated it into Azureus. Today, after more than a year, to consolidate their position and start using the Vuze brand name exclusive. One could say that Azureus has become Vuze which tries to be more [...]

The Bittorrent protocol has gone a long way since the beginning and the applications have become increasingly easy to use for most users. They do come with a lot of settings though which can speed up the seeding and downloading and configure the client exactly the way the user wants it to be but usually [...]

A couple of days ago, I wrote about Uploadjockey, which allows you to upload a file to many of the popular file-hosting sites at one time. I also asked readers for their suggestions and was pleasantly surprised to find there are quite a number of multiple file-hosting sites available. I decided to try out the [...]

A friend of mine has created his own huge home network with several computers throughout the house. Some act as servers, for example file servers and one of them is being used as a download server. It makes perfectly sense to let another server handle the downloads from P2P networks like Bittorrent or eDonkey to [...]