Over the last year, there has been a hard crackdown on piracy, backed by lobbying efforts from the media industry. These efforts made the RIAA and the MPAA the most notorious lobbying groups of last year. Their efforts have been overshadowed by the ongoing SOPA case, but they still exist and are fully functional, nonetheless.  These firms earn their daily bread by preparing infringement cases for media companies like Sony, Fox and NBC. Though, what happens when people inside these very companies are found downloading files illegally?

The guys at TorrentFreak used the web-service http://www.youhavedownloaded.com,  which tracks IP addresses and links them to Torrent downloads. Using this service, they found illegal downloads taking place inside Sony and Fox. They also found illegal downloads at Google’s Corporate office in New York and at NBC Universal. Surprisingly, there were no traceable/illegal download at the Bittorrent Inc. headquarters.

Ernesto ends the article with,

Yesterday, the Dutch blog Geenstijl  exposed  how someone at the local music royalty collecting agency Buma/Stemra downloaded a copy of the TV-show Entourage and video game Battlefield 3.

In a response Buma/Stemra  issued  a press release stating that their IP-addresses were spoofed….After all, if it’s so easy to spoof an IP-address, then accused file-sharers can use this same defense against copyright holders. Checkmate?

As said by Ernesto on TorrentFreak, an IP address is not a person. However, every employee of a company stands for its values and represents the company, especially in their behavior inside the company. Apparently, Sony and Fox have some internal policing to do before they go out and change the world. As for their anti-piracy efforts, pirates are happy, now that the messers become the messies.

The best defense that BitTorrent search engines have churned up lately is that they are “just like Google” in their operation. They allow users to search around information that is lying around the web. Until now, Google has shown little interest in these MPAA cases against torrent search engines, though it has kept a close watch on them. However, this time, Google has responded to the case as a third party in the MPAA vs. isoHunt case, even though it is not a part of any of these cases.

Image via: Digital Digest

Google wants to clear its name in cases where torrent clients say they are like Google. The U.S. District Court of California grounded isoHunt last year in March by issuing a list of 1000 critical keywords; they had to filter in their searches. Google has written to the court,

This cases raises issues about the interpretation and application of the safe-harbor provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, 17 U.S.C. § 512 et seq. (DMCA) and common-law rules governing claims for secondary copyright infringement. Google has a strong interest in both issues,

Google had taken the consent of both MPAA and isoHunt before issuing this testimony. While MPAA was not keen on having Google intervening in the case, isoHunt wanted Google to speak, hoping that it will get some support. As a sudden turn of events, Google has accepted isoHunt being a true pirate and has also criticized the MPAA for its decisions.

It seems like Google has cleared its name in the matter by setting a clear definition of what a pirate search engine does and how it is different from what Google does. Additionally, Google has also pointed out places where the MPAA is going wrong.

Have you ever wanted to share a large file via Bittorrent and then realized that creating a well functioning torrent file isn’t exactly your forte? This is the question that a new file sharing service on the block, FlashSeed, wants to ask the people.

FlashSeed calls itself a One Click Torrent Hostingsite, but if you ask me, this title can be a little bit misleading. What FlashSeed actually does is that it takes the file that you want to share and stores it onto its servers. Then it creates a torrent for that file and seeds the torrent for five days (using the web seed technique). This five day grace period allows enough time for the torrent swarm to become self sufficient.

Unregistered users can upload files upto 500MB and upon free registration, the limit is raised to 1GB. Since your uploaded file is kept on FlashSeed’s server, you can also directly download the file. So if you just need to dump a gigabyte of data somewhere but do not want to use the Bittorrent protocol, FlashSeed can be of some help. Now since FlashSeed does keep files on its own servers for some time, it is susceptible to violating copyright law. However, FlashSeed takes the safer side here and already mentions on its FAQ page, We will take down any materials that obviously violate copyright law.

A service like FlashSeed can come in handy when a user not proficient with Bittorrent would want to share a large file with a group of people. Even though Bittorrent is possibly the best way to share massive files, the learning curve often creates hurdles in the way of the average netizen.

2010 was not a good year for those looking for free movie downloads and other not-quite-legal files. Many of the file sharing sites were either shut down or forced to go legit. One of the most popular sites, The Pirate Bay, is one example of the sites being forced offline.

One of the best way to share files online is using the  BitTorrent protocol. Bittorrent shared files are stored across many different personal computers over the internet, making them almost impossible to shut down. Even though a site like Pirate Bay can be shuttered, the BitTorrent shared files are still around, and there are still ways to search for them.

Recently, the TorrentFreak website posted 2010′s top 100 searches for BitTorrent downloads. Here are the top ten items from their list.

1. inception
2. iron man 2
3. 2010
4. xxx
5. french
6. avatar
7. dvdrip
8. despicable me
9. porn
10. clash of the titans

Some of those searches aren’t surprising. Others in the list leave us wondering what people were really looking for. What’s so great about frenchdownloads? If you have some clue, let us know in the comments below.

Here are a few other posts about BitTorrent, in case you are curious.

Torrent Search bar, search torrents from firefox

Best Peer to Peer (P2P) & Torrent Software Clients for File Sharing

How to Open .torrent Files?

Disable BitTorrent Integration in Opera [How To]

The Pirate Bay: Finally Silenced by Hollywood, But For How Long?

6 Tools for Anonymous Torrenting Options

Truly decentralized BitTorrent has finally been realized and is available with the release of the Tribler client. It is the first client of its kind that has reached the highest possible level of decentralization. With Tribler, files, tracker and anything regarding torrents are no longer on a single server but distributed over multiple users.

Earlier, torrents depended heavily on websites that hosted links to .torrent files or aggregated them. These websites were popular but they were all based on the server-client model. Essentially, the decentralized and peer-to-peer nature of the BitTorrent  protocol was still dependent on the server-client model of the parent website.

The Tribler client is here to change this and has been released for all three popular platforms- Mac, Windows and Linux. The client has a search that is peer-to-peer in nature too. In short, Tribler is decentralized in the true essence of decentralization. You can see more on the Tribler client at Torrentfreak.

Now, coming to the RIAA bullies, this torrent client means more trouble, but at the same time more money to them. The RIAA will still try to take down the company and its backers will pour in more funds without a clue. The decentralized client will eliminate a single point of failure and will take illegal file sharing to a completely new troublesome level for them.

Using the web seeding technology that I wrote about earlier, Burnbit is a new service that allows anyone to create a torrent of a file already hosted someplace on the internet, without first downloading the file to their computer. This can be done in two way: Either the user goes to their website and submit the file’s link or if the user has a website and needs to create torrents of certain files on the fly, Burnbit provides buttons, that can be enabled with a small javascript snippet.

So how can Burnbit be useful to the common folk? I can think of one case. Imaging there’s a huge file that you, and a bunch of your friends need to download off a website, let’s say a video game. But the download servers are really slow. So you take the game setup’s link, give that link to Burnbit and it creates a torrent out of it. Now you share that torrent with all your friends. Initially, everyone will be downloading from the server itself (using web seeding), but slowly, the client-server traffic will be converted to peer-to-peer traffic. All your friends will share the download burden and since data pieces will travel faster, everyone will get the file faster.

That was about the common user. A media producer on the other hand, can use Burnbit’s automatic button creation feature to instantly create torrents of their media, and thus create an addition download option for their users, which is much more stable than conventional http downloading, and will help decreases the load on the producer’s servers.

BitTorrent has been around for a while and like every other technology, it has evolved and become better.  DHT, a form of decentralized distribution; Peer exchange, that allows a group of peers to share a file faster and so, several improvements have been made over the base protocol. One such feature called Web Seeding was implemented in 2006.

What are web seeds?

What seeds give the torrent client the ability to download torrent pieces/data from an http source in addition to the swarm. So if you have a file somewhere on the internet, you can simply add its link to your torrent. Now if the swarm is weak, the torrent client will fetch data from the http source. The advantage, of course, is that a publisher can create a torrent of a file which is already hosted on his server and not worry about seeding it full time, while the user can obtain the data directly from the http source or through the torrent. Either way, the user will get the data from the http source. However, if the torrent becomes popular and self-sustainable, the torrent client will fetch data from the swarm and only use the http seed for pieces which are not available or are deficient in the swarm.

This is a very good approach towards file distribution which can be used by artists, producers who distribute their content online. Using web seeds, they can keep their torrents alive for as long as their servers are up. A perfect balance between load-balancing and content availability.

How to use web seeds?

Adding a web seeds to a torrent is very easy. If you’re creating a torrent in uTorrent, just add the http (or https or ftp) link to the Web seeds box. Only http, https or ftp links will work. Also, do note that if the torrent has just one file, you can add its http link right away. However, if it’s a directory of files, you can add the http link of the directory in the Web Seeds box and the torrent client will automatically append the file names. If the torrent has just one file, the file names in the torrent and in the web seeds can be different. However, in the second case, where it’s a directory of files and only a http directory link has been given in as a web seed, make sure the file names in the torrent and in the http directory are same, because the torrent client will simply append file name and if they don’t match, the file won’t be web-seeded.

Pro tip: Want to share a file through bittorrent but can’t seed for a lot of time? Host the file on Dropbox and add its public link (or directory link) as a web seed. Your torrent will be alive as long as Dropbox is up (which is always)

Apple has a set of very stringent (and at times, nonsensical) guidelines for the App Store approval process. Many apps have, in the past, been rejected for ridiculous reasons. One category that Apple has always steered clear of approving for the App Store has been BitTorrent apps.

The BitTorrent protocol isn’t illegal, but it is the most common method to download pirated videos and music. There isn’t a single Torrent client on the App Store.

However, this week, the BitTorrent based app “IS Drive” was approved by Apple and added into the App Store. It is available for $4.99. It allows you to check and manage the downloads in your ImageShack Drive account. It also shows screenshots of completed video downloads.

The developer, Derek Kepner stated this in a interview with TorrentFreak: “I’m on dangerous ground here, and I know that. I’ll probably add a search feature where it’s up to the user to manually add the torrent site they want. The app will not be designed to easily break the law and I hope no one intends to do so. But if a user is determined to break the law, what business is that of mine or Apple’s? They could do the same in Safari anyway, right?”

“I always had the thought that if I didn’t call the app a torrent client, Apple would probably let it through the review process. After all, there is no real torrenting happening on the client side. It’s *not* a torrent client. It’s an ImageShack Drive client”

“Plus, I didn’t see any reason for the app to be rejected in Apple’s recently released guidelines. So, I was very careful with this release to not use the dirty word torrent’, and I’ll continue to carefully add new features, so stay tuned.”

IS Drive – App Store

Facebook uses BitTorent as an ideal solution for transferring huge amounts of files to a number of locations, in a short span of time. With that view, it uses BitTotrrent to upgrade files across its servers. This makes BitTorrent a prospective enterprise solution for file transfer and upgrades its image from being a simple file sharing utility.

Large websites have a huge number of servers to serve data locally, all of which synchronize centrally. We see this system prevalent in Google and Facebook. Facebook’s systems engineer Tom Cook talked at the Velocity Conference saying,

BitTorrent is fantastic for this, it’s really great. Its superduper’ fast and it allows us to alleviate a lot of scaling concerns we’ve had in the past, where it took forever to get code to the webservers before you could even boot it up and run it.

With this innovation, Facebook can send hundreds of MBs of updates to all its servers in a few minutes. Without BitTorrent, they say it would have taken hours for the process to complete.

Apparently, Facebook is not the only one using this tech. Twitter uses the same technology to roll out its updates. This endorsement has almost made BitTorrent an industry standard in transferring huge data reliably and quickly.

(Source)

Facebook uses BitTorent as an ideal solution for transferring huge amounts of files to a number of locations, in a short span of time. With that view, it uses BitTotrrent to upgrade files across its servers. This makes BitTorrent a prospective enterprise solution for file transfer and upgrades its image from being a simple file sharing utility.

Large websites have a huge number of servers to serve data locally, all of which synchronize centrally. We see this system prevalent in Google and Facebook. Facebook’s systems engineer Tom Cook talked at the Velocity Conference saying,

BitTorrent is fantastic for this, it’s really great. Its superduper’ fast and it allows us to alleviate a lot of scaling concerns we’ve had in the past, where it took forever to get code to the webservers before you could even boot it up and run it.

With this innovation, Facebook can send hundreds of MBs of updates to all its servers in a few minutes. Without BitTorrent, they say it would have taken hours for the process to complete.

Apparently, Facebook is not the only one using this tech. Twitter uses the same technology to roll out its updates. This endorsement has almost made BitTorrent an industry standard in transferring huge data reliably and quickly.

(Source)