Displaying items by tag: BitTorrent

It was only a couple of days that the internet broke open with the news that The Pirate Bay was offline and that their offices had been raided by police. It looked like the end of the world for the file sharing community and a major win for the copyright gang. However, as it turns out, neither of these is likely to be even remotely close to the truth. Although The Pirate Bay has become synonymous with copyright infringement that was not really the intent of the site nor is pulling TBP down going to have any real impact on piracy and copyright infringement. This, like many other very public takedowns will end up being little more than a footnote in the ongoing war between the copyright cartels and… well everyone else.

In one of the dumbest moves I have seen a court make in some time it is now possible for a copyright holder to go after the company that registered a domain name if that name is used for piracy. The logic behind this decision escapes me and will most people that put any thought to it. However the copyright industry is boasting about how this gives them new tools to combat piracy.

It would seem that the guys over at the Recording Industry Artists of America have lost their collective minds. In a recent rant they are actually trying to claim that sites like The Pirate Bay are an “assault on our humanity”. To (intentionally) quote a great line from The Princess Bride: “I do not think it means what you think it means”. The last time I checked copyright law was not a protected “right” in any form of the constitution. Freedom of speech/expression is as it the right against unlawful search and seizure (which the blind copyright letters violate).

Remember when we told you that BitTorrent was coming out with their very own chat app called Bleep? No well they are and from the information we have so far it is looking like a pretty cool application. The concept is to take basic chat and run it, encrypted, through Torrent swarms. This move, in theory, should prevent the big guys from being able to store or grab your communications in transit.

The words anonymity, privacy and security go hand in hand… in hand. Although the term anonymity is often seen as a bad thing by law enforcement and policy makers the truth is that it is a critical part of the security chain and is something that needs to be addressed in the way communications happen over the internet. Simply put, how can an attacker get to you if they do not know where you are coming from? Anonymity is a form of security that is in common use by the “red” team so why not put this to use in protecting the green?

In the late-90s the world was shocked when a single collection of code was able to destroy a number of computers through malicious instructions. Named Chernobyl (or CIH and Spacefilter) this virus was able to overwrite data and even the BIOS on systems. It infected around 60 million computers and cuase upwards of $1 billion in damages around the world. Although there were other viruses before this nasty bug hit the scene, CIH was the start of the anti-malware commercial machine. It was not until after CIH that we really saw companies spring from the ground offering protection from future events like CIH.

Whenever a new game hits the streets you can bet there will be a less-than-legal copy either right before, or right after. This was the case with the new game "Watch Dogs. Shortly before the retail release there were multiple copies available from different sources. One of the most popular sources was BitTorrent. Sadly, someone decided to taint that version with a bitcoin mining utility.

The company BitTorrent, which is behind the eponymous popular protocol for file sharing, will soon introduce a mobile application for streaming of content. The application represents the company's latest attempt to show themselves in a good light as a provider of legal services.

The fight against child pornography was announced earlier this week, and British Prime Minister called for the cooperation of internet service providers, operators of wireless networks and the authors of a web browsers to help filter the content of child abuse.

March 31st was a very important day for anyone that likes to watch tv-series. You could see the finale of The Walking Dead third season, and first episode of the third season of the series Game of Thrones. After the official presentation on Saturday GoT reached the milestone of one million illegal copies in just two days.