torrent
Latest
Purported Grand Theft Auto 5 PC torrents serve up malware instead
A PC version of Rockstar's Grand Theft Auto 5 does not currently exist, nor has it been announced. Keep this in mind if you happen to stumble across a supposed "leaked" copy of the game for Windows, as one such torrent has infected thousands of PCs with malware. The alleged PC version of Grand Theft Auto 5 offered up in a public torrent is around 18 GB in size and has been falsely verified as legitimate, making it seem like the real deal. Once the download completes and the installer is launched, however, malicious software is deployed without the user's knowledge. Torrenters are then instructed to fill out a series of online surveys in order to claim a nonexistent registration key, lining the pockets of scammers in the process. WCCFTech notes that the torrent in question has been downloaded thousands of times, likely compromising thousands of unsuspecting victims. Don't let your hype for a PC release for Grand Theft Auto 5 override your common sense, as the consequences could be dire.
BitTorrent teases decentralized chat client in the wake of security breaches
Today, BitTorrent announced it's building a private instant messaging client for our post-PRISM world. The firm told CNET that BitTorrent Chat should function like the company's other peer-to-peer services, using a form of torrenting's decentralized technology-approach that's been adapted for real-time communications. And while compatibility with other IM protocols is expected in the future, for now it's exclusive to BitTorrent account holders. You can even apply for an invite into the pre-alpha at the BitTorrent Labs site -- if you're so inclined, that is.
Pirate Bay goes on the lam from Sweden, heads for safe harbor in Spain, Norway
Despite a recent effort to move its servers to the cloud, Pirate Bay will be moving its base out of Sweden thanks to recent legal pressure. The Swedish Pirate Party that hosted the torrent site has been feeling heat from the film and music industry-backed Swedish Rights Alliance, which gave it until today to cut ties in order to avoid a lawsuit. As a result, the site has moved its operations to servers in Spain and Norway hosted by Pirate Parties there, saying it's had a contingency plan in place for awhile to do so. Anway, if the embattled site has to keep criss-crossing the seas while fighting legal battles to stay afloat, it might make for another good documentary.
BitTorrent working on file-sync app: sounds like Dropbox, calls itself Sync
BitTorrent has announced that it's working on its very own file-synchronization app -- and it's already looking for a limited number of test subjects for its pre-Alpha stage. So far, the premise is to offer identical copies of your files on all machines, all sounding pretty similar to how you use iCloud, Skydrive or Dropbox, although there would be no cloud-caching. According to GigaOM, files will be protected by 256-bit encryption, with native test apps for Mac, Windows and Linux (alongside NAS integration) already in testing. There's no mobile version just yet, but BitTorrent has stated that it's "committed to mobile across the board," and, well, it's still pre-Alpha. If you're up for trying another file sync service, the company is recruiting willing participants over at the source.
2 Player Productions uploads 'Minecraft: The Story of Mojang' to The Pirate Bay
So, you know how the Minecraft documentary Minecraft: The Story of Mojang premiers on Xbox Live today, and will be available for purchase on DVD tomorrow? Well, that world premier just become a bit less exclusive, as 2 Player Productions has uploaded its film to controversial torrenting destination The Pirate Bay."We wanted to come here first because we knew the movie would end up here eventually," the listing reads, "and the best thing to do seemed to be opening a dialogue. Torrents and piracy are a way of life and it probably won't be going anywhere anytime soon. There are many people that want to punish you for that, but we have a more realistic outlook on things."2 Player Productions goes on to urge torrent-folk to at least "consider" supporting its operations by purchasing the film, either digitally or on DVD: "We're just three guys trying to make a living doing what we love. We love the world of video games, and we love making it real. If you buy the movie, you support those efforts. The reason we Kickstarted this movie in the first place was that we didn't have enough money to make it ourselves, and even then, we still put A LOT of our own money into it."
Editorial: Legal torrent sites are innovators of media consumption
Torrent. In the context of consuming mainstream music and movies, the word reverberates with illegitimacy. The Bittorrent protocol, however, is neutral -- a disinterested technology specification. The same is true for all peer-to-peer platforms, and that essential neutrality has been a pillar argument in lawsuit defenses of P2P companies over the last decade.
French Supreme Court orders Google to censor piracy related terms in Instant search and Autocomplete
The French Supreme Court has handed down a ruling that Google must censor terms such as "torrent," "RapidShare," and other phrases that could be related to illegal file sharing. The decision was in response to a case brought by SNEP, a French music industry group, requesting that Google be forced to censor its results and be held accountable for facilitating piracy. The court ruled that the Mountain View company couldn't be held responsible for people's decision to click through to sites containing illegal material. But it reversed a lower court decision, demanding that related terms be removed from its autocomplete database to making finding such content more difficult. Google was understandably disappointed by the ruling, especially since the company already actively blocks some piracy related search terms. But, that apparently wasn't enough for the SNEP. Check out the ruling itself at the more coverage link.
The Daily Grind: Do you loathe third-party downloaders?
Every time I boot up Lord of the Rings Online or Dungeons and Dragons Online, I'm reminded that somewhere on my computer lurks Pando Media Booster. Ostensibly, Pando and software like Pando helps MMO players to download game clients, but they also spread out the load and track other information presumably of use to the game companies themselves. I've deleted Pando and similar software from my PC multiple times, but some games just don't function well without them. Players have been known to suggest the whole system of third-party installers and downloaders and launchers is nothing more than bloatware, or worse, malware and spyware. Am I alone in loathing MMO patchers that are really torrents I can't disable, launchers that lump the entirety of a company's games together, and third-party download whatever-ware that won't go away? Every morning, the Massively bloggers probe the minds of their readers with deep, thought-provoking questions about that most serious of topics: massively online gaming. We crave your opinions, so grab your caffeinated beverage of choice and chime in on today's Daily Grind!
Vestel shows off a prototype BitTorrent Certified TV at IFA
Far from sneaking in to the living room, Vestel had a BitTorrent Certified television on display at IFA 2011 this past week. That official stamp means it packs the usual suite of connected TV features including playing local media across the network, and it's guaranteed to work with BitTorrent approved files from the internet. There's no word on any official release for this prototype -- and we haven't been able to locate anyone who got a hands-on demo, let us know if you saw it -- but it definitely shows how BitTorrent is trying to expand its platform in a manner similar to DivX and XBMC / Boxee. Check out the press release after the break, we'll be sitting back and watching some totally legal content we just torrented.
Hurt Locker lawsuit targets a record-breaking 24,583 IP addresses
It's been almost a year since the producers of The Hurt Locker filed a lawsuit against 5,000 alleged pirates suspected of distributing the film via BitTorrent. Now Voltage Pictures has updated its complaint, adding almost 20,000 IP addresses to the list of defendants. That makes it the largest file-sharing lawsuit of all time -- a crown previously held by the company behind The Expendables, according to Wired. The plaintiff has already reached agreements with Charter and Verizon to identify individual users, but no such deal with Comcast, who owns nearly half the supposedly infringing addresses. Linking those addresses with user accounts would let Voltage manage individual settlements -- probably somewhere between $1,000-$2,000 -- rather than continue legal action. All of this eerily echoes the Oscar-winning film's plot, about an adrenaline junkie who couldn't resist downloading just one more movie. Or defusing one more bomb. We're a little fuzzy on the details, but venture into TorrentFreak to scan for familiar IP addresses.
Is Comcast blocking the Pirate Bay? (updated: it isn't just Comcast)
We've received numerous reports this morning from users indicating that good 'ol Comcast is at it again. Word on the web is that Comcast ISP subscribers are unable to access torrent site the Pirate Bay, a situation that we've been able to confirm internally. That said, we're not entirely sure it's Comcast's fault. Pings and DNS lookups seem to be resolved correctly, but users are unable to get to the site. Additionally, we're seeing reports that users on other ISPs and in other parts of the world are also having issues connecting, making us wonder if some other piece of rope further toward the topmast has come unraveled. What say you? Update: Comcast just got back to us reaffirming that it is not the cause of this issue. "We're not blocking PirateBay and reports online indicate users from several ISPs around the world are affected." As we originally mentioned we're seeing those reports too, and many of you in the poll below are showing this isn't necessarily a Comcast-specific thing. So the question remains: what kind of a thing is it? %Poll-63686% [Thanks to everyone who sent this in]
Paramount Pictures, BitTorrent team up to distribute feature film (video)
In case you haven't heard, there are websites out there that will let you download movies and software using a little something called the BitTorrent protocol. And while the majority of cinematic fare available is of a non-DMCA-approved nature, filmmakers and organizations are increasingly turning to torrent sites to get the word out. For instance, in 2009 a filmmaker named Hanna Sköld worked with the folks at The Pirate Bay to distribute her film Nasty Old People. And indeed, there seem to be as many zany ways to get your work out to audiences these days as there are filmmakers. One scheme that recently piqued our interest was concocted by the folks at Distracted Media. The Australian company is crowdsourcing its latest production, The Tunnel (not to be confused with Chunnel: 32 Miles of Danger) by selling individual frames for a buck a pop. Of course, "owning" a frame gives you nothing more than the opportunity to say that you helped an indie filmmaker out, but it's a worthwhile cause. And at 135,000 frames that's a lot of dollars! When the film is done, it will be distributed via BitTorrent for free -- alongside an actual DVD release by Paramount Pictures which, when you think about how reluctant Hollywood has been to embrace the internet, is pretty wild. Check out the (NSFW) trailer after the break, and then hit the links below for more info. Tunnel should make its premiere this May.
Google begins censoring autocomplete results for BitTorrent, RapidShare and other Big Media profanity
Tried searching for "BitTorrent," "RapidShare," "uTorrent," "MegaUpload" or even "Ubuntu torrent" lately? Good luck finding a Google domain that'll autocomplete those results for you. Presumably caving to pleading from the MPAA and / or RIAA, El Goog has quietly begun to censor the results it shows when typing the above terms. Needless to say, the aforesaid companies aren't too keen on the new procedures, and strangely enough, a number of other sites that would typically be grouped into this same category -- MediaFire, 4shared and HotFile -- remain on the cleared list. Hit the source link if you're looking for loads of responses from companies angered with Google's move, and feel free to reset your homepage to Bing, Yahoo or any other search engine who has yet to bend. You know, if you're feeling rebellious.
100 million Facebook pages leaked to a torrent site, creating the world's least exciting torrent
Hacker Ron Bowes from Skull Security has created a 2.8GB torrent file which contains the Facebook account details of roughly 100 million users. That's about 1 in 5 of the half billion accounts the social networking site has, and the torrent contains URLs for each account, with other personal details contained in the profiles such as phone numbers and email addresses. Bowes created a crawler to troll Facebook's open access directory, where all the information is kept. There's nothing illegal about any of this, of course -- we put our information out there into the public forum that Facebook is, after all -- but there's still something creepy about the idea of someone torrenting our profile. Then again, we have some pretty amazing shots from the Bronx Zoo in there, so we can't really blame them.
Open source BitTorrent application Transmission updated to 2.0
Transmission, the lightweight, open source, and free BitTorrent client we've written about in the past, recently released version 2.0. Transmission was already one of the leanest BitTorrent clients on OS X, and the new version makes it even faster, with improvements to startup time, local data handling, and optimization of how you connect to peers and download requests. Transmission 2.0 will also search for and discover peers on your local network to connect with for even faster speeds. While Transmission is a cross-platform, open source application, the developers continue to focus on making it feel like a native OS X app, and Transmission feels right at home with all of the other Mac-only applications I use every day. Mac users can now paste trackers into the Create window, magnet links will open the Add Transfer window, and the Compact View replaces the Minimal View to use less screen real estate. Thanks to both its lightweight nature and its adherence to OS X design conventions, Transmission is one of the easiest torrent clients I've used. It accomplishes this ease-of-use without sacrificing the power features like scheduled bandwidth limiting, a Web interface for remotely controlling torrent activity, and port configuration; all of these features can be found in the well-organized Preferences.
Aion full client torrent available
Thinking of returning to Aion to check out the 1.9 patch? You're not alone, as folks are beginning to trickle back into the world of Atreia to partake in the improved XP and other tweaks. If you've deleted the game from your hard drive, or you're a new player, you might want to check out the full client torrent that NCsoft has just released. Given that the game has been out for nine months, and has been patched fairly regularly, you're likely to have a lengthy download and update process if you re-install from your original game discs. Happily, NCsoft has bundled the entire game client, as well as all the patches up to and including last week's 1.9, into a file that you can grab from FilePlanet. Alternatively, you can can grab a torrent from GamersHell or NCsoft's own server. Check out the official news posting for further details.
Iomega iConnect review: getting your printers, HDDs online has never been simpler
Iomega's iConnect managed to launch during the whirlwind that was CES 2010, so if you didn't quite catch it the first go 'round, here's hoping that you're paying attention today. In essence, the device is fairly simple. It's a small, port-filled slab that's designed to sit beneath or beside your current router or hub, and while we're certainly dumbing things down somewhat with this description, it's basically a variant of the Pogoplug. Equipped with four USB 2.0 ports, an Ethernet jack and an internal 802.11b/g/n WiFi module, the iConnect is designed to put your existing thumb drives, external hard drives and / or printers online. We've had less-than-awesome experiences in the past with devices that turn localized storage into network accessible storage, so we went into this overview with fairly low expectations. Much to our surprise, we came away duly impressed with the package that Iomega has assembled, so be sure to read on if this one has been sitting on your maybe-must-have list. Update: After a couple of months of use, we ran across some pretty intense issues with this device. Eventually, none of the PCs and Macs in our house would print to the networked printer, and our USB hard drives would only show up sporadically. Needless to say, our enthusiasm has been significantly tempered, and we wouldn't recommend this for homes where mixed platforms reside. %Gallery-88219%
Automatically open Bittorrent files using Dropbox and Hazel
Every year there is a torrent made to let listeners download most of the music for SXSW. This year's torrent has recently been posted (previous years' are also available at the same site). I don't usually use Bittorent, so I asked around for client suggestions; Transmission seems to be a favorite among several of my TUAW colleagues. I also remembered a tip from my friend Guillermo Esteves (who did the awesome Star Wars crawl using only HTML and CSS), about using Dropbox to start torrents remotely. Guillermo provides some detailed instructions for Transmission and µTorrent to set them up to "watch" a folder for new .torrent files, with an important caveat to make sure that you don't download the files to your Dropbox. One additional Transmission tip: be sure that you un-check the box next to "Display 'adding transfer' options window" so that files will automatically be added, and be sure to check the box next to the "Start transfers when added" option. Guillermo shows both of those settings in his screenshots, but it took me a few minutes to figure out that I had them set incorrectly. Then I asked myself: "How can I be even lazier?" and I remembered Hazel, a program for automatically moving files from one folder to another based on a set of predefined rules. So I added a Hazel rule for ~/Downloads/ which will move any file where "Kind is BitTorrent Document" to my ~/Dropbox/Torrents/ folder. I repeated this on both my iMac and my MacBook Pro. Now I can be on my MacBook Pro and download a torrent file to ~/Downloads/ and have it moved to my Torrents folder, and have the torrent automatically start downloading on my iMac. So when I'm done with my MacBook Pro I can just close it without having to worry about interrupting any of my downloads. You may have noticed that we're big Dropbox fans around here. We use it for syncing Things or instead of a USB sync cable or keeping our notes with us or sharing screenshots, along with any number of other uses. Do you know of any other unusual uses for Dropbox? Let us know in the comments. In the meantime, enjoy the free, legal music downloads from SXSW!
Fallen Earth client now available via torrent
Icarus Studios and Fallen Earth have announced a nice surprise for fans frustrated with slow downloads. As a convenience to their users, there is now a Fallen Earth torrent file for faster downloads of their game client. If you're unfamiliar with how it works, it's pretty simple. Just download the torrent file, provided in this handy link or in the announcement on the official site, then double-click the icon on your PC to begin the full download. Once everything is downloaded, you'll start the installation process. Again, pretty simple, and the Fallen Earth team has kindly provided step by step instructions with the announcement. One last reminder from the Fallen Earth guys: "This is new, so if you encounter any issues, just let us know and we will try to respond quickly!"
Iomega's iConnect turns thumb drives into NAS drives, puts it all online
If you don't trust any of your datas online, meticulously delete your cookies and cache from your browser, and never use the same search engine twice for fear of your online activity being tracked... this post probably isn't for you. But, if you wish you could get to your most precious of thumb drive files even when those thumbs are at home, Iomega's new iConnect looks to be about the easiest way to do so -- and at $99 one of the cheapest. The device packs four USB ports into which you can plug storage or printers, connecting to your home network via Ethernet or 802.11b/g/n. With a few clicks everything will be available online, and when you're on your home network you can make use of DLNA streaming, Time Machine backups, and even rely on the integrated torrent manager to make sure your feed ratio is properly philanthropic. All this can be yours next month.
