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PayPal shoots self in foot while 'white knighting' for Netflix
With the recent rollout of Netflix Everywhere, the company has been on a tear trying to track down and lock out users who rely on VPNs to bypass its regional restrictions and access the US programming list -- or any other country's local selection of shows. Doing so hasn't been as easy as Netflix initially anticipated so it called in PayPal for backup.
Google sees over 1 million daily takedown requests for pirate links
While sites like The Pirate Bay are busy improving the experience for the torrent-loving crowd, Google's facing the task of processing an extreme amount of removal request for pirate links. According to a recent transparency report on the matter, Google is now seeing more than 1 million DMCA takedown notices per day. In the previous week alone, for instance, the tech giant was asked to remove about 8 million results from its search engine. As TorrentFreak points out, the amount of copyright removal notices sent to Google has seen a tremendous spike in recent times -- it wasn't long ago that the number of takedown requests was in the low-hundreds for the entire year. With the growth of the internet as a whole, however, it's easy to see how that's come to be. You can peruse the report in full here, if you're into that sort of thing. [Image credit: will never stop us/Flickr ]
Report: Modern Warfare 2 was the most pirated game of 2009
Last year, TorrentFreak awarded Spore the dubious title of Most Pirated Game of 2008 -- this year, the victor (by an overwhelming margin) is Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. According to the torrent news site's calculations, the PC version of Infinity Ward's shooter was unscrupulously downloaded 4.1 million times. When combined with the 360 version of the game, that number tops five million. Looks like boycotts do work! And by "boycotts," we of course mean, "mankind's overwhelming desire to get things for free through easily accessible, barely regulated channels." [Via IGN]
Running a bittorrent client from the iPhone
A few days ago, TorrentFreak speculated about how someone might create a bittorrent client for the iPhone. While it seems technically possible (except for that nagging "no SDK" problem, which makes it hard to get code running on there), you might question why it needs to be done - since there are plenty of good legal torrents out there, it just seems easier to get them on your Mac first, and then sync them to your iPhone. Still, I'm sure there are quite a few people out there who want to do torrenting on the fly, so maybe it'll be done eventually.In the meantime, the P2P blog has a neat tip that lets you almost get bittorrent on your iPhone. Almost every bittorrent client (including Azureus, which is what I use on my Mac) can establish a remote connection via a browser, which the iPhone has. Using a plugin for Azureus (here's one that P2P recommends, and here's another that they say might work better with the iPhone), you can start and stop downloads, and even queue up local torrents. At this point, the plugin's search function doesn't work (so you must have the torrent sitting on your local box in the first place), but in the future, you'll be able to find and queue a torrent on your iPhone, and then have it ready to go when you get home.
Transmission 0.7 beta reviewed by Torrentfreak
The market for Mac torrent clients has been expanding quite a bit recently, and Torrentfreak has a nice review of a new beta version of Transmission, a long-standing favorite of many a Mac torrenter. While the review rounds up many of the nice new features, I'll give you the cliff notes for the slackers in the crowd: "Transmission 0.7 Beta is by far the fastest, most light-weight and one of the most appealing BitTorrent clients for the Mac."Diving further in, some of Transmission's new features seem to be inspired by Xtorrent, a new beta client from Dave Watanabe (of NewsFire fame). Of these new features, notables include time-of-day based speed limits (i.e. - slow down my torrent downloads while I'm at my desk at work from 9-5), as well as a Watch Folder with automatic cleanup of your torrent files (again, very Xtorrent inspired). The idea is: most Mac browsers by default download all files to the desktop, but that might not be where torrent users want to keep their downloads as well. This Watch Folder allows Transmission to automatically snag any torrent files you download to the desktop, move them to a user-specified folder and begin the torrent download. Ah, software automation - it's a beautiful thing.Check out the rest of Torrentfreak's review, as plenty more is packed under the hood of this new beta.[via digg]
Mac Torrent clients reviewed
We all love OS X, but any Mac user with half a brain will admit that there are some areas in which the Windows world has us beat. When it comes to BitTorrent clients, Windows users have a veritable cornucopia of options to chose from, while us Mac users have a paltry 5 choices. TorrenFreak, always dedicated to excellence in the peer-to-peer realm, decided to take a look at all of the dedicated BitTorrent clients for the Mac. The reviewer considered the whole package of features, interface, and speed. As some of the more torrent astute readers might guess, Transmission and Bits On Wheels came out on top, with Tomato Torrent, Azureus, and the official BitTorrent client trailing behind.
