BitTorrent Inc, the company responsible for the BitTorrent protocol and technology favoured by music, video and software pirates all over the world, has never publicly condoned their illegal actions.
However, these newly-discovered ads appear to take a swipe, quite literally, at Apple and iTunes. Never before seen, they were scripted by Alvir Navin, brother of BitTorrent Inc’s co-founder Ashwin Navin, and for the first time put forward the company’s own view on their digital rivals.
Smartphones are the new PCs: they’re fast, they’re powerful, they’re always online and they’re always with you. But with the advent of 4G network speeds, sophisticated operating systems and apps looms the threat of piracy via file sharing: will BitTorrent data come to represent more than half of all mobile traffic, as it has done for ISPs the world over? We’ve scoured the murkiest corners of the web, crunched numbers and spoken to those involved – read on to find out where we’re headed.
Don’t be evil. That’s the unofficial Google credo but torrent-heads might well have reason to question that today as the search giant begins an effort to soft censor search results around Bittorrent. However the censorship seems patchy at best and little more than a sop to executives at big content firms who consistently get their knickers in a twist…
News that Halo: Reach had leaked filtered out onto the web yesterday. The security breach was originally confined to a community of Xbox 360 modders who said they’d wouldn’t release it. But now Halo: Reach is out in the wild, popping up on all the major BitTorrent sites. Luckily for Microsoft, playing the leaked version requires some serious dedication…
Global Gaming Factory X, a Swedish software company, has bought The Pirate Bay, the Bittorrent sharing site, and Peerialism, the company that developed the technology behind the site. From August, Global Gaming Factory will take over the running of the site.
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The Sims 3, due out on 5 June, has already been leaked onto the Internet. And analysis of its download popularity from peer-to-peer file sharing sites shows that it is suffering worse piracy even than recent EA title Spore.
BitTorrent pirates of the videogame Zeno Clash are being asked nicely “purchase the game if you enjoy it”. Innovative approach, or just a bit naive?
Carlos Bordeu of the Chilean independent developers said ACE Team took the unusual step of on one hand not implementing unpopular “restrictive” digital rights management, and on the other, playing nice with the pirates.
