Archive for December, 2010

2010 Trend Watch Update: Online Video

At the beginning of this year EFF identified a dozen important trends in law, technology and business that we thought would play a significant role in shaping digital rights in 2010, with a promise to revisit our predictions at the end of the year. No…

TorrentFreak Readers’ Top Articles of 2010

We did it again. Despite being chronically understaffed we managed to get at least one article published on TorrentFreak every day in 2010. Although we aim to regularly publish articles worthy of being listed in a year’s end overview, rather than choose those for inclusion ourselves we felt our loyal readers should do the talking. So what were the hottest debated topics in the file-sharing world this year? Let’s find out.

Google Helps Seized BitTorrent Site to Regain Lost Traffic

The domain seizures by the U.S. Government in November hit the sites affected badly, reducing their traffic to a trickle overnight. One of the sites, BitTorrent meta-search engine Torrent-Finder, is refusing to throw in the towel and shows how futile the seizure was. In addition to taking legal action to hopefully recover his .COM domain, the owner has been working hard using Google tools to regain lost traffic.

2010 Trend Watch Update: Web Browser Privacy

At the beginning of this year EFF identified a dozen important trends in law, technology and business that we thought would play a significant role in shaping digital rights in 2010, with a promise to revisit our predictions at the end of the year. Now…

Top 10 Most Pirated TV-Shows of 2010

As the year moves toward its end we have been listing the most pirated entertainment titles of 2010. Following our Top 10 games and movies charts, we now turn to the most downloaded TV-shows. Lost tops the list this year with over 5 million downloads for a single episode, beating last year’s winner Heroes.

2010 Trend Watch Update: Global Internet Censorship

At the beginning of this year EFF identified a dozen important trends in law, technology and business that we thought would play a significant role in shaping digital rights in 2010, with a promise to revisit our predictions at the end of the year. Now…

Radiohead Charity Pay-What-You-Want DVD On BitTorrent

In January 2010, in response to the emerging tragedy from the earthquake in Haiti, Radiohead performed before a limited audience at a charity concert in the United States. Since that performance, footage of the event has been painstakingly compiled by fans and now a twin DVD has been released, endorsed by the band. All proceeds are going to charity and the fastest way of acquiring it? BitTorrent of course.

BotTorrent? Using BitTorrent as a DDoS Tool

A recent talk at the Chaos Communications Congress revealed how BitTorrent swarms can be exploited to take down large websites with relative ease. A vulnerability in the technology behind so called trackerless torrents makes it possible for someone to trick downloaders of popular files into send thousands of requests to a webserver of choice, taking it down as a result. Basically, this turns BitTorrent into a very effective DDoS tool.

Hadopi Sends 100,000 Warning Emails To Suspected Pirates

Hadopi, the French authority with responsibility for issuing warnings to illicit file-sharers, has just announced that so far it has sent out 100,000 email warnings. While the figure is far below the 50-70,000 reports filed by the entertainment industry every day, around 15% of warning recipients have responded by email, some with confessions, some with confusion.

2010 Trend Watch Update: Fair Use of Trademarks

At the beginning of this year EFF identified a dozen important trends in law, technology and business that we thought would play a significant role in shaping digital rights in 2010, with a promise to revisit our predictions at the end of the year. No…