So, this week saw the VIP premiere of Justin Bieber’s new 3D movie, Never Say Never. Unfortunately the glittering event appears to have been overshadowed by countless teenagers who have the nerve to describe themselves as hardcore fans, but are in fact little more than federal criminals who deserve at least 3 years in jail. I blame the parents, and I’m not the only one.
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The 2011 Oscar nominees were announced earlier this week, inspiring many people to fire up their BitTorrent clients and start downloading. As we’ve done in previous years, we now take a look at the availability of the nominated films online and whether there are any new trends emrging. This year, fewer high quality copies leaked online and pirates had to wait longer than in previous years for those that did.
For years The Pirate Bay has been a thorn in the side of the music industry, but things could be about to take a turn for the worse. Over the past days rumors of a new project titled “The Music Bay” have been circling, and now a Pirate Bay insider has just confirmed to TorrentFreak that the major record labels have good reason to be afraid, very afraid.
After years of hard work we decided to go for a new look here at TorrentFreak. Today we’re presenting you TorrentFreak version 5, the first real update of our design in 4 years. There will be plenty of bugs and complaints, so please bear with us.
Dutch anti-piracy outfit BREIN managed to pull one of the largest warez scene topsites offline yesterday. The servers of Swan, formerly known as ATS, were unplugged by their hosting provider WorldStream. The provider acted based on evidence provided by BREIN, and also handed over the servers to this private outfit. The police were not involved in the takedown, but instead it was the result of information allegedly provided to BREIN by a rogue member.
Bob’s Burgers is a new animated sitcom which first aired on Fox last weekend. With nearly 10 million viewers and the highest rated premiere of the season, the show had a pretty decent start. On BitTorrent there has been plenty of interest as well, even from someone who’s actively involved in the production. In fact, one of the show’s animators has been proudly seeding the first episode on the semi-private BitTorrent tracker Demonoid.
Last week the BPI released their overview of 2010 sales volumes in the UK. As always, their press release was filled with claims that piracy is ruining their industry and most mainstream media was quick to republish this propaganda. However, we can use the very same data to show that more music is being sold than ever before, and argue that piracy is likely to have had very little impact.
There are plenty of ways to discover new content on BitTorrent, but searching is still the preferred method for most people. What they are searching for should therefore give a good picture of what the latest trends are. Today we present the BitTorrent Zeitgeist 2010, a list of the 100 most searched for phrases and keywords on one of the most used public BitTorrent indexes this year.
Hackulous, the community dedicated to the cracking of Apple DRM and the indexing of unprotected software for iPhone, iPod and iPad, has announced some interesting innovations. As well as having cracking software for the yet-to-be-released Mac App Store already up their sleeve, they also have an intriguing “reverse BitTorrent” system for jailbroken devices which will increase cracked app availability on the Internet.
What.CD is not your ordinary BitTorrent tracker. The three year old site is most of all a community of audiophiles and music fanatics, and one that has built one of the largest music catalogues that ever existed. Today, What.CD saw the upload of its millionth torrent, an absolute record for a private BitTorrent tracker. TorrentFreak discusses this milestone with the site’s founder, who is far from done.