Ubisoft has announced its new solution to prevent pirates from playing their games. The upcoming DRM will require gamers to be online when playing the game. If no Internet connection is available it means that the game wont work, period.

As with most DRM, Ubisoft’s new anti-piracy solution needlessly hurts legitimate customers. Pirates will always find a way around the access restrictions and will be able to play the game offline without running into trouble. Because of this, Ubisoft’s plans were welcomed with skepticism among fellow game developers.

Gaming magazine Develop has asked several gaming… Continue reading

uTorrent for Windows saw its first public release in September 2005 and soon became the most widely used BitTorrent applications. The client is used by more than 50 million users worldwide and this number continues to rise.

Today, uTorrent version 2.0 was officially released. This new release is built to be more network friendly thanks to the Micro Transport Protocol (uTP) which aims to mitigate network congestion caused by poorly configured BitTorrent clients.

uTP is a new and improved implementation of the BitTorrent protocol which is designed to be more network friendly than its predecessor. The current implementation… Continue reading

Twitter alleges that a torrent script developer has installed backdoors into his software, allowing it to gain login credentials of users. These credentials have been abused to boost the follower count of unnamed Twitter accounts.

Below is an excerpt of Twitters blog post revealing the threat.

It appears that for a number of years, a person has been creating torrent sites that require a login and password as well as creating forums set up for torrent site usage and then selling these purportedly well-crafted sites and forums to other people innocently looking to start a download site… Continue reading

Yet again it appears that the music industry in Sweden has used the country’s IPRED legislation to force the police to take action against illicit file-sharers.

Speaking with Swedish Radio, Lars Gustafsson, chief executive of IFPI Sweden, said that recently his group had made 20 complaints against illicit file-sharers, but only five were considered to be on a large enough scale to warrant the police taking action.

The alleged large-scale file-sharers, suspected of making available between 9,000 and 17,000 music tracks each, were raided by police yesterday.

Five different locations including Gothenburg, Docksta, Handen and Upplands Väsby were targeted, resulting in the… Continue reading

In 2008, Newzbin received complaints from the MPA (the MPAA’s big brother) who raised questions over the legality of their operations. Later that year Newzbin confirmed that the MPA had chosen to file an injunction against the site. (case background here)

Yesterday the showdown of Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation & Others v Newzbin Ltd began before in London’s High Court before Mr Justice Kitchin.

The case began at 10:30 on Monday with the barrister for the plaintiffs making his opening statement. As reported by Newzbin, in a 3 hour speech “mostly being full… Continue reading