Sandvine, manufacturers of BitTorrent throttling technology has seen its first quarter sales drop 88% in a year. After achieving 42,000% growth in 5 years, the company - best known for providing the technology which put Comcast into the spotlight recently - has seen its value plummet 42% in a single day.

When Comcast introduced the Sandvine traffic shaping solution, it hoped it could quietly interfere with its customer’s BitTorrent activities without getting too much attention. Unfortunately for them, their actions didn’t go unnoticed, and during August last year we broke the news that this ISP does indeed mess with it’s customers internet connections.

Since then, things have gone from bad to worse for Comcast, as their customers started to realize that this ISP wasn’t giving them what they paid for. As a result, Comcast are now being sued and annoyed users formed a coalition to challenge the company to try to claim compensation. All of this is on top of a FCC hearing which deemed that Comcast uses ‘hacker-techniques’ to interrupt BitTorrent traffic, techniques which are employed via the traffic management ’solution’ from Sandvine. Essentially, the Sandvine system allows Comcast to inject forged reset packets into BitTorrent transfers which makes seeding impossible - good news for ISPs who don’t want to give their customers the bandwidth they paid for, but bad news for BitTorrent, and even worse news for supporters of Internet neutrality. Read the rest of this entry &raquo

In the US, several universities have banned filesharing applications such as BitTorrent, mostly under pressure from the RIAA. A university in the Netherlands has taken a different approach. They use uTorrent to distribute software and OS updates across 6500 workstations, and end up saving a lot of time, money and resources by doing so.

The BitTorrent protocol was designed to save companies time, resources and bandwidth while distributing large files. For some reason this aspect of BitTorrent never really got off the ground. Until now that is.

According to an article in the weekly Dutch magazine Automatiserings Gids, the Dutch university INHOLLAND uses BitTorrent as a network management tool to distribute software to 6500 desktop computers in 16 different locations throughout the Netherlands. Instead of distributing software updates and images from several centralized servers, INHOLAND now utilities the efficiency of BitTorrent, and uses all the computers in the network to help distribute the files.

Before they decided to use BitTorrent, more than 20 servers were needed to distribute 25.6 TBs of data to the desktops, and even then it could take up to 4 days to update them all. Now, with BitTorrent, this process has speeded up significantly, and all computers are updated with the latest software in less than 4 hours. The data doesn’t have to be distributed from one location, since all the workstations connected to the network actively help in the distribution. Read the rest of this entry »

Following pressure from the IFPI, a court has ruled that ISPs should be forced to block access to a file-sharing link site. The Haifa District Court in Israel has ordered that the country’s three largest ISPs should block access to HttpShare.com, a BitTorrent and http hyperlink-only website.

It hasn’t been so long ago that in order to shut down or block access to a file-sharing site, it would be necessary for the site to be breaking the law. BitTorrent sites located in countries where there is no such offense as ‘facilitation’ of copyright infringement operate legally, and this is why sites such as The Pirate Bay continue to thrive.

However, the lack of a legal basis to try to stop people from using such sites doesn’t hold back the likes of the IFPI. In February we reported how the IFPI successfully managed to convince a Danish court to block its users from accessing The Pirate Bay, despite the likelihood that this action breaches EU law. In the past, Turkey has blocked access to The Pirate Bay and Kuwait has recently blocked access to quite a few torrent sites in what appears to be a rising trend.

As attempts to actually close sites seems to be faltering, the IFPI is putting more effort into forcing ISPs to block access to them instead. The latest addition to this tactic comes from Israel, as the Haifa District Court - under pressure from twelve IFPI affiliated recording labels - has ordered the three biggest ISPs in Israel to block access to BitTorrent and http link site, HttpShare.com.

HttpShare does not carry any copyright material itself. Instead - and typically for this type of site - its users provide links to material stored elsewhere on popular file-hosting sites such as Rapidshare and MegaUpload, along with regular BitTorrent links. Read the rest of this entry &raquo

According to a new study just released in the UK, one of the biggest causes of copyright infringement is a lack of choice. The study further shows that one third of the Brits have downloaded copyright infringing content, or plans to do so in the future.

This claim, published in the 2008 Digital Entertainment Survey (pdf), is only reiterating what has been said many times before – that trying to promote the artificial scarcity is what is fueling piracy.

In total, 70% of those who admitted to piracy agreed that “legal sites just don’t have the range of illegal ones” (try looking for Beatles tracks) whilst almost as many said they would pay for downloads, if what they wanted was available. This is probably also one of the main reasons why half of the BitTorrent downloads are TV-shows.

The fact that one third of the UK citizens can be labeled as a pirate is thus a signal that these customers want something that is not available through other channels. It’s more about availability than the fact that it’s free. Read the rest of this entry &raquo