BitTorrent’s popularity is growing every day. Despite efforts from anti-piracy outfits such as the MPAA and IFPI, torrent sites continue to grow traffic wise, and there is no sign that this trend will be brought to a halt anytime soon.

We decided to compile a list of the 25 most popular BitTorrent sites, and see how their (relative) popularity has grown over the past three months. Out of the 25 sites in the list, 21 improved their ranking in Alexa’s list of most popular sites on the Internet.

There are a few changes in the top 10 compared to the list of 2007’s top torrent sites. Mininova is still leading the bunch, but The Pirate Bay is now in second place, in front of isoHunt. Torrentportal and TorrentReactor traded places as well, the sites are now 7th and 9th respectively.

YouTorrent is the only newcomer, and it’s really impressive that the site made it into the top 25 only 2 months after its launch. Read the rest of this entry »

Until recently, if you’ve wanted to play videos you’ve downloaded on your TV, you either needed to hook it to your PC, buy an AppleTV, or use an Xbox. Now, one company aims to add another option - one which can get the videos itself, via BitTorrent.

The Myka box, is a small set top box, not all that dissimilar from the AppleTV although larger. Like the Apple product, it aims to be a video playback device for your television, able to pull video from computers on a local network. What makes the Myka different, however, is that it incorporates a BitTorrent client.

Incorporating torrent technology into a set-top box could be a very powerful driving force for the torrent community, bringing it into the homes and minds of many more people. Quite how Comcast will feel about it though, is another matter.

Technically, the box’s specs look good, with HDTV resolutions up to 1080i available. Of perhaps greater note is that it may be possible, with its h.264 support, to playback Blu-Ray torrents. Also, there has been suggestions posted to the Myka forums, that a Blu-Ray drive could be coming in the future. If so, it might cut into some of the sales the PS3 has been getting. Read the rest of this entry »

The Federal Constitutional Court in Germany has ruled that the identities of file-sharers must remain private and can no longer be revealed to media companies who accuse them of copyright infringement. In future, only those accused of ‘heavy’ crimes such as murder, child pornography or kidnapping will be revealed.

Germany has some of the toughest copyright laws and it’s thought that as many as 200,000 German file-sharers have had their identities revealed to entertainment and media companies, so that they may be threatened with legal action.

According to Christian Solmecke, a lawyer defending file-sharers in Germany, the system typically operated like this: “Based on the data provided by Logistep and other P2P tracking enterprises, an offense is reported. The public prosecution service is obliged to investigate because a copyright infringement is a criminal offense in Germany.” This would then force an ISP to hand over the identity of an alleged file-sharer and they would be threatened to pay up - or else. Read the rest of this entry &raquo

No Starch Press and Wired’s news editor Leander Kahney have released free copies of “The Cult of Mac” and “The Cult of iPod” on the Pirate Bay. Publishing music, movies and books on BitTorrent seems to be becoming a trend, and there’s nothing wrong with that.

The success of the best selling author Paulo Coelho, who posted several of his books on BitTorrent, has inspired the publisher and Leander Kahney -the author of the two books- to do the same.

No Starch Press’ Bill Pollock uploaded the torrent to The Pirate Bay himself, as he writes: “I think that publishers (music and book) are spending too much time circling the wagons and not enough time thinking of ways that they can use technology to advantage.

“Certainly, our move here is a bit unusual, but someone has to take the plunge. May as well be us. After all, we were the first publishers in the United States to come out publicly against the DMCA. Time to put our money where our mouth is, as they say,” Pollock adds.

We applaud this move of course, and hope that many authors and publishers will do similar experiments. When Paulo Coelho, the best-selling author of “The Alchemist” made his Russian translation available, without consent from his publisher, the sales in Russia went from 1,000 books a year, to over 1,000,000. Who doesn’t want that?

Download The Cult of Mac and The Cult of iPod

This is an article from: TorrentFreak

Publisher Posts Mac Books on The Pirate Bay