In a bizarre move, The Pirate Bay, the world’s largest BitTorrent tracker, is partnering with social dating site Meezoog to launch an online dating site PirateDate.com, to take on Match.com, Zoosk and others.

The Pirate Bay, which has had a tumultuous year, is launching a dating network around sharing. PirateDate will allow singles to share and assist their social connections in finding potential dates, while getting recommendations and referrals from their friends.

Pirate Date is utilizing Meezoog’s technology to provide users with “social proximity” measurements, that allow people to efficiently filter their cyber connections.

According to the site, personal information added by members is immediately visible to their friends (through Facebook connect), encouraging users to be honest with their information. Pirate Date’s ‘Social Radius’ technology exposes members to singles who are socially connected to them, as well as displays how they are connected.

The site will also share users’ ‘Trust Paths’ to every member, showing people’s social graph. And the site’s ‘Social Proximity Gauge’, calculates how close you are to people you find interesting on Pirate Date. Read more »

New data from Arbor Networks shows that global P2P traffic is continuing to decline. In fact, P2P apps are the fastest declining application group, according to a report presented at the 77th IETF meeting in Anaheim last week. Here’s a graph showing the rate of decline, in relationship to overall Internet traffic, from 2007 to 2009:

And here’s a list of apps and their weighted average grow and decline over the last two years: Read more »

Striving to get the most out of your bandwidth? Struggling with slow BitTorrent download speeds? The first step is to see if your BitTorrent client is properly configured through the settings – a simple tweak here and there can drastically improve the download speed. Here are some other suggestions to fine-tune your downloading to maximize those torrents:

— Do not ‘Force Start’ your torrents. While doing this seems to ’start’ all torrents when some are waiting in a queue, this in fact spreads out your upload capacity over too many connections thus impacting your download speed. You are better off to change your settings to allow more current simultaneous connections/downloads.

— Do not operate torrents in ‘Super-Seed’ Mode. Super-seed mode is NOT recommended for general use. While it does assist in the wider distribution of rare data, because it limits the selection of pieces a client can download, it also limits the ability of those clients to download data for pieces they have already partially retrieved. Therefore, super-seed mode is only recommended for initial seeding (ie. new torrents from the original uploader), or for re-seeding. Read more »

A review of Movie ‘Streaming’ Websites, and why it works.

Websites that feature full-length movies shown as ’streaming’ video have taken great strides in becoming quite remarkable. Some even offer films & clips in High-Definition (HD). So how do they get away with it, you ask? Simple! They don’t host the movies – just the links to them. This lovable loophole even permits them to play the movies on their sites, while staying and inch or two out of the MPAA’s reach.

Very few ‘free’ online movie sites actually host the movies themselves – it requires an enormous amount of bandwidth, not to mention the legalities associated with hosting copyrighted content. The solution? They use inadvertent carriers such as youtube, megavideo, stage6, video.google, veoh.com etc. – all of which offer a staggering amount of video – but frown upon any copyrighted content submitted by their users. Uploaded content is heavily moderated – and promptly deleted – if and when something is found to be in direct violation of the sites’ policies on copyright infringement. Well, piracy is a wonderful weed – give it just a crack of sunlight and an iota of soil, and it will happily flourish. Movie piracy has found an opportunistic niche within the folds of the youtubes – almost the same way that pirates have inundated the 1-click file hosting sites with illegal content, as in the case of rapidshare and megaupload.com. The exact same ideology bodes true for youtube – copyrighted content gets uploaded; it becomes discovered and gets deleted; someone else re-uploads it under a different filename. It’s an infinite cat-and-mouse game in a world where there’s too many mice and not enough felines. Read more »

Yep, it’s true. You read it here first. There’s pr0n on BitTorrent sites.

Pornography and the Internet go together like peanut butter and jelly; so why should BitTorrent miss the boat? They haven’t. Pr0n, being a multi-billion dollar industry, has not eluded both public and private torrent sites alike. Love it or hate it – Internet pr0n brings big traffic. Which in turn brings in mad advertising dollars. Sorry, Jon Huntsman Jr., but it appears that the mob has spoken. Grab your life jacket and get aboard – here’s a list of private adult BitTorrent sites that are accepting new registrations. Read more »

lindly searching the web for cracks & keygens is about as smart as using Limewire to search for antivirus software – something not well-advised. Undoubtedly and unfortunately, the number of crack sites with overtones of a malicious agenda heavily outweigh sites that just want to serve up the honest goods. Having said that, there actually are quite a few creditable ‘crack’ sites that won’t try to bombard you with full-screen popup ads, or commandeer your computer into a spam-loving Kraken or Srizbi Botnet army. We’ve done the hard work for you, and present a list of “clean” crack sites for all the latest warez.

Be aware that the site reviews herein only include information about each site, not the contents of the ‘cracks’ themselves. Always use a reputable antivirus and antispyware program on cracks & keygens before using them.

Our Recommendation: Due to security flaws and exploits, avoid using Internet Explorer when browsing potentially harmful websites (such as any of these on the list) – use Firefox instead. Better still, for added safety use these two Firefox add-ons: NoScript and AdBlock Plus. Sorry, but you’ll have to copy/paste the links into your Browser window – I don’t wish to be a “known associate” of most of these sites. Read more »

Here’s a ridiculously easy tip to squeeze out as many users as you can on a dead or dying torrent. It’s particularly handy when a torrent stops near the end, and/or the seed count is listed as zero. Having said that, I’ve also noticed that it helps to increase download speeds from healthy torrents, as well.

NOTE: Do not attempt this trick with private torrents – it’ll only get you banned from the tracker. Use this tip with torrents you find at mininova, thepiratebay, etc.

How it works:

Simple. Just copy/paste this list of public trackers into your torrent’s tracker list. Read more »

Canada’s Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) has decided that incumbent Bell Canada can charge its wholesale ISP customers based on the bandwidth usage of their end users, as first reported by CBCNews.ca. This decision puts pressure on smaller ISPs that are using Bell’s network infrastructure to implement bandwidth caps similar to those the telco is imposing on its own customers, or significantly raise prices for unmetered accounts.

Bell’s new wholesale pricing structure includes bandwidth limits of as little as 2 GB per month for the lowest-priced wholesale DSL account and charges of as much as C$1.75 ($1.59) for each GB above that limit. Customers of resell ISPs will be able to subscribe to higher tiers if they’re wiling to pay more, but Bell’s highest cap stands at 60 GB per month. Good luck to all those Canadian HD video startups. Continue reading on Newteevee.com.

The OS X Bittorrent client XTorrent got released as a public beta a few days ago. The new version features enhanced search functionality, giving users the ability to include torrent sites of their choice, as well as Twitter integration and performance improvements.

The improved performance should largely be due to the fact that XTorrent switched from the libtransmission library to its own implementation of Bittorrent. From the delevoper’s blog:

“Xtorrent 2 features a brand new torrent engine named Xcore. This engine has been designed exclusively for Mac OS X and written in 100% Cocoa. The result is a lightweight, powerful, and very stable download engine that supports torrent extensions such as encrypted message streams.”

I tested XTorrent over the weekend and found it to be a very clean and responsive torrent client. The design is definitely something others have looked at and learned from, and the integrated RSS feed catcher is an important bonus for users that need this feature but otherwise prefer lightweight clients like Transmission. Read more »

Online video has significantly contributed to the growth of the market for content-delivery networks, two new research reports show, but it’s unclear how much the industry as a whole will benefit from this trend going forward. The worldwide value of CDN services is estimated to reach more than $2 billion in 2011, In-Stat reported today. That’s up from $1.25 billion in 2008. In-Stat attributes this growth largely to the increasing popularity of online video.

Those numbers are echoing similar predictions from competing market research outlet AccuStream, which is predicting CDNs to bring in $1.16 billion in 2010, up from an estimated $1.37 billion this year. However, the price war for online video delivery has actually resulted in video becoming a smaller piece of the cake in terms of percentage of overall revenue. And then there’s the big unknown: How will Apple’s and Microsoft’s plans to shoulder more of their data delivery in-house affect the industry? Continue reading on Newteevee.com.