During the last three years, not many new BitTorrent clients have surfaced. Together, the likes of uTorrent, Azureus and BitComet have a 90% market share, with uTorrent being the most popular client.

For a new client it is nearly impossible to catch up with these giants, but Halite might just stand a chance.

The open source application is developed by Irishman Eóin O’Callaghan, who started the project in 2006, and has been adding features and improvements ever since.

We’ve been following Halite’s development for quite a while now and over the past few months it has become a fully-featured, yet lightweight BitTorrent client.

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As we mentioned earlier in the week, EU commissioner McCreevy has been pushing for a longer copyright period for recorded performances.

This proposal has now passed the commission and is on the way to the parliament.

The upside however, is that the commission also aims to break music royalty monopolies.

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YouTorrent is without a doubt the most talked about newcomer in the BitTorrent scene this year.

The site initially indexed all the popular torrent sites, but switched to purely ‘verified’ torrents after receiving legal threats.

Today, YouTorrent officially relaunches with 67,170 “legal” torrents, good for 6 TBs of data.

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Just days after the QuebecTorrent BitTorrent tracker was taken down by an injunction in a blaze of publicity, a near identical clone of the 108,000 member tracker has appeared out of nowhere.

Allegedly the product of the old team, Torrent411.com is up and running with 109,000 members - and counting.

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A seedbox is BitTorrent jargon for a dedicated high-speed server, used exclusively for torrent transfers. With a seedbox you’ll be able to download and upload faster than you ever imagined.

Additionally, you can manage your torrents through a browser from anywhere, anytime.

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The Pirate Bay has ambitious plans to bring end-to-end encryption to all network activity, essentially blacking out a user’s traffic from deep packet inspection gear and other prying eyes. Interesting project, sure, and definitely ambitious, but will it work? We doubt it, at least in the near term, and here’s why.

NewTeeVee has a nice writeup on the proposal by Pirate Bay cofounder Fredrik Neij for a system which he calls IPETEE. The system either replaces or sits atop the basic operating system network stack, encrypting and decrypting all communications that pass through the the computer.

Diffie-Hellman key negotiation is used to generate session keys for the computer on each end of the network connection, though the system is smart enough to revert to standard, unencrypted TCP/IP or UDP should the target computer not support the encryption scheme. (Rudimentary information is on the project’s wiki.)

Apart from the obvious drawback of CPU and bandwidth overhead, such a project could no doubt be completed (eventually) by the Jolly Roger-waving lads of The Pirate Bay, but its hurdles to adoption are legion. For one thing, there’s the practical matter of what benefit it would have.

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Mininova has just launched their new bookmarking feature for registered users. One of the benefits of your mininova bookmarks page is that generates a personalized RSS feed which allows you to automatically add bookmarked torrents to your BitTorrent client.

Importing torrents via RSS can be very useful if you’re at work, school, or at a friends place. With this new feature from mininova you only have to bookmark the torrent, and it will start downloading automatically when your BitTorrent client is running at home.

Here is how it works. First of all, you’ll have to be a registered user at Mininova to use the bookmarking feature. Then, when you come across a torrent you would like to download, simply click on the “Add to bookmarks” button. The torrent will then be added to your personal bookmarks page, which has its own RSS feed.

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BitTorrent’s popularity is growing every day. Despite the lawsuits that some of the larger torrent sites are involved in, they continue to grow traffic wise. Let’s take a look at how Google ranks the top torrent sites.

It is hard to make a definite list of the most popular BitTorrent sites. Over the years we’ve made quite a few lists, and reported some of the latest trends.

Most lists we published were based on Alexa’s ranking, mainly because it was pretty much the only traffic source that was available. Recently, however, Google started to rank websites as well, including a traffic estimate.

So, let’s see how well Google does, and how their traffic estimation and ranking compares to actual traffic data and Alexa’s ranking respectively.

One of the interesting features of Google’s site comparison is that it gives an estimation of the daily traffic when you’re logged in on a Google account. The data used for the traffic statistics comes from Google analytics, consumer panels, and other third-party market research.

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File sharing has unfortunately attracted all kinds of scams over the years. One common way to get money from unsuspecting users is to set up bogus websites for P2P services that charge good money for membership plans and then offer little more than access to freely available applications.

A company targeting the German market is now trying to pull of a twist in this old scam that tops everything we’ve seen before.

Fastload.tv charges its customers more than 80 Euros (almost 130 USD) to access their file swapping service for a year - and then sends them letters threatening to send their name to German prosecutors.

That is unless they pay the company another 340 Euro (about 540 USD), according to a report of the German online magazine netzwelt.de.

From the letter Fastload sent to one of its customers. Check out the original article for a complete copy.

Netzwelt was able to get a copy of one of these extortion letters from one of the Fastload customers. The letter states: Read more »

Jesse Alexander, the executive producer of the popular TV-shows ‘Heroes’ and ‘Lost’ and Matt Mason, author of ‘The Pirate’s Dilemma’, are working on a new TV-show about piracy. The show will be based on Matt’s book, and will show how important pirates are for today’s society.

att recently told us that he has been working on turning the book into a TV show with Jesse Alexander, the Executive Producer of the popular TV-shows Heroes and Lost.

“It all happened a few months back when I was in LA talking to Disney, Matt told TorrentFreak, adding “We are trying to get this made into a 13-part TV show.”

The upcoming show aims to educate people about the history of piracy, and how it shapes our future. Pirates are innovators, they signal market problems and lead the way to new business models. Nevertheless, they are often tagged as thieves.

In many cases, piracy is helping old businesses to innovate, and it helps to create new legitimate market spaces. Read more »