Continuing our series of articles on the most pivotal BitTorrent sites of the last decade, our focus turns to the most dramatic site shutdowns. Without doubt, 2005 proved a momentous year, marked by the introduction to the war of a new anti-piracy force to be reckoned with – the FBI.
Chalk up another private tracker that brought out the banhammer against Romania. Two months ago, BitMeTV issued a warning to their Romanian users of a possible "global ban". Consider this to be some sort of "trial period" in which if Romanians didn’t clean up their act, further action would be implemented. Yesterday, BitMeTV made good [...]
As the year moves toward its conclusion, we have been listing the most pirated entertainment titles of 2009. Following our Top 10 games and movies charts, we now turn to the most downloaded TV-shows. Despite declining viewership offline, Heroes is the most downloaded show, with over 6 million downloads for a single episode.
Under normal circumstances FSF doesn’t often review older trackers, as torrent forums pretty much have this market adequately cornered. But since we couldn’t find a review on Seedmore.org anywhere, we thought we’d put it out there. On the surface SeedMore is a Wordpress blog, very much similar to yours truly, except without all the P2P [...]
We are about to end the decade that brought us BitTorrent, and all the good and bad that came with it. In a series of articles during the coming days, we will review some of the most pivotal torrent sites that emerged over the years, each of which left their mark and brought us to where we are today.
Conduit, the leading provider of community toolbars for Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox and the Safari web browsers, has decided to ban the use of P2P-related words on their services. Toolbars using the words ‘torrent’ or ‘p2p’ are banned as they apparently violate the the terms and conditions of Conduit’s publisher agreement.
This decade witnessed the meteoric rise of BitTorrent, but during the last five years associated sites have endured some of the most aggressive anti-piracy legal action ever seen. The top three BitTorrent sites, after fending off threats for years, all lost in a big way during 2009. But the show ain’t over yet.
The FrostWire P2P client promotes music of starting and independent artists through its FrostClick service. The service has been running for over a year and is a great success. To celebrate the first million downloads of 2009, a compilation album has been released, featuring free Creative Commons-licensed tracks from 21 artists.
This decade has not only brought us the file-sharing technology BitTorrent, but also social networks and social news sites that have really flourished in recent years. This Christmas, users of Reddit, one of the largest social news sites, decided to start their own BitTorrent tracker.
Etiv.in is one of those torrent invite forums that essentially remains mostly a closed-system. Rarely does Etiv have registration open directly (just twice in their site history; both times were related to FSF articles). Nor do they have a perpetually-open IRC #invite channel for aspiring members to apply – the last time this occurred was [...]
