torrent freak

The 404 1264: Where we try and stay Glassy (podcast)

Leaked from today's 404 episode:

- Public's first reaction to Google Glass summed up by SNL.

- Can you really make money online by playing competitive games?

- Busting online piracy group has led to increase -- in piracy.… Read more

'Game of Thrones' sets piracy record, report says

"Game of Thrones," the wildly popular fantasy drama on HBO, has set an all-time record via BitTorrent, according to data collected by Torrent Freak.

The site, which tracks the world of BitTorrent and piracy, was tracking uploads and downloads of the first episode of the latest season of "Game of Thrones." It found that just a few hours after the first torrent was shared on the site, 163,088 people were sharing just one torrent. The so-called "swarm" of people sharing the torrent outpaced the previous titleholder, "Heroes," which had 144,663 … Read more

BitTorrent downloads linked to RIAA, DHS IP addresses

The TorrentFreak blog has outed the RIAA and U.S. Department of Homeland Security as harboring downloaders of pirated songs by hip hop artists and crime-based TV shows, but the RIAA denies it.

TorrentFreak said it used the YouHaveDownloaded.com site to find instances of IP addresses within the RIAA and the DHS linked to downloads of copyrighted content from BitTorrent.

Six RIAA IP addresses were linked to downloads of music by Jay-Z ("American Gangster") and Kanye West ("My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy"), as well as the first five seasons of "Dexter," a "… Read more

Facebook bumps up privacy controls

The new iPhone may land on Sprint by mid-October, developers can start submitting apps for Windows Phone 7 "Mango" due out next month, and Facebook has announced new privacy controls.

Links from Wednesday's episode of Loaded:

New BlackBerry Curve arrives

RankMyHack.com lets hackers brag about their latest endeavors, the iPhone 5 is rumored to be a dual-mode device, and Research In Motion has released a new BlackBerry Curve.

Links from Tuesday's episode of Loaded:

RIAA wants revived LimeWire dead and buried

The four largest recording companies claim in court papers that Lime Wire, the company behind the LimeWire file-sharing service, has thumbed its nose at a court injunction that requires the peer-to-peer network be shut down, CNET has learned.

"Defendants have demonstrated in no uncertain terms that they either will not or cannot do what the injunction commands," wrote lawyers working for the Recording Industry Association of America.

The RIAA, the trade group for the major labels, asked the court yesterday in a 20-page document to appoint a "receiver" to ensure that Lime Wire complies with the … Read more

Six months later, no ISPs joining RIAA piracy fight

Last December, the music industry's message to song writers, publishers, and musicians was that antipiracy help was on the way. Hopes soared after the major labels announced that they had convinced a group of telecoms to work with them.

Filing lawsuits against individuals accused of illegal file sharing was, for the most part, a thing of the past, said the Recording Industry Association of America, the trade group representing the top music companies. The new strategy was to enlist Internet service providers, the gatekeepers of the Web, to issue a series of warnings meant to increase pressure on alleged … Read more

DVD rips of 'Dark Knight' appear online

Last summer, I wrote how Warner Bros. celebrated that it was able to prevent all but one unwatchable pirated copy of The Dark Knight from appearing on the Web.

Well, this time the pirates won.

According to Ernesto over at TorrentFreak, DVD-quality copies leaked to the Web last week at P2P sites. The DVD version of the movie, the latest in the Batman series, doesn't go on sale in the United States until December 9.

A Warner Bros. spokesman declined to comment.

This from TorrentFreak: "From the looks of it, Batman will crush Iron Man, The Incredible Hulk … Read more