The Pirate Bay is about to turn 13, and in honour of the site becoming a teenager, folks like Torrentfreak are checking out the oldest content that has been continuously available since its launch back in 2003.
On a popular torrent site, Fallout 4 has been downloaded nearly 140,000 times. Nearly 200 people are downloading right now, as I write this. AAA or indie, Fallout 4 or Super Meat Boy, it doesn’t matter. Piracy is inevitable. But a torrent doesn’t appear out of thin air.
The Witness has been illegally downloaded by thousands of people since it was released last month, but did you know pirates have their own forums? Comments sections? Technical support questions? Yeah, I was surprised, too.
On December 20, 2003, a torrent file was created for an ASCII version of The Matrix. In January 2016, after countless other albums, movies and TV shows have come and gone, it’s still active.
One of the most popular and well-known torrent distribution sites in the world, EZTV, has closed down. Surprisingly, it had nothing to do with the cops, or lawyers.
Torrents are suddenly allowed in Steam chat again. No disappearing messages, no block pages. At worst, you'll get a warning that you're venturing beyond Steam's gilded grayblue cage. Valve has not explained why they made this sudden about-face after their recent spat of arbitrary blocks. Welp. As you were, then.
This is curious. Recently Steam users (myself included, after a few tests) discovered that certain torrent links no longer work in Steam chat. Some have even reported messages disappearing altogether. Here's the thing, though: it only applies to some popular torrent sites, but not others like The Pirate Bay.
Update, 2:57 pm: Looks like it's down again. Will report back when I hear more about the outage.
Sony Pictures is having a tough Thanksgiving week. After being hacked almost week ago (by maybe North Korea?), DVD-quality downloads of Fury and other unreleased Sony films have leaked on the web, according to TorrentFreak.
Wolfenstein's digital version on PC is a monstrous 43GB download. If you thought that was an inconvenience for people using Steam's servers, spare a thought (or a laugh) for those trying to illegally download the game.
Torrenting may be a practice dominated by the sharing of movies, tv shows, music, porn and games, but the oldest active torrent on the internet is none of those things.
Yesterday the High Court ruled that infamous torrent site The Pirate Bay must be blocked from access by all UK internet providers due to copyright infringement issues. "The galaxy's most resilient BitTorrent site" responded with a call to arms and a way around the oncoming ban.
This week, TorrentFreak reported on the 50 most searched terms on torrent sites, giving indications as to what may have been the most pirated things of 2011. Not a single video game title was among them.
Torrent site Kat.ph has opened its databases to the download specialists at TorrentFreak, sharing with them the 50 most commonly searched terms for torrent downloads in 2011.
Let's take a look, courtesy of a report from online piracy specialists TorrentFreak!
Just how big a deal is software piracy? When security company Avast noticed that one of its paid-for licenses was being distributed illicitly online, they decided to track it. A year and a half later, the downloads approached one million.
As leaked copies of Halo: Reach hit the torrent sites, Microsoft tells Kotaku that they are aggressively investigating the leak and are fully prepared to hand out bans to anyone caught playing the game pre-release.
Sales figures can be an impressive thing, but so too can the figures showing how many times a game has been pirated. OK, maybe not "impressive". "Disappointing" might be a more suitable term.
The Congressional International Anti-Piracy Caucus asks that Canada, Russia, China, Mexico, and Spain please cut down on the software piracy. Thanks!
Yes, yes - Gears of War 2 has begun showing up on popular torrent sites across the internets, with a gigantic 6.76 GB file in convenient RAR format currently being seeded by hundreds of inconsiderate asshats around the world. I won't go into details because quite frankly I've gotten to the point where I don't even…
