As I sat down this morning to begin working on a few small news items, Torrent Freak had dropped a bomb on my RSS: the Pirate Bay has been sold for just under $8 million US.

Swedish gaming giant Global Gaming Factory X will become the new owners, and The Pirate Bay as you and I know it will change forever. A necessary evolutionary step, according to Peter Sunde (brokep).

"We've been working on this project for many years. It's time to invite more people into the project, in a way that is secure and safe for everybody. We need that, or the site will die. And letting TPB die is the last thing that is allowed to happen!"

Why would a legitimate company want to purchase TPB? For starters, it's one of the top 100 most visited sites on the internet. While I'm not in the habit of referring to $8 million purchases as a bargain, it's hard to imagine being able to pick up any of the other 99 sites on the list for that kind of money.

It was only a matter of time before the P2P community came up with some workable options for anonymizing our activities. Sure, Tor has been able to do it for quite some time, but torrenting is very taxing on the network and transfers can be painfully slow. Recently, however, three new services have appeared that could provide the privacy protection we've been waiting for.

iPredator VPN - We've known this one was coming for a while. The beta launch date got pushed back quite a bit, but that little courtroom skirmish may have slowed things down a little. In a blog post yesterday, the iPredator team announced that the first 3,000 beta invites have been sent out. If you're in the queue, don't start drooling just yet. There are 179,999 others names lined up.

Furk (pictured) - Find a torrent, paste it into Furk, and you're provided a direct download link. Even with the free account, I still averaged about 275k/s, which isn't much slower than what I typically manage on a straight torrent download (thanks to my ISP). Download links are also passed to you with SSL encryption. Just don't use it to download stuff like what's in the capture - it's there for illustration purposes only, of course...

Paid accounts are just under 10 Euros a month or 24/three months.

BitBlinder - Jay posted about this service the other day. The open source project aims to anonymize not only torrent downloads but also your web browsing. How does it work? Think of your Internet traffic as the fruit in a smoothie. Now take all your friends' fruit, chuck it all into a blender, and press 'liquify'. Pour it into a glass, and all you see is smoothie - you can't tell what's your fruit and what belongs to your friends.

As with iPredator you may be waiting a while to get your invite and download link.

There are a few widely-accepted ways to anonymize your browsing or torrent activity, but they all have their drawbacks. TOR is free, but it's poor etiquette to use it for torrents and put a strain on the bandwidth of the nice folks who run TOR servers. Not to mention that it's incredibly, stupefyingly slow. You could get a VPN, but that'll cost you. So, what's the solution to making your torrents free and anonymous, without a huge drag on your transfer speeds? A new open source project called BitBlinder might be the ticket.

BitBlinder is sort of like a private tracker for your anonymous data. A private tracker requires you to upload a certain percentage of data compared to what you download, in order to keep using it. BitBlinder works the same way, requiring each person on the network to anonymize a certain amount of data for others in order to have their own data anonymized for free. To keep your IP address safe, it's passed through several peers before it reaches your target website, but each computer only receives the address of the next peer in the chain, not the address the request is coming from. That way, you don't know who anyone else is, and nobody else knows who you are, which makes it difficult for anyone to track what each person on the network is doing.

BitBlinder isn't just good for torrents, though. It can also be used to hide your browsing activity and get around blocked sites at work or school. BitBlinder comes with an anonymous browser, built on Firefox. It's worth noting that BitBlinder will be a bit slower than browsing without anonymity, but still faster than TOR. It's planned as a cross-platform project, but the Mac version isn't ready quite yet. Registration is required, and there are currently a limited number of slots available.

[via TorrentFreak]

Torrents have gained some infamy as a way for users to share resources and quickly download large files, but their potential as a way to watch streaming video is comparatively almost unknown. StreamTorrent is a Windows app that taps that potential to let you watch online TV, including HBO, the BBC, and plenty of sports channels. It works the same way torrent downloads work, with a collection of users "seeding" parts of the video to other users as they watch.

It might not be practical unless you've got a lot of people watching and seeding, but you could theoretically stream your own channel over StreamTorrent. Users would only have to search for it to connect. This could prove to be an affordable way of providing large video files when you don't have the cash to pony up for high bandwidth fees, and it can, at least in theory, stream to an unlimited number of users.

[via gHacks]

Apple has done it again, this time wielding the ban hammer on Maza Digital's Drivetrain, an iPhone app that allows a user to remotely control his or her Transmission downloads.

What gives, Apple? According to the notice sent to Maza, "This category of applications is often used for the purpose of infringing third party rights. We have chosen to not publish this type of application to the App Store."

That's some pretty backwards thinking for a company that prides itself on modern, progressive products. Drivetrain is not a torrent client. On top of that, not even Transmission is to blame for what a user chooses to download.

I'm with Torrent Freak on this one - someone better tell Apple about WebUI and Clutch so they can start crippling Safari on our handsets.

I wonder if Apple is aware that some users use iTunes to sync music that has been obtained through illegal means?

[via Torrent Freak]

Many of you are probably already downloading your torrent files directly to an external hard drive. Looking for a slick, portable client for torrenting on the go with your drive? Vuze has a new app for that.

Called Vuze to Go, the version makes use of Ceedo's application virtualization and costs $9.99. Because of the way it's packaged, VTG will run even on systems that don't have Java installed. All the functionality of the original open source client is there - meaning you can fire up your hard drive at a buddy's place at stream your movies to a PS3 or Xbox 360 right from your HDD.

While there are free portable torrent alternatives (like uTorrent), Vuze's added media functions may make it a useful purchase for some. Vuze Marketing Director Chris Thun told Torrent Freak "we believe that if we're solving a real problem in an elegant way, our users will be willing to pay for it."

[via TorrentFreak]

Things in the P2P world continue to change in the wake of the Pirate Bay trial. Today, Mininova announced a new feature designed to make the removal of copyright-infringing works easier for users of their content distribution service.

Mininova's content checker utilizes a third-party recognition system, and the crew hopes that it will allow artists and producers to better control their own content.

Will it make a difference? Eventually, perhaps. The screenshot above illustrates pretty clearly that this 1) isn't going to impact all Mininova's torrents and 2) won't change things instantly.

As you would expect, user response to the announcement has been largely negative. Apart from the "way to make your site suck" comments, one user posted "Bad move. By being active in copyright control you're opening yourselves up for even more lawsuits, just like YouTube."

The bottom line? It's a tough gig running a torrent site today, and it's only going to get tougher.

[via TorrentFreak]

There's more than one way to skin a cat. Today's cat: starting torrent downloads on your computer from a remote location!

The first two options require 1) your home machine's address and 2) a forwarded port on your router. If you're on a dynamic IP connection like me, a DDNS updating service like Dyndns.org makes finding your machine much easier - it gives you an easy-to-remember, permanent address likemycomputerathome.dyndns.org. Not too sure how to set up port forwarding on your router? Check out PortForward.com for help with just about any brand or model.

If you'd rather not mess around with port forwarding and dynamic dns, you might want to try setting up Hamachi or Comodo Easy VPN on your machines. Either one will provide you LAN-like access to your main computer with minimal fuss (apart from installing and configuring a new program).

Or you could skip the zero-config VPN software and check out the last two options after the break - neither of which require you to know your home system's address or change any router settings.

Now let's get started!

Using Your Client's WebUI (pictured above)

uTorrent, Transmission, and Deluge all offer a web-based control panel for their clients. Getting remote access is as simple as opening the appropriate port on your router and then opening the right address in your web browser.

For uTorrent, you may need to download the webui.zip from their forums and save it to your %appdata%\utorrent folder.

Now that an initial guilty verdict has been handed down in the Pirate Bay case, there's a lot of talk going on about Google being "the next Pirate Bay." In an interview with Forbes, Harvard professor Ben Edelman states "Google now can and does do what the Pirate Bay has always done."

Wait, what?

Isn't that like implicating Superpages for the extras a client receives at a massage parlor provides if that's how he found the phone number? Google does not run a public torrent tracker. Sure, they may index torrent sites for search purposes, but I'm pretty sure that I can't tell uTorrent to create a new torrent file with Google as the primary tracker for it. The Pirate Bay, on the other hand, acts as the sole tracker for some .torrent files. Without their tracker, no one would have access to such files. That's a massive difference.

I also can't open a torrent file directly on Google's site and start downloading it. Even if a direct link to the .torrent file does appear in Google's results, I'll still be redirected off-site to the actual source of the file to open it.

Eric Garland of torrent research group Big Champagne says "I've argued for years that the real battle rights holders are fighting isn't with individual users or file-sharing sites, but with search." Right. It's the link on a search result page that causes lost revenue for the RIAA and MPAA, not the actual mp3 or avi files.

Besides, there are any number of ways to find files that don't involve search engines - forums, Twitter, Facebook. I can even call my friends and give them a truncated URL to a file if i want too. If it's access to the files and not the files themselves that are the problem, then these witch hunters will have to figure out some way to prevent any form of communication imaginable.

And heck, if Google can be blamed for their involvement the companies that develop web browsers next. After all, if we didn't have web browsers we wouldn't be able to search for torrent links on Google, would we?

Despite the founders of The Pirate Bay saying they thought a not guilty verdict would be handed down, the Swedish judge presiding over the Pirate Bay trial felt differently. Today, Peter Sunde, Frederik Neij, Gottfried Svartholm, and Carl Lundstrom were each found guilty and sentenced to one year in prison and fined $905,000 each.

The fine was handed down as a single amount ($3.62 million) to the four men as a team, a perception the defense had worked hard to prevent during the trial. News of an impending guilty verdict was already creating a stir amongst the press several hours before it was set to be announced.

While Sunde has stated repeatedly that the site will live on regardless of the verdict, one has to wonder for how long. It won't be a stretch for prosecutors to take this one guilty verdict and use it to support further lawsuits against ISPs - who surely must be complicit in the act because they are allowing users to torrent copyrighted materials on their bandwidth - and other trackers, like Mininova.

Remember that the verdict itself isn't all that meaningful yet. The defense plans on filing an appeal and moving the case to a higher court. At this still-early stage the guilty verdict may only serve to make P2P martyrs of Sunde, Neij, and Svartholm, and rally more support to their cause. Here's hoping.

TorrentFreak will be updating their post with continuing news as it breaks.

When I last wrote about the Pirate Bay's new feature that enabled sharing torrents through Facebook, Facebook hadn't yet responded or acted to stop the Pirate Bay from using the social network as a link repository. Now they have. Facebook is blocking incoming links from The Pirate Bay, according to TorrentFreak.

Not only can you no longer use the "Share on Facebook" buttons located on Pirate Bay torrent pages, but you can't even manually share a Pirate Bay URL. Facebook says that they won't allow "Share on Facebook" buttons on any site that contains infringing content, even if there's legitimate content mixed in. Whatever small minority of artists were using Pirate Bay to push legal torrents won't have Facebook's help in doing it. As for the blanket measure of blocking all TPB links, even the ones manually entered by Facebook users, Facebook is doing it to punish the torrent site for failing to remove its Facebook buttons.

While most of you responded that laws like IPRED won't stop you from downloading whatever it is you download from torrent trackers, you may change your minds if Swedish law enforcement agencies keep doing what they're doing.

Two arrests have been made in connection with Operation Carbonite, an cooperative effort involving law enforcement agencies from the US, UK, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Sweden.

It's likely that the investigation into the two men's alleged file sharing activities concluded prior to April 1st as TorrentFreak speculates. Authorities may have delayed the arrest until IPRED went into effect in an attempt to impact the severity of their punishment.

Bear in mind that the defendants also were found in possession of a high end computer dedicated to decoding and ripping movies, so we're not exactly talking about John A. Downloader in this case.

Whether or not arrests will be pursued for more run-of-the-mill file sharers remains to be seen, though the expense and time involved in prosecuting someone who is simply torrenting music or software probably isn't worth it - as the RIAA has found out on a number of occasions.

Of course, the two Swedes still have to be found guilty and there's still no guarantee the court-ordered log files from an ISP will prove helpful in securing a conviction.