Just yesterday, PortableApps.com made its first foray into the world of freeware. Round one of the new releases included Skype and Google Chrome, two Download Squad favorites.

Today, John T. Haller and crew have added another winner to the mix. The world's most popular torrent client, µTorrent, is the most recent addition to the PortableApps freeware family.

You've been able to make µTorrent mostly portable for quite some time, but it's nice to finally have a pre-packaged version - especially one designed to drop in alongside the rest of the PortableApps suite. Portable µTorrent is especially useful on super-sized external hard drives for on-the-go torrenting of massive files.

ed note: pardon the 'u' in the title - but that's what most people search for when they're looking for this app on our site --Lee.

When I last tried Opera Unite, it was still in its very early stages. I had trouble getting a few of the default applications to play nicely with Firefox and Google Chrome.

Late last night, the beta version became available and it looks like Unite has learned to play well with others. I didn't experience any of the strange glitches I had when trying to play back audio files or browse folders that I did with the alpha build.

Fresh Unite installs include basic file sharing, photo sharing, media player, messenger (lets you IM your Opera friends), lounge (chat room), the fridge (a message board), and web server. User created services have started appearing as well.

Some that you might find useful include the Uploader and Document Courier - both of which allow others to send files to your system - and a streaming media server. There's also a Unite-powered OpenID provider you can install if you want to serve your own identity URL.

You can grab the new Unite beta from Softpedia (click the External Mirror - Beta 1 link), and get the additional services straight from Opera.

There are plenty of places that will host your files for free. Many of them, however, have bandwidth limits or size restrictions, or are just too darn complicated to bother with. s4ve.as offers the basics I want from a free host and is dead simple to use.

As Jay mentioned to me, it's kind of like a beefed-up Senduit. While Senduit offers customizable time-before-self-destruct, it's got a 100Mb limit. That's just not enough in a lot of cases. s4ve.as does away with size limitations, so you're free to upload whatever the heck you want.

Simplicity is key here - browser for any file, and click upload. When the transfer is complete, integrated bit.ly support gives you an automatic short url to paste into sites like Facebook and Twitter.

Just make sure you tell your pals to grab it within 24 hours. After that, it's gone, daddy, gone.

Thanks for the tip, Scott!

If you woke up this morning hoping to download last night's episode of Mad Men (of course, I totally wouldn't know anything about that) you'll have to look somewhere other than The Pirate Bay. The popular, controversial torrent site was taken down by the Swedish government earlier today, and is still unreachable as of this posting. Authorities got to the Bay by threatening the site's hosting service with hefty fines, according to TorrentFreak.

TorrentFreak also reported that The Pirate Bay is back online after changing hosting companies, but I've been unable to connect to the site all day. The Pirate Bay is currently in the middle of a civil case brought against it by several large media companies, and is also the target of a faltering acquisition attempt by games company Global Gaming Factory. This sort of thing hasn't killed The Pirate Bay before, so I expect we'll see it back up again shortly.

In the meantime, remember how one user posted a complete backup of the site's index last week? Yeah, someone has already posted a TPB clone at BTarena.net. The servers appear to be getting hammered right now and the site is pretty slow. But it's better than nothing.

We all had a good little chuckle when Firefox took Antarctica by storm, capturing 100% of the web browser market share. Today the news is not so rosy for bittorrent and peer-to-peer supporters.

The U.S. Antarctic Program has banned their use. From the official communique from the USAP's director of IT and communications:

There are many different Peer-to-Peer (P2P) applications: BitTorrent, LimeWire, Gnutella, and KaZaa to name a few more popular ones. Some are used to download legitimate software and media, some illegitimate. None of them are permitted on the USAP enterprise network for both bandwidth and security concerns. P2P applications have the potential to overwhelm the internet connections on the Ice and inadvertently bring malicious software and traffic into the network.

An unhappy USAP employee wrote FreakBits "The gist I got from it was 'because you are all too dumb to use a computer correctly.' At least the plans for my secret uranium mine won't leak out while I'm down here freezing my ass off."

We went poking around the icy continent to see what other Antarcticans thought about the policy.

One penguin speaking on the condition of anonymity told us, "Hey, there are plenty of legitimate uses for bittorrent. It's going to take forever for our Linux group to download new distros now." He added, "We're not all trying to download episodes of The Real Housewives of Orange County like Professor Opposable Thumbs over there."

And he's right. He stinks like greasy fish, but he's right. Bittorrent and peer-to-peer apps aren't the problem. It's inappropriate use and carelessness that's the problem.

The penguins plan on staging a protest later this month, though they refused to announce any details at this point. "We don't want to jeopardize the operation," said our source.

[via FreakBits]

Microsoft is head-over-heels excited about this announcement: Build 7600.16385 has been officially declared the RTM version of Windows 7.

Strike up the marching bands! Bring in the dancing girls!

But hang on just a tic. Isn't build 7600.16385 already floating around all over the P2P filesharing ether? The previous incremental build 7600.16384 looked pretty real, based on what Softpedia shared.

It sure looks like the new leak is the real deal. IsoHunt has several results for 7600.16385 and they've been happily active for several days. I've even seen it installed firsthand - on someone's Toshiba laptop, though I can't recall where *cough*.

Of course, Microsoft's official line all along has been to stay away from leaked ISOs, because you never know what kind of pure digital evil might be hiding inside. And there could very well be some subtle differences between what's been leaked and what winds up preinstalled on systems and boxed on retail shelves.

I'm pretty convinced that what's out there is legitimate and that someone, somewhere (possibly in Eastern Europe - Wzor, we're looking at you) leaked the build that was later signed off on as the RTM.

What about you?

Breaking addition! Check after the break for ACTION-PACKED footage of Steven Sinofsky signing off! It's better than an episode of Briscoe County Jr....

Over on MusicVoid, Wayne Rosso blogged that he had spoken with Hans Pandeya, chief of Global Gaming Factory. The subject: how to go legit with The Pirate Bay without alienating every last user that still has an ounce of faith in the site.

Rosso states that he has recently met with numerous content providers and "various major executives in the international music scene." Contrary to what most of us would expect, the meetings have apparently been very positive and the parties involved supportive and even excited about Pandeya's vision.

Here's the interesting bit for users. Rosso offers a glimpse as to how the system is going to work, saying "In short, the more computer resources the user contributes to The Pirate Bay, the more his content consumption is subsidized."

That sounds to me like you'll get credit back when you share files you've purchased or acquired legitimately. Perhaps like an iTunes that "pays" you to upload tracks, apps, movies, and other content to other users on the system.

I'm ok with buying from iTunes and I'd love it if Apple gave me credits for uploading my library to other users who make purchases. We all know that's not going to happen any time soon and it's certainly not the same type of sharing that made the Pirate Bay what it is was, but it is a system that could work.

Until more details surface, it's all conjecture - but what do you think? Would you be onboard with a system like that?

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.

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]

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?

Have you torrented the new U2 album? We won't tell, and neither will Last.fm, if those unreleased tracks show up on your listening profile. That's not what TechCrunch is saying, though. Earlier today, they incorrectly reported that Last.fm turned over listener data to the RIAA as part of an investigation into piracy of the U2 record. According to TechCrunch's anonymous source, "I heard from an irate friend who works at CBS that last.fm recently provided the RIAA with a giant dump of user data to track down people who are scrobbling unreleased tracks."

But according to one of Last.fm's founders, commenting on the TechCrunch post, "This is utter nonsense and totally untrue. As far as I can tell, the author of this article got a "tip" from *one* person and decided to make a story out of it. Techcrunch is full of shit, film at 11." I'm not attacking TechCrunch's reporting here, I'm just doing some reporting of my own to make sure everyone knows that this story should apparently be downgraded to rumor status, and there's no need to dump your last.fm account over it.

UPDATE: Despite it being past 1AM at Last.fm's London HQ, the Last.fm staff have posted in their forums: "Of course we work with the major labels and provide them with broad statistics, as we would with any other label, but we'd never personally identify our users to a third party - that goes against everything we stand for. As far as I'm concerned Techcrunch have made this whole story up."