Taking a leaf out of the Recording Industry Association of America’s (RIAA) book, the producers of the Hurt Locker on Monday instituted legal proceedings against people who illegally downloaded the critically acclaimed film from the internet. Voltage Pictures, the production company responsible for the film, fired the first salvo in the form of a copyright infringement complaint against 5,000 people. The scope of the complaint might even... 

Another popular torrent search engine finds itself staring down the barrel. A U.S District judge has ordered IsoHunt to remove all unauthorized content. The order is not merely restricted to the removal of infringing dot-torrent files, though, but further requires that IsoHunt limit the scope of its search function to only legal content “using or based on infringement-related terms.” However, IsoHunt owner Gary Fung believes a keyword-based... 

The Ubisoft DRM situation has been covered to death, but it’s like a train wreck we just can’t seem to look away from. The latest news comes out of Europe and is reporting that the DRM authentication servers have been down all day, and have yet to return. “I don’t have any clear information on what the issue is … but clearly the extended downtime and lengthy login issues are unacceptable, particularly as I’ve... 

We’ve tossed around some pretty harsh criticisms of Ubisoft’s new PC DRM approach, and it’s very much deserved. Piracy is a tricky issue to combat, we get it, but we also know that no amount of DRM will ever stop the dedicated few kleptomaniacs who for one reason or another, simply refuse to pay for software. The only truth when it comes to copy protection is that the stronger it is, the more honest customers you …  Read More →

It’s been a busy week for BitTorrents! I’ve showed you how to download them, how to tweak the heck out of a great program you can use to download them, and how to remotely access your BitTorrent downloads through Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox . You, young padawan, are now fully grounded in the ways of the torrent. But you are no Jedi yet… The final…  Read More →

As much as we like to multitask, there’s only so much a processor can handle at once. And some processes, like games, monopolize CPU clock cycles, making it inconvenient to run other processor-intensive utilities in the background. That’s why we keep our home PC powered on while we’re at sleep or at the office. Forget about energy savings–a powerful PC is meant to be utilized! From scheduled FTP downloads to converting... 

I don’t care what you use BitTorrent for. I don’t even want to know. What you download is your own business. That said, don’t even think about coming in the comments with a “omg check out this awesome freeware Pirate Bay scanning app it helped me download all the copies of My Little Pony in like no time whatsoever.” Not cool. Now that the semi…  Read More →

BitTorrent has plenty of practical and legal uses, but sadly, if you’re one of the millions of people using it, you’re probably breaking the law. A student at Princeton University by the name of Sauhard Sahi has conducted a study of more than 1,000 random files acquired using the trackerless Mainline DHT, and found that more than 99% of them infringe on copyrights. I somehow doubt this news will shock or amaze you, but at least one...