Articles about BitTorrent

The fourth episode of the latest season of Game of Thrones has leaked online before its official air date. Download links to the episode -- The Spoils of War -- have been shared on Reddit and Twitter, and the video appears to be a low-quality internal version.

Earlier this week, HBO was the victim of a hack in which 1.5TB of data was stolen. In addition to full episodes of other shows, there were scripts and spoilers for Game of Thrones, and these were subsequently leaked. This time around, however, it does not seem that the hack was the source of the S07E04 leak.

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This week's hack of HBO led to the release of stolen episodes of Ballers and Room 104, and the threat of Game of Thrones leaks. Now the hackers have made good on their threat and uploaded scripts and episode summaries for yet-to-be-aired episodes, and speculation is rife that it is just a matter of time before episodes hit torrent sites such as The Pirate Bay.

Season seven of the show is just getting underway, and details of episodes three and four have now been published online. Other files have also been leaked following the hack, including log in credentials for HBO staff.

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As the new season of any major series kicks off, torrent traffic for episodes clogs up internet pipes around the world. This has been true of everything from True Blood to Lost, and it's no different with season seven of Game of Thrones.

Clearly the networks behind shows that are shared via BitTorrent and through other means are keen to clamp down on piracy, and anyone planning to download Game of Thrones is cautioned that HBO is actively monitoring people pirating the series, and warnings are being sent out.

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It used to be very easy to find pirated movies, music and software using Google Search, but the company has taken steps over the past few years to downgrade sites offering easy access to such material. You can still find that content of course, it’s just a lot harder than it used to be.

But despite this crackdown, Google has just introduced a new feature that makes it much easier to find the best Torrent sites.

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The Pirate Bay may be something of a battered ship after an onslaught of attacks over the years but, somehow, it remains afloat. The latest blow, however, comes from the European Court of Justice which has just ruled that the site -- despite not hosting any content itself -- can still be held liable for copyright infringement.

The landmark ruling means that the site could be considered to have broken the law for simply directing people towards copyrighted material. There are implications for a wide range of sites and services, but the focus is very much on that stalwart of the torrenting world, The Pirate Bay.

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Just a couple of weeks since a leak of season five of Orange is the New Black was held to ransom, the same is now happening with the upcoming Pirates of the Caribbean 5. Yesterday Disney CEO Bob Iger revealed that hackers had stolen one of the company's movies, and it has since transpired that it is the upcoming Johnny Depp flick.

Subtitled "Dead Men Tell No Tales", Pirates of the Caribbean 5 is due to hit the big screen next week, and hackers are demanding a ransom from Disney to avert a leak ahead of the official launch. This is the latest move in the world of piracy that shows a marked shift from the previous aim of release groups simply wanting to be the first to push out a decent quality rip of a movie.

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Most people alive today have seen the evolution of the internet over the course of a couple of decades, and can remember life before it was so integral. But there is a growing proportion of the population that has never lived without internet access, and such people have developed something of a different outlook on things.

Millennials, in particular, have been able to reap the benefits of being permanently connected, and have no experience of what it was like before. One of the side-effects of the always-on, always-available nature of content is that piracy has become second nature. Not only are most millennials streaming pirate content, they do not see it as wrong -- although downloading the same content is viewed differently.

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It's no secret that despite being billed as a great way to download large Linux distros and copyright free software, BitTorrent is primarily used to download the latest Star Wars movie, episodes of The Grand Tour, and illicit copies of Photoshop.

A new website -- unsophisticatedly named 'I Know What You Download' -- does exactly what you might expect: it exposes the torrents you have downloaded. More than this, it can be used to check what has been downloaded by any IP address, and there is even an option to trick people you know into letting you spy on what they are torrenting.

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KickassTorrents was the most recent high profile torrent site to hit the headlines after it was seized by feds. The site reappeared in the form of mirrors, but ultimately the site lives on only as a community. Out of the blue, Torrentz.eu has also dropped off the face of the internet.

Running for more than 13 years, Torrentz.eu was one of the largest torrent sites in existence, but it differed to many of the other big names. It was considered a meta-search engine, and pulled in results from other sites including KickassTorrents and the Pirate Bay.

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Just a few days ago, KickassTorrents was dealt a blow when Artem Vaulin was arrested and the site seized by feds. Of course, it didn’t take long for mirrors to spring up, keeping KAT online in new locations. But the original team has also taken steps to ensure that the community lives on.

The KAT team has set up Katcr.co, home to a forum complete with many familiar old faces. This time around, there are no torrents -- this is strictly a forum -- although the KAT mirrors are still to be found online.

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Even though US authorities have taken down KickassTorrents and managed to get owner Artem Vaulin arrested in Poland, the most popular BitTorrent website in the world is now back in the game.

KickassTorrents is alive and well through two working mirrors which have been set up by supporters to ensure that fans can continue to enjoy the content distributed through the website. In the wake of these events, it would seem that it's business as usual in BitTorrent land.

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The Ukrainian owner of KickassTorrents (KAT) has been arrested in Poland and his torrent-touting website seized by authorities. Artem Vaulin -- who also goes by the name 'tirm' -- stands accused of criminal copyright infringement, as well as conspiracy to commit criminal copyright infringement and money laundering.

The Department of Justice says that the site owned by 30-year-old Vaulin "has enabled users to illegally reproduce and distribute hundreds of millions of copies of copyrighted motion pictures, video games, television programs, musical recordings and other electronic media, collectively valued at more than $1 billion". Authorities now want to extradite him to the US to face prosecution.

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The High Court of Paris has ruled that Google and Bing do not have to have automatic filters in place to scrub torrent-related results from searches. The battle against piracy is something that search engines have found themselves pulled into, but this latest ruling turns the debate on its head.

French music industry group SNEP went to court on behalf of a trio of artists, requesting that Microsoft and Google automatically filter out links to pirated material. The group had called for a complete block on searches that include the word 'torrent' as well as blocking sites whose name includes the word.

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The Pirate Bay is no stranger to court cases, and the site has just lost another one in Sweden. A Swedish court has ruled that the torrent site's thepiratebay.se and piratebay.se domain names must be handed over to the state.

The two domains have been confiscated after a judge at the Court of Appeal decided that they were being used to (gasp!) commit crimes under the Copyright Act.

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Let's not beat around the bush: we know that a lot of you use the likes of the Pirate Bay, KickAssTorrents and the like to grab copies of movies and TV shows. You're probably aware of a number of release groups on the scene, but you might not know that there are fairly strict rules dictating capturing, formatting and naming releases.

This weekend a major change comes into force. Until now MP4 has been the video format of choice, but the change in standards means that this format is being ousted in favor of MKV. There are astoundingly lengthy standards documents covering standard and high definition releases of TV shows, and while the alterations are touted as bringing things up to date, not everyone is happy.

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