Articles about BitTorrent

It's hard to believe that it has been one year since BitTorrent released its Sync app. I was among the first testers when it was in private alpha, and it came at a welcome time, as Microsoft had announced it was killing Live Mesh, an app I used between my desktop and laptop.

Since then, Sync has gone to beta and then final release. It even released a Kindle Fire app just recently, adding even more integration with your home. It was already available for Windows, Mac, iOS, FreeBSD, Android and NAS.

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BitTorrent has been busily updating its Sync ever since the service first debuted. The organization bills this as having no cloud involved, describing it as "being more private and secure than the public cloud".

Now BitTorrent is joining forces with Netgear for the first NAS integration of its Sync program. "NetGear is our first partner to launch a native BitTorrent Sync app, which can be accessed from the ReadyNAS Add Ons page today", says Erik Pounds.

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BitTorrent Sync entered the market with a clear plan to not be anything like other services, instead choosing to do things its own way and protect the end-user. This resulted in alpha and beta testing, with a slow roll-out, but slow and steady often wins the race. The service is widely available now, being updated, and encompassing more platforms.

While Android was already a part of the ecosystem, there are certain flavors of Google's OS that don't readily comply with the traditional. One of those, in fact perhaps the primary one, is Fire OS -- the operating system produced by Amazon for its popular line of tablets.

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The Pirate Bay seems to be a never-ending controversy, as we have discussed here many times. The site has been hounded by the law all around the world, although it always seems to manage to survive. Now the service has achieved a major victory, at least in the Netherlands.

A three-judge panel in The Hague has ruled that the blocking of The Pirate Bay by ISPs is not legal. The case had been filed by two providers -- Ziggo and XS4ALL.

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Movies are very important to me and to society overall. Seeing popular films gives the moviegoer a shared experience with other members of the community. This in turn allows you to understand references to the film in jokes and documentaries. For example, if you've never seen a film such as Star Wars, you would not understand the Family Guy and Robot Chicken parodies of it.

Sadly, for many people, a trip to the movie theater is not achievable due to extremely high prices. Where I live, New York, a couple going on a date to the movies can easily spend over $30.00 when drinks and snacks are factored in. Those same people may not be able to afford the premium movie channels. I am one of these people -- I typically wait years for a film to hit FX, USA or something similar, so I can see it in all its censored, commercial-riddled glory. The alternative is movie piracy -- something I do not condone nor take part of, for more reasons than one.

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To perhaps nobody’s amazement, piracy has not diminished in 2013, despite the recent and frequent woes of high-profile sites such as The Pirate Bay. The data is not all that difficult to track, which is one reason that various users have found themselves on the wrong end of a lawsuit.

Each week, Torrent Freak posts statistics, showing the most popular files and, earlier this year BetaNews talked about the HBO hit Game of Thrones, and the network and producer’s strange lack of concern about the rampant downloads of each episode.

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The other day I chronicled the strange journey of The Pirate Bay, a BitTorrent site that is notorious for finding less-than-legal software, movies, TV shows, music…you name it. Sure, it’s wrong to steal content, no matter how you justify it -- people deserve to be paid for their work. After all, I don’t work for free, I fully expect to be compensated for my efforts. I have a wife and kids to provide for. I would guess you also do not labor for free.

However, that piece about the many domains the service has recently occupied, combined with something my colleague Mark Wilson brought up about the ridiculous porn filtering in the UK, got me thinking.

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Forget Carmen Sandiego, The Pirate Bay has become the hardest thing to find these days. The torrent sharing site has been on a recent world tour, following ongoing legal woes, that have included court trials and domain seizures. The past week has been especially busy for the owners, involving lots of packing and unpacking of suitcases.

Just yesterday the site called Guyana home, making the service available for those who found the .gy domain. In previous days, the service has visited Sint Maarten (.sx) and stopped for a whirlwind tour of Ascenion Island (.ac). The Pirate Bay had, earlier this year, racked up frequent flier miles for visits to Iceland (.is) and Greenland (.gl).

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BitTorrent Sync has been around since January, when it debuted in private alpha. After moving to beta and going public, the service announced a major update and the achievement of reaching one million users. That was 30 days ago, and what a difference a month makes.

After taking from January until November to hit that first million, the organization has doubled the user base in just one month, today announcing two million users. "The milestone demonstrates the accelerating momentum for BitTorrent Sync. It also signals that in it’s first 8 months BitTorrent Sync has grown more rapidly than Dropbox at the same stage", BitTorrent told BetaNews in a statement.

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BitTorrent still accounts for a massive proportion of Internet traffic, but it looks as though the global spread is switching somewhat. According to data published by Sandvine, BitTorrent traffic has dropped significantly in North America. While the protocol accounted for more than 31 percent of traffic five years ago, today this has plummeted to below 10 percent.

The Global Internet Phenomenon Report found that BitTorrent now accounts for just 7.39 percent of traffic in North America, a drop of 20 percent. Conversely, in Europe, BitTorrent traffic has increased to 17.99 percent. Interestingly, during peak hours, 48 percent of European upstream traffic is accounted for by BitTorrent.

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Way back in January, BitTorrent released its sync app, though it was early days, and the organization wished to keep testing to a private level. Since then, there has been steady progress, including making a beta version available to the masses. Now it seems the service reaches critical mass with today's news.

The company starts its announcement with news that Sync has surpassed one million users, along with more than 30 petabytes of data synced so far. The company points, in part, to the recent security climate as one of the reasons for its popularity. "BitTorrent Sync is a beta project in cloud-free syncing. Our goal is to build a sharing tool that lets you move big files, and big ideas, freely. Without surveillance. Without speed limits. And without size caps. Your data belongs to you. Sync is designed to keep your stuff yours; with you and your team, wherever you are", the announcement states.

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To say security and spying has been a hot button issue recently would be a mild understatement. Mostly we understand that if we are doing nothing wrong then we have no reason to worry about monitoring, though that certainly makes it no less a creepy feeling to some people.

Launching its first messaging service, file sharing organization BitTorrent points out "this year alone, more than six million people have been impacted by data breaches. The right to own your own conversations online: it’s not a given. It should be".

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I have been using BitTorrent Sync between my desktop and laptop since it debuted in private alpha form. The service has since matured to beta, and now ages a bit more as it spreads to another platform -- iOS, after landing on Android last month.

"Today, we’re happy to report that BitTorrent Sync is now available for iOS devices on the App Store. iOS fans: you can now sync freely", the company reports.

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Despite being one of the main means of downloading pirated content and, therefore, a threat to Microsoft's profits (and that of many other big companies), the software giant just accepted a BitTorrent client on Windows Phone Store. Surely, popular service providers Netflix, Pandora, Spotify and the like are not too pleased about this decision, especially after releasing apps for the tiled smartphone operating system.

The BitTorrent client in question is called wpTorrent, and, judging by the number of features it touts, all the basics are covered. Users can discover and find files via RSS feeds and search engines and download content straight to their handsets (even when the device is locked).

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BitTorrent has been making waves recently with the release of its Sync client. To its credit, the organization seemed to see the coming privacy apocalypse that we have fallen into over the past few weeks, and built features into the service that it hopes will protect customers.

What began as private testing and entered alpha in April, is finally growing up. Christian Averill, a company representative, told BetaNews "BitTorrent Sync was designed to solve what we see as real, fundamental challenges to data synchronization: limitations on privacy, file security and dependency on cloud infrastructure. Also, limitations on speed, size, and space".

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