Posted 11/17/09 at 01:15:56 PM by Paul Lilly

It's been a wild and crazy six year run for the The Pirate Bay, the world's most popular torrent tracking site, but by all accounts, it looks as though TPB's founders are finally ready to quit sailing through legal waters and have decided to bring the torrent tracker to port.

"Now that the decentralized system for finding peers is so well developed, TPB has decided that there is no need to run a tracker anymore, so it will remain down! It's the end of an era, but the era is no longer up2date. We have put a server in a museum already, and now the tracking can be put there as well," the ever-defiant Pirate Bay bandits wrote in a blog entry.

At its peak, TPB helped coordinate the downloads of more than 25 million peers, but it's no secret that many of those were illicit downloads for everything from pirated movies and television shows, to cracked videogames and closed-source operating systems, particularly Windows. Earlier this year, TPB's legal troubles culminated in a high profile court case in which a Swedish judge ultimately sentenced the torrent tracking site's four founders to a year in jail and ordered them to pay 30 million krono ($3.6 million) to a handful of entertainment companies.

Hit the jump to find out what TPB's founders are up to next.

Read More

Posted 10/09/09 at 11:30:00 AM by Paul Lilly

Iomega today announced the next generation of its double-drive desktop NAS box, the StorCenter ix2-200. The box comes available in 1TB, 2TB, and 4TB capacities, each with a four-step setup process, and sports a few noteworthy tricks, such as built-in torrent support.

It also touts multiple IP security camera support, RAID 1 configurations, device-to-device replication, VMWare certification, Time Machine support for Apple computer backups, Bluetooth, remote access, and a bunch more marketing bullets.

"The new StorCenter ix2-200 is definitely the easiest to use small office and consumer network storage appliance in the marketplace today," said Jonathan Huberman, president of Iomega and the Consumer and Small Business Products Division of EMC.

Both the 1TB and 2TB models are available now for $270 and $370, respectively. The 4TB NAS box will debut later this month for $700.

Read More

Posted 08/25/09 at 12:49:46 PM by Paul Lilly

The Swedish courts are doing everything it can to decimate The Pirate Bay -- at least in its current form -- from the Internet, and that includes ordering the torrent tracking site's ISP to disconnect TPB from the Internet. The penalty for failing to comply would have been 500,000 kroner, or $70,600, so the ISP did what was ordered saying it had no choice but to uphold the law.

Game, set, match for the Swedish courts then, right? Not so fast. Rather than jump ship and throw in the towel, The Pirate Bay just jumped servers instead. And true to TPB's form, it had a defiant message for Swedish authorites.

"Even though large parts of the Internets and many old and famous trackers have fallen or may fall into the grip of the lfpi and all the odious apparatus of MPAA rule, we shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end," TPB said in a statement.

In related news, Global Gaming Factor will vote this Thursday whether or not to proceed with plans to purchase the controversial site and proceed to turn it legit.

Read More

Posted 07/29/09 at 08:24:42 PM by Pulkit Chandna

A week after Microsoft released Windows 7 to OEMs, crackers have cracked Windows 7 RTM Ultimate. Tech website Softpedia was the first to report on the matter, though it stopped short of linking to websites and forums where the proof-of-concept of the crack can be found. You don’t mind, do you? 

The OEM copy of Windows 7 RTM Ultimate being blamed for the crack is said to have been stolen/leaked from Lenovo’s safekeeping (or un-safekeeping). The crackers also managed to get their hands on the OEM-SLP (System-Locked Preinstallation) product key and the OEM certificate for Windows 7 RTM Ultimate, both of which are enough to crack open Windows 7 RTM Ultimate on a system posing as an OEM machine.

 

Read More

Posted 07/20/09 at 04:00:00 AM by Paul Lilly

Get ready for a whole new kind of Pirate Bay, one that embraces the RIAA rather than try to fight it. That is, if investors okay the $7.8 million deal that would have Global Gaming Factory acquire the popular torrent sharing site. Already getting a head start, the Swedish software company has hired Wayne Rosso, the former president of Grokster and founder of Massboxx, to help hammer out licensing deals with content owners.

"I've gotten friendly with a lot of these guys," Rosso said of Mitch Bainwol, the RIAA's CEO and other music industry execs. "These are good guys. They've been wonderful to me. Other people in the business have been nice to me but they've had to hold thier nose."

Rosso's comments are in stark contrast to an opinion he held during his days with the now defunct Grokster. Back then, Rosso compared RIAA execs to Stalin. But, as Rosso notes, "The Pirate Bay has turned over a legitimate new leaf, so it has to be above board from the first day."

That means a new business model, one which will likely include unlimited music downloads for a monthly fee. Rosso says that eventually users will be able to pay nothing to download music, so long as the tunes stay tied to the user's computer.

Read More

Posted 07/01/09 at 09:30:01 AM by Paul Lilly

We all know what really goes down over at The Pirate Bay, and apparently so does the Swedish District court, which found TPB's defiantly outspoken founders guilty of assisting copyright infringement and ordered them to serve a year in prison and pay a combined $3.6 million in fines. And if the latest rumor turns out to be true, they'll be the ones laughing all the way to bank, even if ultimately paying the fine, which would leave them with $4.2 million.

That's the amount that would be left over after Global Gaming Factory X, a gaming company, acquires the torrent sharing site for $7.8 million. GGF says it plans to complete the acquisition by August and then launch new business models that would pay copyright owners.

"We would like to introduce models which entail that content providers and copyright owners get paid for content that is downloaded via the site," said Hans Pandeya, CEO of GGF. "The Pirate Bay is a site that is among the top 100 most visited Internet sites in the world."

Of course, illegal access to copyrighted content might play a small huge role in why TPB is so popular, but GGF believes it can build on the torrent site's success while going completely legit.

Read More

Posted 05/18/09 at 10:05:10 AM by Paul Lilly

Citing "legal issues," EMI nixed plans to release Danger Mouse's new CD, Dark Night of the Soul, a collaboration with rock group Sparklehorse that also features Iggy Pop and The Flaming Lips. But that doesn't mean fans of the mashup artist are completely out of luck, depending on how far they're willing to go. 'Just pirate the music,' is the message essentially being sent.

Since EMI refuses to release the project, Danger Mouse has decided to sell the album as a "100+ page book" of David Lynch photographs inspired by the music, and will toss in a blank CD-R.

'For Legal Reasons, enclosed CD-R contains no music. Use it as you will."

The idea, of course, is for fans to illegally download the music via P2P/torrent and fill the CD themselves, and though EMI hasn't said yet said anything, it can't be too happy about the move.

Read More

Posted 04/20/09 at 09:31:11 AM by Paul Lilly

We're not sure if this is just an excuse to dress up as pirates and wave the Jolly Roger in a public setting (and admit it, you've wanted to do this since the first time you rode Disneyland's Pirates of the Caribbean ride as a child), but a band of Swedish 'pirates' marched in protest of the Stockholm district court scalawags who issued a guilty verdict in the Pirate Bay trial. Pirate Bay's founders -- Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, Peter Sunde, Fredrik Neij and Carl Lundstrom -- were each sentenced to walk the plank one year in jail and ordered to be pay 30 million kronor ($3.6 million) in damages to several major media companies following the ruling on Friday.

Hundreds of protesters took to the streets led by Sweden's Pirate Party, a political organization which supports free file sharing for noncommercial use, many of which could be seen wearing bandannas and other pirate-attire. The party said it's membership shot up 20 percent to about 20,000 after the verdict was announced.

"The establishment and the politicians have delcared war against our whole generation," said Rickard Falkvinge, party Chairman and founder.

While unconfirmed, we hear that several court officials, fearful the protest might turn physical, made a clean getaway after someone distracted the crowd by shouting out, "Look behind you, a three-headed monkey!"

Read More