Posted 11/18/09 at 12:00:00 PM by David Murphy

Half the internet says The Pirate Bay is dead; The other half says the first half has no idea what it's talking about. Popular BitTorrent index The Pirate Bay is never without controversy, it seems. But is the site's latest move to kill its BitTorrent tracker for good really that much of a white flag? I don't think so, because decentralized BitTorrent tracking has already been here for quite some time now. If anything, The Pirate Bay is just trying to cover its poop deck from additional legal threats.

Here's the deal. For the last many years, anyone could head on over to The Pirate Bay site, do a quick search for a piece of content, download the associated .torrent file, and connect up to The Pirate Bay's tracker. The tracker would, in turn, find you a number of peers to connect to and your BitTorrent client of choice would commence the download of bits and pieces of your file from these multiple sources. Easy.

When a tracker fails to work--or gets forcibly removed from the Internet--you can keep on transferring bits and pieces of a file to those you're already connected to. If you want to start a new download, however, you'll be unable to find any peers seeding the file for you. The same holds true in reverse: Without a tracker, others on the Internet won't be able to connect to you either.

To solve these problems, BitTorrent has embraced two technologies that, together, transform the art of downloading files into a truly peer-to-peer solution: DHT and Mirror Links.

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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.

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Posted 11/17/08 at 04:41:59 PM by Andy Salisbury

If you’re wondering whether or not you should bring that personal bottle of hand sanitizer with you to work today, Google has got your back. With their latest tool, the Flu Trends, Google is tracking where flu outbreaks are happening – and doing so weeks before the CDC is.

Google’s Flu Trends follows its users’ searches. Once a search for “flu symptoms” or “muscle aches” is tracked, it’s aggregated to its location and placed on a map. Since the Feds have taken notice, Google has been willingly sharing its information with the Epidemiology and Prevention Brach of the Influenza division of the CDC.

Thanks to the accuracy and speed of the Flu Trends map, lives could actually be saved. The flu still kills many elderly people and those with weak immune systems each year.

Who knows what Google will think of next? But goodness knows their all seeing eye is being put to good use.

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Posted 11/03/08 at 01:00:00 PM by David Murphy

The best kinds of system applications are the ones that make your life easier without you having to lift a finger. While the freeware applications we're profiling in this weekly roundup still require you to input a few settings, they're great tools to help automate some of the critical parts of your daily computer life.  From hotkey creation utilities to applications that help you conserve power by turning off your PC at specified intervals, these freeware tools are must-have additions to your computing repertoire!

Click the jump to check out this week's batch of free, awesome apps!

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