Good News: Shareaza is Fighting Back

TorrentFreak gives exclusive updates as to Shareaza's fight with its hijackers.

The Shareaza team informs their supporters that they are "announcing that we have legal representation and will be contesting the trademark application on our name and identity taken out by Discordia Ltd. After that, we’ll be looking to get our old domain back from the people who threatened, bullied and intimidated the team member holding it on the project’s behalf and who are now using as the gateway to their deceptive business model".

Good luck, guys!

The Pirate Bay Interrogations - Transcripts

The Swedish authorities are all over The Pirate Bay, but these guys don't seem to flinch.

First, they promised the site will keep on working, no matter what. And now it seems the Swedish prosecutor can't accuse them with anything more than "assisting copyright infringement", which is a relatively small accusation.

TorrentFreak posted the transcripts from the interrogation of the Pirate Bay people. Here they are.

Aside from a lot of "no comments" there are funny things, like this bit:

Interrogator: How can one translate the word tracker? (Note: same in Swedish)

A: It is not possible to translate.

Or this:

I: This has been a police investigation for a long time. The prosecutor’s case is one of copyright infringement, assisting in copyright infringement and conspiracy to commit copyright infringement. What is your position on this?

T: That he is wrong. That if we are guilty, then Google is guilty too.

I: You mean you can compare Google to The Pirate Bay?

T: Almost.

I: What the difference between them?

T: Well... One difference is that you can upload torrents on The Pirate Bay, but it’s really the same thing because if you have a site with copyrighted material, you can add the link to be indexed on Google. It’s the same level as both sites are handling user-generated material. We don’t have any views on what the content is, we just provide a search engine.

--

Hopefully, this will all clear out soon, and the good guys of the Bay will continue doing their stuff.

So, who wiped RIAA out?

RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) has certainly made itself one of the most hated organizations on earth.

I'm guessing this means that a lot of people will be happy to hear that the RIAA site has apparently been wiped out by unknown people, hackers or mysterious entities from outer space.

According to TorrentFreak, it all started when a Reddit user has posted a link to a slow SQL query in RIAA's site. Soon after that, and with the help of Reddit users, apparently, the site has completely vanished (first it lost all of its content and appeared more than half empty, though) and has not returned online until this very moment.

*** Please hold on while I wipe away my tears ***

RIAA's tactics have been to sue anything with a heartbeat that ever listened to music they might suspect as pirated. The latest news were that a Judge ordered RIAA to Pay legal fees to falsely fccused lawsuit target - the Second Such Ruling.

Let's hope they DON'T have backups. Too bad their law suits keep coming in.

Malware Warning: Shareaza isn't Shareaza!

Torrentfreak published an amazing story. Apparently, the domain Shareaza.com, formerly home of the hugely popular p2p client, has been hijacked.

If you go to Shareaza.com now, you'll see the design has changed (although they stole some of the original graphics) but there is still a program for download. DO NOT download this software, as it is not Shareaza anymore. If you click on any on the links in the new, fake site, you'll see that they are actually leading to Shareazaweb.com - a known scam site.

According to Torrentfreak, "the software on offer from the hijacked site although labeled wShareazaV4.exe', is not Shareaza at all but likely a clone of the new malware infested iMesh/Bearshare client and should not be downloaded under any circumstances. Once installed, the software wants to install a search bar and make contact with a central server. Unlike Shareaza - which is abslutely free and has a reputation for being non-profit and shunning involvement with money - the hijackers are touting a subscription based product".

If you want to download the REAL Shareaza, get it from here.

This is not the first time that Shareaza has encountered problems. You can read about it in the Torrentfreak article. I hope they find a solution for the problem and recover their site. Good luck, guys. Your program rocks.

20 BitTorrent Tips and Tricks

I really like TorrentFreak.com. It's a very professional site, and there is a lot of interesting info and discussion going on there.

Yesterday the released a very cool post - 20 BitTorrent Tips and Tricks.

I get a lot of questions about torrents and how to use them. Mostly it's from people who got stuck in the age of eMule and don't know how to get out of it. After a little bit of technical explanation, I tend to remark that torrents have some clear advantages, but also some problems.

I think the biggest advantage is the speed of download. When the amount of seeders is reasonable, you can download at amazing rates. As a user that "grew up" on download rates of 0.9 KBs (yes, I am that old), seeing a download speed of more than a 100 KBs constitutes a bloody miracle for me.

Still, the torrents have one big disadvantage - things get old, and fast. A DVD rip of a movie which is a year old or more, is much more difficult to get than a low-quality screener of the current top-hit. If you are looking for a movie from the 80s - you are better off with eMule or Newsgroups.

The biggest problem, of course, is that there are not enough seeders!

Spread the wealth and rejoice. Who knows when it's all going to end.