BitCoin was started in 2009, and it was until very recently that it started getting more adoption worldwide. Unlike most currencies, bitcoin does not rely on trusting any central issuer. Bitcoin uses a distributed database spread across nodes of a peer-to-peer network to journal transactions, and uses cryptography in order to provide basic security functions, such as ensuring that bitcoins can only be spent by the person who owns them, and never more than once.

BitCoin is purely P2p , that means that there is no central authority to issue new money or keep track of transactions. Instead, these tasks are managed collectively by the nodes of the network. So you get the same advantages that you see in BiTorrents, yet better:

• Bitcoins can be sent easily through the Internet, without having to trust middlemen.
• It can’t be stopped.
• Transactions are designed to be computationally prohibitive to reverse.
• Be safe from instability caused by fractional reserve banking and central banks. The limited inflation of the Bitcoin system’s money supply is distributed evenly (by CPU power) throughout the network, not monopolized by banks. No extra currency conversion fees.

Bitcoin relies on the transfer of amounts between public accounts using public key cryptography. All transactions are public and stored in a distributed database. To prevent double-spending, the network implements a distributed time server, using the idea of chained proofs of work. The whole history of transactions must be stored inside the database.

Here are few videos that can get you started:

Very Recently, A Google developer release a Java-based open source implementation of BitCoin and called it BitCoinJ.

BitcoinJ implements the native Bitcoin P2P protocol, which allows it to maintain a wallet and send and receive transactions without needing a local copy of the official implementation.

BitcoinJ implements the “simplified payment verification” mode so it stores what it needs in order to verify transactions with the aid of an untrusted peer node.

Andresen said Google is more likely to adopt Bitcoin if the company has an in-house implementation of the client software like BitcoinJ and that’s why we see a Big future in BitCoin And a second implementation of Bitcoin is very good for network diversity of apps, platforms and robustness.

Download C++ based BitCoin application:

Download for Windows (5.8MB)
Download  for Linux (32-bit & 64-bit) (9.8MB)
Download for Mac OS X (10.5+ Intel) (7.7MB)

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The new version is about extending the BitTorrent protocol and all new set of features. The biggest new is uTorrent Remote integration with uTorrent Web. uTorrent Web offers secure and private zero-config control of your torrents via a Web control panel.

Listing down What’s New in uTorrent 3:

• New Dot-P2P decentralized Torrents protocol support – Non-bloackbale torrents.
• Video and Music Streaming
• Pulse based torrent Ratings
• Simple file sharing
• uTorrent web – Web-based Remote.

Music and video streaming

Media streaming, which first appeared back in uTorrent 2.1 alpha, has made  comeback in the 3.0 beta. Basically, this means you can consume your media as you download.

Rate torrents with Pulse

There’s a new tab called Ratings at the bottom of the client, and you simply provide a star rating, and optionally a comment. Eventually, once enough people are rating torrents, you’ll be able to scan through your RSS feeds and pick out the torrents with the best ratings.

Simple file sharing

‘Drop files to share’ zone in the bottom left corner of the interface lets you share files and folders  and uTorrent generates a TinyURL link that you can share with your friends.

This feature uses ‘Web Seeds’, which means that the torrent is also being seeded, via HTTP, by uTorrent’s dedicated servers.

uTorrent Web Remote

The crowning achievement for uTorrent 3.0 is its integration with uTorrent Web, which is BitTorrent’s new zero-config Web control panel. To get started, goto Options > Preferences > Web and type in a username and password — There’s NO need to configure anything else, Not even port forwarding, it works anywhere, anytime. Use http://web.utorrent.com to log in.

Download uTorrent 3.0 ‘Falcon’ for Windows

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Hackulous is the mastermind behind making piracy on App Store possible. Now, they have been working and knock off DRM on Apple’s iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad products, for about two years.  Why? They do what they do because they believe that Apple’s App Store is unfair to consumers since it has no trial service or refund policy.

Hackulous’s system comprises of two parts : Apptrackr, a web-based index of cracked apps;  Installous, the  app on jailbroken Apple devices which allows the installation of apps found via Apptrakr . The number is huge, there are around 10million devices which use them.

Hackulous is about to make it worse by providing updates to the existing software that would make it ever easier to share pirated IPA files (Apps).  In the past, owners of App Store apps would have to crack the software using special instructions and then upload it manually to apptrakr and share it to millions. Obviously, there were millions who were passive either due to ignorance or due to lack of ability.

But Installous will now bring a new update that will make it possible to share apps installed on any iOS device to auto-upload in background to Apptrakr servers, distributed over devices, just like BitTorrent.

“Essentially what will happen is when you’re using Installous you’ll get a little pop up that says ‘Hey, you have an application that Apptrakr doesn’t. We will add the application to a queue in the background (if you say yes) and it will start uploading tiny pieces of it, kind of like a torrent, up to the cloud’,” Dissident explains.

With hundreds or thousands of copies of the same piece of software, and little tiny pieces of each upload from each person’s device to the cloud in order to make one final copy, which will then become available from Apptrakr. From there it will be available for 10 million+ devices to download. Imagine how much easier it would become, and how much inevitable.

Going further, Hackulous has plans to pirate Mac App Store as well. They already have the stuff ready but, as per the author, they don’t wish to discourage developers, hence they would wait till Mac App Store gets significant amount of “crappy apps”.

In his own words:

“We don’t want to release kickback as soon as the [Mac App] Store gets released. I have a few reasons for that,” says Dissident. “So we’re not going to release Kickback until well after the store’s been established, well after developers have gotten their applications up. We don’t want to devalue applications and frustrate developers.”

As per the estimates, the plan is to roll it out sometime around feb-march time frame.

It would be a mess of pirated apps all over the Apple stores. Will Apple counter the attack ? They’ve to!

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Despite all efforts, Piratebay has lived and its estimated that it will continue to do so, forever.  Its really hard to stop BitTorrent ffile sharing today coz of its peer-2-peer nature. however, it can be blocked at the gateways if ISP chooses to. But that is never the case, unless they wish to lose all the subscribers.

It is hard today, and could become impossible int eh future to block or censor content in the future. Piratebay founder has started to work on a new standard that would make it impossible to block P2P file sharing, and uncensor the Internet  forever.

For governments it is apparently quite easy to take over the DNS entries of domains. According to some, this setup is a threat to the open internet.

According to the project’s website, the goal is to “create an application that runs as a service and hooks into the hosts DNS system to catch all requests to the .p2p TLD while passing all other request cleanly through. Requests for the .p2p TLD will be redirected to a locally hosted DNS database.”

“By creating a .p2p TLD that is totally decentralized and that does not rely on ICANN or any ISP’s DNS service, and by having this application mimic force-encrypted BitTorrent traffic, there will be a way to start combating DNS level based censoring like the new US proposals as well as those systems in use in countries around the world including China and Iran amongst others.”

The Dot-P2P project was literally started a few days ago, but already the developers are making great progress. It is expected that a beta version of the client can be released relatively shortly. Being backed by some great developers and geeks, it bound to get popular and effective.

How it would work:

The .p2p domain registration will be handled by OpenNIC (OpenNic DNS), an alternative community based DNS network. OpenNIC also maintains the .geek, .free, .null and several other geeky top level domains.

On the other hand, there are also thoughts that favor distributed domain registration, which would keep the system entirely decentralized. Unlike the popular domain registrations, the domain registrations on p2p network will be totally free, but registrants will have to show that they own a similar domain with a different extension first, to prevent scammers, spammers from taking over a brand.

However,  new P2P-based DNS system will require users to run an application on their own computer to access the domains, but there are also plans to create a separate root-server (like OpenNIC) as a complimentary service for all its .p2p domains.

Technology always stays ahead of rules, the more aggressive law enforcement gets, the more creative and motivated adopters of the Open Internet will respond in ways no one has thought about before.

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A Year back, Yahoo discontinued new registrations & access to this service in favor of cutting costs and paid services, however, those websites are still available for existing users.

But those good old sites are still filled with bulks of information and thats why the Archive team has decided to release them to general public as a Torrrent that sizes to 900GB of content.

“Websites and hosting services should not be ‘fads’ any more than forests and cities should be fads – they represent countless hours of writing, of editing, of thinking, of creating. They represent their time, and they represent the thoughts and dreams of people now much older, or gone completely. There’s history here. Real, honest, true history.”

The team has been working for past year on downloading old Geocities Web sites and is in the process of putting together a torrent that will contain the entire Geocities archive.

However, I belive a better thing to do is host it on a  Usenet rather than a public torrent. That will make invaluable information available for decades to come.

More on it when it becomes available. Stay tuned.

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Its easy to create Torrent File for a file available on your local PC. But what about the files you have uploaded to online drives, and sharing sites?

Burnbit is here to kill this pain by letting you generate a torrent for any file hosted online. The inherent advantages being faster speeds and local bandwidth conservation, and will be available 24/7.

P2P networks can now get impressive speed boosts and availability, experienced never before.

Burnbit is a new service aimed at people who are looking for a convenient and efficient way to share files via BitTorrent, without consuming too much bandwidth. After uploading a file to a web-server, Burnbit users can generate a torrent file to share with the public.

Burnbit’s concept isn’t all that new. All the popular BitTorrent clients allow users to add a web-mirror nowadays. However, Burnbit gives additional features, with ease.

First and foremost, its easy to use. You don’t need to be a Geek to use it. BurnBit provides a inbuilt snippet for sharing .torrent file, and webmasters can even track various stats, like the download count and the number of seeds and leechers.

Burnbit’s network is growing. At the time of its launch the site already indexes more than 150,000 files which the site’s crawlers have found while browsing the web. All the files have been automatically categorized, but users can add their own categories when they upload files. All Torrents created are available publicly and is automatically listed on their website.

BurnBit can bring p2p revolution, after all, ease of use increases adoption.

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How successful is uTP in eliminating congestion is still a matter of discussion. According to some owners of private BitTorrent trackers, uTorrent is no longer playing fair. Since uTorrent users are the only ones using the new protocol, uTorrent favors its own kind over other clients. What this means is that that when connecting to other clients, uTorrent users will give preference to other uTorrent users, behavior that some have declared as ‘unfair’.

Simon Morris, BitTorrent’s VP of Product Management admits that the tracker owners have a point, but says that it is very hard to innovate without having to face such technical downsides.

BitTorrent Inc. has opened up the specifications of the uTP protocol and hosted a conference in their San Fransisco offices a few weeks ago to discuss uTP in detail with developers of some of the most popular Bittorrent clients. According to Morris, other popular client developers have shown interest in implementing uTP into their own applications.

Widespread support for the new protocol would of course be the easiest way to get rid of the unfairness allegations, but uTorrent’s major competitor Vuze has no plans to support uTP in the short term.

So far, only a few private trackers have decided to ban uTorrent and there is no word on how long it would continue. So for the meantime moving to other clients like Vuze makes alot more sense till the issue is resolved.

We will let you know of any further updates. We write about Latest in Tech, Google, Do-it-yourself (DIY), iPhone, Gadgets, Open Source, Programming. Grab them all @taranfx on Twitter or below:

Today is an important day in the history of Mininova. From now on, we are limiting Mininova.org to our Content Distribution service. By doing so, we comply with the ruling of the Court of Utrecht of last August. Unfortunately the court ruling leaves us no other option than to take our platform offline, except for the Content Distribution service.

The Lawsuits had been going worldwide to hunt Pirates down.  Mininova had been warned by the Court and seems like they accepted the defeat for the good of the industry.

PirateBay, the leader of all pirates, has been able to survive all attempts for shutdown. PirateBay, proved that Pirates are more powerful than a government can reach-out to. Recently, they stopped their Torrent trackers and encourage the use of DHT which make them more anonymous and almost impossible to stop.

After months of Tiring legal controversy and Lawsuits, which were followed by months of uncertainty about the future of the service, the Pirate Bay’s popular torrent tracker has been shut down for good.

On August 24th, we had  reported “PirateBay is Dead“, after being unpligged by ISP on a special threatening order to ISP that feeds PirateBay. But Piratebay somehos managed to get back up via another ISP proving how Ineffective a Government can be when Pirates go supreme.

Since last 2 months, it had been a cat-mouse game, governments trying to catch PirateBay without success.

But todays shutdown wasn’t a court-ordered takedown or the result of regulatory shuffling, the old Pirate Bay torrent tracker simply became obsolete. As a result, the Pirate Bay is no longer running its old tracker, and has switched over to listing “magnet links,” a method for locating DHT (Distributed Hash Table) or PEX (Peer Exchange) nodes. This finds our tutorial very helpful for enthusiasts who still seek to get the service: 

Download Torrentz without .Torrent file

The Pirate Bay team posted in its blog today,

“DHT (combined with PEX) is highly effective in finding peers without the need for a centralized service. If you run uTorrent you might have noticed in the tracker tab of your torrents that the [Peer Exchange] (PEX) row is often reporting a lot more peers than the trackers you might have for that torrent. These peers all came to you without the use of a central tracker service! This is what we consider to be the future. Faster and more stability for the users because there is no central point to rely upon.”

This might be a step to make PirateBay more anonymous to the Legal authorities. Even if PirateBay does shutdown (which is very difficult, their are already several mirror images of the Torrents, enough to keep the service up for next century. (Why Pirate Bay Won’t R.I.P. Not atleast Till Next Century)

This Ship, just won’t Sink

However, BitTorrent clients like uTorrent, Vuze (formerly Azureus) support magnet links, which, for the purpose of BitTorrent, allow users to start downloads without an actual .torrent file. This could be very helpful when torrent file download is blocked and for all other cases, adds convenience

Once installed, Firefox addon Magnetiser monitors your searches on Torrentz. If it detects that you’re on a torrent’s detail page, you’ll see “Magnetise” in the Firefox status bar. Click on Magnetise to open the torrent in your default BitTorrent client, saves time.

So here is the cause of why you should consider using it, as per author: “Not only does it save time, it also comes in handy when a torrent is no longer available on the external site. It’s also useful for people with ISPs or IT people who block .torrent file downloads.”

The add-on is not available on Firefox’s add-on section just yet, but those who want to try it can download this Zip file. Download and rename to .xpi and drag it into the Firefox browser window. After it’s installed users can add additional trackers, but since it includes the most-used trackers by default, this is not really needed. Soon Mozilla will approve it, and can be downloaded here too.

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The Wi-Fi Alliance announced it has almost completed the standard which could make these a reality: Wi-Fi Direct.

Wi-Fi Direct was known as “Wi-Fi Peer-to-Peer,” and has been termed to in IEEE meetings and consumer forums as a  Bluetooth Killer. Using this new Wireless standard, direct connections between computers, and gadgets: phones, cameras,  keyboards, and future classes of components are established over Wi-Fi instead of another wireless technology governed by a separate standard.

Feeling happy Already? Let us know what you think about this.

After the years of Lawsuits held against the Piracy Giant, today Swedish district court has ordered the Internet service provider(ISP) that used to power PirateBay, to stop servicing The Pirate Bay immediately or the ISP could face heavy fines of 500,000 Kroner ($70,600 US) a day. The Pirate Bay’s ISP had no choice but to comply and disconnect the website from the Internet.

If you are Torrent fan, no doubt you love PirateBay. It’s indeed a sad day in the history of P2P and File-sharing. The most popular BitTorrent tracker in the world appeared to be inaccessible to many in the U.S. on Monday morning but the blog TorrentFreak reported that the site had found a new connection to the Web and there were reports from readers that they were able to log on to the site. Citing a source close to The Pirate Bay, TorrentFreak said that the tracker was still down but would be back up on Tuesday.

The take down of The Pirate Bay comes 3 days earlier than expected, as the site was going offline on August 27 or legalize the site before then, which was unlikely to happen. Black Internet, The Pirate Bay’s largest bandwidth supplier is not the only connection to the Internet the website has, technically the website could go back online until other ISP’s are sent cease and desist orders.

“This is absolutely ridiculous. The Court seems to consider themselves above the Constitution”, said the leader of The Pirate Party, Rich Falkvinge.

As one of the world’s largest torrent trackers goes offline, dozens more will surface in its place. The Pirate Bay had over 25 million unique peers and 3.6 million registered users downloading from its website.

The future of The Pirate Bay is uncertain as the owners will face one year in prison and a fine of $2.4 million US.

A Mysterious Update: A Pirate Bay insider has told sources they have “got a new connection to the net” for their website. The owners of the website were prepared for take down actions such as today’s and have secured another Internet connection for the website, with minimal down time. The Pirate Bay should return by tomorrow morning for almost all users.

The Pirate Bay team added this, “The MAFIAA has spent millions of dollars and endless amounts of time to get this ban in order. Our guess is that they also bribed a bit to get it since it violates so many laws not only in Sweden but also in the EU, not to mention violations against human rights. And what do they have to show for it? 3 hours of partial downtime.”

An executive with Black Internet told Swedish newspaper SvD that the court informed the company that it would either shut off The Pirate Bay or face penalties. The founders of The Pirate Bay were found guilty of copyright violations last April.

The executive told the newspaper that Black Internet is not the only ISP servicing The Pirate Bay but is probably the largest. He said none of the other ISPs were affected by the decision. He added that the company is considering options.

It’s unclear how long Black Internet will be forced to stop service for The Pirate Bay. The company may not be able to resume service until the appeal filed by The Pirate Bay founders is settled, SvD reported.

The news comes on the heels of a victory for the founders of The Pirate Bay.

Sweden’s government run debt-collection agency, commonly referred to as the bailiff, said it could find no attachable assets belonging to three of the four founders of the site. A group of media companies had asked the bailiff to collect the $4 million a court had awarded them after finding the four Pirate Bay founders guilty of copyright violations.

At this point, the future of the site, at least in name, appears to rest with the software maker Global Gaming Factory X, the software maker and operator of Internet cafes. The company said in June it would pay $8 million to acquire The Pirate Bay and the deal is supposed to close on Thursday. But Swedish regulators halted trading in Global Gaming on Friday over questions about the company’s financial readiness to complete the transaction.

At the very least, the launch of a new Pirate Bay, one with authorized film and music copies, is unlikely to happen anytime soon.

But there is a good news for Pirates and Bad news for Authorities -

PirateBay backup exists - Several Terabytes of Torrent tracker data – and It’s not hard to bring it up again. It could be up anytime soon. As per Torrentfreek.com -

The Piratebay moved their servers to the Netherlands and is (almost) fully functional. They changed the title of the BitTorrent tracker to “The Police Bay”.