µTorrent was written with efficiency in mind. Unlike many torrent clients, it does not hog valuable system resources – typically using less than 6MB of memory, allowing you to use the computer as if it weren’t there at all. Additionally, the program itself is contained within a single executable less than 220 KB in size.

uTorrent Changelog:

– 2009-08-27: Version 1.8.4 (build 16286)
- Fix: Fixed negative allocation in RequestChunks() for web seeds
- Fix: Fix startup race condition between network and disk I/O thread
- Fix: installer with UAC
- Fix: Crashes when removing labels
- Fix: selection of labels over 256 characters in length

– 2009-08-12: Version 1.8.4 (build 16150)
- Feature: Enabled magnet bundles.
- Change: run the 64 bit version of explorer when running as a 32 bit app in a 64 bit windows OS.
- Change: disable toolbar offers for Wine installs
- Change: uninstaller is added to all user profiles
- Fix: crash when assigning new label to torrents from RSS
- Change: Incomplete downloads sort after completed downloads if sorting by “Completed On”
- Fix: maintain category list selection on update for some edge cases
- Change: if selected, install start menu and desktop shortcuts to all users instead of only current user
- Fix: buffer overrun vulnerability in create torrent dialog
- Fix: Check at startup for incompatible versions of NVIDIA nForce firewall

Download µTorrent 1.8.4

It looks like torrents isn’t the only business the Pirate Bay is concerning itself with. First there was image hosting and now there’s blogging. BayWords is the site’s foray into the world of blogging services, aiming to provide a service that does not want to restrict “uncomfortable thoughts and ideas” and let people say and link to what they want (as long as it complies with Swedish law).

Apparently one of the Pirate Bay captains, Brokep, had a friend who’s blog was shut down by linking to copyrighted material. This inspired him to offer this alternative, which runs on a customized version of a multi user install of Wordpress. The site plans to continue adding features, updates, and themes, and encourages users to “blog your heart out.”

If you’ve been looking for a place to take your blog, BayWords might offer a nice home, as long as you don’t mind having “myname.baywords.com” as your address. Or maybe you just want to be able to tell people that your blog is hosted by Swedish pirates. Or something like that. Unfortunately, it does look like ads will be implemented eventually to cover expenses, but information on bandwidth or other stats are not available at this point.

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Following a recent court loss, hugely popular file storage service Rapidshare might soon be faced with a tough choice: stop users from uploading/downloading copyrighted music from its servers, or get shut down.

German’s equivalent of the RIAA, GEMA, has won a copyright infringement case against Rapidshare, as the judge ruled that Rapdishare can be held accountable for the actions of its users. It’s the story as old as the internet: if you’re merely providing a hosting service, should you also monitor every file hosted on your servers and prevent any copyrighted files to be uploaded/downloaded? Lately, the answer has been yes: at the very least, if the music/movie industry points to a file and ask you to remove it, you have to comply.

However, although GEMA was quick to declare victory on this one (press release in German), claiming that RapidShare now must take preventive action and check all the files on its servers for copyright infringement, it’s not quite clear what the court has decided yet. We’ve seen pressure to put similar requirements on ISPs, and the general consensus among experts is that this would be either impossible or highly impractical; RapidShare, with the huge amount of material it hosts (they claim 4.5 petabytes of storage), would be no different.

The folks at TorrentFreak spoke to Christian Solmecke, a lawyer at the Cologne Chambers of Lawyers Wilde & Beuger, who thinks that RapidShare’s demise is far from inevitable. “RapidShare will appeal against the decision of the Landgericht (District Court) of Düsseldorf. If they do so, we will have to wait and see what the Oberlandesgericht (Higher District Court) of Düsseldorf (as the Court of Appeal) says,” he says.

RapidShare is fully operational at the time of this writing.

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Hollywood laid much of the blame for illegal movie downloading on college students. Now, it says its math was wrong.

In a 2005 study it commissioned, the Motion Picture Association of America claimed that 44 percent of the industry’s domestic losses came from illegal downloading of movies by college students, who often have access to high-bandwidth networks on campus.

The MPAA has used the study to pressure colleges to take tougher steps to prevent illegal file-sharing and to back legislation currently before the House of Representatives that would force them to do so.

But now the MPAA, which represents the U.S. motion picture industry, has told education groups a “human error” in that survey caused it to get the number wrong. It now blames college students for about 15 percent of revenue loss.

The MPAA says that’s still significant, and justifies a major effort by colleges and universities to crack down on illegal file-sharing. But Mark Luker, vice president of campus IT group Educause, says it doesn’t account for the fact that more than 80 percent of college students live off campus and aren’t necessarily using college networks. He says 3 percent is a more reasonable estimate for the percentage of revenue that might be at stake on campus networks.

“The 44 percent figure was used to show that if college campuses could somehow solve this problem on this campus, then it would make a tremendous difference in the business of the motion picture industry,” Luker said. The new figures prove “any solution on campus will have only a small impact on the industry itself.”

The original report, by research firm LEK, claims the U.S. motion picture industry lost $6.1 billion to piracy worldwide, with most of the losses overseas. It identified the typical movie pirate as a male aged 16-24. MPAA said in a statement that no errors had been found in the study besides the percentage of revenue losses that could be attributed to college students, but that it would hire a third party to validate the numbers.

“We take this error very seriously and have taken strong and immediate action to both investigate the root cause of this problem as well as substantiate the accuracy of the latest report,” the group said in a statement.

Terry Hartle, vice president of the American Council on Education, which represents higher education in Washington, said the mistakes showed the entertainment industry has unfairly targeted college campuses.

“Illegal peer-to-peer file-sharing is a society-wide problem. Some of it occurs at college s and universities but it is a small portion of the total,” he said, adding colleges will continue to take the problem seriously, but more regulation isn’t necessary.

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Popular BitTorrent search engine TorrentSpy lost a copyright case brought against it in a US cought by the Motion Picture Association of America by default for destroying evidence, reports the BBC. The site’s operator’s apparently ignored an order to keep server logs of the IP addresses of people who facilitated the trading of files via the site.

“They have engaged in widespread and systematic efforts to destroy evidence and have provided false testimony under oath in a effort to hide evidence of such destruction,” wrote Judge Florence-Marie Cooper in her decision.

For their part, the defendants, site operators Justin Bunnell, Forrest Parker, Wes Parker and Valence Media, put forward multiple arguments for why they should not hand over server logs. Initially, they argued that because their servers were located in the Netherlands they were under the jurisdiction of Dutch law and were protected by a US court order to turn them over.

Later they told the judge that they could not comply with an order to turn over certain server logs because it was temporary information and was not able to be retained. The lawyer for the defendants said that they were reluctant to turn over records of IP addresses to protect the privacy of their users.

The BBC reports that TorrentSpy is expected to appeal. The MPAA was predictably pleased by the ruling, calling TorrentSpy a “one-stop shop for copyright infringement” in a statement.

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Earlier this month we wrote about the University of Oregon and Oregon Attorney General’s resistance to the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) legal demands for the names of students alleged to have illegally downloaded free music.
Now the Oregon AG has taken a step further, taking the offensive and filing legal papers demanding disclosure of the RIAA’s investigative methods. The filing alleges that the RIAA may have spied on students and illegally obtained their Social Security numbers and other personal information.

An RIAA spokesperson responded with indignation, accusing the University of protecting a wave of piracy. The Association now says that student pirates need to be stopped for their own good, lest they accidentally put files like their bank records and tax info into the folders they share on P2P services.

It’s good to know there’s some one, the Oregon Attorney General, taking an aggressive stand against such stupidity. While some record companies are changing their tune about suing customers, it’s hard to imagine what else the attack dogs at the RIAA would do if not things like this. I imagine they feel the same way when they show up for work each day. Readers interested in some smart discussion on the legal move should check out posts and their comments by Mike Masnick at TechDirt and New York City lawyers Ty Rogers and Ray Beckerman at their blog Recording Industry vs. The People.

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Reports from the Capitol v Thomas case are starting to come in with the jury awarding $220,000 to the record companies. There is no mention of an appeal yet, but one would assume this is inevitable.

An interesting fact that came up in the trial was that Thomas was a very large consumer of legal music. This backs up what has been said for years, that the recording industry is suing their biggest customers. Expecting the recording industry to get their heads out of the sand at this point is a pipe dream.

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In a blog on its Web site, Pirate Bay said the complaint alleges infrastructural damage, denial of service attacks, hacking and spamming on a commercial level.

The blog said the complaint named the Swedish or Nordic subsidiaries of Twentieth Century Fox, EMI Music, Universal Music Group, Universal Pictures, Paramount Home Entertainment, Atari (ATAR.O: Quote, Profile, Research), Activision (ATVI.O: Quote, Profile, Research), Ubisoft (UBIP.PA: Quote, Profile, Research), Sony BMG Music Entertainment and Sony Pictures Home Entertainment.

Pirate Bay spokesman Peter Sunde said the complaint, filed on Friday, stemmed from e-mails released to the public by hackers after an attack on U.S. firm MediaDefender, an online corporate security company.

He said Pirate Bay’s investigation of these e-mails showed the entertainment companies had hired MediaDefender to spam file-sharing sites, including Pirate Bay, with fake downloads.

“So we are actually filing the complaint against them as MediaDefender has no Swedish company structure. But these other companies are represented in Sweden,” Sunde said.

So, if true, regardless of where one stands on the Pirate Bay web site, should companies be able to acquire hired guns to perform illegal acts against another company or entity? Should these companies be able to take the law into their own hands? Are they powerful enough that governments will turn a blind eye?

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Most of the features present in other BitTorrent clients are present in µTorrent, including bandwidth prioritization, scheduling, RSS auto-downloading and Mainline DHT (compatible with BitComet). Additionally, µTorrent supports the Protocol Encryption joint specification (compatible with Azureus 2.4.0.0 and above, BitComet 0.63 and above) and peer exchange.

This release comes quickly on the heels of the 1.73 release due to a quick fix.

-Fix: DHT crash when Mainline clients were present

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If you’ve followed our beginner and intermediate guides but your BitTorrent download speeds are still less than stellar, there’s a chance your ISP may be throttling your BitTorrent traffic. The Wired How To Wiki details several ways to get around ISP traffic shaping, from encrypting your traffic and changing your default port number to reducing or hiding your transfers. Following these methods won’t guarantee faster traffic (in fact, encryption could end up slowing you down), but if you think your ISP is behind your disappointing speeds, it won’t hurt to try.

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