zButterfly torrent client focuses on current movie releases originally appeared on Download Squad on Fri, 19 Nov 2010 15:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

The folks behind Pioneer One have been busy since the show's pilot release back in June, and it seems as though their hard work is beginning to pay off. The pilot was a campy success, having won Best Drama Pilot at the New York Television Festival -- but it won instant pseudo-historical status as well. It was the first science fiction drama series to be produced entirely off of donation-funding and released freely through torrent networks. Hundreds of thousands of views and five months later, the made-for-torrent drama series is set to move forward with the release of three new episodes, starting as early as mid-December.

Viewers can also expect to see a revised re-release of the pilot, in which one of the main roles has been recast. The upcoming episodes will comprise about half the expected first season -- of a projected four-season offering should the show's success continue. On that note, it's important to remember that Pioneer One, along with other free P2P community offerings like it, are only made possible by donations. So don't be afraid to donate if you like it, and be sure to catch the teaser trailer for the upcoming episodes after the break.

Continue reading Torrent-loving sci-fi drama Pioneer One landing soon with new episodes

Torrent-loving sci-fi drama Pioneer One landing soon with new episodes originally appeared on Download Squad on Tue, 16 Nov 2010 10:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

uTorrent 2.2 arrives with apps support, privacy features originally appeared on Download Squad on Wed, 10 Nov 2010 15:45:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

• The Gnutella network did not get shut down -- the actual songs you were downloading came from the Gnutella network, not directly from LimeWire. LimeWire merely found the songs on the network and then downloaded them.
• LimeWire is open source software -- this means any developer with the know-how could download the LimeWire program code and modify it and release his or her own version of LimeWire.

Continue reading Three LimeWire alternatives for easy peer-to-peer downloading

Three LimeWire alternatives for easy peer-to-peer downloading originally appeared on Download Squad on Mon, 01 Nov 2010 10:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Continue reading FrostWire for Android brings quick, slick P2P file sharing to your phone

FrostWire for Android brings quick, slick P2P file sharing to your phone originally appeared on Download Squad on Mon, 01 Nov 2010 09:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Breaking: LimeWire P2P network shut down by RIAA originally appeared on Download Squad on Tue, 26 Oct 2010 18:31:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Burnbit turns just about any download into a torrent originally appeared on Download Squad on Mon, 13 Sep 2010 18:18:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

BitTorrent Mainline 7.1 now has uTorrent's apps originally appeared on Download Squad on Thu, 09 Sep 2010 14:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Pirate Bay goes down after police raids in 14 European countries originally appeared on Download Squad on Tue, 07 Sep 2010 12:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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More than 40% Valve's Steam user base are also avid users of BitTorrent originally appeared on Download Squad on Tue, 24 Aug 2010 10:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Take.fm: the movie torrent indexer that's a little bit Netflix, a little bit PirateBay originally appeared on Download Squad on Tue, 10 Aug 2010 08:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Image via TorrentFreak (click image for full size).

In an ironic twist, The USCG seems to have been caught quite red-handed in an attempt to lazily steal code from a competitor's website. They didn't just take bits and pieces, either; the site they had "built" was a nearly complete reproduction of the original. To further deepen the irony of the incident, it was the crew at TorrentFreak who called them out on their shenanigans by posting screenshots of both sites and their source code.

You may remember the USCG for their mass-litigation back in May of this year over infringement of The Hurt Locker -- in which they began suing thousands of file-sharers on behalf of the film's makers.

After grabbing their screenshots, and no doubt having a good laugh at the USCG's expense, TorrentFreak contacted the Copyright Enforcement Group, to let them know that their settlements site had been ripped off by the competition. The CEG promptly replied that they had never authorized anyone to use their site's code, and that the USCG would be receiving a cease and desist letter from them. It didn't take long for the doppelganger-site to begin a quick metamorphosis into a completely different, bare-bones replacement page. Needless to say, the entire ordeal is pretty embarrassing for the USCG.

U.S. Copyright Group caught stealing competitor's code originally appeared on Download Squad on Sat, 31 Jul 2010 13:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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uTorrent 3.0 features live streaming video and uTorrent Web, works with iPad and Android originally appeared on Download Squad on Fri, 30 Jul 2010 17:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

There's no exploitation in play here, just the wholesale harvesting and presentation of superficial data for roughly one-fifth of Facebook's half-billion strong user-base.

Ron Bowes, of Skull Security, posted the torrent to the Pirate Bay after realizing that his pet project had become something that others might be interested in. He had basically crawled the Facebook directory, and indexed the results. What he got was a list 171 million entries long, representing 100 million unique users, their names, and their Facebook URLs. He packaged it all into a database and posted the 2.8GB file as a torrent.

It's important to note that there isn't any other information in the database. Shortly after word got out about the torrent, the BBC posted a story about it, and quoted a random user in the comments section as stating that it was "awesome and a little terrifying." Honestly, the only thing terrifying about any of this is the thought of going through the Facebook directory. Seriously, I looked, and there are so many people with my name that I would never find myself.

Bowes has stated that, though there isn't any real information aside from names and a URLs in the database, any number of contact details may be present on a user's Facebook page -- it all depends on how that user has his privacy settings set. Basically, with this database in hand, a potentially malicious user could sift through all the names and come across the user he was looking for, see that user's Facebook landing-page (the little page with their name, picture, and a few friends) -- and that's about it.

But regardless of the harmless nature of the database, this torrent has become a big deal, because simply being in the cavernous Facebook directory is an option in itself. Now that there's a torrent containing the most basic contact information for 100 million users, that particular privacy setting has become null for the users on that list.

So, in the end, this is just one more reminder for everybody on Facebook to check their privacy settings.

Torrented database contains public data for 100 million Facebook users originally appeared on Download Squad on Wed, 28 Jul 2010 22:42:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Judge rules that circumventing DRM is not illegal originally appeared on Download Squad on Mon, 26 Jul 2010 08:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

From the putting-a-smile-on-your-newly-awoken-face department...

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RIAA forks out $64 million to catch music pirates, recovers just $1.3 million in 3 years originally appeared on Download Squad on Wed, 14 Jul 2010 08:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The Pirate Bay hacked, user email and IP addresses in the hands of hairy Argentinians originally appeared on Download Squad on Thu, 08 Jul 2010 07:45:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

You may remember that, back in May of this year, the Swedish Pirate Party became the new ISP of the Pirate Bay. That alone was not only surprising, but proved to be politically spectacular in the rawest sense of the word. Now the Pirate Party wants to take their stand even further, and plans to use a section of the Swedish Constitution to allow them to host the seemingly indefatigable TPB from inside Parliament.

The Party announced their plan in a blog post at their official site on Friday. They state that while there shouldn't be a need for such drastic action, that hosting the torrent site from within the walls of Swedish Parliament would carry "an important symbolic value." There's not much doubt that they're right about symbolism there.

The Party references a section of the Swedish Constitution that protects MP's from prosecution if they're acting in accordance with their political mandate. In this case, hosting the Pirate Bay would not only fall under that wide umbrella, but would also provide a measure of immunity that would be much harder to crack than ever before.

Whether or not the Party will be able to pull this off hinges on the coming September elections, which as TorrentFreak points out, currently shows a 4% gap that needs to be filled for the party to get a seat. Given their success last year in winning a seat in the EU Parliament, I'd say they've got a decent chance.

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Swedish Pirate Party intent on running the Pirate Bay from Parliament originally appeared on Download Squad on Sat, 03 Jul 2010 10:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

uTorrent 1.0 for Mac gets a stable release originally appeared on Download Squad on Mon, 28 Jun 2010 15:35:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Google beats Viacom in YouTube court case, BitTorrent users win originally appeared on Download Squad on Thu, 24 Jun 2010 16:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.