Sending a few photos to your friends is a snap. We’ve all done it — just drop the pictures in an e-mail and hit send. But what if you want to send a 25 megabyte audio file? Or a package of hi-res photos that tops 80MB? Or a 690MB video file?

Pando is an innovative and free P2P application that lets you send large files to your friends over e-mail. It doesn’t use e-mail for the actual file delivery (that part is handled by a simple, downloadable client) but your friends are notified that you want to share with them over e-mail, and they get a small e-mail attachment they can click on to launch the client and initiate the transfer.

To share a file, you must have the Pando client (a free download for Mac OS X, Windows 2000, XP and Vista) installed. Open the client, drag and drop the file or folders you want to share and enter the e-mail addresses of your friends you want to deliver it to. Pando sends e-mails to your group of friends inviting them to share with a small .pando file attached. They click on the file and (presuming they have the free client as well) Pando launches and the sharing begins.

There are also add-ons for Outlook, Gmail, Yahoo Mail, AOL and Hotmail. Users can send attachments normally or as Pando-ized attachments without leaving their regular e-mail client.

Continue Reading “Send Huge Files to Your Friends with Pando” »

A new open-source application lets you remotely manage your BitTorrent downloads using a web browser.

Clutch, a free download for Mac OS X and Linux, adds a simple web interface to the popular Transmission client. Install all of the bundled software and you can manage your active shares in Transmission from any computer on the internet. Clutch uses a simple Ajax interface to display real-time data, so you’ll be able to control all of your torrent sharing in any modern browser that can handle Ajax. You can set per-torrent preferences, too (see the screenshots below). It’s remarkable — the web interface looks just like Transmission running in your browser. All without Flash or Java, which is nice.

Please note that you’re required to run Transmission (also a free, Mac/Linux-only download) on your home machine to get Clutch’s remote management capabilities. You can’t use Clutch with other BitTorrent clients.

Transmission is an open-source BitTorrent client beloved by Mac users. It uses a daemon for remote control, and Clutch is simply a web-based UI wrapper for the Transmission daemon. Other torrent clients use similar means for remote control, but this is one of the slickest we’ve seen and definitely the best option for Mac users.

Continue Reading “Manage Your BitTorrent Downloads From Anywhere with Clutch” »

The Pirate Bay has rolled out some interesting new features designed to help users discover new music. When you go to a page containing a music torrent, provided TPB can parse out the name of the band, you’ll see a new link to “show detailed artist info,” just below the torrent info box.

Clicking the link will reveal a new panel with the name of the artist, an image, a list of albums (with links to other torrents if they exist), related artists and an embedded Last.fm radio widget which lets you listen to the artist right from the page.

The Pirate Bay’s Brokep tells TorrentFreak that the new features are “a first step towards our goal of getting meta data seriously into the torrent scene.”

Continue Reading “The Pirate Bay Adds Music Discovery Tools” »

The popular BitTorrent tracker Demonoid has been taken offline again and this time it looks like the site is gone for good. A notice on the Demonoid homepage reads: “The CRIA threatened the company renting the servers to us, and because of this it is not possible to keep the site online. Sorry for the inconvenience and thanks for your understanding.”

The CRIA, Canada’s answer to the RIAA, started to go after Demonoid earlier this year, but the site was able to get back online after a few days. However, this time the Canadian anti-piracy group may have forced it off for good. According to some reports, while the site is gone, the tracker appears to still be functioning and the downloading continues.

Of course, if there’s anything we’ve learned from covering BitTorrent shutdowns, it’s that there will be at least five new sites up by the end of the week all vying for Demonoid’s former members. When the site Oink was raided and shut down last month, the Pirate Bay promised to resurrect it and a number of new competitors have sprung up since. We have no doubt the same will happen with Demonoid — whack a mole and ten more pop up. [Update: There are also rumblings on IRC, that Demonoid may be back in the near future. I also updated the Pirate Bay statement to reflect that while they've vowed to bring back Oink, as the commentors below note, they haven't actually done it.]

Continue Reading “Demonoid Torrent Tracker Gone For Good” »

The Pirate Bay (TPB) isn’t happy with the fact that BitTorrent Inc. is no longer making additions to the BitTorrent source code entirely open and so TPB is hard at work on a new file sharing protocol that will address many of the shortcomings of BitTorrent.

The new protocol, which will create files with the extension .p2p, will be backward-compatible with .torrent, and yet, somehow, reportedly will be designed to limit the effectiveness of both spammers and anti-piracy organizations.

So far no real details are available and frankly those goals sound mutually exclusive — how do you simultaneously make something more transparent and harder to track?

Continue Reading “The Pirate Bay Wants To Ditch BitTorrent” »

It’s a bad week to be a site admin, earlier today OiNK, a private BitTorrent site specializing in pre-release material, was shut down and its administrator arrested, which follows on the heels of a similar move against TV-Links and its administrator.

The raids on OiNK were coordinated by Interpol acting on behalf of the UK music industry group, the International Federation of Phonogram and Videogram Producers (IFPI), which is the equivalent of the U.S.-based RIAA and MPAA. The IFPI claims the actions follow a two-year investigation into OiNK.

For the most part this is a standard and ineffectual move by the recording industry, the site may be gone, but the same material will resurface elsewhere in a matter of days and new site will take over OiNK’s status as what the IFPI calls “the world’s biggest source of illegal pre-release.”

However, there is one interesting quote in the IFPI’s press release. Jeremy Banks, head of the IFPI’s Internet Anti-Piracy Unit, says in the press release: “OiNK was central to the illegal distribution of pre-release music online. This was not a case of friends sharing music for pleasure. This was a worldwide network that got hold of music they did not own the rights to and posted it online.” (emphasis mine)

Continue Reading “OiNK Is The Latest BitTorrent Site To Fall” »

Here’s a familiar story: over-regulation in the United States is driving innovation overseas. It happened with cryptography in the ’90s and apparently it’s happening again in the peer-to-peer market.

Thomas Crampton, who writes for the New York Times and others, has posted an interesting interview Kaiser Kuo of Ogilvy, a Chinese PR firm. Kuo talks about up and coming Chinese web services, specifically Blin.cn, which Kuo claims offers streaming downloads at 50 times the speed of BitTorrent and can play DVD quality video in near real time.

It’s true that Kuo’s claims are largely annecdotal, but as Duncan Riley points out on Techcrunch, the regulations and content limitations imposed on P2P networks in the United States by the RIAA and friends aren’t a stumbling block for the same technologies in the Chinese market. In China companies have been free to innovate based solely on technology, without worrying about copyright concerns.

Continue Reading “Chinese P2P Trumps U.S. Technologies” »

TorrentSpy, which recently started blocking U.S. users, has apparently failed to appease the movie studios that filed suit against the site last year. The studios involved in the case still want to see the site’s visitor logs.

According to CNet, a recent filing by the Hollywood studios claims that TorrentSpy “took steps to make the Server Log Data unavailable for the express purpose of avoiding compliance with the (court) order.”

Given that the case’s end goal seems to be shutting down TorrentSpy, you would think that blocking U.S. users would suffice to make the studios happy, but is hasn’t.

Continue Reading “TorrentSpy In More Legal Hot Water” »

After a five day outage that started last week, the popular torrent site/tracker Demonoid.com appears to back online — sort of. Early reports say that the site relaunched with the following message on the front page:

We received a letter from a lawyer representing the CRIA, they were threatening with legal action and we need to start blocking Canadian traffic because of this. Thanks for your understanding, and sorry for any inconvenience.

At the moment, Demonoid trackers appear to be working, but the site is currently down. However, it would seem that the site outage is most likely a technical problem. The front door says “the latest changes to the site are giving us some problems – We’ll be back soon.”

Continue Reading “Demonoid Returns: Canadian Users Banned” »