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This Wednesday a security blog reported that several rogue sites are in operation which aim to pull in people who were aiming to reach The Pirate Bay, but accidentally entered the URL with typos. While this kind of activity is nothing new, there is a more interesting detail being overlooked. One of the companies behind the scheme is trying to register the Pirate Bay trademark in the United States.


For as long as illicit file-sharing has been around there have been entrepreneurs targeting those out for a free lunch – or a free movie or song. Since many thousands of people new to the downloading game are aware that what they are doing could land them in a little hot water, these individuals are perfect targets for scammers.

Rogue file-sharing sites have been flourishing for years and keeping up with them all is an impossible task. What most of them have in common though is that generally users don’t get what they expected from their visit. In some cases they do get what they want but end up paying, often quite high prices too through shady small print or confusing terms and conditions.

These days more often than not they get what they were looking for but also get something unexpected on top – such as

Earlier this year The Pirate Bay’s co-founders Gottfrid Svartholm and Fredrik Neij were banned from operating the site by a Swedish court. Today, The Pirate Bay’s former spokesperson Peter Sunde was added to this list, and now faces a fine of nearly $70,000 if he does not comply with the decision.


Directly or indirectly, The Pirate Bay and its ‘founders’ have been involved in a dozen court cases in the past years, most notably the trial in which four people associated with the site were sentenced to one year in jail and hefty fines.

Despite this unfavorable verdict, which will be appealed later this year, the site itself remains online aside from some incidental hosting issues. To change this course, Hollywood movie studios have been going after the alleged operators of the site in court, and not without success.

In May this year, the Swedish Court of Appeals confirmed an earlier judgement by the District Court, prohibiting two of the site’s founding members – Gottfrid Svartholm and Fredrik Neij – from operating the site. Failure to comply with the court’s decision will

An anti-piracy group has revealed that when it comes to shutting down torrent sites, it is the undisputed king of the Internet. BREIN, which works on behalf of the Hollywood movie studios, says that not only has it shut down several Usenet indexers and streaming sites already in 2010, but hundreds of torrent sites too. There is torrent site carnage going on in The Netherlands and we’ve failed to report on any of it.

When it comes to reporting on BitTorrent-related news and issues, we try our very best to cover every angle here at TorrentFreak. Admittedly we can’t cover everything and sometimes it’s hard to constantly turn out positive articles which fill our readers with optimism that the Internet isn’t about to taken over by evil corporate entities hell bent on web-wide file-sharing destruction.

Today, however, we have a big apology to make. We’ve let you all down and we’ve let ourselves down too by completely missing one of the biggest developing stories the BitTorrent world has ever known. We’ve totally neglected to cover what can only be

The KDE BitTorrent client KTorrent has become the first to implement the ‘improved’ BitTorrent protocol that was open sourced by BitTorrent Inc. a few days ago. With uTP, KTorrent users should cause less network congestion and interference with other applications. They are also the first to benefit from faster connections to uTorrent users.


In March the uTorrent team released the long-awaited version 2.0 of their popular BitTorrent client which introduced several significant changes.

One of the novelties in the new uTorrent release was uTP, a new and improved implementation of the BitTorrent protocol which is designed to be network friendly. Critics, however, have labeled the new release as unfair, which has resulted in the client being banned from