Eight people face federal charges for running illegal streaming sites

The creators of Jetflicks and iStreamitAll are facing federal charges for running two of the largest illegal streaming sites in the United States. A federal grand jury today charged eight people with conspiring to violate copyright law for their invo...

New Mexico asks BitTorrent what it does to stop child exploitation

New Mexico Attorney General Hector Balderas is worried that technology is enabling child exploitation, and he's putting pressure on the companies creating that technology. His office has sent a letter to BitTorrent asking it to cooperate with an inve...

Deal: Download Torrents via The Web with Streamza

The proliferation of torrenting clients out there has lead to a variety of nasty things happening to users, from viruses and malware infections, to network hacks. Streamza aims to reduce this risk by acting as a remote gateway for torrenting.

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Basically, Streamza’s remote servers do all of the downloading, so your computer is isolated, plus you get the added benefit of faster downloads of large files. There’s no app to install, and you can perform all of your file searches and downloading via Streamza’s website and a standard web browser.

With this special deal in the Technabob Shop, you’ll get lifetime access to Streamza, along with a 100GB monthly quota for streaming files for a one-time payment of $49, with no ongoing subscription fees.

Note: Customer usage intended for downloading content available according to local copyright laws.

Google Safe Browsing makes accessing The Pirate Bay harder

Guess what? There's another speedbump to browsing The Pirate Bay. Rather than internet providers blocking access to the URL (currently thepiratebay.org), certain web browsers are flagging torrent download pages with variations on the following messag...

WebTorrent Desktop Streaming Torrent Client: Peer-to-Play

You may know programmer Feross Aboukhadijeh from his real-time YouTube search page YouTube Instant. But Feross has been working on something much bigger called WebTorrent. It’s a JavaScript torrent client for web browsers that uses WebRTC, an API that lets browsers share data without additional plugins. Ferros recently released an offshoot of WebTorrent called WebTorrent Desktop.

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Both WebTorrent and WebTorrent Desktop let you play video or audio files as they’re being downloaded. You can even seek or fast forward. All you need is a torrent file or a magnet link to start streaming.

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So why would you bother downloading the desktop app when WebTorrent can stream within your browser? First, WebTorrent Desktop has a more user-friendly visual interface. Second, the program can link to peers on both WebRTC clients like WebTorrent as well as Bittorrent clients such as uTorrent. On the other hand, WebTorrent users can connect only with each other.

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WebTorrent Desktop is currently in beta. You can download it on the WebTorrent website, or check out its source code on Feross’ GitHub page. I tried for a couple of minutes and it works fine, although sometimes it won’t start playing the video automatically even if it’s already downloading. The program also has no support for subtitles and has no volume controls as of this writing.

As I mentioned, WebTorrent Desktop is just one of WebTorrent’s applications; its FAQ page has more examples of how people are using it. In fact, Netflix talked to Feross about WebTorrent, and appeared to be interested in using the technology to improve its streaming service.

[via Redmond Pie & TorrentFreak]