TerraMaster, a professional brand that specializes in providing innovative storage products, including network attached storage (NAS)devices, announces the availability of qBittorrent and Transmission applications to select TerraMaster devices. Both qBittorrent and Tranmission are popular and easy to use free BitTorrent clients. qBittorrent is a free and reliable P2P BitTorrent and an open-source software alternative to major BT clients. On the other hand, Transmission BT is also an open-source, volunteer-based BT client and doesn't play games with its users to make money. Both HD BT download apps are now added to the TerraMaster TOS system application for TNAS users. The apps allow your TNAS to become a remote offline download tool.

qBittorrent is a cross-platform, lightweight, feature-rich, open-sourcetorrent client. It runs and provides similar features across all major platforms which include Windows, macOS, OS/2, Linux, and FreeBSD. qBittorrent is based on the Qt toolkit and libtorrent-rasterbar library.

Buffalo Americas, a leading provider of USB storage, network attached storage (NAS) and networking solutions, announces the availability of the LinkStation 520DN, a network attached storage device made specifically for the home. The LS520DN is a customizable NAS solution designed to serve as the hub of consumers' connected homes by making it easier to store, share, and secure all digital data for the modern family.

"We are excited to introduce the Buffalo LS520DN as a way for consumers to organize and protect their digital life," said Arthur Traub, Director of Strategic Accounts at Buffalo Americas. "This new product allows home users to easily store, organize, access, stream and protect all their digital assets. We provide NAS-grade disk drives for always-on performance in the LS520DN to ensure ease of use and reliability. And, as with all our Buffalo products, if a customer needs any help, they simply need to contact our 24/7 US-based customer support team."

The N2310, the latest entry level home and small office NAS from Thecus, is now available in North America. The N2310 provides fast, safe and reliable file storage for homes and small offices, all while consuming only 5W.

The N2310 is packed with useful features. Support for RAID storage (0, 1, and JBOD) offers speed and reliability. Web-based file access allows users to manage and access their files from anywhere, even another country. There's also a built-in FTP server to distribute and share files. The BitTorrent client lets the N2310 handle downloads by itself, saving power and freeing up resources on PCs. There's also Plex Media support, allowing users to manage and stream their media to devices such as the Xbox 360, as well as mobile devices.

Akitio introduced its newest desktop storage device, the Cloud Hybrid. The device can function as network-attached storage (NAS) over gigabit Ethernet, and disk-attached storage (DAS) over USB 3.0. It holds a single 3.5-inch hard drive, with SATA 3 Gb/s interface, up to 3 TB unformatted capacities are supported, as are volumes bigger than 2 TB in capacity. The device supports Microsoft exFAT file-system.

Its maker vaguely mentions that the device is driven by a "300 MHz CPU", with 32 MB DDR RAM, and 2 MB flash ROM. As a DAS, the device likely mounts its hard drive as a mass-storage device. As a NAS, however, most modern features are supported, including UPnP-AV, DLNA, iTunes music server, FTP, Samba, etc. Features such as BitTorrent and WebDAV server make for interesting additions for a device of its class, as is remote access over the internet, via a web-portal. While USB 3.0 (mass storage) posses minimal interface bottlenecks, Akitio assures 60 MB/s transfer-rates over SMB (in a GbE network). It is priced at US $99.

Famous and very popular media search engine, The Pirate Bay, perpetually in the crosshairs of Big Media to shut it down, is to shift away from torrent files from next month and replace them with Distributed Hash Table (DHT) and Peer Exchange (PEX) technology reports ExtremeTech. They have actually been using these for quite a while now, as this is the technology underlying their Magnet links which have appeared next to the torrent links as an alternative way to download. They have done this, because torrent files are stored centrally on a web server, which makes them vulnerable to aggressive rights holders who want to take them down, while Magnet links are decentralized "trackerless", removing this vulnerability. Also, at the moment, it's impossible for anti-piracy outfits to tell how many files a user is sharing when using Magnet links, or what they are. From next month therefore, only Magnet links will be available. Note that Magnet links are compatible with various anonymizing services, for anonymous downloading, but there can be a significant performance impact on those services. In fact, TPB has been using Magnet links with torrents for some now too, but just did so quietly, without telling anyone.

Popular BitTorrent clients such as uTorrent already use Magnet links as easily as torrent files, so there won't be much difference to the user experience. The main difference, is that they can take a bit longer to get going, but the final download speed isn't any less, due to the cascading exponential pyramid nature of incoming peer connections guaranteed to max out any internet connection, when there are enough peers.

BitTorrent, a leading peer-based technology company, today announced that the company's flagship BitTorrent Mainline and µTorrent software clients have grown to over 150 million monthly active users worldwide.

In December 2011, the classic BitTorrent Mainline client boasted over 20 million users, while the legendary tiny-but-mighty µTorrent client grew to over 132 million users. The numbers represent an aggregate count of both software clients running on Windows, Mac, Android and Linux platforms.

The company also announced four new strategic "BitTorrent Certified" device partnerships at CES in Las Vegas including TVs, set-top boxes, media adapters, and Blu-ray players. BitTorrent Certified devices are designed to enable consumers to discover, play, share and move all types of personal media, regardless of size, type or format, so that they can play high-quality content in their living rooms. New certification partners include:

Thecus is well known in the market for always putting innovative hardware and state of the art technology on the table for a fair price in order to guarantee our customers the best value. Thecus's new N4100EVO NAS offer a broad range of advanced features and differentiate themselves with low-energy hardware for those who place strong value on cutting down their electricity costs and carbon footprint. This cost-effective hardware is the first four-bay NAS on the market to feature the speedy and efficient dual-core Cavium CPU to get the quick transfer speeds necessary for large backups and heavy use. The N4100EVO is designed to change the way you run your office, at home or at work.

Well, it looks like the freemium model of selling software is working quite well in the industry, as Bram Cohen's very popular BitTorrent application, uTorrent, has just adopted this model. Known for being fast, efficient and light on system resources, it has now gained a few pounds, sorry features in version 3, some of which are available only for a subscription of $24.95 per year. These include things like an antivirus scanner powered by BitDefender, a media player and integrated support for converting popular video file types such as MPEG4, H.264, Theora, and VP8, as well as MP3, AAC and AC-3 audio files. The media player is interesting, in that it allows playback of videos that are still downloading. Note that this feature is also available in the free version.

For those that still want to hang on to the lean and mean free version, it's still available and isn't going away any time soon. Both versions can be compared here. Perhaps it's ironic that this legal application which is often used for software "piracy" can now itself be pirated… Cohen's take on this will be interesting.

QNAP Systems, Inc., a leading manufacturer of world class NAS servers announced today 4 new QPKG add-on applications and 3 updates to the original QPKGs for its NAS customers. These QPKGs give users a versatile NAS covering their need from web applications such as Gallery, to media servers and download utilities consisting of PS3 Media Server, pyLoad, and Transmission. These applications improve a QNAP NAS by enabling it not only as a pure storage server, but also a powerful yet energy-efficient downloading machine, multimedia sharing center to game consoles with transcoding capability, IP TV streaming, online photo sharing server, and an all purposed web server with advanced manageability.

QNAP's QPKG applications are free to download and convenient for end users to install. "The QPKG platform is a great feature for users to explore unlimited possibilities of what a QNAP NAS is capable of," said James Wu, Product Manager of QNAP. "With over 20 QPKG apps now available to help create and manage databases, run websites, implement ecommerce, enjoy multimedia files, and much more". QNAP strives to stay ahead of consumer needs by providing innovated add-ons to make today's data-heavy society a more user friendly world.

Patriot Memory, a global pioneer in high-performance memory, NAND flash, storage and enthusiast computer products, today debuts the Javelin Media Server - the perfect central hub for all your digital media storage needs. The Patriot Memory Javelin delivers form and function with stylish aesthetics and world-class network connectivity.

Equipped with four drive bays that support standard 3.5-inch drives, the Patriot Memory Javelin is a media server that is customizable to your storage requirements -- up to 12TB of storage capacity is achievable when equipped with four 3TB SATA or SAS drives. The Patriot Javelin supports RAID levels 0, 1, 5, 10 and a hot-spare drive for enhanced storage efficiency whether performance or redundancy is needed.

Patriot Memory, a global pioneer in high-performance memory, NAND flash and computer technology, today announced the release of their new Valkyrie two-bay network attached storage device targeted for SOHO and 'prosumer' users.

In today's multi-media world, the need to have large storage capacity has quickly changed from being a luxury to being a necessity. Network Attached Storage (NAS) is designed to meet this need, and has become the local storage solution for home networks and small businesses. NAS has become the central digital media and file 'hub' for your entire network. Rather than supporting just one computer, now you can support multiple digital devices within the home as well as share files across the internet.

QNAP Systems, Inc., a leading manufacturer of world class NAS servers, NVR Video Surveillance Systems, and Network-based Video Players today expanded their Turbo NAS lineup with the addition of the TS-110 desktop NAS server for home and SOHO users. The TS-110 supports a single 3.5" SATA hard drives with up to 2TB of total capacity and features a Marvell 800MHz CPU and 256MB DDRII memory which provides solid performance with low power consumption. The TS-110 can be configured with QNAP's exclusive Q-RAID 1 for high data redundancy. The TS-110 also supports advanced features such as iSCSI Target service with Thin Provisioning and a Gigabit LAN port and policy based IP blocking, S.M.A.R.T hard disk health monitoring, email and SMS notifications if there are problems with the unit, features generally found on much higher end NAS servers. The TS-110 also features 3 USB ports (with unique auto-copy feature on the front port) for expanding the storage capacity, printer sharing, or backing up the TS-110. The TS-110 also features an e-SATA port.

The TS-110 is a smart choice for installation in home or home-based business as it's fully compatible with Windows, Macintosh, Linux, and UNIX networks and features a built-in UPnP/ DLNA media server (with TwonkyMedia enabled) supporting a wide range of DLNA media players such as Sony PS3 and Microsoft Xbox 360 gaming consoles. By installing the DLNA/ UPnP application on your iPhone or iPod touch, users can access the TS-110 on the home network and play videos, music, and photos from the server over the network. In addition, the high-speed PC-less Download Station with the unique QGet utility enables users to manage the BT/ FTP/ HTTP download tasks (fully BitTorrent compatible) remotely over the local network or the Internet. The TS-110 can perform centralized backups of all computers attached to the network to protect valuable paid downloaded music & video content, digital pictures, and documents.

LaCie announced today the availability of two new high capacity Network Attached Storage (NAS) solutions - Big Disk Network and d2 Network. These professional file servers are optimized for users to instantly store, share, and back up files, from any PC or Mac on a wired or wireless network. LaCie's new NAS solutions deliver high-performance and professional-class reliability, in an easy-to-use network solution for the home or small office.

The d2 Network supports up to 1.5TB capacity, while the Big Disk Network combines two drives in a RAID 0 setting, for up to 3TBs of storage. Both NAS solutions are perfect for advanced users or small to medium sized offices that want to develop workgroup environments for up to 50 users (15 at one time). Network administrators can choose from various security levels for user profiles, groups, and public or guest access. Users can connect an external USB drive to increase security through scheduled backups, or even expand capacity. The d2 Network also includes an eSATA connection for storage expansion.

The Pirate Bay, one of the largest BitTorrent tracker websites, that allows peer-to-peer file sharing and is infamous to host torrent links to copyrighted content on users' computers, is in legal soup vide a verdict from a Swedish Court of law. The Court has convicted four men responsible for running the website after its founding anti-copyright group, Piratebyran gave up control. The four men, Frederik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, Carl Lundstrom and Peter Sunde were found guilty of multiple counts of copyright infringement, and sentenced to one year's imprisonment. A fine of around US $3.5 million was further issued, with each of the four having to pay around $905,000.

The verdict comes as a victory for record companies, that welcome it, despite the fine imposed not being anywhere close to the $17.5 million + damages, several groups of record companies were pushing for. Speaking in a video address hosted on the website, Peter Sunde described the verdict as "bizarre". "It's so bizarre that we were convicted at all and it's even more bizarre that we were [convicted] as a team. The court said we were organized. I can't get Gottfrid out of bed in the morning. If you're going to convict us, convict us of disorganized crime" he said. Speaking about the fine, he said "We can't pay and we wouldn't pay. Even if I had the money I would rather burn everything I owned, and I wouldn't even give them the ashes."

TorrentFreak summed up the gist of this story in a short paragraph.

Several BitTorrent developers have joined forces to propose a new protocol extension with the ability to bypass the BitTorrent interfering techniques used by Comcast and other ISPs. This new form of encryption will be implemented in BitTorrent clients including uTorrent, so Comcast subscribers are free to share again.

Basically, ISPs like Comcast block piracy by banning the extensions BitTorrent trackers use. BitTorrent clients are currently adapting to a new file extension, so that Comcast subscribers are once again free to download and share whatever they please freely. Please check the source link for a more detailed description of how the crack worked. TechPowerUp! does not condone piracy.

Despite the apparent popularity of getting the latest Windows and Photoshop versions off of BitTorrent, a new pie chart based on download statistics from torrent tracker Mininova shows that people are downloading far more than just that. Out of all the .torrent downloads that happened in the past two year, caught by Mininova, roughly half of them were television shows. The rest of the downloads break into what users would expect: games, movies, software, and "other". For an intrepid analysis of what exactly all this means, please follow the source link. Otherwise, do enjoy the pie graph.

No doubt this news will be met with ferocious attacks from the generally public, but it looks like internet users in the UK could soon see themselves banned from the internet for illegal film and music downloads if new government proposals are approved. Internet service providers will be legally required to enforce a "three-strikes" system - strike one means an email from the ISP, strike two means a suspension and strike three a ban. Under the proposals ISPs would be prosecuted for failing to enforce the new rules and suspected customers details could be made available to the courts. The government is yet to decide whether information on offenders will be shared between ISPs, but if so it could make it much more difficult to find a new ISP once you have been banned. This move comes as a result of six million UK broadband users downloading files illegally each year, with the proposals being officially unveiled next week.

The Pirate Bay said Friday that it was working on bringing back OiNK, a BitTorrent tracker that featured music files from "hundreds of thousands" of music albums. OiNK was taken down on October 23 by police in the Netherlands and Britain in conjunction with the IFPI and BPI, and a message on the site's front page indicates that an investigation was ongoing into the "identities and activities" of its users. However, the BitTorrent community has chosen to fight back, opening another site called BOiNK which is expected to be live within the next several days. The original owners of OiNK are not involved, nor are any other BitTorrent sites.

The most important thing about BOiNK is perhaps the message it sends out to the IFPI and the BPI: It shows that that if you stop one tracker, others will pop up days after,

Ernesto wrote for TorrentFreak. Read the full story here.

BitTorrent recently presented the general availability of the BitTorrent Delivery Network Accelerator (DNA) service. BitTorrent DNA is a peer-accelerated content delivery service that provides consumers faster, more reliable, more efficient access to rich content through downloads or streams. Brightcove, an Internet TV platform leader, will be the first to integrate BitTorrent DNA to accelerate the delivery of instant-on, broadcast-quality streaming video to their customers.

A while ago the all known to us BitTorrent P2P company bought utorrent a free, light and user friendly P2P program company. Today we have the official announcement of BitTorrent 6.0 Beta their first joint effort to create what is believed to be the best P2P program.

The new BitTorrent 6.0 Beta brings together BitTorrent's proven expertise in networking protocols with µTorrent's efficient implementation and compelling UI to create a better BitTorrent client. As we continue to develop this new client, we'll be focused on innovative ways to simplify and improve the BitTorrent user experience.
The new BitTorrent 6.0 Beta client features:

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