Announcing the Torrent Compact and Torrent Nano - two space-efficient PC cases devoted entirely to providing the highest possible air cooling performance of their respective form factors. Much like the base model Torrent, the attention to detail is reflected in everything from the choice of components to the streamlined design inside and out, creating two cases that really reach new heights in the pursuit of ultimate airflow for compact and nano builds.

When it comes to technical innovations, the main standouts include an inspiring layout, an open front grille and two 180 x 38 mm Dynamic PWM / Prisma ARGB PWM fans custom-made to achieve maximum air cooling while maintaining controlled noise levels. Simply put, the new models are powerhouses that let you enjoy airflow to a degree normally associated with larger cases, making Torrent an excellent choice for air cooling aficionados looking for a compact or nano case.

Editor's note: Our review for the Fractal Design for the Torrent Compact & Torrent Nano can be found here.

[Editor's note: We have posted a review of Fractal Design Torrent Black RGB TG Light Tint Case here.]

The Torrent is a brand new high-performance PC case devoted entirely to providing premium airflow straight out of the box. The attention to detail is reflected in everything from the choice of components to the streamlined design inside and out, and the result is a case that goes further than any previous Fractal case in the pursuit of ultimate airflow.

When it comes to technical innovations, the main standouts include a brand-new component layout, the open front grille and two 180 x 38 mm Dynamic PWM or Prisma RGB fans custom-made to achieve maximum air cooling while maintaining controlled noise levels. The Torrent ships with another three 140 mm fans (Dynamic or Prisma for RGB) pre-installed for a total of five. (Fun fact: if you're a really big fan of airflow, you can get an additional pair of 180 mm Dynamic/Prisma fans separately and replace the 140 mms for a total of four massive 180 mm fans.)

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."

ASUSTOR Inc., a leading innovator and provider of network storage solutions, announced today that it has added a series of Usenet download and media streaming tools to its App Central library. These new Apps include SABnzbdplus, Sick Beard, CouchPotato, Headphones, and Subsonic. All ASUSTOR users are welcome to try out these new Apps as they are available free of charge from ASUSTOR's App Central.

As the world's first NAS devices designed around the use of Apps, the ASUSTOR NAS App Central library contains a rich variety of Apps that users can download and enjoy. Presently, App Central contains over 90 different Apps that users can install to add functionality to their NAS devices. App categories include business, project collaboration, website construction and digital home entertainment.

Japan passed a new legislation that could imprison illegal downloaders for two years. The country is combating illegal downloads as its local entertainment industry struggles. Recording Industry Association of Japan (RIAA's counterpart from across the Pacific) and its affiliates estimate Illegal downloads outnumbering legal downloads 10:1, with a 16% decline in legal downloads just last year.

The new law makes Japan the toughest state against piracy. Before it, Japanese laws, like most others', targeted uploaders of copyrighted content/software with up to 10 years in prison, and 10 million JPY (US $128,300) in fines. The new law allows the police to penalize mere downloaders with a 2-year jail term and 2 million JPY ($25,680) in fines.

The British High Court has ruled that Sky, Everything Everywhere, TalkTalk, O2 and Virgin Media, nearly every UK-based ISP, must block access to The Pirate Bay. The move will strip access by internet users in the UK, to the notorious bit-torrent tracker. The Pirate Bay responded, saying that they are not concerned with yet another court-ordered blockade, and pointed out that there are just too many ways to circumvent such censorship. British ISPs responded, saying that they will comply with the ruling.

ORICO unveiled an interesting portable hard drive enclosure, which doubles up as a wireless NAS and internet access point. Called the WiDrive (model: WDX-8 625), the device can enclose one 2.5-inch SATA HDD/SSD, and share its contents over a secure wireless network (802.11 b/g/n). As an added value, it can also serve as a wireless internet access point, if an upstream wired internet connection is plugged into its 10/100 Mbps Ethernet port. As a NAS, it packs most modern features, including SAMBA, FTP, Bit Torrent, iTunes server and Media Center. Its storage can be expanded by a USB 2.0 port (mass storage device). The enclosure draws power from an external AC adapter. ORICO plans to charge 899 RMB (US $142) for the WiDrive.

The Pirate Bay completed a huge transition from being a host of .torrent files to a host for magnet:// links. The people behind the site believe the move was essential to make Pirate Bay "future proof". For instance, when replaced with magnet:// links, the entire site can be squeezed into a 90 MB "portable site" archive, which can be used to play chicken with the authorities. "It (the transition) shouldn't make much of a difference for the average user. At most it will take a few more seconds before a torrent shows the size and files," The Pirate Bay team told TorrentFreak today. "Just click the red button instead of the green one and all will be fine," it added. Magnet links, instead of sites hosting .torrent files, make the bit-torrent system vastly more decentralized. Those with the looming question of "Magnets...how do they work?" can refer to this article by Wikipedia.

This is arguably every copyright enforcement group's worst nightmare, The Pirate Bay, which calls itself "the most resilient bit-torrent site in the galaxy", unveiled what is known as its "portable version", meaning, when taken down by an enforcement agency, any person, in any part of the world can restore the site, because it now weighs just 90 megabytes. That's right, the 90 MB copy of the site itself contains all its HTML, script and static images, and Magnet Links to over 1,643,194 torrents spread across all its categories.

A little earlier this year, The Pirate Bay transitioned from being a host for .torrent files to a host for magnet:// links. This transition means that each torrent consisted of a typically 50 KB .torrent file, is now reduced to a <1 KB Magnet link in the resource. The copy of the site itself is there for anyone to copy. Enforcement agencies' worst nightmare indeed weighs just 90 MB.

Sweden's Supreme Court decided not to grant leave to appeal in the long-running Pirate Bay criminal trial. This translates to the earlier judgement of the Swedish Court of Appeal being upheld. In November 2010, the lower court had found four of the founders of The Pirate Bay, Peter Sunde, Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm, and Carl Lundström, guilty of criminal copyright infringement. Although Fredrik Neij, Peter Sunde and Carl Lundström all had their prison sentences decreased from the levels ordered at their original 2009 trial, they were ordered to pay increased damages amounting to millions of dollars to the plaintiffs in the entertainment industry.

Peter Sunde, AKA Brokep, faces 8 months in prison. Fredrik Neij, AKA TiAMO, faces 10 months. Businessman Carl Lundström has the lightest sentence of 4 months. All will have to pay their share of a combined 46 million Kronor (US $6.8 million) in damages. In related news, the operators of Pirate Bay changed the domain name of their site from *.org to *.se to prevent seizure by the US Government.

Yesterday, the website of MegaUpload was shuttered for good by the US Department of Justice over copyright infringement aka 'piracy' and various criminal charges (see the domain seizure graphic). This was done regardless of the many non-infringing files that people were also using it for, so for anyone that had their only copy of a file on the site, this is very bad news. It's also arguably even worse news for the site's operators, as they have been arrested and face extradition from New Zealand to the USA for criminal trial, all their assets seized, including all the domain names and computing infrastructure to run them, plus many personal belongings of very high value, such as fancy cars like Maseratis and Rolls-Royces and huge 100 inch TVs to name just a few.

However, this story, isn't really about this and we have linked to reports below which cover this in great detail (hot beverage recommended). MegaUpload was one of the biggest file sharing sites out there and in fact, one of the biggest sites out there, period. This means, that an awful lot of people all around the world have very much noticed its sudden demise (especially those with their only copy of a file, because they didn't bother to back it up, tsk) and are met with that highly unwelcome Department of Justice graphic, instead. Hence, the chances of an almighty backlash against this shutdown not happening are slim to none. In fact, Anonymous have already hit the websites of the DOJ, RIAA, MPAA & HADOPI (French three strikes) and others in retaliation, with likely much more to come, which is good or bad, depending on one's point of view and how effective one believes it will be.

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:

Church Of Kopimism: The New File Sharing Religion (updated)

With file sharers all over the world being hunted by copyright holders and aided by the governments they lobby, there's now a new angle to this fight: file sharers turn their hobby into a religion. Since 2010, a group of self-confessed Swedish 'pirates' have tried to have their beliefs recognized as an official religion, but were denied several times. However, just before Christmas, they have finally succeeded in convincing the authorities that the Church Of Kopimism is a real, genuine bona fide religion. How they exactly achieved this isn't clear, however. The Missionary Church of Kopimism was founded by philosophy student Isak Gerson, who is one of a large group of Swedes that believe file copying to be a sacred act. Gerson is ecstatic at this development and hopes more people will now feel able to come out as 'Kopimists'.

Gerson explained to TorrentFreak, "I think that more people will have the courage to step out as Kopimists. Maybe not in the public, but at least to their close ones. There's still a legal stigma around copying for many. A lot of people still worry about going to jail when copying and remixing. I hope in the name of Kopimi that this will change."

Today Kotaku is reporting the top 5 games pirated for major platforms this year according to TorrentFreak. As usual the PC platform is the most guilty almost doubling in pirated copies then its competitors.

Some of the titles listed are not surprising but the lack of a certain title filled with dragon slaying is. Why Skyrim didn't make the top five is anyone's guess. Either Steam is in fact the most user friendly DRM or people just love Skyrim. Either way this is just a small glimpse into the world of pirated software.

Top Five Pirated PC Games

1. Crysis 2 (3,920,000) (March 2011)
2. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 (3,650,000) (November 2011)
3. Battlefield 3 (3,510,000) (October 2011)
4. FIFA 12 (3,390,000) (September 2011)
5. Portal 2 (3,240,000) (April 2011)

Almost everyone who understands something about technology will have heard of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) (H.R.3261) currently being debated in the U.S. House. This is internet censorship legislation by any other name and anyone that doesn't have a vested interest in it like the big media cartels is against it. This is because it hands almost total control of the internet to powerful (read: money) special interest groups, allowing them to shut down websites at the mere whiff of an accusation of 'piracy', however small and however unfounded. This will easily ruin many legitimate businesses, all on the pretext of 'protecting copyright' from supposed 'financial losses' due to content 'theft'. It also does an awful lot of other things, all of them bad, which are fully detailed in the link above. Now, if anyone thinks that this is far-fetched, just look at how the current 'darling' of the internet, GoDaddy operates: they pulled the DNS records of weebly.com, because of one little complaint against the site and without even contacting the domain owner first to advise of the situation. Disgraceful. Give them SOPA and a webmaster doesn't stand a chance, regardless of their size.

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.

Amelia Andersdotter from Sweden will soon take oath as the youngest to join European Parliament in Brussels. The 24-year old member of The Pirate Party was voted to her seat more than two years ago, but her appointment was delayed all this while, due to bureaucratic hurdles. Andersdotter promises to fight archaic copyright laws and corporate interests.

In an interview to Torrent Freak, Andersdotter touched on issues like competition between telecommunication companies (state and private operators), certification, and the infamous ACTA legislation. "When national parliaments have been saying that they can't do anything about ACTA, activists and media just kind of happily accept. What national parliaments could do, and should do, is obviously tell their national governments not to sign the agreements. That is and would be within their power," she said. You can read the full interview at the source.

DICE's PC version has been leaked to various torrent sites almost two weeks before release on October 28th, with console versions being safe for now, DSOGaming reports. This is perhaps unsurprising because most, if not all high profile games are leaked early one way or another. It looks like it might have possibly been done by a retailer - but why would they risk reducing sales of the product like this? Perhaps a disgruntled employee? We can only speculate. Apparently, the single player campaign is fully playable and the file size weighs in at around 10GB.

The one thing that seems to hold true about such situations, as undesirable as they are, is that a game's success will be on its own merit, regardless of how much it has been downloaded illegally. No doubt though, however large the profits from this game turn out to be (and they're likely to be substantial for this triple A title) the publishers will complain that they would have been even bigger without piracy, but without being able to offer any actual proof of this, of course.

Rice University and Duke University are the latest in a long line of educational institutions to fund research on the effect of using restrictive Digital Rights Management (DRM) to try and control levels of so-called "piracy", which is allegedly reducing sales of content-only, infinite goods/virtual products, such as music, movies, computer games and books. (Some observers writing about DRM replace the word "Rights", giving us the phrase Digital Restrictions Management, which seems a more accurate description of what it's really about and removes the veneer of legitimacy from it. When buying DRM'd content, you are buying digital handcuffs, nothing more, nothing less.) The universities sponsored a study called Music Downloads and the Flip Side of Digital Rights Management Protection and what it found is that contrary to popular belief amongst the big content companies, removing DRM can actually decrease levels of piracy and increase sales. The fact is that DRM is always broken by hackers and pretty quickly too, often within a day or two (there isn't a single one still standing) leaving legal users who work within its confinements with all the restrictive hassles that it imposes, while the pirates get an unencumbered product to do with as they please. How is this progress?

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.

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."

BitTorrent Sites Shut Down In Spain

Bad news for the ones that are into using torrents since the Spanish police has reportedly shut down two BitTorrent sites the Todotorrente.com and the trackertdt.com. Both were taken offline and three administrators were arrested and accused of facilitating copyright infringement. Needless to say todotorrente.com, was one of the largest Spanish BitTorrent sites in Spain with tens of thousands active users thus resulting to €500.000 in losses to copyright holders, while the site itself made more than €30.000 in profits according to Spanish police.