torrent sites

For nearly a decade BitTorrent sites have ruled the file-sharing landscape.

Late last night, the fifth largest BitTorrent search engine — BTJunkie — was voluntarily shut down by its owners.

Like Mininova, BTJunkie was set up in the wake of Suprnova’s shutdown in 2005. BTJunkie is survived by its bigger brothers: The Pirate Bay, Torrentz, KickassTorrents, and IsoHunt.

Founded in June 2005, BTjunkie has been among the top BitTorrent sites for more than half a decade.

The site was never involved in any legal action, and to keep it this way the site’s operators decided to shut the site down for good today.

The following message was posted on the BTjunkie homepage a few minutes ago:

A decade ago people were truly amazed to find out that they could download entire movies using BitTorrent.

At the time substantial online video simply didn’t exist, and BitTorrent was an eye opener which has since become the movie industry’s biggest worry.

As one of the older torrent sites around, The Pirate Bay has been at the forefront of this copy revolution.

But according to the people behind the torrent site, copying bits is just the beginning. The next step is to download stuff you can hold in your hands.

The Pirate Bay is no stranger to being censored.

Finland, Denmark and Italy are just a few of the many countries where ISPs have been ordered to make the website inaccessible to their users.

But on the horizon looms threats of a different kind, the PIPA and SOPA bills.

As part of a ongoing campaign to crack down on Internet-based piracy, Bulgaria’s organized crime unit targeted two of the country’s largest BitTorrent trackers at the weekend.

Officers from the National Directorate for Combating Organized Crime said they raided a total of three locations in the western city of Pernik, the central northern city of Gabrovo and the capital Sofia.

The aim: stop the illegal distribution of music and movies.

With WordPress pretty much anyone can set up a personal blog or small website in a few minutes, and thanks to the new WP-Trader plugin it becomes just as easy to start a fully operational torrent site.

Millions of people use BitTorrent every day, and those who want to share a file of their own literally have thousands of sites to choose from.

However, the problem with most public BitTorrent indexes is that they are littered with ads and sponsored download traps that can be quite cumbersome.

As 2011 draws to a close, movie company Reliance Entertainment have demonstrated yet again why corporations should not be trusted to put anyone’s interests above their own when they have powerful censorship tools at their disposal.

For the third time this year, Reliance have persuaded India’s High Court to track the responsibility for preventing copyright infringement of their movies right back to the country’s Internet service providers.

During December, all self-respecting search engines produce an overview of the most popular search terms of the past year.

These lists give insight into recent trends, and in 2011 Rebecca Black, Google Plus and Ryan Dunn were the fastest rising searches on Google.