News

10 Nov. 2008

Slightly Dusty Again

Further unforeseen hangups occurred that delayed updates for a couple weeks. Sorry about that, folks.

Legal Piracy A Possibility?

This is hardly new news at this point, but the Swedish Left party wants to legalize piracy in their country. It would take a strong argument to win the votes of the whole government and push the motion into law, but if one whole section of government is ultimately supportive of the idea, it just might be possible. One particularly important note of interest in the matter is the fact that dropping efforts to stop piracy would greatly reduce government expenditure in anti-piracy efforts. Saving money is always attractive.
The term 'piracy' is almost taboo for some people. We at Torrent Freedom would like to remind you that it simply a colloquial term for the act of sharing media on the Internet that, strictly on a technicality, violates copyright by creating a copy that previously did not exist without purchase. Unfortunately, extremists on the anti-piracy front like to use all previous definitions, even the murderous ones, to enforce just how horrible this act must be. It's tough to present the truth to biased and/or misinformed parties.

Busted

It seems that the Apocalypse Production Crew has been targeted for years as a Warez distributor that courts like to pick on. Of course, we at Torrent Freedom don't condone old fashioned warez distribution, or even the use of the word 'warez', which seems childish in today's refined file sharing practice. To tote the illegality of your shared media is to sign your own warrent. Anyhoo, it looks like they nailed one of the most abstract associates. We thought it was an interesting article, and we use this to remind you to be careful out there. :)
Also, a small note: The founders of the APC were 'acid*rain' and 'Viper'? Many of you should now be thinking 'lol hacker names'. 1997 brought us the 'hacker underground', which was a silly excuse to run around pretending you knew what a hacker was, pretending to be one, and pretending sending a copy of a copy of your friend's copy of Quake II to your buddy via IRC DCC made you that much more 'elite'. It's nice to see that we've grown up... sort of.

Why So TorrentFreak?

You might wonder why we have so many Torrent Freak articles listed. This is not a first-hand news source. Torrent-oriented news service is not our speciality. The fact that we link so many Torrent Freak articles is simply because they're a first-hand news source focused entirely on torrenting. We just pick up the tasty tidbits and relay them to you, usually with additional commentary. We link other sites too. Honest.

18 Oct. 2008

Dusty

Cough cough. Well, we have a lot of catching up to do! Unfortunately, this page and other sections of the site stumbled into a state of poor maintenance. We admit that it has been a challenge to keep some of the site up to date while many other changes within our group have been taking place. The focus of our team, for a time, has been turned entirely on future projects and development. Now that we've made satisfactory progress in those fields, things are getting back on track. Regular updates should become a reality once again.

Hair In Strange Places

Torrent Freedom is going through some interesting changes. Regarding the sudden blast of upkeep that's about to kick in, you may have noticed that the support page recently fell off the face of the earth (and was then replaced by something rather ugly). We can only claim partial responsibility to this, as our previous supplier of support helpdesk goodies decided to hop off the bandwagon (and get trampled under the wheels). We're researching alternatives while everything else gets a polished finish. The hideousness is likely to be a temporary situation. In general, TF is getting some serious updating, starting very soon if we manage to get off our asses.

And Now for Some Real News

First and foremost, we would like to bring your attention to this horrific information. It seems that very soon, we will truly be watched at all times. Big brother is going 3.0, and whether or not the Government really follows the rules will likely be out of our control. In space, nobody can see you spy. We recommend investing in lead roof paneling while it's still cheap.

Second Helping of News

It seems that our beloved Pirate Bay has been censored in Italy. This is an unfortunate turn of events. Italy is a lovely country, and it should not be a detriment to piracy's growth. Luckily, our service here at Torrent Freedom is a surefire way to use the Pirate Bay and any other torrent tracker from anywhere on Earth, unless your network admins are Cylons or something.

UPDATE: Further investigation has shown us that this ban was lifted a little while ago. It's still interesting news, so it will remain here.

Dessert

Well, it seems that smaller ISPs just don't have what it takes to keep a steady flow of torrent activity from pouring through. Behemoths like Comcast are of course backed by the powers of demonic anti-sharing spirits or something like that, because they manage to pull it off fairly well when they want to. This lovely TorrentFreak article lays it out in detail.

17 Mar. 2008

A Nice Dream?

This article goes into vivid detail about the reality of online privacy in the UK and elsewhere. We protect your privacy. Don't forget that.

14 Mar. 2008

Wha?!

Verizon has taken a stand in support of peer to peer transfer systems, including BitTorrent. Their overall intentions seem to be to help cut down costs by utilizing the method of file sharing in a commercial way. That's not exactly our ballpark, so to speak, but certain sentences here seem to suggest that they will utlimately be making P2P traffic in general more effective. It also sounds like they'll be watching said traffic like a hawk if they go through with it. Nonetheless, this article made us all do a double take.

Satisfied Customers

A fan of the service going by the name of Reaper submitted this video today in a helpdesk ticket. Needless to say, all of us here at Torrent Freedom are quite pleased with the dedication we see from some of our users.

A 'satisfied customers' page may be in the works soon depending on how things turn out in the next week. By that I refer to this invitation: Anyone who has something good to say about TF is welcome to submit a ticket at the helpdesk. If a good number of sumissions are received, they'll all be published on a new page with the associated username and optional email address. We hope to hear from you.

07 Mar. 2008

Hair In Strange Places

The site has been going through some changes lately. Tweaks to the layout to make things a bit more desirable. The content of the main page was decidedly too wordy and a bit disorganized, so it's been cut down and split into a bisectional layout. Those unfortunate enough to suffer under resolutions of 1024px wide or lower complained that the 'giant' logo and top panel were in the way of the content.

The logo has been reduced by 25% and the panel has been adjusted to match. The width of the news text has been compressed a bit, since some of the shorter updates looked a bit odd running to the end of the page. Messy text is presumably undesirable. Finally, a few backgrounds have been swapped around, as these changes have altered page lengths just a bit.

27 Feb. 2008

Score One for Freedom

This article here deserves pointing out. Seems we've scored a victory in the fight for net neutrality, but the battle is not yet finished.

25 Feb. 2008

Dubya

Well, it looks like US Citizens may soon have their privacy endangered more than ever before.

21 Feb. 2008

PayBully

In light of an earlier fight with PayPal (see 13 Feb. news) and for the sake of sanity, anonymity, and the desires of a multitude of our users, we will soon be implementing a new payment system as an alternative to PayPal. We will still offer PayPal as a payment option, but will also provide this for those who are less than eager to leave their money and their identity in PayPal's hands.

Let it be known that even now, we do not link billing data with account data on our servers. Your activity on our service cannot be traced to your PayPal account because we don't keep records of activity.

19 Feb. 2008

Oops?

We're not sure why an 'apparent miscommunication' can be called a 'glitch', but we do know that stuff like this is very uncool. It's a good thing this wasn't a big ISP in control of the email of millions of people, but it's nonetheless frightening.

SMTP Unlocked

You asked and we delivered. We were blocking SMTP (port 25) for security reasons, but we've now found a solution that allows us to open it up. Local mail will work just fine now, so all you Thunderbird users can be content when clicking the 'Send' button. Enjoy.

We Prefer Red Delicious

Mac users, we need your help! We're looking to refine the complicated process behind installing and using our service on Mac OS X.

By packaging some binary files created after compilation on different systems, we hope to integrate the results into easy-to-use packages, and eventually a GUI client. See the bottom of the Mac howto page for details on what we're looking for.

16 Feb. 2008

More Juice

Well, if you haven't noticed (and you probably haven't), we just moved to 10 times our previous available speeds. We are no longer 100/100M, but 1000/1000M. That's right, we now have 1/1Gbit lines.

Torrent Freedom reminds you that the weighted companion cube will never threaten to stab you and, in fact, cannot speak.

We also remind you that this service can't defy physics. If you have a 10M connection, that's the best you're going to get. We can't magically make it go any faster than it already is.

War On Sharer

This article speaks for itself. Note the part about filtering peer-to-peer stuff. This is what we prevent, folks. It's a big part of why we're here.

13 Feb. 2008

Articles We Didn't Write

First off, here's some news about Comcast. Most amusingly, Comcast describes the cause as something to prevent 'clogged' networks. Sounds like they need more tubes.

We anticipate seeing customers from Kuwait in the near future after hearing the news covered in this article. Poor Kuwait. :(

Not Our Pal

We've been experiencing some PayPal wackiness. Lots of people love it, but after the crap we've gone through because of it, we don't. As a result of the various issues, a few payments managed to miss the database on the 9th (we believe they're all taken care of now), and as a result, a few refunds on those older payments have been comparable to pulling teeth.

For you paranoid folks: Don't worry, we fixed everything, and no private information or payments were compromised during the mess. You're fine. Refunds still work. Nobody is in danger.

12 Feb. 2008

Manifesto

A link to the TF Manifesto has been added at the bottom of the main page. Have a look.

News Gremlins

Rumors have been going around that the news content is randomly changing. We have no idea what you're talkiALL HAIL THE GREMLINSng about. Seriously, guys, quit making shit up.

11 Feb. 2008

Speed vs. Latency

Latency isn't speed, so don't panic just yet. We can pump lots of packets through a 120ms pingtime tunnel. If you have applications that really thrive in ultra-low-latency environments, we're working on satellite server 'VMlets' in the US and elsewhere. With those, you'll be able to choose your preferred entry/exit nodes from the TF 'cloud'.

Not a tracker

We've received a question or two asking where all the torrents are. We're not a torrent tracker. There's plenty of torrent trackers out there that do a great job already. We keep people's sharing activities private, no matter what trackers they visit and use.

See, Torrent Freedom is like Drano Max for your internet tubes. We take your internets and unclog them magically, and coat those tubes with a protective layer to keep them from getting clogged again. It's all very technomological. Just buy it.

09 Feb. 2008

Going Public

Well it looks like our friends at TorrentFreak certainly helped us get a warm reception. We at Torrent Freedom implore everyone and their dogs to tell all of their friends (and their dogs). You know what? Go ahead and tell their cats too.

Physics are Law

It's worth remembering that we can't get electrons from point A to point B at a rate faster than the speed of light (well, in certain cases of systemic quantum entanglement. . . but quantum mechanics is black magic so let's just leave that one alone). So, for our customers who are geographically further away from sunny Amsterdam (inside joke, it is not so sunny in the city right now), their pingtimes will be in the low triple digits. We can't push that down much further, unless we take the quantum genie out of the bottle.

So yeah, if your connection is, like, 6M/800K normally and you want to go at 100M/100M just by signing up to our service, dream on. That would be a lot more than impossible. However, if you've got a 100M/100M connection at home, you... Well then you're rich. What do you care?

Update: There's an interesting Schneier article here.

The Cables

Heard about the cut undersea cables? It's pretty interesting, really. Scary, even.

Not clear enough?

Well apparently saying it twice in plain view isn't enough for some people. Here it is again: We don't log your activity. Logs are not kept. The only thing we keep are connection status records, and even they expire after you've disconnected! When using your client, the printout you see is for your eyes only! The only thing we see is whether you managed to connect or not. Furthermore, IPs are assigned randomly. Since we keep no records of activity or who's doing what at what time, any attempted seizure of our logs would be useless towards tracing your activity to you.

31 Nov. 802701

In control

WE ARE THE NEWS GREMLINS. WE ARE ALL KNOWING. WE ARE IN CONTROL. THERE IS NO ESCAPE.

01 Feb. 2008

Taking Away Our Freedom

If you haven't heard, our beloved Pirate Bay is in trouble (again). We at torrent freedom wish them the best of luck and hope they come out on top.

29 Jan. 2008

Threatening Our Freedom

This is nothing new for most, but this article deserves a little attention.

Same old story - some big artist whining about how we're taking away their precious imaginary millions. It may be commonplace these days, but that only makes it more significant as a threat to our personal freedom and choice. With Net Neutrality still in the hands of the courts, all it would take is enough push to get them to make the wrong decision. Scary thought.

We at Torrent Freedom stand proudly in opposition to the poison of corporate copyrights.