Tuesday, August 24, 2010

TorrentFreak Email Update

TorrentFreak Email Update

Steam Gamers Are Avid BitTorrent Users

Posted: 24 Aug 2010 04:41 AM PDT

With an interesting addition to its survey of customer hardware, Valve has now published its first set of stats detailing which software is installed on the computers of those using its Steam client. While Flash, Acrobat and Firefox dominate the listings, BitTorrent clients also make a significant appearance. uTorrent is installed on almost as many systems as iTunes.

SteamFor quite some time, video game developer and digital distribution company Valve has been collecting data from users of its Steam client. Up until now the only information gathered has related to the hardware they have installed in their machines, but now the company has made an interesting addition.

Starting July, Valve – which is believed to control around 70% of the digital distribution market for video games – also began collecting data about the software installed on the machines of its customer base. Although participation is voluntary, the sampling potential is significant since the company is believed to service around 25 million users.

Valve has just published the results of its data harvesting for July from its Windows users and the stats make interesting reading. With 100% install rate, the top position is understandably dominated by the Steam client itself. In second place with a 96.79% install rate is Adobe’s Flash Player, with Acrobat (73.18%), Firefox (63.05%) and Office (57.26%) completing the top five places. Eight Microsoft packages pad out the rest of the top 20 along with just one product from Apple – Quicktime.

While Steam is the most famous official game delivery platform around, Apple’s iTunes takes that accolade in the music sector. According to the survey it is installed on 30.73% of respondents’ machines, a fairly impressive result.

Perhaps even more significant though is the achievement of the package sitting directly below iTunes – the tiny but mighty uTorrent. The BitTorrent Inc. client is installed on the machines of 29.41% of Steam users and is the most popular file-sharing client in the entire list.

uTorrent nearly as popular as iTunes among Steam users

steam

This high percentage of uTorrent users even beats the market share of the client among all BitTorrent users worldwide. According to data gathered in December 2009 from 357 million BitTorrent peer IDs, uTorrent was the client of choice for 25.77% of all BitTorrent users.

The Mainline BitTorrent client, which is in use by 4.81% of all torrent users worldwide, is installed on 5.28% of Steam user’s machines.

The Vuze client, also known by its previous label Azureus, is the client of choice for 4.37% of Steam customers. When taking a worldwide perspective Vuze does considerably better and is installed on the machines of around 24% of BitTorrent users, but unlike the Steam survey this data was not limited to Windows users.

The 5th most popular client with all BitTorrent users worldwide is BitComet. Overall it has a 4.01% market share, which betters its 2.44% install rate among Steam users.

It is safe to conclude that more than a third of all Steam users are also BitTorrent users, with the vast majority preferring the uTorrent application over others. Compared to average Internet users, Steam gamers are undoubtedly avid BitTorrent users.

Nonetheless, the Steam survey also shows that having access to free games doesn’t hold these users back to also pay for games on Steam.

The full survey results can be found here.

Article from: TorrentFreak.

File-Sharing Lawyers To Face Disciplinary Tribunal

Posted: 23 Aug 2010 01:14 PM PDT

A law firm that says it has made more than £1 million by sending threatening 'pay or else' letters to alleged file-sharers in the UK, will now face a disciplinary tribunal. ACS:Law, believed to be the most complained about law firm in its field, has been referred to the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal. This is the second time in front of the tribunal for principal Andrew Crossley.

ACS:Law and its boss Andrew Crossley are certainly leaders in their field. They have generated more bad press for lawyers in the IP sector than any other firm in recent history and have turned the lives of countless innocent people completely upside down with their demands for cash to make non-existent file-sharing lawsuits to go away.

The Solicitors Regulatory Authority (SRA) is a body which regulates in excess of 110,000 solicitors in the UK and are the regulatory body of the Law Society of England and Wales. They exist to serve the public by ensuring that disreputable lawyers are kept in check. They have been very busy indeed dealing with the fallout from Mr Crossley’s activities.

In September 2009, complaints made to the SRA about the conduct of ACS:Law constituted more than 16% of all complaints to the body for the whole month. As of July 8th 2010, the SRA had received a staggering and unprecedented 418 official complaints from members of the public, a record in the IP sector.

The SRA had been slow to deal with this admittedly huge task but for the thousands affected by ACS:Law’s activities, light is on the horizon.

In 2009, consumer group Which? filed a complaint against ACS:Law in which it accused the law firm of bullying recipients of its threatening letters. Which? has been most vocal on the issue and have committed significant resources to dealing with the problem – its work is now beginning to pay off.

Today, Which? reports that the SRA is now referring Andrew Crossley to the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal (SDT).

The Tribunal adjudicates upon breaches of professional conduct and exists to protect the public by maintaining the reputation of the legal profession. It has significant powers including the ability to fine, reprimand or even strike off a lawyer.

“We welcome this decision because we've received so many complaints from consumers who believe they been treated appallingly by this law firm,” said Deborah Prince, Which?'s head of legal affairs.

“We also believe that it's time for the profession to take action against law firms, and those responsible for them, which behave in a way we believe most right-thinking people would view as both aggressive and bullying.”

Crossley is no stranger to disciplinary action at the hands of the SDT having previously been admonished and fined for behaving in a way “unbefitting” of a lawyer.

BeingThreatened.com, a consumer group dedicated to offering help and support to those targeted by file-sharing settlement letters, welcomed the news that ACS:Law will have to answer for their tactics.

“We also echo the comments of Which? that the process appears very drawn out and consumer unfriendly,” a spokesman told TorrentFreak. “We would also welcome clarification from the SRA as to whether a temporary hold has been enforced on the continued practice of ACS:Law in relation to filesharing cases or if they will be free to continue their campaign unabated until the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal has ruled.”

“Should ACS:Law be free to continue with their existing methods, BeingThreatened.com believes many more innocent people may be subjected to heavy handed tactics before the situation is resolved.”

While copyright holders have every right to take action in appropriate cases, the extreme methods employed by ACS:Law have been astonishing. For the sake of the legal profession and all of the bullied letter recipients, let’s hope that this is the very last time that Mr Crossley is brought before the SDT.

Article from: TorrentFreak.

uTorrent’s New Privacy Settings Cause Confusion

Posted: 23 Aug 2010 05:34 AM PDT

A few days ago the uTorrent team updated the 3.0 release with several privacy features. Due to some unfortunate wording, the new feature caused confusion among users. One of the new options, "do not share your IP with peers", led some to believe that uTorrent had implemented a new feature that makes BitTorrent transfers anonymous.

utorrentA day before we published an article on how BitTorrent users can hide their identities from the outside world , the uTorrent development team released build 21340 of the uTorrent 3.0 client.

Aside from the usual changes and fixes, there was also a new feature listed in the changelog that piqued the interest of several uTorrent users who were looking for increased privacy.

In the last days multiple TorrentFreak readers informed us about this new feature that could, according to their understanding, make BitTorrent transfers completely anonymous. If true, this would be a breakthrough for BitTorrent and render our earlier article useless.

In the changelog the new feature is listed as “added privacy options to BitTorrent settings” and the screenshot below shows three options under the new privacy heading. The first one reads “do not share your IP with peers”, which does indeed suggest some form of anonymity.

uTorrent’s new privacy settings.

utorrent

Unfortunately the reality is not as exciting as the wording of the new option suggests. After conducting some tests it seems that for regular BitTorrent users this option does very little. When downloading a torrent file, other people in the swarm still get to see the IP-address of users who have this option enabled.

From our testing it seemed that the option was only effective for peer-to-peer communications that go beyond the downloading process, such as DHT and PEX. The new privacy features do not eliminate the need for an anonymizing proxy, on the contrary, they are specifically there for people using proxies.

This was confirmed by BitTorrent's VP of Product Management Simon Morris, who told TorrentFreak. “This is actually related to not ‘over-communicating’ IP-addresses with other peers – for example when connecting to clients using a proxy, peers might have a habit of forwarding on their IPv6 address.

“This option is intended to simplify privacy settings in some edge cases. Actually I'd agree its not ideally worded right now – we'll probably clarify the label shortly,” Morris added, noting that the new feature is only implemented in the 3.0 ‘alpha’ client, so it doesn’t affect the largest part of uTorrent’s users.

For those who do use the latest 3.0 version of uTorrent and those who plan to use it in the future, please be aware that “don’t share your IP with peers” doesn’t equal anonymity. For those who already use anonymizing software, the new options prevent their real IP-address from leaking, for all others the new options should be left untouched.

Article from: TorrentFreak.
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