BitTorrent

This year Activision’s gaming hit Call of Duty: Black Ops was the most pirated franchise as reported by TorrentFreak, a blog that covers BitTorrent and filesharing news.

The report says that the PC version of Black Ops launched on November 9 has been downloaded 4,270,000 times so far by people who like the famous file sharing protocol. Meantime, the Xbox 360 version of the game was downloaded another 930,000 times.

Last year "Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2" was the most pirated game, says TorrentFreak.

Irrespective of the much buzz around the illegality of torrent practices the usage of such services is increasingly growing. uTorrent reports about two fold increase of its 28 million a year user base to 52 million and expects no stop in future.

“In addition to this, at the start of this year we saw almost 5 million monthly users of BitTorrent Mainline,” said Simon Morris, BitTorrents VP of Product Management. “In November 2009 we saw over 10 million”. “We see no evidence whatever that BitTorrent clients are any less popular”.

 Google’s operating system that was presented by the company last week has already leaked onto the Internet and posted for download on several file-sharing sites. Users have compiled Chrome OS from the bits that Google publicly released as part of its move to take the operating system open source.

The “complete” and ready to run application has become available on a number of BitTorrent tracking sites, including Mininova.org and Pirate Bay. The Gdgt website has also posted a free download of the Chrome OS disk image.

 The popular online tracker The Pirate Bay reported the shut down of their service having replaced the tracker technology with a decentralized peer-to-peer network that all modern clients can hook up to.

"Now that the decentralized system for finding peers is so well developed, TPB has decided that there is no need to run a tracker anymore, so it will remain down! It's the end of an era, but the era is no longer up2date. We have put a server in a museum already, and now the tracking can be put there as well."

On Friday Swedish court pronounced its judgment in the Pirate Bay case. The four defendants were found guilty of violating copyright laws. The verdict was handed down to four men behind BitTorrent tracker site this morning in a court in Stockholm.

"The Stockholm district court has today found guilty the four individuals that were charged with accessory to breaching copyright laws," the court said in a statement. "The court has sentenced each of them to one year in prison."