Pirate Bay Ordered Shut Down... Almost An Entire Day

The Pirate Bay has long been one of the most popular public torrent trackers on the internet. As a result teams of MPAA lawyers have spend millions of dollars, and numerous years trying to fabricate and exaggerate legal claims to shut down the pirate bay and similar torrent trackers. The Pirate Bay keeps a list of the more amusing legal threats here: http://thepiratebay.org/legal.

Through a lot of legal backtalk, and spreading their exaggerated, if not completely baseless claims, the MPAA finally won a case causing the Pirate Bay to go offline. They were not able to ban The Pirate Bay, nor get TPB's ISP shut down, but somehow managed to scare the Pirate Bays ISP's ISP to get them removed. The end result of all this MPAA legal positioning was that The Pirate Bay had to go offline for about 3 hours. After which point they returned with a David Vs Goliath mentality to show that a lot of money and a team of lawyers isn't enough to abuse the law and squash personal freedoms. The complete Pirate Bay statement is as follows:

Riding out the storm

We have, ourselves, full confidence that if all do their duty, if nothing is neglected, and if the best arrangements are made, as they are being made, we shall prove ourselves once more able to defend our Internets, to ride out the storm of war, and to outlive the menace of tyranny, if necessary for years, if necessary alone.

Even though large parts of Internets and many old and famous trackers have fallen or may fall into the grip of the Ifpi and all the odious apparatus of MPAA rule, we shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France, we shall fight on the ef-nets and darknets, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our Internets, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the baywords.org, we shall fight on the /. and on the digg, we shall fight in the courts; we shall never surrender, and if, which I do not for a moment believe, the Internets or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our Empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the Anon Fleet, would carry on the struggle, until, in Cerf's good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old.

Signed;

The Pirate Bay Crew - Always when needed.

I am personally relieved to see the Pirate Bay is not taking these legal abuses lying down, and is willing to stand up to the MPAA and fight to keep torrents around for the future. If the larger public and private torrent sites don't fight these battles now, and spread the truth about how torrents really work to the general public, smaller sites will not stand a chance in the future. Allowing the internet to become as regulated and corporately controlled as current forms of media and information would be a huge blow to every internet user.

Useful Tools To Improve Torrent Experience

Torrent files are commonly used to transfer popular media between users. There are numerous tools and programs I have found useful to enjoy the media I've shared through torrents over the years. I wanted to make a quick list and share these various programs with torrent world readers.

General Tool: WinRAR

The most common program you will need to open the content is WinRar. Large torrent files are often packed into multiple .zip or .rar files, in order to open these you need to use a program like Winrar, which knows what to do with those file types.

Video Tools and Utilities:

There are a number of useful tools that you can use if you are trying to view a video file. These range from helpful, to required/essential.

• Video player such as VLC or Windows Media Player.
• Gspot Codec Utility - This utility will identify codec errors, and inform you what codec you need to play a particular video file.
  
• The optimal Video and Audio Codecs - Follow this Guide to Codecs which explains why codec packs are bad, and lists the most commonly needed video and audio codecs.

Another video tool that is incredibly useful, is AVS Video Converter. This program supports almost every imaginable video format, and can transfer one file type to any other type. There are also loads of settings that you can set to either maximize conversion speed, or get the best quality possible.

DVD/ISO Emulators, Burners, and Other Tools:

The most common file format DVD files are packed in are .ISO files. The most common program used to read these various DVD formats is Daemon Tools. This program simulates a DVD drive, and treats the .iso file in the same way your DVD drive would read an actual disc. PowerISO is also common and quite similar, but I personally have little experience with that program.

A second handy DVD tools is the DVD burning program ImgBurn. As the name suggests, ImgBurn will burn almost any type of DVD file (referred to as an image) to a physical disc. ImgBurn is one of the best (free) DVD burning programs, and supports even top quality 8.5GB DVD+R DL Verbatim discs, are required for modern systems like blue ray.

DVD Decrypter is the final program in this category and is widely used by PC media users. This program allows you to backup or restore movies you own on DVD, and either change the file format to allow transfer to a hard drive, or save your personal DVD to a preferred storage device.

Hearts of Iron 3 released

Hearts of Iron 2 was one of my favorite strategy PC games of all time, and I am not alone in that belief by any stretch. It had a number of flaws, but due to the huge community of mod makers and scores of developer interaction and patches, much of these issues were improved upon years after release. This community interaction by paradox interactive is nearly unheard of in this day of PC gaming, and the fact that they continue updating all their titles, 4 or more years after release, is reason enough to be excited that Hearts of Iron 3 has finally arrived.

The Skidrow group has had a working torrent version of the game out for a few weeks now, but this is a game you really need to buy the full version of. If supporting the developers of a quality strategy PC game (not a strong gaming market) isn't reason enough to buy it, you should know there is already a 1.1 version patch out, and 1.2 is scheduled for release by the end of this month. If you don't have the retail version you will miss out on all these updates and improvements, which there will be plenty of knowing the quality update history of other Paradox Interactive games.