There's a service out now called Pirate Pay, the latest in the phonographic industry's attempts to subdue the internet. There are articles all over the place, MS have recently added their support.

The main thing I don't understand is why there's no thread on it. I assume I've missed it, but our all encompasing search feature has not helped me. It all strikes me as being totally illegal as a disguised denial of service attack (they won't reveal their methods), but I know little of it.

Anyway - A link the thread, or perhaps some opinions?

Link to article: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-18056727

I always forget that some people still use torrents

Apparently mainly male under 34 yr olds, costing the industry £1.2bn (their stats).

EDIT: add url.

What? people still use torrents?

I was scared because I was thinking about to bring up a thread relating about the pirate bay for a while now so can I say this:

is the only way to get Diablo 1 now is to pirated it

I really never thought I'd say this to you, but start a different thread on that one. :)

For those who are interested in more information here are some links:
http://torrentfreak.com/microsoft-funded-startup-aims-to-kill-bittorrent-traffic-120513/
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-18056727

They might as well be swatting at flies while they are at it.

How dare they do a quasi-not-really DDOS on such innocent businesses. Cry me a river.

I was on my initial reaction of the same opinion. Then I thought, hold on aren't there laws we have to follow, regardless of convenience or our own ideological preference?

With all the free sites these days, whats the point.

True enough.

Well the truth of it is we know that this won't be effective. They will work around it.

Whoa, I was hoping they had done like GOG and found a stupidly easy way for people to buy the things they torrent (versus suffering the consequences), or offer fantastic rates/great bonuses/etc (stuff like that) to interest people into actually paying instead of pirating.

EDIT: (Based on the name "Pirate Pay")

Torrents still exists? I thought they have died already.

Around here Torrents are generally the only alternative to paying somebody for a pirated copy. Many things are just not sold outside of Europe or the Americas.

My choices often times come down to not viewing it at all or pirating in some way or another. I'm grateful that GOG sells to people here, a lot of stores won't or if they do they then fail to provide me with a copy I can actually use. Just because I'm in the PRC doesn't mean that I can read Chinese.

Probably the most ethical way of obtaining materials is via VPN to pretend like I'm in the US which may or may not actually work.

Just another case of a company fleecing the media cartels by promising they have a magic bullet that will finally put an end to piracy. Most torrent clients already employ methods to filter out poisoned peers, and even if this company found a way to get around those measures new measures will be developed very quickly. In addition to that given that this is essentially a DDOS, there's a good possibility that any company that uses this could be looking at a civil or even criminal action against them (people engaging in piracy probably aren't going to try to bring such an action, but given the media cartels' considerable less than stellar record in targeting their anti-piracy efforts up to this point it's just about a given that some non-infringing torrents would get hit by this, and then it's lawsuit time).