Pirate Bay co-founders Peter Sunde and Fredrik Neij gave a keynote speech at the Hack In The Box Security Conference 2008, entitled “How to dismantle a billion dollar industry - as a hobby.” The two discuss how The Pirate Bay grew to be the largest BitTorrent site on the Internet, and some of the challenges they face today.

At the Hack in the Box conference, held in Malaysia, Peter and Fredrik gave a talk this morning, where they offered some background information on how the site became the world’s largest BitTorrent tracker, in a relatively short period of time.

The French Senate has approved a three strikes law for Internet users who download copyrighted entertainment without paying for it.

The goal is to force people now engaged in electronic piracy of movies, music and video games to use legal sources like iTunes.

The “graduated response” would start with an e-mail warning. Those who persist would get a letter by snail mail.

If after two warning a person continues to download pirated music and movies the internet service providers would cut off access for a year.

The pre-beta version of Microsoft’s Windows 7 operating system released to developers at the Professional Developers Conference has already made it onto prominent BitTorrent sites, where thousands of enthusiasts around the world are currently downloading it.

Well-known BitTorrent sites such as The Pirate Bay and Mininova were at the time of publication Friday hosting multiple downloads of the newly aired operating system–both the 32-bit and 64-bit versions.

A Mac version of the popular torrent client, µTorrent has leaked out into the wild. Although the creators of µTorrent have been promising that a Mac version would be available soon, this is the first public confirmation of those claims.

BitTorrent Inc, owners of µTorrent, doesn’t seem overly concerned with the leak, though they have cautioned that the leaked version, currently available on The Pirate Bay and other torrent trackers (natch), is not even alpha grade software and definitely not intended for general use.

News Corp’s MySpace, the world’s largest social networking site, on Wednesday unveiled a long-expected joint venture with all four major music companies in a bid to compete with Apple Inc’s market-leading iTunes store.

MySpace Music is designed to win fans with a mix of unlimited free music, comprehensive music catalogs, concert tickets, merchandising and other entertainment features.

The launch of the new service had been dogged by speculation on the start date and the ongoing search for a chief executive.

The war against unauthorized file-sharing has taken another bad turn for the entertainment industry today, as The Pirate Bay appears to have won their appeal in Italy. If you’ve been following along you’ll remember that a judge in Italy ordered a nationwide block of the Swedish BitTorrent tracker in August of this year. The Italian crackdown on The Pirate Bay was preceded by the shutdown of Colombo-BT, one of the largest trackers in the country.

BORED SPAMMERS have reportedly disseminated millions of e-mails accusing random surfers of illegally downloading copyrighted files on Bit Torrent.

The phony e-mails, disguised as a stern message from the anti-piracy company Media Defender, warns the recipient that his or her download activity has been logged. In addition, the message demands an immediate cessation of illegal downloads and threatens criminal prosecution under US federal law.

The malicious e-mail also includes an attached activity ‘report’ in the form of a nasty Mytob worm. When accessed, the worm installs a trojan that allows hackers remote access to the infected machine.

Propaganda is probably too light of a term to describe this piece of propaganda.

We’re referring to an educational comic strip (fat .pdf) on unlawful file sharing of music developed by judges and professors to teach students about the law and the courtroom experience. It was produced by the National Center for State Courts, a nonprofit describing itself as an “organization dedicated to improving the administration of justice by providing leadership and service to court systems in the United States.”

After months of hard work and more than six months since their previous stable release, the uTorrent team has released version 1.8 of their BitTorrent client, with significant improvements and updates. Adding to the excitement, we were told that a public Alpha of the Mac version will be released in the next few weeks.

uTorrent is the preferred client among many BitTorrent users. In December we reported that the number of uTorrent users worldwide had more than doubled in a year. At the time, 5.1% of all Windows PCs had the BitTorrent client installed, and this number has probably been growing further since then.

The Pirate Bay has been “censored” in Italy following an urgent decree from a deputy public prosecutor. Pirate Bay’s IPs and the domain name are inaccessible, as they are blocked by ISPs all over the country. Whether these blocks will be very effective, however, is doubtful, since The Pirate Bay has already announced several countermeasures.

In a response to the news, Pirate Bay co-founder Peter Sunder told TorrentFreak that they have already implemented countermeasures to make sure all Italians will be able to access their site. “We’re working on setting up a really annoying system for them to filter,” he said. “Some of the ISPs decided to nullroute - so we changed IP so it works for them now some other decided to block the domain name so we added labaia.org, which means “the bay” in Italian.”