Internet Archive serves up 1.4 million BitTorrent downloads
The Internet Archive, a non-profit online library dedicated to the permanent preservation of information in digital form, has made nearly a petabyte of materials available via the controversial BitTorrent peer-to-peer file sharing protocol.
For the project's launch on Tuesday, founder Brewster Kahle announced that the Internet Archive was hosting more than a million torrents, the small files that point to data accessible by BitTorrent clients. The collection has grown since then, and now comprises nearly 1.5 million torrents.
The majority of those torrents – more than one million – point to digitized books, while the others point to audio and video files. Read more...
Christmas downloads for Angry Birds: 6.5 million
The mobile gaming phenomenon that is Angry Birds showed no signs of slowing down over the holidays, with Rovio’s Ville Heijari telling the Wall Street Journal's AllThingsD blog the series racked up 6.5 million downloads on Christmas Day alone.
The number, which includes paid and free downloads of the original "Angry Birds" as well as sequels "Angry Birds Rio" and "Angry Birds Seasons," is well above the 1 million download a day average Rovio reported in June, but just a drop in the bucket compared to over 500 million total downloads for the series since the first game was released just over two years ago. Read more...
Microsoft: One in 14 Downloads Is Malicious
The next time a website says to download new software to view a movie or fix a problem, think twice. There's a pretty good chance that the program is malicious.
In fact, about one out of every 14 programs downloaded by Windows users turns out to be malicious as Microsoft said. And even though Microsoft has a feature in its Internet Explorer browser designed to steer users away from unknown and potentially untrustworthy software, about 5 percent of users ignore the warnings and download malicious Trojan horse programs anyway. Read more...