BitTorrent launched its next-generation torrent client in a public beta today, offering people a unique system for not just sharing content via torrents but also for socializing the experience and turning the tool into one with deep content discovery hooks. BitTorrent 8 beta (download) contains one enormous change from the alpha that launched in March: personal content channels, which streamline the torrent creation and sharing process to allow you to share high-quality versions of your homemade videos, audio, and photos with friends.

As announced at CES 2011, the implementation is unique to BitTorrent, and an integral part of its push to emphasize the use of the torrent protocol for legally shared files. BitTorrent currently has more than 100 million active users spread across BitTorrent, uTorrent, and uTorrent for Mac, BitTorrent Chief Strategist Shahi Ghanem said during an interview at BitTorrent's San Francisco office. He also said the company holds 80 percent of the torrenting market.

The new channels feature benefits from leveraging current file-sharing link-distribution techniques as used in YouSendIt to share both the torrent program and the torrent itself. It also removes the requirement that videos be compressed before being posted to public Web sites, while providing a more controlled environment to share personal files privately. "We're doing the inverse of cloud storage. It's cloud storage, but it's distributed cloud storage," Ghanem said when explaining how BitTorrent channel users will share files in the channels they subscribe to.

To ensure that a channel retains its health, which is a way of saying that it always has a minimum number of people seeding the files, Ghanem said BitTorrent will guarantee the minimum number of active seeds. Said BitTorrent lead engineer Thomas Ramplelberg, "We expect the content to be fast-distributed and short-lived on our servers." He also said that while the company had yet to figure out how many seeds would equal the minimum number, the current number was around seven.

How it works
Click the arrow link in the upper-right corner, just below the Options menu, to create a channel. You then customize the channel, including choosing a channel avatar that will appear in the channel bar above the main interface; add files to upload; invite others via e-mail, Facebook, or Twitter to the channel; and publicly leave messages for and respond to channel subscribers.

When you first invite somebody to the channel, the link that gets sent out detects if they have BitTorrent 8. If they don't, the link downloads the beta and automatically subscribes them to the channel. If they do, it simply adds the channel. The channel acts as a grouping mechanism for the torrents contained within. Each file added gets its own torrent, so that subscribers don't have to fiddle with choosing files within a torrent.

Files can be added to a channel over time, allowing channel owners to create content themes. The parent of a child on a baseball team, for example, can add new videos throughout the season, and the parents of other children on the team can be invited to download them at their convenience.

Artist-endorsed content
There are also public, legal channels for file distribution under the "Discover Content" button on the left of the interface. BitTorrent divides these two types of files into the aforementioned personal content channels, and artist-endorsed content. The artist endorsed content so far includes the TED conference videos, the Bill Gates-endorsed Khan Academy free education series, Make Magazine, ClearBits-featured media, and the music discovery tool Musicshake.

The punk-pop band Sick of Sarah also has a channel of its own, illustrating that musicians can share high-quality versions of their videos and music. The band's latest album recently passed the 1 million torrent downloads mark, while recent legal access to the 2008 movie "The Yes Men" got it more torrent downloads on BitTorrent than it had HBO viewers.

Ghanem also noted that the beta has basic monetization features built-in via a PayPal link.

Video playback is a major concern not just for browsers, which are a more generalized content delivery tool, but for BitTorrent as well. The cost of licensing codecs for streaming and playback can be steep financially and cause otherwise unnecessary bloat to a program. Ghanem said that BitTorrent has plans for a "global transcoding strategy," and currently employs both H.264 wrapped in MKV, and MPEG4 ASP wrapped in AVI. However, he noted, "we'll probably use our own propriety 4CC code," eventually.

BitTorrent intends the channels to be shared among both private and public social groups, but if the channel link was accidentally posted in public the channel creator could delete the channel without affecting the locally stored files or the files already downloaded by channel subscribers.

The beta is available only in English and only for Windows computers. Also, at least during the beta phase of development, the channels feature in BitTorrent 8 will not impose file size restrictions and is free to use. Ghanem said he was unable to comment on whether the services would continue to be free of restrictions after BitTorrent 8 final was released.

Netflix, the popular movie- and TV-streaming service, has just landed on the Android platform. Already a staple for many iOS and mobile Windows 7 users, the Netflix mobile app now lets Android owners in on the instant-streaming party. It also comes with a full browsing experience, and it enables you to manage your Instant Queue.

The Netflix Android app is now available for free download in the Android market, but only for the following supported phones: HTC's Incredible, Nexus One, Evo 4G, G2, and Samsung's Nexus S. While the list does seem a bit thin, Netflix says it's working hard to roll the app out en masse. Read about the release on the official Netflix blog.

For more details, check out Eric Mack's post over on CNET's gadget blog, Crave. Also, stay tuned for a more in-depth look.

Originally posted at Android Atlas

Apple has updated its popular iPhoto program to version 9.1.3, which addresses a problem where merged photo events could split back up again after being synced to iOS devices. The update is approximately 106MB and requires OS X 10.6.6 or later to install. It should be available through Software Update for those who have iPhoto already installed, but it can also be downloaded and applied manually from the iPhoto 9.1.3 update Web page.

Be sure to back up your iPhoto libraries before applying this update. If you have Time Machine set up, you can select Back Up Now from the Time Machine menu to ensure that a backup is done, or if you do not then you can copy the iPhoto library to an external drive via the Finder. This update does not require you to restart your computer, so it can be applied without disrupting your workflow.

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Questions? Comments? Have a fix? Post them below or e-mail us!
Be sure to check us out on Twitter and the CNET Mac forums.

Originally posted at MacFixIt

SAN FRANCISCO--Native Client, an obscure security project at Google, is about to get much more important as the foundation for Chrome, CNET has learned.

Native Client--NaCl for short--got its start as a part of Chrome as a way to run software modules downloaded over the Net safely and quickly. With the move, though, the tables will turn, and Chrome will itself become a NaCl module.

"We want to move more and more of Chrome to Native Client," Linus Upson, vice president of engineering for the Chrome team, said in an interview at the Google I/O show here. "Over time we want to move the entire browser in Native Client."

The move is a bold bet on a project that hasn't yet even been enabled by default in Chrome, much less tested widely in the real world. But if it works, Google will get a new level of security for Chrome--and for its new browser-based operating system, Chrome OS.

Inevitably, programmers introduce bugs into their products. But if Chrome is running as Native Client, those bugs aren't as big of a security problem: "It becomes extremely difficult for a bad guy to compromise your computer," Upson said.

Google is starting small, not with the whole browser, Upson said. The first part of Chrome to run within a Native Client framework is the PDF reader, Upson said. And that move is coming soon.

"It'll happen this year," Upson said.

Native Client innards
To understand Native Client, it's best to understand its chief alternative today. Web-based software today runs within the browser in JavaScript, a language that's much slower to run than native software that runs directly on an operating system.

JavaScript performance has grown by leaps and bounds in recent years, helping Google expand what can be done with Web apps such as Google Docs. But JavaScript programs aren't prepackaged to run on a particular processor the way native software is. Instead, it's written in higher-level instructions compiled on the fly into machine-comprehensible code that runs not on the hardware but instead in a virtual environment called a JavaScript engine.

There's a good reason for that approach. Running native software you just downloaded over the Web, with the full privileges of native software such as Microsoft Word or Adobe Photoshop, poses a huge security risk. It's the reason today's operating systems ask if you really want to run that installer you just downloaded: do you really trust the source? If attackers could run whatever software they wanted on your machine just because you happened to visit a particular Web site, it would be a golden age for malware.

Native Client, though, is intended to make that high-risk behavior safe with two main types of protection.

First, it confines running software to a sandbox--in fact, to two levels of sandboxes--that restrict the privileges of the software. Second, it scrutinizes the machine code instructions in advance to make sure it's not performing any of a set of restricted operations that could enable an attack--for example, writing data to the hard disk or launching new computing processes.

Special programming tools
That means not just any old machine-readable binary code will run on NaCl. Instead, a specially crafted compiler must be used to build the NaCl module without any of the offending instructions.

With Native Client, "you can run untrusted machine code, verify it doesn't do anything bad, move at the full speed of the hardware, and maintain the security model of the Web," Upson said. "Full speed" is a pretty bold claim, but Google thinks it can reach performance just a few percent shy of an ordinary native program.

Running Chrome within Native Client is one idea. Google has plenty more: decoding video, encrypting corporate data, and running the calculations of video game physics engines. With planned improvements later encompassing 3D graphics, NaCl could be better for more game technology, too.

One big problem for early versions of NaCl was compatibility, since it used native code compiled for a specific processor, Web programmers would have produce different versions for different types of chips. Initially only 32-bit x86 chips were supported, but 64-bit ones arrived later. However, ARM processors--the lineage used in virtually all smartphones today--were not.

Thus, Google created a variation called PNaCl, short for Portable Native Client. It uses software modules compiled not all the way to native instructions but to an intermediate and universal form called Low Level Virtual Machine (LLVM). The browser itself handles translation the rest of the way into the native language of the processor.

Native Client has passed at least early stages of security scrutiny, and Google is exquisitely sensitive to security issues. The fact that the company is willing to base its entire browser on NaCl is a tremendous vote of confidence for the technology.

Skeptics
But not too many others have voted publicly for NaCl. Unity, a start-up with a cross-platform engine that can be used to build video games on everything from browsers to mobile phones, is one fan. Upson insists there are other developers interested as well, but there hasn't been the level of public declarations of support the way there has been even for modestly successful new Web technologies such as WebGL.

Indeed, one major potential ally, Mozilla, isn't interested. To refresh your memory, Mozilla's Firefox is the lineal descendant of the Netscape Navigator browser from the 1990s that rattled Microsoft with its promise of new Web-based applications. Mozilla programmers took pleasure in producing a JavaScript version of an image-editing app that Google earlier had produced to show off chores that seemingly were too taxing not to be running native.

Much of the browser world today is focused on Web performance through other means. It's not just JavaScript that's getting faster: hardware acceleration is speeding up many graphics tasks, including Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) for formatting and animated transitions; Canvas and Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) for 2D graphics; and WebGL for 3D graphics. Work on faster processing of Web page elements, faster loading of pages, more intelligent caching, Web page preloading, multithreaded JavaScript work, and other improvements are speeding up other aspects.

So with all these other high-speed Web programming options, might NaCl be left by the wayside? No, said Upson.

"It's tremendously important," he said. "The high-level [interfaces of Web browsers] keep getting faster, but they don't give you the full performance of the hardware," he said.

In addition, there's a programming reason for NaCl, he argued. A lot of people write software such as games in C or C++ that's relatively easy to port to NaCl. "You don't have to rewrite it in JavaScript," he said.

For now, though, a lot of that is vision. Upson is working hard to make it reality, though, and hopes to enable Native Client by default in Chrome.

"It's a hard problem," Upson said of NaCl. "We don't want to ship it until it's really good."

Originally posted at Deep Tech

Global software piracy reached a record figure of $59 billion last year, a new study from the Business Software Alliance has found.

That figure represents a 14 percent increase compared with 2009 and a doubling since 2003, the trade group said today. Forty-two percent of PC software was pirated worldwide last year, the group added, down one point from the previous year.

"The software industry is being robbed blind," BSA CEO Robert Holleyman said in a statement. "Nearly $59 billion worth of products were stolen last year--and the rates of theft are completely out of control in the world's fastest-growing markets."

The Business Software Alliance operates on behalf of the software industry. Its members include Adobe Systems, Apple, Microsoft, and Symantec.

Emerging markets are the most troublesome for software makers, with the majority of all software piracy--$32 billion worth--occurring in those markets. In 2010, the BSA said, 50 percent of all PCs shipped around the world went to emerging markets. However, less than 20 percent of all paid software license revenue came from those areas.

Central/Eastern Europe and Latin America had the highest piracy rates, hitting 64 percent each in BSA's study. The Asia-Pacific region saw piracy rates jump one point to 60 percent in 2010. North America had the lowest piracy rate at 21 percent.

Though software piracy is rampant, the BSA found that not everyone knows they're committing a crime. About 60 percent of people believe buying a single software license and installing it on multiple computers--the most common form of piracy--is legal in the home. BSA said 47 percent also believe that engaging in such activity is legal in the workplace.

"The irony is people everywhere value intellectual property rights. But in many cases they don't understand they are getting their software illegally," Holleyman said in a statement.

Holleyman added that governments need to do more to help.

"The software industry is doing everything it can to promote legal software use," he said. "We need governments to step up their efforts on this issue by supporting public education efforts, enacting and enforcing strong intellectual property laws, and leading by example."

Originally posted at The Digital Home

Quick housekeeping note: I'm traveling tomorrow, so I won't have another deal for you until Monday. See you then!

Tired of burning through pricey ink and toner cartridges? PretonSaver Home promises to cut these consumable costs by up to 70 percent. Best of all, it's free. (Note: You can use the previous link to download the program, but click here to go to Preton's site and register for the activation code.)

This Windows-only utility works its ink-saving magic by removing overlapping pixels (of which there are many, apparently) from the printed page, thus reducing ink consumption. And it's compatible with pretty much all programs and printers.

But does it work? And, more importantly, does it work better than your printer's own Draft mode, which ultimately accomplishes the same thing?

I started by printing a few "mixed" Web pages (containing both text and graphics) on my laser printer. The good news: The PretonSaver Home-powered pages looked virtually indistinguishable from the regular ones, despite the driver's claim that I'd used 13 percent less ink.

On the other hand, the printer's own "toner saver" mode did just as well (though without any quantifiable savings).

With a color inkjet, the PretonSaver and non-PretonSaver pages were again nearly identical unless you looked really closely.

When I switched to photos, however, the PretonSaver images looked a bit lighter, but no less sharp. Very good overall, very passable. The inkjet's economy mode produced very poor results in comparison.

I really like the PretonSaver driver's instantly calculated savings, slider-adjustable level of "savings aggressiveness," detailed reports, and other interesting data. Whether it's as accurate as it claims, that's tough to say. Time will tell.

The utility originally sold for $39.95, then $19.95. Now, it's free for home use. You'll need Windows XP, Vista, or 7 to run it; Preton offers both 32- and 64-bit versions.

Bonus deal: If you're among the few people on the planet who haven't yet played Angry Birds, or you just want to play it on a screen larger than your smartphone's, Roxio is offering a free browser-based version of Angry Birds. You need a decent video card, though; on my oldish Compaq laptop, it was too slow to play.

Bonus deal No. 2: Penny-auction sites promise big-ticket items (laptops, iPads, and more) at huge discounts. But are they worth your time--and money? Find out in my new blog post: Are Penny-Auction Sites Worth the Price?

Originally posted at The Cheapskate