Gone are the days of using expensive, noisy, bulky computers to serve media to our networks. Behold the Addonics NAS Adapter! This $55 doodad turns any USB drive into a network share accessible via SMB or FTP. But that’s not all! It also includes a BitTiorrent client, so you can download all those episodes of “How I Met Your Mother” directly to your USB drive while you’re at work! It acts as either a DHCP server or a client, and offers web-based management. Who wouldn’t want to find this little guy under the Christmas tree this year?

Via eHomeUpgrade.

Gather ’round, merry men, for now is the time when we look back at the year’s most pirated video games. Specifically, we’re looking at the most pirated PC games, according to data compiled by TorrentFreak.

And they are:

10. Pro Evolution Soccer 2009

9. Far Cry 2

8. Fallout 3

7. Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas

6. Call of Duty 4

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CNET is reporting that the sun will rise tomorrow. That is, they’re reporting, citing TorrentFreak’s data, that The Dark Knight is well on its way to becoming the most pirated movie of all time. Of course, more people have access to broadband now, and the proliferation of well-seeded BitTorrent sites means it takes zero effort to download it—no waiting in an IRC queue these days—so the claim (“most downloaded ever!”) is hollow.

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Say you’re the developer of a hit PC game franchise, like, maybe, Command and Conquer? How do you go about combating piracy, which, let’s be honest for a moment, isn’t likely to go away any time soon? (There will always teenagers with no money but a fast Internet connection, waiting to download the latest game at the drop of a hat.) Rather than wrap your game in layer after layer of ultimately pointless DRM, Red Alert 3 producer David Silverman has a radical idea: make your game so good, make it so compelling that people feel obligated to buy it because it’s so awesome. Something to that effect.

That’s what Mr. Silverman told VideoGamer.com in a to-be-released interview. Let’s look at what he said, shall we?

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Lost in a flurry of caramel and processed sugar this weekend was news that the New Xbox Experience, also known as a user interface, has leaked online.

The fancy, I guess, UI for the Xbox 360 can be found at the usual places—you know what they are. Keep in mind that it’s merely a beta, the same one that was handed out to a lucky few in recent days. Gee, I wonder where the leak came from?

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French pirates may want to think twice about downloading that episode Entourage off the Pirate Bay. A new law just passed the Sénat that would cut file-sharers off the Internet. Those caught illegally sharing material, be it music, movies, software, or whatever else, will be warned, both by e-mail and regular mail. After two such warnings your connection is shut off.

Under the law, a new government body would be created to help patrol the France’s Internet use.

The law now has to be approved by the lower house of Parliament, the Assemblée nationale, which is directly elected by citizens.

There’s only one small problem with the proposed law: it directly conflicts with the wishes of all mighty Brussels, which has called such a measure—kicking people off the Internet for file-sharing—to be a violation of “civil liberties and human rights.”

Don’t mess with Brussels is the new Don’t mess with Texas.

What.cd continues to show the decrepit recording industry how to promote music in the BitTorrent era. The site just released The What CD Volume 2, a compilation album of some of the artists that are featured there. (Bands, song writers, and so forth are encouraged to submit their material to the site—they’re added to a special subsection called the Vanity House, which is promoted differently than otherwise commercially released music.) It’s a 20-song album, and comes in at just around 1.4 hours long. A quick first listen while doing a million other things suggests that it’s a better album than the first volume, which was released during the summer.

To those of you on the site, make sure you grab it. The rest of you, well, make friends with someone on the site ;-)

One year ago today OiNK’s Pink Palace was shut down by police. It’s only appropriate to pour one out for it today.

OiNK had been in operation for a little over three years; I had joined exactly one year before it was shut down, invited to the party by CrunchGear alum Vince Veneziani, who’s now kicking about over at GearFuse. Be sure to say hi.

The thing about OiNK (and its primary successors, What.cd and Waffles.fm) is that it wasn’t really ever about getting music for free. To anyone with a job, paying $1 per song is more or less equivalent to paying $0 a song. Music is a commodity. What the labels don’t recognize, or consciously refuse to recognize, is that there was a very real community on OiNK. It was that community that made OiNK special, not being able to download some pop album a few days before it shipped to Wal-Mart.

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Wow, Gears of War 2 has now leaked and can be found all over the place. I just checked Usenet, and it’s there waiting for you. It’s also on private and public torrent sites if you feel like risking a hefty fine (maybe).

The game is scheduled to come out three weeks from now on November 7.

It can’t be too long before Epic and/or Microsoft make a comment about its leak.

Famous director Michael Moore released his latest movie, Slacker Uprising, on that there Internet a few weeks ago. Unfortunately, for would-be viewers outside the U.S. and Canada, trying to download the movie results in a great big fail whale.

And then the movie appeared on The Pirate Bay, where anyone can download it. Is this Mr. Moore’s doing, or the work of some busybody fan who wants to spread Moore’s film as far and wide as possible?

Well, we don’t know (of course), but Mr. Moore told TorrentFreak that he thinks copyright laws are wildly outdated—if he can buy a book, read it, then hand it over to a friend, why can’t he do the same with a downloadable movie?

Ding ding, Mr. Moore. That’s what we all want to know.

Plenty of people have downloaded Spore using BitTorrent, but EA doesn’t seem too concerned. Because on Earth 2, where EA is apparently based, people downloading torrents of the game doesn’t necessarily mean that the game is being downloaded.

Nope, that makes no sense to us, either.

Says an EA rep:

Stepping aside from the whole issue of DRM, people need to recognize that every BitTorrent download doesn’t represent a successful copy of a game, let alone a lost sale…. We’ve talked to people that made several unsuccessful attempts to download the game and ended up with incomplete, slow, buggy or unusable code. In one case, a file identified as Spore contained a virus.

Well, I’d like to meet, interview, then tease the person who’s not able to hop on The Pirate Bay, type in “spore,” then have a fully working copy of the game in a few minutes.

Perhaps EA should re-consider using SecurROM, lest it run into more of this piracy nonsense.

The Pirate Bay is back online in Italy. I suggest grabbing Gary Unmarried, featuring the aggravatingly funny Jay Mohr.

The Web site was blocked by Italian ISPs last month.

In other Italy news, my money’s on Inter this weekend. Bwin, baby.

The real Office

Let’s all congratulate NBC for seemingly having figured out how to prevent its great content, like clips of Saturday Night Live, from appearing on the likes of YouTube and Dailymotion. Well done, chaps!

NBC told CNET that it’s gotten to the point that unauthorized video clips (like from the Olympics or The Office) are removed so quickly that there’s hardly a soul who sees them. NBC also says its own Web site and Hulu.com are now getting more traffic than ever.

As a closing note, I will be grabbing this week’s episode of The Office from BitTorrent. Not to be a jerk or anything, but because I can’t visit Hulu from Barcelona. You’ve made me a criminal, NBC!

Will Wright’s Spore officially comes out on Tuesday, and it’s already raking in the positive press. But perhaps you want to play the game this weekend, what do you do then? You turn to BitTorrent, of course.

Release group RELOADED cracked the game’s SecureROM encryption, and now the game’s all over the usual sites: The Pirate Bay, Mininova, etc. (I probably shouldn’t link to it, but you know how to find it, I’m sure.) You’ll have to live with the fact that you’re helping to put Will Wright in the poor house, though.

Or, you can be Mr. Noble Pirate and download the game now, then buy it when it comes out next week. That’s not too objectionable, right?

To combat network congestion, Comcast will slow the Internet connection of its heaviest users for as long as 20 minutes. It used to be that Comcast would block altogether certain traffic, including BitTorrent. The FCC said a few days ago that doing such a thing—blocking traffic it doesn’t like—is a big no-no. So now you’ll have to deal with a bit of slowdown.

Even though it may seem just as annoying, slowing Internet service, now Comcast isn’t allowed to pick and choose what it blocks from its network. Now, if you’re found to be using “too much” bandwidth (Comcast says it has the tools to monitor traffic in real time), Comcast will slow you down a bit. A Comcast rep said the slowed speed would be comparable to a “really good” DSL connection.

Somehow, I don’t think people are shelling out X-Amount per month for unlimited Internet access just to have a “really good” DSL connection. That’s a fight for another day, though.

That said, is this enough to calm down the boo boys, merely slowing down speeds for a few minutes rather than blocking traffic altogether? For some light BitTorrent users I’d have to say yeah, it ought to be. You’ll never satisfy the guys hanging around TorrentLeech and Bit-HDTV all day, though.