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If you've been looking for a reason to jailbreak your iPhone, look no further. Yesterday, iPhone developer Alec Renolds announced on multiple online forums that his long-awaited BitTorrent-powered application called "appDowner" is about to be released. When he first announced this project last year, the idea was to create a simple BitTorrent client for the iPhone. Unfortunately, personal issues got in the way of development and the project was put on hold for months on end.

But now, Renolds has returned and this time he's expanded on the original concept to create what appears to be a full-on App Store replacement application.

Our good friends over at TechDirt discovered an interesting anomaly and enormous security hole in BayTSP's website today.

BayTSP, a Los Gatos, CA-based company, is best known for putting the cease-and-desist smackdown on peer-to-peer copyright violators. The site serves infringement information forms to offending parties on behalf of the copyright holders. Think of them as the online debt collectors of the BitTorrent universe, with all the information security risk that implies.

The Participatory Culture Foundation just released version 2.0 of Miro, the open source online TV application formerly known as Democracy Player. Miro is a combination of a video and audio podcast player with a built-in bittorrent client. In this new version, Miro also adds rudimentary support for streaming video, though in that respect, it is clearly outclassed by Boxee. Besides the support for streaming video, the new version of Miro also features a more streamlined user interface, a better programming guide, and, maybe most importantly, significant performance upgrades.

The increasing usage of BitTorrent services has been a living nightmare for big industry publishers. The RIAA is one of the most notable opponents of BitTorrent sites due to most users using the service to pirate music among other things. Some of these opponents fail to see the upside to using BitTorrent technology as a great marketing tool. However, a Program Director at the University of Seattle has chosen to use BitTorrent to generate buzz and spread his latest eBook to the masses.

Spore, a Sim-like game about the evolution of creatures, was recently released as one of the most anticipated games of the year. Our initial impressions were high with the release of SporeCreator. However, Spore itself failed to meet our expectations. In the end, we found the game to be too simple for our tastes.

A major problem that plagued the release of Spore was the inclusion of a DRM system. This has caused multiple reviews of Spore to be disappointing for Electronic Arts (EA), the developing and publishing company of Spore. If EA hoped the problem would go away, it hasn't. Fans and "pirates" have taken things one step further to make Spore one of the most pirated games ever.

The Federal Communications Commission ruled this morning by a 3 to 2 vote that Comcast's arbitrary throttling of customers' use of BitTorrent was illegal. Hours before the ruling, the Electronic Frontier Foundation released software that anyone can use to see if their Internet Service Provider (ISP) is engaging in the same or similar behavior.

BitTorrent accounts for a substantial percentage of traffic on the internet and some people believe it causes unfair slowdowns for web users doing anything else online. Many other people argue that ISPs have an obligation to treat all internet traffic equally regardless of content. This is a key battle in the Network Neutrality debate.

The law-abiding and popular BitTorrent client Vuze added some key new features this week that make it an even better choice of ways to get video on the internet. When you encourage your friends and family to be part of a world's record today by downloading Firefox, it could be a good time to encourage them to grab Vuze as well. If they like it, you'll be glad you did.

The new Vuze client includes some really useful search and social features that are worth a look. It's remarkably easy to use and includes access to both affordably priced and free content from around the world.

MediaDefender is a company that acts on behalf of other media companies to muck up P2P and file sharing networks. They're the ones seeding BitTorrent with fake files - a tactic they hope will make filesharing appear to be too much of a hassle and therefore not worth the effort. In September of last year, MediaDefender was in the news for some leaked emails which helped The Pirate Bay prove that the company had hired professional hackers and saboteurs to bring down the world-famous file-trading site. Now, it seems MediaDefender is at it again. This time their target was Revision3, home to popular shows like Diggnation, Tekzilla, Systm, and The GigaOm Show.

Today we heard that P2P browser plug-in AllPeers has shut down, a blow to a market that seemed very promising back in 2006. Indeed, with AllPeer's closure and the lack of progress of similar services such as Skyrider, we have to wonder about the viability of commercialising P2P as a service.

It's getting trendy these for top-tier musical artists to buck the music labels and release their albums as free or cheap downloads via the Internet or some other means. The latest to do so is Trent Reznor's Nine Inch Nails, which today uploaded part one of its new four part album Ghosts I-IV to BitTorrent sites (you can grab it here). The free piece encompasses the first 9 tracks of the 36 track instrumental effort which was recorded over a 10 week period.

According to TorrentFreak, the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) last week released their latest report, summing up the digital music landscape at the start of 2008. The IFPI claims in the report that for every legal music download, there are 20 illegal downloads taking place. Or in other words, illegal downloading is happening at a rate that is 20 times that of legal downloading. This, says the IFPI, lead to US$3.7 billion in industry losses. But there are some big holes in that claim.

Online BitTorrent client BitLet has released a new service that lets users stream MP3 and Ogg encoded music directly from torrent files. The new music feature, called westeam, works by prioritizing bits at the beginning of each track -- and then subsequent to the one you just listened to, but also gives preference to rare bits to achieve optimal speeds. WeStream is a Java applet that works in any browser that support Java.

Popular BitTorrent search engine TorrentSpy lost a copyright case brought against it in a US cought by the Motion Picture Association of America by default for destroying evidence, reports the BBC. The site's operator's apparently ignored an order to keep server logs of the IP addresses of people who facilitated the trading of files via the site.