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In what may prove to be the first "yanked from the App Store" story of 2011, TorrentFreak reports that there's a new BitTorrent app available for iPhone users. The app, iControlbits (iTunes link), offers an interface for Transmission, the popular BitTorrent client for Mac.

The iControlbits app allows you to control your BitTorrent downloads remotely, with an interface far improved over the alternative - the mobile web version of Transmission.

Noting that both Google and Bing have released their year-end "top search" lists, TorrentFreak has released its "BitTorrent Zeitgeist 2010," its list of this year's most searched for words and phrases on a top BitTorrent index, KickassTorrents.

It's not a complete picture of all torrents, of course, but KickassTorrents is one of the top 10 torrent sites in terms of visitors, and the searches are probably fairly indicative of what people are searching for on BitTorrent.

The Humble Bundle ended its second pay-what-you-want deal on Saturday. After running for just 11 days, the startup, newly backed by Y Combinator sold over $1.8 million in video games, outperforming the great success the first bundle had earlier this year.

The Humble Bundle lets customers choose the price they wanted to pay - anything from a penny up - to download a package of 5 indie video games. And even though they could have paid just a cent, the average customer spent $7.83 to download the bundle. Some companies, in order to have their names listed as top contributors on the Humble Bundle site, paid several thousand dollars for the bundle. (And for those keeping score at home, Linux users again paid twice as much as Windows users - $13.76 to $6.67.)

With the news of Pirate Bay convictions upheld in Sweden, website seizures in the U.S., and now threats to "do something" about Wikileaks, it's no surprise that there are now calls for an alternative DNS, one outside the reach of governments and of ICANN.

The DNS, or Domain Name System, is one of the foundational elements of the Internet, responsible for translating the numbers in IP addresses to the more human-friendly names. And ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, is a nonprofit organization tasked with managing both the IPv4 and IPv6 Internet Protocol address spaces, maintaining the registries of IP identifiers, and managing top-level domain names.

The verdict against three people assoiated with the BitTorrent tracking site Pirate Bay was upheld by the Swedish Appeal Court today. Peter Sunde, Fredrik Neij and Carl Lundström were found guilty of "contributory copyright infringment" in April, but the group appealed the sentence - which included one year in prison and a sizable fine. Today's ruling upheld that conviction, decreasing the length of the prison sentence, but increasing the damages that the trio will have to pay to more than $6.5 million.

Apple has removed the BitTorrent iPhone app IS Drive from the App Store. We reported with some surprise the news of the app's acceptance, but this news isn't surprising.

Derek Kepner, app developer, tweeted news to that effect earlier today, and the app is indeed unavailable at this time. "Just got a call from Apple," said Kepner. "They're taking IS Drive down. I'm seeing what I can do. I have a feeling I won't be able to change their mind."

A BitTorrent app called IS Drive is now available for iPhone, despite Apple's history of rejecting this sort of app.

Even though Apple loosened some of its guidelines for the iOS Developer Program in early September, the policy still reads that your app cannot break the law or infringe on copyrights. And that's the reason why there have been no BitTorrent apps to date, according to an Apple spokesman who claimed last year when another BitTorrent app was rejected that "this category of application is often used for the purpose of infringing third party rights."

It was a surprise, then, to see the approval of IS Drive, now available in the App Store.

There is a fundamental problem that Internet startups face when they begin to grow: scalability. It is imperative to be able to not only handle large flows of data from usage, but also to deploy changes and upgrades to your software across multiple servers as fast as possible. Twitter faces this challenge every day as its farm of servers grows, and today the San Francisco-based company is open sourcing its solution to the deployment problem for all to use.

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.