Critical.
Authoritative.
Strategic.
Subscribe to CIO Magazine »

Downloads of pirated Windows 7 beta candidate soar

Build 7000 of upcoming OS growing in popularity on BitTorrent sites

Downloads of a new build of Microsoft's upcoming Windows 7 operating system have soared in the past two days, with thousands of systems now pulling pirated copies from BitTorrent sites.

Searches Tuesday on the Pirate Bay BitTorrent site, for example, returned multiple listings of Windows 7 Build 7000, which Microsoft identifies as a beta candidate in the filename. The torrent is a disk image of the 32-bit version of Windows 7 Ultimate; a 64-bit version is not yet available.

The most heavily trafficked Windows 7 BitTorrent on Pirate Bay showed more than 4,300 "seeders" -- the term for a computer that has a complete copy of the torrent file -- and about 7,500 "leechers," or computers that have downloaded only part of the complete torrent. Less popular BitTorrents of the file on Pirate Bay claimed an additional 1,000 seeders and more than 3,000 leechers.

On Saturday, a day after the first copies of Build 7000 appeared on BitTorrent, Pirate Bay's prime listing showed less than half as many seeders as it did today.

Similar increases could be seen on other BitTorrent sites. For example, Mininova listed almost 20 Windows 7 BitTorrents -- some of them duplicates of the ones that appeared in searches of Pirate Bay. Two of the torrents on the Mininova site had more than 4,500 seeders each.

Bloggers who have downloaded the pirated operating system -- such as ZDNet.com's Ed Bott -- are reporting that its end-user licensing agreement labels the new build as the beta that Microsoft has promised it will open to the public in early 2009.

Although Microsoft hasn't specified a release date, information published on its own Web site earlier this month hinted that the beta would become available no later than Jan. 13. And with Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer slated to deliver a keynote speech Jan. 7 on the evening before the opening of the International CES trade show in Las Vegas, speculation has been brisk that he will not only talk about Windows 7, but possibly also announce the immediate availability of the beta.

However, Microsoft has stuck to its earlier vague timetable. "The Windows 7 public beta is still expected in early 2009," a company spokeswoman wrote in an e-mail. She declined to respond to questions about what actions Microsoft would, or could, take against BitTorrent sites that list the pirated build.

Windows 7 is scheduled to ship late next year or in early 2010, according to statements made previously by Microsoft.

Join the CIO Australia group on LinkedIn. The group is open to CIOs, IT Directors, COOs, CTOs and senior IT managers.

More about: Microsoft
References show all

Comments

Post new comment

The content of this field is kept private and will not be shown publicly.
Users posting comments agree to the CIO comments policy.
Login or register to link comments to your user profile, or you may also post a comment without being logged in.
Related Coverage
Related Whitepapers
Latest Stories
Community Comments
Tags: Windows 7
Latest Blog Posts
Whitepapers
  • Improving the Management and Sharing of Massive Data Volumes
    Making sound business decisions requires timely access to accurate data. Every day operations in every industry generate vast quantities of data, including email, video, complex computer simulations, scientific data sets, medical images, records, and more. In addition, regulatory and industry requirements mandate ongoing data preservation, hastening the growth of massive volumes of data that must be managed and retained. This data poses serious challenges in the areas of management, sharing, protection, and retention. Read on.
    Learn more »
  • Best Practices for Energy Efficient Storage Operations Version 1.0
    The energy required to support data center IT operations is becoming a central concern worldwide. For some data centers, additional energy supply is simply not available, either due to finite power generation capacity in certain regions or the inability of the power distribution grid to accommodate more lines. Read on.
    Learn more »
  • IDC Whitepaper: Next Generation Firewall - Enabling New Security Strategies
    The firewall market has traditionally been a staple, yet, mature market within the security space with little innovation being introduced. However, with the rapid change in the technology and threat landscape, a newer breed of of innovation focussing on applications visibility and control, termed Next Generation Firewalls has surfaced. This paper examines how Next Generation Firewalls can help organisations identify and block threat, while at the same time enforcing policies at an application level and ultimately helping organisations reduce the number of security devices and thus, saving costs.
    Learn more »
All whitepapers
rhs_login_lockGet exclusive access to Invitation only events CIO, reports & analysis.
Recent comments

HP and IDG news, product videos and resources