One of the teams still working on Popcorn Time is about to make it a whole lot harder to punish movie downloaders. Popcorn Time, for readers who are unfamiliar, is the latest in a long line of (illegal) free online streaming services that allows users to watch copyrighted movies over the Internet for free. Popcorn Time is widely compared to Netflix because of the program's easy-to-use interface, which resembles that of the paid service. The service streams movies using the BitTorrent protocol. Popcorn Time was originally developed by a group of self-described "startup geeks" from Buenos Aires. The original team took down their site because of the controversial nature of their program. In their announcement from March of this year, the team said they had started the project as a challenge to themselves, but by the time they stopped, Popcorn Time had been downloaded in every country in the world. They also wrote that piracy was a "service problem," which was "created by an industry that portrays innovation as a threat to their antique recipe to collect value," They closed with the following message: "Our experiment has put us at the doors of endless debates about piracy and copyright, legal threats and the shady machinery that makes us feel in danger for doing what we love. And that's not a battle we want a place in." After the original team moved on, the project was taken over by two different teams of developers at Popcorntime.io and Time4Popcorn.eu. After some users received legal threats for using the software, the Time4Popcorn.eu team decided to protect its users by encrypting all of the app's BitTorrent traffic and also offering a free Virtual Private Network (VPN) service to its users. VPN services anonymize traffic within the private network. The latest version on the Time4Popcorn.eu site is Beta 4.2, downloadable from their website. (It's illegal and copyright infringement to watch nearly all of the content provided by this app, so tinker with Popcorn Time at your own risk — you've been warned.) Also keep in mind, the new security features are only available on the PC version of the app right now. The Time4Popcorn.eu team told Latin Post, "At the moment these security features are available only for PC, while the Mac OS version is in the making and will be out not long from now." What's next for the Time4Popcorn team behind Popcorn Time? Chromecast support for PC. The movie industry is in big trouble when that hits. The Popcorn Time software is currently available for Android 4.2 and above, Mac OSX 10.7 and above, Windows XP and above, as well as 32-bit and 64-bit Linux users.