The project was supposed to generate a healthy revenue stream to support the company in tough economic times. A few months later, however, the project has been canceled and the site closed, as the company focuses on other ways of satisfying its users.

“Over the past six months, we prioritized our projects to focus development on features that were gaining significant traction with our community. As part of this prioritization, StudioHD was closed in November,” a spokesman at Vuze told TorrentFreak.

Although Vuze officially claims that the closure of StudioHD is a matter of changed priorities, we assume that it was not as profitable as the company had projected. This is not really a big surprise, as even the ‘free’ adult torrent sites are having trouble keeping up with the increasing popularity of adult video streaming sites.

The Vuze spokesman told TorrentFreak that the company will instead focus on integrating devices and torrent search capabilities into its client.

“Almost half our active community use Vuze Device integrations to watch their media on screens other than their computers (iPhone, iPod, PS3, Xbox 360 etc). They’ve successfully transferred more than 50m files to other screens since launch last March.”

In addition to the successful device integration, the built-in search capabilities using existing torrent sites such as isoHunt and BTjunkie, has gained in use significantly. Three quarter of all Vuze users are searching for torrents using the feature, compared to 55% a year ago.

Ironically, this integrated search allows users to find thousands of adult torrents that can be downloaded for free. No paid subscription needed. Could that be one of the reasons why the StudioHD subscription service was canceled?

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

Understandably, Mininova’s traffic took a huge hit in the last week which is likely to continue in the months to come. For most other torrent sites, however, 2009 has been a successful year with growing visitor numbers all around.

We have compiled below a list of the 25 most-visited torrent sites as of today. Only public and English language sites are included. The list is based on traffic rank reports from Compete, Alexa and SiteReport’s World Rank. The number of daily visitors and page views are estimates.

#1 THEPIRATEBAY.ORG - Daily Visitors: 4,467,074 - Pageviews: 26,177,054 (5.86 per visitor) - Alexa Rank: #104 - Compete Rank: #787 Visit Site | Full Report
#2 TORRENTZ.COM - Daily Visitors: 2,656,483 - Pageviews: 12,963,637 (4.88 per visitor) - Alexa Rank: #180 - Compete Rank: Currently Not Available Visit Site | Full Report
#3 ISOHUNT.COM - Daily Visitors: 2,461,643 - Pageviews: 16,566,857 (6.73 per visitor) - Alexa Rank: #186 - Compete Rank: #1,226 Visit Site | Full Report
#4 MININOVA.ORG - Daily Visitors: 1,406,653 - Pageviews: 6,597,203 (4.69 per visitor) - Alexa Rank: #96 - Compete Rank: #1,123 Visit Site | Full Report
#5 BTJUNKIE.ORG - Daily Visitors: 1,321,113 - Pageviews: 6,143,175 (4.65 per visitor) - Alexa Rank: #403 - Compete Rank: #2,286 Visit Site | Full Report
#6 TORRENTREACTOR.NET - Daily Visitors: 898,167 - Pageviews: 1,796,334 (2 per visitor) - Alexa Rank: #391 - Compete Rank: #1,500 Visit Site | Full Report
#7 TORRENTDOWNLOADS.NET - Daily Visitors: 888,663 - Pageviews: 1,581,820 (1.78 per visitor) - Alexa Rank: #1,086 - Compete Rank: #3,477 Visit Site | Full Report
#8 MONOVA.ORG - Daily Visitors: 622,539 - Pageviews: 1,512,770 (2.43 per visitor) - Alexa Rank: #1,736 - Compete Rank: #11,068 Visit Site | Full Report
#9 EXTRATORRENT.COM - Daily Visitors: 594,026 - Pageviews: 2,952,309 (4.97 per visitor) - Alexa Rank: #1,199 - Compete Rank: #5,760 Visit Site | Full Report
#10 BTMON.COM - Daily Visitors: 551,256 - Pageviews: 1,025,336 (1.86 per visitor) - Alexa Rank: #1,754 - Compete Rank: #7,009 Visit Site | Full Report
#11 KICKASSTORRENTS.COM - Daily Visitors: 489,477 - Pageviews: 1,830,644 (3.74 per visitor) - Alexa Rank: #2,129 - Compete Rank: #6,178 Visit Site | Full Report
#12 VERTOR.COM - Daily Visitors: 418,194 - Pageviews: 857,298 (2.05 per visitor) - Alexa Rank: #2,365 - Compete Rank: #6,821 Visit Site | Full Report
#13 EZTV.IT - Daily Visitors: 408,690 - Pageviews: 948,161 (2.32 per visitor) - Alexa Rank: #1,751 - Compete Rank: #16,064 Visit Site | Full Report
#14 SUMOTORRENT.COM - Daily Visitors: 384,929 - Pageviews: 869,940 (2.26 per visitor) - Alexa Rank: #1,737 - Compete Rank: #6,039 Visit Site | Full Report
#15 ALIVETORRENTS.COM - Daily Visitors: 361,168 - Pageviews: 664,549 (1.84 per visitor) - Alexa Rank: #2,555 - Compete Rank: #8,391 Visit Site | Full Report
#16 FENOPY.COM - Daily Visitors: 346,911 - Pageviews: 655,662 (1.89 per visitor) - Alexa Rank: #2,494 - Compete Rank: #6,825 Visit Site | Full Report
#17 TORRENTPUMP.COM - Daily Visitors: 342,159 - Pageviews: 1,064,114 (3.11 per visitor) - Alexa Rank: #1,880 - Compete Rank: #10,954 Visit Site | Full Report
#18 TORRENTHOUND.COM - Daily Visitors: 270,876 - Pageviews: 436,110 (1.61 per visitor) - Alexa Rank: #3,108 - Compete Rank: #9,589 Visit Site | Full Report
#19 TORRENTPORTAL.COM - Daily Visitors: 266,124 - Pageviews: 548,215 (2.06 per visitor) - Alexa Rank: #2,878 - Compete Rank: #8,045 Visit Site | Full Report
#20 DEMONOID.COM - Daily Visitors: 247,115 - Pageviews: 274,298 (1.11 per visitor) - Alexa Rank: #1,728 - Compete Rank: #5,927 Visit Site | Full Report
#21 ZOOZLE.NET - Daily Visitors: 218,601 - Pageviews: 655,803 (3,459 per visitor) - Alexa Rank: #3,144 - Compete Rank: #71,461 Visit Site | Full Report
#22 SEEDPEER.COM - Daily Visitors: 218,601 - Pageviews: 375,994 (1.72 per visitor) - Alexa Rank: #2,912 - Compete Rank: #7,548 Visit Site | Full Report
#23 TORRENTZAP.COM - Daily Visitors: 194,840 - Pageviews: 490,997 (2.52 per visitor) - Alexa Rank: #5,252 - Compete Rank: #22,348 Visit Site | Full Report
#24 YOURBITTORRENT.COM - Daily Visitors: 190,088 - Pageviews: 321,249 (1.69 per visitor) - Alexa Rank: #8,541 - Compete Rank: #20,391 Visit Site | Full Report
#25 SEARCH-TORRENT.COM - Daily Visitors: 171,079 - Pageviews: 501,261 (2.93 per visitor) - Alexa Rank: #4,831 - Compete Rank: #132,233 Visit Site | Full Report

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

Since it is technically unfeasible to pre-approve or filter every potentially infringing torrent file, the Mininova team decided to throw in the towel and only allow torrents to be submitted by approved uploaders. This move resulted in the deletion of more than a million torrents, many of which were not infringing any copyrights at all.

Thankfully, there are still plenty of alternatives for those BitTorrent users who are looking for the latest Ubuntu, OpenSUSE or Fedora release.

Below we provide a random list of public torrent sites that are still open, but there are of course hundreds more sites we could have included. If your personal favorite is missing, feel free to post it in the comments below – preferably with your reasons why it should be included in any upcoming lists.

If you’re looking for high speed downloads, you might also want to check out Usenet.

1. Torrentzap

2. Vertor

3. ExtraTorrent

4. KickassTorrents

5. BTjunkie

5. Monova

7. isoHunt

8. yourBitTorrent

9. The Pirate Bay

10. ShareReactor

Update: The owner of Monova, told TorrentFreak that he has reserved all Mininova usernames for people who want to make the switch to his site. The account names can be claimed here. Also, we replaced some sites in the original top 10 because they went down or started to serve trojans,or viruses.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

Unlike most other BitTorrent applications, Vuze has a search feature that returns results from torrent sites within the application itself so users don’t have to use their web browser. With the latest update of Vuze, KickassTorrents was added to the search.

Luckily, the owner of the site was contacted by Vuze beforehand to warn him about the traffic spike that was ahead, and to request some changes to the search template so it could be easily integrated into the client. This warning was indeed necessary, as the site received an additional 100,000 unique visits a day through Vuze.

These are impressive numbers indeed, but not that surprising if you consider that Vuze has more than a million active users that use the client at any given hour of the day. According to Vuze’s Director of Marketing Chris Thun, two thirds of these users utilize the built-in search functionality.

“Our search is a pretty popular feature with over 65% of monthly Vuze users leveraging the convenience and speed of Vuze search. My guess would be that we’re driving a fair amount of traffic to these sites,” Chris told TorrentFreak. Vuze users can download the torrents directly in the client, or visit the website the torrents are listed on.

Vuze’s integrated search currently uses Mininova and KickassTorrents. The latter replaced BTjunkie in the most recent update of the client. “We liked KickassTorrents’ clean design and layout, and liked the quality of the results coming from their API integration,” said Chris when explaining Vuze’s decision.

“BTJunkie is still an option for users, as it can be added to their default list of search sites simply by clicking ‘add/edit’ in the filters on the right side of the Vuze search results page. In fact, a wide variety of sites can be added to personalize the Vuze results,” he added, referring to the dozens of Vuze search templates that are available online.

There is no doubt that Vuze’s listing of KickassTorrents as the default search engine is a huge deal for the site. BTjunkie on the other hand wasn’t even aware of the fact that they were delisted. With millions of visits every day, a few thousand visits can go easily unnoticed.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

This level of coverage is a great accomplishment for a new torrent site, but the fun didn’t last very long. Those who took a closer look at the site could easily see that TaffyBox was simply using the resources of another torrent site, BTjunkie, without informing the site’s founder.

Needless to say, the BTjunkie team was not amused when they found out and they responded by preventing TaffyBox from accessing the site’s backend. As a result, the newly launched site no longer functions.

“Sites like TaffyBox drain costly resources without putting into the pot. Most sites that utilize our backend reciprocate and when they don’t we ban them,” the founder of BTjunkie told TorrentFreak. “He just ripped off the site and stripped the ads,” he added.

The disconnection which rendered TaffyBox useless didn’t go unnoticed by Jake who runs the site. Just minutes after BTjunkie disallowed the newcomer from using their resources he offered to link back to BTjunkie, but unfortunately for him that is not enough to earn a reprieve.

BTjunkie’s founder explained to TorrentFreak that those who want to use the search have to link to the site’s download page instead of hotlinking the torrents. “You would think the least he would do is put some reference to BTjunkie, not wait until I cut him off and offer to add one link,” he added.

What happened to TaffyBox is probably a good lesson for all the people that want to use existing torrent indexers to create their own torrent search engine. Sites like BTjunkie don’t see any problems in sharing some of their resources, as long as they get something in return. After all, BitTorrent is all about reciprocity.

Update: TaffyBox switched to The Pirate Day and seems to be working again.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

However, history has shown that BitTorrent users are an adaptive species that simply migrates to the next site when their home bases become uninhabitable.

While private trackers certainly have their place and will accommodate those lucky enough to get an invite, for this article we are interested in sites that are open to everyone, ranging from full Pirate Bay replacements to a do-it-yourself setup. If you’re looking for high speed downloads you could also consider to try Usenet instead (our Usenet guide).

Full Pirate Bay Alternatives

The only full Pirate Bay alternatives are sites that index torrent files, are open to everyone and also have a working tracker. Unfortunately, there are only a few sites out there that offer this full package -there are four of them below. We decided to include Demonoid here because it tracks many public torrents.

1. Torrentbox

2. 1337x

3. H33t

4. Demonoid (semi-private)

Torrent Indexers

Torrent indexers are sites that have a searchable directory of torrent files, but don’t host a (public) tracker of their own. Mininova has a tracker, but they only allow ‘featured’ torrents uploaded through their content distribution service. The most used torrent indexers are:

5. Mininova

6. isoHunt

7. Torrentreactor

8. BTjunkie

Torrent Meta-Seach Engines

BitTorrent meta-search engines are yet another brand of torrent sites. They don’t have a tracker and don’t host any torrent files on their servers. Instead they search for and link to torrents hosted on third party sites.

9. Torrentz

10. Nowtorrents

11. Qtorrents

12. Torrent-Finder

Private Trackers (open signup)

Most of the larger private trackers require an invite to join, but there are always a few that allow new members. Below are four of these (open) private trackers and more can be found on Btracs.

13. RTN

14. BiteMyTorrent

15. BitShock

16. TorrentIt

Standalone BitTorrent Trackers

Torrent indexers and meta-search engines can be used to find torrents, but none of them will be of much use without a stable BitTorrent tracker. Standalone BitTorrent trackers are much needed, they handle the communication between downloaders but don’t index any torrents themselves.

17. OpenBitTorrent

18. PublicBitTorrent

19. The Hidden Tracker

20. Denis.Stalker

DIY Pirate Bay Alternatives

The last category of Pirate Bay alternatives are the do-it-yourself projects. By using the three ingredients below The Pirate Bay can be easily rebuilt. It might take a few hours, but then the path to world domination is clear.

21. Pirate Bay Torrents Clone

22. Pirate Bay HTML Clone

23. Torrage: Torrent API

24. Tracker Software

Last but not Least

Google, the mother of all search engines has a filetype:torrent search command that allows you to find torrent files scattered across the Internet. Also, Google’s custom search allows everyone to create their own torrent search engine. Don’t tell the MPAA and RIAA.

25. Google

If you think we missed any good alternatives, please feel free to add your own in the comment section below, while clearly noting which category they fit into.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

Founded in 2003, isoHunt is one of the oldest BitTorrent sites that remains around today. The site has millions of pageviews a day and searches through more than 2 million torrent files, which totals an impressive 1729 terabytes of data.

Gary Fung, the founder of the site, is in charge of daily operations from his hometown Vancouver in Canada. Below is a picture of Gary sitting behind his 2008 Mac Pro hooked up to a Dell 30″ LCD monitor (3008WFP).

What’s really keeping the site up and running is not his Mac though, rather the 14 servers located in Ontario, Canada. Below is a picture of the server rack currently in use. Gary told us that he is working on adding another cluster in Europe soon.

isoHunt is currently using four dual quadcore Opteron 2352’s for the web servers. The site’s database runs on three additional servers, two Opteron and one Intel Nehalem based. Four old dual core AMD nodes are used for various background processing, one Intel, dualcore Xeon is used by the search backend and two more for load balancing.

Below you’ll find another picture isoHunt’s server rack, all wired up. We thank Gary for sharing this with us, and we will continue our behind the scenes series this weekend with a brand new workspace of another torrent site admin.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

“So this is my mission control, believe it or not I bought most of this stuff with baccarat winnings,” he told TorrentFreak, while sharing two pictures of his home base with us. Below he walks us through his current setup.

Desktop 1: My fastest desktop is a Dell XPS 630 with Intel® Core™2 E8400, 2GB RAM, 500GB SATA + 1TB external., and Dual nVidia GeForce 9800GT video card. This machine is hooked up to the very nice 25.5″ Samsung Syncmaster 2693HM monitor.

Desktop 2: The computer next to the XPS is a home built Athlon 64 3GHz, 1GB RAM, 250GB SATA, and it’s hooked up to 17″ Samsung SyncMaster 173P.

Laptop: The laptop is the Samsung X460: Intel Core2 Duo P7350, 3GB RAM, 14″ WXGA screen, and weighs only 1.29kg.

Server: The server I’m setting up to send to a data center is the IBM 326m with Opteron 280, 4GB RAM, 73GB 15K SCSI.

Misc: I have a little apple in my diet, I use my jail broken iphone for monitoring servers & tethering on the go. For all my paper work I use the Canon MP620. The speakers & sub are the Altec Lansing VS4221.

To top it off the BTjunkie founder told us that his Internet connection was just upgraded to a 30Mbit connection. Below are the pictures of his current setup and links to the larger sized images. In a few days we continue this series with the workstation of isoHunt’s Gary Fung.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

The Pirate Bay’s prominence has been the Achilles’ heel of BitTorrent. If the tracker should fail today, hundreds of thousands of torrents would begin to slow down significantly or stop working entirely. With the upcoming sale of The Pirate Bay this weakness has become even more salient.

Good and stable alternatives are needed, and luckily some of the leading figures in the BitTorrent community realize this. Last week we already reported on OpenBitTorrent, a free service that is already tracking 1,828,973 torrents for more than 20 million peers.

Still, replacing one tracker with another wont add much redundancy. The founder of BTjunkie and another major torrent sites came to the same conclusion and decided to launch a tracker of their own – PublicBitTorrent. Similar to OBT, PublicBT uses the Beerware licensed Opentracker software.

“Me and others felt that too much of BitTorrent tracking relies on one group and we would like to share some of that responsibility,” BTjunkie’s founder told TorrentFreak. “If anything were to happen to TPB, hundreds of thousands of torrents that are only tracked by TPB could be lost,” he added.

PublicBT has just launched, and although the site was almost entirely copied (without authorization) from the OBT website, it is operated independently. To get the ball rolling all torrents on BTjunkie will soon be updated with the new OBT and PBT trackers, BTjunkie’s founder told TorrentFreak.

Operating a standalone BitTorrent tracker, especially one that tracks millions of peers, can be a costly project but is a prerequisite for the BitTorrent ecosystem. It’s good to see that more BitTorrent site admins stepping up to take responsibility.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

Targets of the scam receive an unsolicited email purporting to come from notorious anti-piracy company MediaDefender. The email, which is simply addressed “Dear User!” claims the individual has been monitored on any of several torrent sites while engaging in anything from copyright infringement, through to simply browsing the sites.

Of course, citing MediaDefender is a nonsense, since that company doesn’t get involved in anti-piracy warning letters – its specialty was spoofing on BitTorrent networks.

Additionally, most of the sites listed don’t even operate a tracker, so committing any type of copyright infringements on them is almost impossible. Here is the body of the email;

Dear User!

Your recent internet activity was logged on the following sites:

* Btjunkie
* SumoTorrent
* isoHunt
* Btscene
* Mininova
* Fenopy
* Monova
* Yotoshi
* GetInvites
* Btmon

hxxp://XXXXX.net/report_78478XX.exe (XX added by TorrentFreak)

We have a report about the copyrighted movies, music, softwares you downloaded or searched on these webpages. We strongly advise you to stop any future activities regarding the downloading of illegal content or you can expect prosecution by 17 U.S.C.512,1201?1205,1301?1332; 28 U.S.C. 4001 laws.

Sincerely,

MediaDefender Inc.

So what is this scam all about? Attached to the email is a logfile which supposedly provides additional information about the user’s infringements, but of course this is a lie – the log is really a virus.

This type of scam is nothing new – the same type of thing has been tried before, probably by the same people. However, this time the virus is different. Here is the report, courtesy of ThreatExpert;

Threat characteristics of ZBot – a banking trojan that disables firewall, steals sensitive financial data (credit card numbers, online banking login details), makes screen snapshots, downloads additional components, and provides a hacker with the remote access to the compromised system. Creates a startup registry entry. Contains characteristics of an identified security risk.

Savvy Internet users will hopefully realize the email is a scam fairly quickly, but hardened file-sharers should smell a rat even earlier due to the omission of demands for money.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

Two months ago, 75 sites involved in this franchise were already pulled offline, and this week the remaining 19 followed. All the sites were allegedly operated by the same person, a 45 year old Dutch man. BREIN, who previously said that the man was involved in an organized piracy ring, will report the man to the FIOD-ECD – the Fiscal Investigation Unit of the Dutch Police.

FIOD-ECD is dedicated to chasing down people alleged to be involved in fiscal, financial and economic fraud – usually major criminals or cases where a significant amount of money is involved. It therefore seems unlikely that they will pursue the man, especially since they were unable to find any evidence in previous filesharing case involving ShareConnector.

BREIN’s strength seems to be their ability to exaggerate and spin the truth in order to influence public opinion, which required us to send them an open letter some time ago. In recent years BREIN has succeeded in taking hundreds of torrent sites offline, mostly by making direct contact with the site host, who then feel they must cooperate. Unfortunately for BREIN, most sites simply responded by relocating to another hosting facility.

In 2007, MyBittorrent, SumoTorrent, BTmon.com, BTjunkie.org, SeedPeer, What.cd, Waffles.fm and many other BitTorrent sites were forced to leave Leaseweb thanks to an intervention from BREIN. Today, all these sites are still online though, which proves that BREIN’s actions are far from effective.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

The list is based on traffic rank reports from Compete and Alexa, backed up by visitor reports from some of the site admins. If you’re looking for high speed downloads, a free Usenet trial might be a good alternative.

1. The Pirate Bay

It has been a good year for The Pirate Bay. The number of visitors spiked, despite efforts in Denmark and Italy to block access the site. Last month, The site celebrated its 5th anniversary, just after it broke the 25 million peers mark. At any given point in time, more than 25 million peers actively trade files thought the Pirate Bay tracker.

2. Mininova

Mininova has seen a steady rise in visitors in 2008, and more than 3 billion torrents were downloaded from the site in the past 12 months. In addition to user uploaded content, the Mininova team has started to focus more on premium publishers with their content distribution platform.

3. IsoHunt

Despite being ensnared in legal proceedings with the MPAA and CRIA, isoHunt is continuing to grow. This year they partnered with the Creative Commons music distribution site Jamendo, and just like The Pirate Bay, isoHunt added SSL encryption to the site, making it impossible for your ISP or the authorities to monitor users’ activities.

4. Torrentz

Torrentz.com, one of the oldest torrent sites around, celebrated its 5th anniversary in July. The site added a “verified torrents” feature this year, and inspired many other meta-search engines to do the same. Last month a “hacker” caused some problems after it took over the torrentz domain, but luckily this issue was resolved in a few hours.

5. TorrentReactor

TorrentReactor redesigned and optimized the site throughout 2008, which resulted in a significant increase in visitors. In addition, the TorrentReactor launched TorrentPrivacy, a service that allows BitTorrent users to download torrents anonymously.

6. Demonoid

After being forced to go offline following threats from the CRIA, Demonoid returned this April after 6 months of downtime. Since then it is business as usual, and most of the members returned quickly.

7. BTjunkie

In December 2007 BTjunkie was forced to leave their ISP following a takedown notice from the Dutch anti-piracy outfit BREIN. This year there were no troubles, and the site continues to go strong.

8. SumoTorrent

In 2007, SumoTorrent quickly settled itself among the top torrent sites, and traffic continued to increase this year. The pop-ups and redirects are new though, and don’t make it one of the most convenient sites to browse.

9. BTmon

BitTorrentMonster, BTmon for short, debuted in 10th place last year, and managed to climb a spot. Other than that, there is not much news surrounding the site.

10. TorrentPortal

Not much news about TorrentPortal this year either, but for BitTorrent sites that is usually a good thing. Traffic seems to be stable, although the site is not growing as fast as the other BitTorrent sites in this list.

Honorable mention: TorrentSpy

In 2006 TorrentSpy was more popular than any other BitTorrent site, but this changed quickly in August 2007, when a federal judge ordered TorrentSpy to log all user data. The judge ruled that TorrentSpy had to monitor its users in order to create detailed logs of their activities, and hand these over to the MPAA.

In a response to this decision – and to ensure the privacy of their users – TorrentSpy decided that it was best to block access to all users from the US. This led to a huge decrease in traffic, but still, it managed to make out top 10 list last year. March 2008 TorrentSpy owner Justin decided to shut down completely, and in May his company was ordered to pay a $110 million fine, which it will appeal.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

In fact, earlier this year the MPAA had to release a statement saying ‘they made a mistake’ in the figures. Nevertheless, the $6 billion figure in question has been quoted a lot, with MPAA chairman Dan Glickman still using it in almost every public talk, to convince his listeners of the seriousness of the ‘piracy’ issue. According to the MPAA there is more bad weather ahead, as it is now worried that piracy might flourish in the current financial climate.

“If you look at the situation, the current economic crisis makes this problem much more serious than before,” Glickman said recently at a forum, adding, “If we don’t protect IPR (intellectual property rights), our economic losses will be far worse.” The MPAA will of course leave no excuse unused to justify its anti-piracy measures, nothing new there. Although there are no studies that show how illegal downloads actually affect sales at the box office, there has been a significant bump in the number of BitTorrent users recently.

One should always be cautious to interpret these two events as having a causal relationship. However, after several months of relatively slow growth, BitTorrent sites have seen a dramatic increase in visitor numbers this fall. Since September, the number of peers tracked by The Pirate Bay has nearly doubled from 14 million in early September, to 25 million now. Other BitTorrent sites such as Mininova, Torrentz and BTjunkie report an increase in downloads, searches and web traffic, ranging from 25 to 50 percent over the same time frame.

This increase, even if it is directly related to the economic downturn, is not necessarily linked with a drop in box office grosses or DVD sales. ‘The Dark Knight’, which is the most downloaded movie on BitTorrent in 2008 sold millions of DVDs, and grossed a record breaking billion dollars in cinemas worldwide. That does not really sound like a ‘bad year’ to us.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

The move prompted the admins to work on an international version of the site which caused it to rapidly gain in popularity. It now has over 100,000 users, with its tracker reporting 185,000 seeds and 178,000 leechers.

Of course, with popularity comes more attention from anti-piracy outfits, the most famous one in the Netherlands being BREIN. Accordingly, BREIN has put pressure on LeaseWeb who in turn has advised its customer, RARBG, that it has 48 hours to shut down the site – or LeaseWeb will do it for them.

So what makes it so easy for BREIN to shut down the site? In 2007, LeaseWeb, once one of the largest BitTorrent hosts, was ordered by a court to shut down the relatively unknown BitTorrent tracker everlasting.nu. Leaseweb actually appealed the court’s decision to shut down the site but lost, and was ordered to hand over the admin’s personal details. The overall result was an exodus of BitTorrent sites from LeaseWeb, including the likes of BTjunkie, Demonoid, What.cd and Waffles.fm.

TorrentFreak spoke with the admin of RARBG who told us he intends to move the site out of the Netherlands and into the current BitTorrent safe-haven of Sweden. Asked about plans for the future, he responded, “To keep the site up, whatever it takes.”

Update: RARBG has successfully moved to Sweden.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

With the latest release, 4.0, Vuze once again introduces quite a few changes. The difference this time is that they emphasize more on the BitTorrent experience than their Vuze Network. The UI is more lightweight, less cluttered, and should appeal to both novices and hardcore BitTorrent users (old UI is still supported).

The most interesting change they made is to include BitTorrent search in the application. This allows users to search all their favorite BitTorrent sites from within the application. Mininova and BTjunkie are included by default, but any site can be added to the search, including private BitTorrent trackers.

We had the chance to discuss some of the major updates to the client with Vuze CEO, Gilles BianRosa.

TF: What was the reason to update the user interface of the client, and how is this new release an improvement to its predecessors?

Gilles: Our new UI has been directly inspired by the feedback of our users, who told us loud and clear that our previous UI was confusing and a little schizophrenic—with core torrent functionality they loved, and new features bolted on in odd places. So we’ve done a few things.

First and foremost, we’ve tried to have the application reflect our core functionality, and that’s what you’ll see across the top of the global toolbar: Find, Download, and Play. Second, you’ll see an intuitive left-nav framework that users have responded to extremely well, since it provides direct and persistent access to all of the product features. And finally, you’ll see improved category navigation within the Vuze HD Network, to enable our users to browse directly to the type of content that interests them.

In terms of functionality, there are two key things users will appreciate in this release. First, there’s the new subscriptions, and second, there’s now private tracker login support for the meta-search functionality that we launched back in June.

TF: How do these new subcriptions work, and how are they different from the regular RSS feature most BitTorrent clients have?

Gilles: The new subscription feature enables users to request that specific content be sent to them automatically. Just click the orange Subscriptions button associated to content in your Library. You can set your subscriptions to download automatically, or simply to notify you when new items are available.

The big innovation here is that these subscriptions are initially created by users (usually power users) and then made available to everyone. This removes entirely the complexity associated with RSS for torrents, which tend to return lots of unwanted or duplicate results. Just click Subscribe!

TF: The latest release seems to offer an “all in one” solution where users can search, download and play content. Do you believe this approach will appeal to both advanced and new users?

Gilles: For the uninitiated, the BitTorrent ecosystem is a confusing one. In order to get up and running, a person has to find a tracker site, choose and download a torrent client, download a video player, and then figure out how each one works and how they all work together. For the new user who isn’t shown how it works, it’s almost impossible to figure out.

So, for new users, we’ve created an all-in-one BitTorrent client, that enables them to Find, Download, and Play high quality and HD content, all in one easy-to-use application. We think advanced users will like it too, since Vuze has all of the features it’s known for, plus some great new functionality like torrent meta-search with support for private trackers, and Subscriptions. As we’ve user tested the new Vuze, new and advanced users have found the all-in-one functionality to be both intuitive and powerful.

TF: You said before that you listened to feedback from users. How has this helped to develop the client?

Gilles: This release has been directly inspired by feedback from users. We’ve surveyed our users in multiple ways, talked with them on the phone, and watched them as they used the last version of Vuze client, as well as prototypes for this new one. We’ve talked to power users, casual users, and non-users. All of that is reflected in this release. That said, this release is just a foundation for the great things we’ve got in the development pipeline.

Vuze was scheduled to be launched today, but the release has been postponed for 48 hours. TorrentFreak readers who want to play around with an unofficial early release can grab it from Vuze (Win/Mac).

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

As we reported earlier, the decision to use BitTorrent for facilitating distribution of the movie made a bit of a mockery of the limitations of Moore’s offer, since using The Pirate Bay’s tracker sent the movie worldwide. So, even for a completely free movie, it seemed inevitable that the legal profession would get involved at some point, it was just a question of time.

It didn’t take long. In a letter dated September 25th, lawyers representing Westside Productions LLC, owner of the Slacker Uprising copyright sprang into action, demanding the removal of a torrent linking to the movie. However, they managed to make a novice error. Instead of contacting the host of the torrent site in question, the Swedish-hosted BTJunkie, they actually sent the US copyright takedown request (email & fedex) to their DNS provider, easyDNS.

easyDNS are based in Canada and, just like BTJunkie in Sweden, are not subject to the laws of the United States, although most lawyers don’t seem to understand this. Furthermore, since easyDNS aren’t even BTJunkie’s host, they are in no position to do anything about the torrent anyway.

Mark Jeftovic, a co-founder of easyDNS wrote: “But really, come on folks, please tell us that isn’t the basis for this take down request. Anybody with half a clue knows the net doesn’t work like that. In any case, I’ve sent them our standard ‘we’re not the web host, we’re just the lowly DNS service’, but I did point out this seeming contradiction in Michael Moore’s message vs his lawyer’s actions.”

Now that the lawyers managed to get a grasp of the role of a DNS server, they have withdrawn the complaint against easyDNS. They state that the problem is due to the fact that the infringing .torrent was hosted outside of the US and Canada, a situation which for some reason is unacceptable to their client and a ‘problem’ worth spending large sums of money on to remedy. Let’s be clear – no amount of money will solve this issue and it is absolutely absurd to even try.

“I’ve replied that they [the lawyers] should know it is highly impractical to attempt to impose geographical constraints on otherwise freely available files,” said Mark at easyDNS, “but I guess they want to give it a shot.”

Meanwhile, the admin of BTJunkie told us he has not yet received a takedown request.

Mo(o)re money down the drain….

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

Although most scams can be avoided easily when a few simple rules are followed, they still manage to trick thousands of novices every day – and this is not going to end anytime soon. Since BitTorrent has become more or less mainstream, with millions of users worldwide, it also proves an interesting target for email spammers.

The latest scam, unlike the others we have reported on before, is one that is sent by email. The email is disguised as a message from the anti-piracy company MediaDefender (using their logo etc.), and warns the recipient that his or her download behavior has been logged. The email has a report attached with more details about the infringed material, which turns out to be a virus (A Mytob worm which installs a trojan, and allows outsiders to gain access to your computer).

Dear User!

Your recent internet activity was logged on the following sites:

* Btjunkie
* SumoTorrent
* isoHunt
* Btscene
* Mininova
* Fenopy
* Monova
* Yotoshi
* GetInvites
* Btmon

We have attached a report about the copyrighted movies, music, softwares you
downloaded or searched on these webpages. We strongly advise you to stop any
future activities regarding the downloading of illegal content or you can
expect prosecution by 17 U.S.C. §§ 512, 1201?1205, 1301?1332; 28 U.S.C. §
4001 laws.

Sincerely,

MediaDefender Inc.

To the more experienced and BitTorrent savvy users it is clear that the email is a scam. First of all, MediaDefender has never been involved in anti-piracy enforcement. The only thing they do is spoofing, flood BitTorrent sites with fake files, and the occasional DDoS attack on Revision3.

In addition, the email claims to have data on what the user searched for on the sites, which is irrelevant and practically impossible. It seems that the spammers should have done some more research on the topic. A good spammer would have included The Pirate Bay in the list of sites instead of Getinvites, which is a BitTorrent invite trading site, and not a search engine

A related scam email, sent out by the same group of people judging by the style and format, is also targeted at filesharers and threatens to suspend their Internet connection. The email claims to be sent by the Internet service provider consortium, and again includes an infected attachment with a report.

The email is a clever scam that shows how mainstream BitTorrent has become. The emails are sent out randomly, but many recipients, scared by be cut off by their ISP, or sued for downloading copyrighted material, might open the infected attachment without realizing that it is a scam.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

It started last year when LeaseWeb, once one of the largest BitTorrent hosts, was ordered to shut down the BitTorrent tracker everlasting.nu. This led to a an exodus of BitTorrent sites such as BTjunkie, Demonoid, What.cd and Waffles.fm, some left voluntarily, and others were urged by Leaseweb.

Leaseweb did however file for an appeal against BREIN, which they lost last week. The Amsterdam court upheld their earlier decision, and the web hosting company was ordered to shut down the BitTorrent tracker everlasting.nu, and hand over the admin’s personal information.

Now, only a few days later, another hosting company, EuroAccess, faces a similar judgment. The court ruled that it was obvious that the website torrent.to was facilitating copyright infringement, and ordered EuroAccess to take the site down, and hand over the personal details of the site owner to BREIN.

This ruling is different from others we’ve seen so far in the Netherlands, because the judge simply assumed that the torrent site was “illegal”, something that many lawyers might oppose. BREIN didn’t have to prove this part, and it suggests that webhosting companies will have to comply every time BREIN asks them to take down a site and hand over the personal details of their customers.

“Hosting providers have to take responsibility,” said Tim Kuik, managing director of BREIN. “EuroAccess hosts several illegal sites and servers, and didn’t respond to inquiries from BREIN and others. This has to change.”

EuroAccess can probably look forward to more takedown request from BREIN, and this “victory” for BREIN will probably result in more court cases and new clientele for Swedish webhosting providers. Torrent.to remains unharmed, and moved to Sweden, which has now become the new “safe haven” for torrent sites.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

So, let’s see how well Google does, and how their traffic estimation and ranking compares to actual traffic data and Alexa’s ranking respectively.

One of the interesting features of Google’s site comparison is that it gives an estimation of the daily traffic when you’re logged in on a Google account. The data used for the traffic statistics comes from Google analytics, consumer panels, and other third-party market research.

The traffic data seem to be quite accurate, for some sites at least. The daily (absolute) unique visitors for Mininova, for example, is estimated to be slightly above 2 million a day, which matches with real traffic stats we got from the Mininova team.

As we look at the graph below we can clearly see that Mininova is in the lead judging by the number of visitors, followed by The Pirate Bay. isoHunt and Torrentz compete for the third place. After these four sites there is a huge gap to other BitTorrent sites such as BTjunkie, TorrentReactor and TorrentPortal.

It is interesting to see how many similarities there are between Google’s ranking, and the daily reach according to Alexa.

The regional differences in popularity of the sites are also worth mentioning. The Pirate Bay, for example, is more popular than Mininova in the US, and especially in Sweden. Torrentz, on the other hand, does really well in India, while isoHunt has a relatively large fanbase in Japan.

Overall it seems that BitTorrent sites are still growing, especially The Pirate Bay, since they nearly doubled their traffic in a year. This is pretty much in line with the growth in the number of peers on The Pirate Bay trackers, which went from 5 to well over 10 million in the last 12 months.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

At the time Leaseweb was hosting dozens of torrent sites, including Demonoid, mybittorrent.com, btmon.com, btjunkie.org, seedpeer.com, what.cd and waffles.fm. Although Leaseweb decided to appeal the decision, the torrent sites were no longer welcome, and were asked to find a new ISP.

Yesterday the appeal was denied, as the Amsterdam court again ruled that everlasting.nu was facilitating copyright infringement by allowing their users to download copyrighted content via torrents hosted on their site.

Leaseweb’s defense argued that Everlasting was not facilitating copyright infringement, because the torrent files itself are not copyrighted. However, the judge ruled that this was irrelevant, since the files are an essential part of the download process.

Leaseweb’s lawyers further argued that the tracker is not necessary for the download process, that the torrents could be mislabeled, and that there are also BitTorrent clients that do not upload (downloading music and movies is legal in the Netherlands), but their arguments did not impress the judge either.

At the moment it is still unclear what this means for future cases, such as the upcoming court case between Mininova and BREIN. In the ruling the court places a lot of emphasis on the tracker, as an essential component of the infringement process. Mininova does not operate a BitTorrent tracker.

It is however very unlikely that Leaseweb will ever host a BitTorrent tracker again. The ISP that once was a safe haven for most torrent sites is most likely done fighting.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.