To solve these issues, some ISPs have started to slow down all BitTorrent traffic, Comcast-style. Others choose to limit BitTorrent speeds at certain times of the day, and there are other examples where customers simply cannot download files with a .torrent extension at all.

Luckily there are options available which can help manage BitTorrent traffic and please customers, all at the same time. The Israeli ISP Bezeq International has taken this more consumer-friendly route. This ISP actually makes BitTorrent downloads faster by caching popular torrent downloads on their own network. By doing so the load on the network decreases and since there are less connections to peers outside the network Bezeq is also saving on costly bandwidth.

It works as follows. When a Bezeq International customer downloads a .torrent file the ISP will intercept it and add (!) a new tracker to it. The additional tracker is only accessible for Bezeq International customers and it connects to a high speed web-seed hosted on Bezeq International’s network. As a result the files will be downloaded much faster. A Bezeq customer told us that almost all ‘popular’ torrents he downloaded connect to local seeds.

Interestingly, the tracker Bezeq International uses is hosted by an ISP in The Netherlands, while the actual seeds (caches) are on the ISPs network. The provider confirmed to TorrentFreak that the ISP is indeed listed as a client, but they were not aware of its torrent caching practices or that they were hosting a BitTorrent tracker.

On the surface this seems to be a win-win situation for both the ISP and its customers. Bezeq saves on resources and expensive bandwidth while the customer enjoys higher download speeds. There are of course privacy concerns, since the .torrent files are intercepted and edited without permission, but the biggest opposition to such a system will most likely come from the entertainment industry.

Various anti-piracy lobby groups, including the MPAA and RIAA are already pushing for more cooperation from ISPs in tracking down copyright infringers. The relationship between the entities is an uneasy one already, and that’s before an ISP decided it would become a BitTorrent seeder. Although Bezeq International does not control which files are cached on their servers, the likes of the MPAA and RIAA will likely see it as aiding in copyright infringement.

Caching BitTorrent traffic and attempts to keep it within the local network as much as possible are not new, but aside from occasional tests these technologies are never implemented by ISPs. Bezeq International did not respond to our inquiries so we can’t confirm that they have implemented it for all their customers. For those who are lucky enough, enjoy the ride.

More discussion in Israeli.

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

Born out of the VPNTunnel Project, the TorrentFreedom ‘manifesto’ is an interesting document, particularly if you’ve ever worried about being tracked, traffic shaped, blocked or censored on the Internet. With a suitably clandestine feel, the manifesto states:

“Today, there is a nexus of Schumpeterian creative destruction to be found at the asymptotic fringe of intellectual property law and networking technology. Everyone says there is an ‘arms race’ between the unwashed filesharing masses and the forces of Big Brother – we like to think of ourselves as the suitcase nuke for the little guys.”

TorrentFreak got in touch with ‘Faust’ of TorrentFreedom to find out what on earth they’re talking about.

TF: Tell us about this ‘creative destruction’ and what inspired you to create TorrentFreedom.

Faust: It’s all but trite to point out nowadays that we’ve undergone a revolution in how human knowledge is created, stored, and shared. And, much as Schumpeter himself had predicted, the creativity unleashed has more than made up for the detritus of old forms of information transmission that now scatter the landscape like broken, forgotten toys. This is as it should be. The backlash from the praxis of stasis threatens to drown the organic reinvigoration that innovation technology has always brought forth – there would be no 95 theses without Gutenburg, remember.

So our inspiration comes from a deeper, historical appreciation for the transformative role of new technologies in human social organization. Nobody knows where creativity, academia, and knowledge creation will evolve as our tools allow for more and deeper interconnection between physically disparate peoples – but we do know that hampering that process isn’t part of making a better world for all beings. We’d like to see people keep sharing, keep learning, keep exploring. . . and they can’t do that if there’s roadblocks and threats of censorship every step of the way. Make it easy and make it work, that’s our approach – then the creative destruction can continue apace.

TF: There are number of evils you appear to tackle head on with this service, such as traffic shaping, packet raping, blocking, censorship etc. I expect lots of Comcast customers will be interested as you specifically mention the ‘Sandvining’ technique they employ. How does your system work and how will it benefit each type of problem?

Faust: Metaphorically, the system is quite simple: think of the difference between sending postcards in the postal mail, versus sending sealed envelopes. A postcard can easily be read by anyone along the way, and if they don’t like what it says (or who it is addressed to), they could just throw it out – oops! A sealed letter isn’t vulnerable like that – the contents aren’t readable whilst in transit. Even more than that, our system protects the address (sender and receiver) on the envelope as well – so nobody can block the message just because they don’t like where it’s headed (or where it’s come from).

At a deeper level, our server farm is based in the Netherlands. Everything passes in and out of these machines, and all IP addresses are associated with them. The activities of our customers – once their sessions decrypt and leave our server farm – are fully and unambiguously decoupled from their RL info (including local/physical IP address). Big Brother isn’t going to show up at their doorstep with a fishing-expedition summons or subpoena. We took it a step further, however – we’ve broken the link between RL info and public IP for our customers inside our systems as well – once an account is set up, it is methodologically impossible for anyone to back-connect a given external TF IP address to a customers’ specific account, ever.

TF: You’re called TorrentFreedom so it’s fairly clear which crowd you’re aiming your product act. What sort of dedicated optimizations can BitTorrent users look forward to when using your service?

Faust: We’ve tested the service extensively with just about every BT client out there. They all work seamlessly. We also don’t penalize our customers for running lots of network traffic over TorrentFreedom – there are no monthly caps, and no drama if someone uses a lot of gigs with us. That’s cool – it’s why we built the system!

OpenVPN, in its rawest form, will work with BT traffic – but getting it to do so consistently and smoothly is nontrivial. We’ve done all that work, so our customers don’t need to become experts in subnet addressing, MTU window sizing, and the 100 other little tweaks one needs to do to really make BT over a VPN sing. We also hand out real, public IP addresses – so no port forwarding garbage, just fast connectivity.

TF: Please give us a brief rundown on how your system works.

Faust: On a technical level, it’s an implementation of the TLS-based OpenVPN project’s codebase (which itself implements various OpenSSL crypto algorithms). Starting from there, we’ve created a Java-based client that handles all the encryption and coordinates OpenVPN’s handshake tasks, to ensure that every packet coming and going from our customers’ PCs is tightly encrypted (including DNS queries, unlike pptp). The really cool stuff comes in the firewall-busting tricks that our client has up its sleeve – there’s very few local network configurations that we can’t tunnel through. . . with no customer tweaking of the software needed. We’ve also implemented a rather clever port 443 wrapper so that, unlike many VPN instantiations, the TorrentFreedom service can’t be blocked unless the entire HTTPS capacity is also shut down – unlikely.

We’ve built most everything with open code, and we’re pushing further in that direction (with perhaps full distribution of the source for our client extensions in the works). “Just trust us” crypto isn’t worth anything – if it’s not open, it’s not reliable. We run 2048 keylength RSA algorithms so, to the local ISP or anyone else “listening in” to our customers’ packets, the data all looks like a stream of secure web traffic, back and forth. This is true for ALL IP traffic coming off a machine, all protocols and all applications. So there’s no need to tweak individual applications to get them to “work” with TorrentFreedom – just set up the client, connect, and everything is encrypted all the time.

TF: There are other well known VPN services that say they are strong on anonymity and hide your IP address, yet all of them will give up your personal details at some point. How is TorrentFreedom going to live up to the claim in the manifesto that BitTorrent users using your service will be “just about as traceable as dusty footprints in a windswept street. You can’t subpoena what doesn’t exist” ?

Faust: Ok this is where the rubber really meets the road. An “anonymizing” service that keeps detailed records of their customers’ activities is just a problem waiting to happen. There’s no point in hiding an IP address only to keep records that connect that IP address to the one that’s used to cover for it! And, reality is that there is no place in the world that isn’t subject to some form of legal jurisdiction – just saying “we won’t turn over records” is silly. When the authorities show up – with court orders or guns – and people start talking about jail time and contempt, those records are going to get coughed up, period. Despite our respect for the company overall, Hushmail’s admission that it provides “secure” email information to certain government authorities demonstrates all too well that even a good team will fold if the pressure gets too high – and if they have information to provide in the first place!

We built the system from day one so that there’s no correlation between an IP+timestamp and a username – this means we can’t hand over logs of “who was on what IP at what time”, and therefore the user can’t be tracked back from their online activity. Our payment system is fully abstracted from the operational environment – billing events are passed to the VPN engine via temporary “tokens” that are one-way-factors – there’s no link between the VPN account and the details of the billing transaction, ever.

We keep a little bit of data on file to make sure we can monitor the performance of the system overall, but we don’t have “server logs” like everyone else does. They don’t exist. So, we can be forced to turn over those logs – but they don’t link back to anything. Not to mention all of our operational VMs run in fully-encrypted partitions, etc. Someone seizing any of our servers has nothing but an expensive doorjam for their troubles. Even someone with full access to every machine we have cannot link people to their past network traffic through TorrentFreedom. It’s structural anonymity, at the most fundamental level.

Now, there’s lots of other VPN services out there and some of them are sorta ok. Most, let’s be honest, are based on pptp – it’s really insecure with several known weaknesses. Plus, it’s closed-source/proprietary, so who knows if it has backdoors or not? The reason people use it is because it’s easy to set up – Windows machines come with it pre-installed. Well, we did the hard work of getting a real VPN implementation (OpenVPN) to work just as easily as pptp – but without the security problems.

Some of the stuff we did is a little complex, behind the scenes, but the end result is a service that’s really easy to set up and use. We’ve got clients for Windows, Macs, and Linux. We don’t limit bandwidth, and we’ve got some very fast servers backing it all up. It’s all done right.

TF: Any final thoughts?

Faust: Using TorrentFreedom for online security is like bringing a machine-gun to a knife fight. . . it might not be ‘fair,’ but the outcome isn’t going to be in question either.

TF: lol ;)

Update: the free invites are gone.

Alternatives: (not free)

Relakks
Smarhide
VPNtunnel

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

Initially, AllPeers was not meant to replace traditional BitTorrent clients because it didn’t support .torrent downloads. However, this has now changed, BitTorrent support was added in their latest update, and they are now ready to compete with other BitTorrent clients and P2P firefox extensions.

Still, the more advanced BitTorrent users don’t really see the need for a socialized BitTorrent client. In the first versions of AllPeers, some users also missed the more advanced settings and features that their regular BitTorrent client offered, yet this can hardly be an excuse anymore since AllPeers added most of the essentials.

We decided to have a chat with Matthew Gertner, Chief Technology Officer at AllPeers who – like many others – uses the BitTorrent extension to get timely access to decent television. Among other things we asked him why we need a social BitTorrent client, why we should use it and what the future brings for AllPeers.

For those who are unfamiliar with AllPeers, at the bottom of this article is a video that shows the extension in action.

TorrentFreak: What is so great about a social BitTorrent client?

Matthew: There are two issues that we want to address with Social BitTorrent. First of all, there are relatively high hurdles to getting up and running with BitTorrent as compared to watching a streaming video on YouTube or downloading a song from iTunes. To some degree this is a result of the relative technical complexity of BitTorrent clients. We’ve addressed this by integrating BitTorrent into the web browser so torrent downloads behave more like normal web downloads. We’ve also hidden a lot of the details of what’s going on in the background, while still making this available to the more technically savvy user who wants to know what their seeding ratio is or how many leechers they are connected to.

Social BitTorrent starts to kick in to help with the other big hurdle: the difficulty of finding content. Of course, experienced BitTorrent users don’t have any problem with this. But I can say from personal experience that it’s a big challenge for newbies. Most people I’ve tried to turn on to BT gave up quickly because they couldn’t figure out how to find files. With our client, it’s much easier to introduce your friends to BT because all they have to do is install AllPeers and wait. When you have a torrent file you think they’d enjoy, you share it with them using our Drag-n-Share feature, and they click on it to download. This saves everyone the time of going out and hunting for files themselves, and downloads are also much faster because you can download from the person who shared with you and from the torrent simultaneously. Once people catch the BT bug, they’ll be more motivated to figure out how to go and find files themselves.

The other aspect of Social BitTorrent is more forward-looking. To be competitive with media distribution websites like Flickr and YouTube, BitTorrent needs social features. I should be able to comment on or rate a torrent file and see other people comments and ratings. Of course, most torrent websites let you do this, but we think this should be built into the network, not dependent on a specific site. I also want to be able to tie my media consumption via BitTorrent with my social network, and we’re geared up to do this since managing a private contact list has always been central to our vision. In the longer term, it should be possible to set up ad hoc communities around various content. For example, I’m a golf fan (some would say addict), so I’d like to be able to join a community where I can exchange golf-related content with other people using BT while discussing the content and just plain meeting like-minded folks.

TorrentFreak: Should people who are not interested in the social aspect of AllPeers try it anyway?

Matthew: I’ll be fired unless I say yes. :-) Seriously, I think anyone interested in BitTorrent should at least take a look at AllPeers because we’ve done something quite different from existing clients. That said, if it’s really important for you to be able to tweak every last parameter when configuring your downloads, it might not be for you since we’ve put such a heavy emphasis on simplicity. On the other hand, the convenience of downloading directly inside Firefox is a really significant factor and might attract a lot of people who don’t care about the social aspect.

TorrentFreak: Is AllPeers “feature-wise” ready for the more demanding BitTorrent user?

Matthew: It really depends on what you mean by demanding. If you want to make sure that downloads over 312Mb start automatically at 2am while consuming no more than 47Kb/s of upload bandwidth and using at most 50 half-open TCP/IP connections, then AllPeers is definitely not the client for you. (Although we leverage Firefox’s extension architecture so maybe one day people will be able to add more esoteric features as addons.)

That said, I consider myself to be a demanding BT user, but I’m also lazy and I don’t want to spend time tweaking anything. I just want downloads to be fast and reliable. For this reason we see advanced features like peer exchange and selecting individual files for download as necessities, whereas a lot of other companies left this type of thing out of early versions of their software. BitTorrent is a big part of my lifestyle because I live in Europe, so it’s the only way for me to get timely access to decent television (much as I enjoy watching Baywatch reruns dubbed in Czech). If AllPeers didn’t download as fast as other clients, I simply wouldn’t use it. As it transpires, I use it every day, so draw your own conclusions!

TorrentFreak: Will you release a light version of AllPeers that just adds BitTorrent support to firefox?

Matthew: To some degree we already do this, since you don’t have to register to use the BT support, only if you want to use our social features. Note that currently about 75% of people who download the client do register.

As far as stripping out all the code except for the BT client, we don’t have plans currently to do this. Our client is open source so this is certainly something that a motivated outside developer could do themself. In the longer term, we’re interested in investigating whether some parts of AllPeers might make sense as built-in functionality for Firefox, and BitTorrent support is an obvious choice. I’m not affiliated with Mozilla in any official capacity, and this is pure speculation on my part, but perhaps one day we’ll see BT support in Firefox “out of the box”, and I’d be delighted if this support were based on our code.

TorrentFreak: AllPeers is maturing fast, have you ever considered to release it as a standalone application, so non-firefox users can use it as well?

Matthew: This is a no brainer, especially since XULRunner (Mozilla’s platform for standalone applications) is maturing in parallel to AllPeers. I don’t even think the development effort would be that significant. Like every big, ambitious software project, we’ve constantly grappling with an ever-expanding to-do list, but a standalone version is slowly creeping its way to the top.

In the meantime, we do have a bundle called “Firefox with AllPeers” (produced in partnership with Mozilla) for people who want to install our client, but don’t have Firefox.

TorrentFreak: Can you tell us what the future brings for Allpeers? Any exciting features?

Matthew: I don’t want to ruin the suspense by giving away too many details, but we are focusing heavily on expanding the notion of Social BitTorrent that I described earlier. We’ve already developed a feature to let you comment on files that people share with you, which we’re currently testing. We also have big plans for letting people create sharing communities. Right now, most people use AllPeers simply to send files to one or more people. In the future, we want to make it possible to continue to interact with content in interesting ways once it has been shared. I should be able to search for content in a given community that interests me, view comments and ratings, get recommendations for other files I might like, etc. Basically my dream would be to see an Amazon-like experience emerge, but completely open and based on BitTorrent.

TorrentFreak: Thanks Matthew for taking the time to answer our questions!

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

BitTorrent For Beginners

1. How and Why BitTorrent Works

BitTorrent is often referred to as the best filesharing protocol for sharing large files. But why? What makes BitTorrent so unique? Well, lets take a sneak peek under the hood of your BitTorrent client, and list a couple of features that make BitTorrent as fast, stable, and robust as it is.

2. How to Make a Torrent

Torrents are great, they are the best way to share large files with your friends, or even with people you don’t know at all. But surprisingly enough, not many people create torrents when they need to share something. We show you how.

3. uTorrent Beginners Guide

The uTorrent website has a great beginners guide for BitTorrent newbies. Worth a visit if you just started using BitTorrent.

4. Where to find Torrents

By now you probably know how BitTorrent works, now you need a good place to find .torrent files. Here’s a list of 10 great BitTorrent sites. There’s also a list of 20 less known BitTorrent sites.

Fight Throttling ISPs and be Anonymous

5. ISPs Who throttle BitTorrent Traffic

Some Internet providers try to slow you down when you use torrents. The Azureus wiki has list of ISPs who throttle BitTorrent traffic. It also suggests what encryption levels you should use.

6. How To Encrypt BitTorrent Traffic

More and more ISP’s are limiting and throttling BitTorrent traffic on their networks. By throttling BitTorrent traffic the speed of BitTorrent downloads decreases, and high speed downloads are out of the question. We show you some techniques that should help you evade some of these measures.

7. How To Tunnel BitTorrent over SSH

Sometimes it is impossible to use BitTorrent, if you’re at work, school, Comcast! or connected to a public hotspot for example. But there is an easy solution to overcome this problem. If you use a secure connection (SSH), you will be able to bypass almost every firewall.

8. How to make BitTorrent Transfers Anonymous

The Swedish Pirate Party introduced a completely anonymous (VPN) service called Relakks. Relakks makes it possible to browse the web, and use p2p-applications (like BitTorrent) without being monitored by your ISP or anti-piracy gangs like the MPAA and RIAA.

Speed up your BitTorrent Downloads

9. How to Optimize Your BitTorrent Download Speed

BitTorrent can be fun, as long as you get decent speeds. Not satisfied with your current speeds? These suggestions might help you to optimize your download pleasures.

10. How to Speed Up Bitcomet and uTorrent

90% off all people use the default settings on their client, and that’s a problem. Azureus users might want to try this tutorial by Paul Stamatiou.

11. Calculate Your Optimal BitTorrent Settings

Configuring your BitTorrent client is extremely important if you want to get the best out of BitTorrent. However, the settings pane of the average BitTorrent client might be a bit overwhelming, and some people just don’t know where to start.

12. How to Protect Your Torrent From Failing Trackers

Nothing is more frustrating than your download getting stuck. The fact that a torrent has stopped downloading can have several reasons.

BitTorrent and RSS

13. How to Use RSS & BitTorrent to Download TV shows

Are you tired of scanning several BitTorrent sites for the latest episodes of your favorite TV show in HDTV? You should definitely try using RSS feeds then. RSS and BitTorrent are a perfect match.

14. How to Make a Custom TV Torrent Feed

How to create a personalized TV torrent feed, and have all your favorite TV torrents in one feed.

15. Subscribe to TV Shows Using BitTorrent and TVNanny

TVNanny is a BitTorrent site specializing in the indexing of TV show torrents. Using a subscription based interface, it’s possible to automatically download your favorite TV show episodes to your PC, utilizing the RSS feature in your chosen torrent client.

16. How to Use Gmail to Search Torrents

Gmail is more than a useful email service. In just a few steps you can turn it into your personal torrent search engine. And by using labels and filters you can keep your inbox clean.

uTorrent Tips and Tricks

17. How to Run uTorrent on a USB Stick

A portable version of uTorrent may come in handy when you’re with friends, at school, or at work. It will fit perfectly on every usb-stick, iPod, mobile phone, or any other device that is recognized a “removable disk”.

18. How to Run uTorrent in Mac OS X

uTorrent is currently only available for Windows. But that doesn’t going to stop us from running it in OS X.

19. How to Use Firefox to Remotely Control uTorrent

The uTorrent WebUI can be used to access uTorrent from an external computer. This Firefox extension will make it even easier.

20. Use uTorrent to Organize Your BitTorrent Downloads

BitTorrent is great, but all those downloaded torrents have the habit of making a mess of your harddrive. Do you still have all your downloaded stuff in a single folder? Take action, organize your torrents.

Feel free to drop a comment if you have anything to add to this list. Happy torrenting!

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

With seventeen months still to go until election time, (and the previous election only 7 months ago) some congressional candidates are already accepting contributions for their November 2008 campaign run from so called “political action committees” (PAC). In this article we’ll be looking at two of them; RIAA’s “Recording Industry Of America Inc. Political Action Committee” and MPAA’s “Motion Picture Association of America Political Action Committee”.

With the newest hearings on June 5, more and more congressional committees and subcommittees are looking into what is being termed ‘campus piracy‘. As well as the Committee on Science and Technology, the House Judiciary Committee has also taken an interest, sending letters to a number of universities in early May, asking what steps they were taking to curb file sharing. The list of universities was obtained from the RIAA and consists of their more frequent targets.

At the hearing on Tuesday, Bart Gordon, a democratic representative from Tennessee, and Science and Technology committee chairman, said, “Illegal file sharing isn’t just about royalty fees. It clogs campus networks and interferes with the educational and research mission of universities.” The chairman presumably doesn’t have any issue with college sports, where coaches at universities are often amongst the highest paid staff members, the most prolific, and can be some of the most powerful voices in a university. These collegiate teams are the main feeders for the big money professional sports leagues in the US. Many of the students in university on a sports scholarship, would find it difficult to meet minimum requirements for entry were it not for their athletic prowess. If anything, these preferential treatments of so-called sports stars “interferes”. The millions spent on scholarships for these students, and their general lack of academic contribution is the problem.

Coming back to contribution however, Bart Gordon can hardly comment, having taken $4,500 from the RIAA and MPAA PACs to fund his 2006 election campaign. Representative Tom Feeney, a Republican from Florida, suggests universities should have their congressional funding withheld until the universities enforce copyrights on their networks effectively. Such statements will mean the RIAA/MPAA will not withhold funding from him , he’s already received $1,000 from the MPAA for his 2008 campaign in addition to another $1,000 from each PAC in 2006. The RIAA PAC publishes its contributions quarterly, and at the time of last reporting hadn’t contributed anything to anyone whilst the MPAA publishes monthly

The Judiciary committee is similarly affected. Rep. Lamar Smith (Republican, Texas) received $7,500 from the RIAA in 2006, and has already got $1,000 for his next election. Rep. Wexler (Democrat, Florida) had a contribution of $9,000 from the RIAA in 2006 and has similarly received contributions to his next election campaign from the MPAA.

Finally, who can forget Congresswoman Mary Bono (Democrat, California)? Wife of deceased congressman and performer Sonny Bono, she is well know for her extremist views on copyright (unsurprising, since she undoubtedly receives royalties from her late husbands work) even to the point of stating, “Sonny [Bono] wanted the term of copyright protection to last forever. I am informed by staff that such a change would violate the Constitution. I invite all of you to work with me to strengthen our copyright laws in all of the ways available to us. As you know, there is also Jack Valenti’s proposal for a term to last forever less one day. Perhaps the Committee may look at that next Congress.” when commenting upon the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act. She received the $4,000 from the RIAA, and the unusual amount of $2,211 from the MPAA, in 2006.

What does this funding get you? Well, it seems that as well as making politicians sympathetic to your desires, it also means that they take, without evidence, any claims you care to make. A prime example is the hearing charter for “The Role of Technology in Reducing Illegal Filesharing: A University Perspective” where data from the much maligned LEK study (1, 2, 3, 4) was stated as fact, and claims for losses and download numbers were stated without any qualifiers at all; notably at the end of the first page, which says “In 2005, copyright-infringing file sharing in the U.S. cost the movie industry $500 million, an estimated 44% of which was due to college and university students.” An amazingly round figure, for something that by its very nature is not reported or recorded, stated as a definitive figure.

These figures may not seem huge, but it is never the entire story. Under US campaign finance laws, there are limits to how much a PAC can give to any candidate during an election cycle. There are far more hidden ways of contributing, be it on issue advertising, personal donations in the names of its staff and so on. It is certainly an interesting look at what makes American politicians tick. By contrast, in the UK, MP’s are not allowed to spend more than £15,000 (about $30,000) on their campaigns.

It’s not dirty money, it’s legal, but it does make you wonder. There are several committees looking at this problem. That’s dozens of congressional representatives, spending their working time working for organisations that often work in questionable methods, which have in the past openly voiced unconstitutional views, all to prop up a failing business model using data so flimsy, its source and methodology is NEVER revealed. These are supposedly representatives of the people, who seem to be only representing bullying lobby-groups which are striving to preserve outdated business models. These very politicians are also the very people expounding on democracy before cameras. Why not contact them, and let them know how you feel?

The full list of donations is available here [opendocument Spreadsheet]

(Source: Politicalmoneyline.com)

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

p2p-blog did an early review and reports that the extension still has some issues. It causes major memory leaks and it doesn’t work with SSL-secured servers like those from BitTorrent.com.

I’ve quickly tested the audio and video streaming capabilities of the extension, and found that it worked surprisingly well. However, the problem with streaming is that the chunks can’t be downloaded at random, which slows down the speed of the download. Moreover, streaming only works if the download speeds are high enough, which is often a problem.

One thing’s for sure, Bram Cohen is not going to shit his pants (yet).

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

Bram Cohen: I really enjoy making products which I personally want to use, and like to empower people to do things they couldn’t do without BitTorrent’s efficiency and reliability. I also enjoy working with my team. We’ve recruited a really talented group of engineers from the P2P community and the tech industry, as well as some of the best business people in Silicon Valley. Together, we’re taking BitTorrent to new heights while still remaining true to our original goal of delivering content to the masses.

TorrentFreak: How do you see the future of BitTorrent Inc, what will its core business be?

Bram Cohen: We have two core businesses. We have a content delivery service to power websites which have downloadable and streaming objects on them, and we also have an entertainment destination at BitTorrent.com which will allow consumers to both publish and download high-quality digital content. Professional publishers have licensed over 5,000 downloadable video, music and game files, some of which will be free, and some for rent or purchase. We expect our network to be very prominent and an extension of our well-known brand.

TorrentFreak: Are there still “puzzles” that need to be solved to improve the BitTorrent protocol?

Bram Cohen: I had lunch with Vint Cerf at Google last week, and we discussed this at length. BitTorrent is a mature protocol at this point, but there are still a number of interesting things to work on. For example, improving tit for tat, making seeding optimizations for enterprise use, and trying to figure out if there’s any good use for error correcting codes. Regarding that last one, it turns out that there are, but most of the academic work has been barking up the wrong tree. We also have a great testing environment built, so we can test the impact of protocol extensions on real, live swarms, which is critical when making enhancements that benefit the BitTorrent community at large.

TorrentFreak: More and more ISPs have started to throttle BitTorrent traffic. How do you feel about this, especially related to the upcoming BitTorrent video store?

Bram Cohen: ISPs have historically thought that all P2P traffic is illegal, which most definitely is not the case today. Identifying traffic as BitTorrent versus http is a very poor proxy for determining legal versus illegal. Even more so as content creators have begun using our self-publishing service to distribute their own work and major studios have signed up because they recognize the enormous potential of BitTorrent as a sales channel.

Legal traffic is growing within the P2P ecosystem and piracy also travels with HTTP and FTP in high volumes. ISPs have to invest in making their networks better and faster rather than stifling applications which consumers use and love. That’s just bad marketing and customer service, especially given the competition which exists in the broadband industry and consumer focus on network neutrality. For instance, in Japan and Korea, consumers currently enjoy true all-you-can eat symmetric fiber-to-the-home at 100 mbps. That’s a great environment for P2P development to make the Web a truly powerful medium for on-demand media, with broadcast economics. Of course, it also leads to the question: Why is the United States two generations behind?

TorrentFreak: What would you advise BitTorrent users to do, when they find out that their ISP is throttling BitTorrent traffic?

Bram Cohen: Switch. Competition is the best thing for the consumer. If you’ve got a couple of options, try the alternatives. If you have no alternatives or both alternatives suck, call customer service. And call them a lot. It turns out that angry customers are more expensive to ISPs than providing unadulterated access to popular applications and websites.

TorrentFreak: The mainline client now supports encryption, but there are no settings to control this (correct me if I’m wrong). Does this mean that the client encrypts all transfers?

Bram Cohen: No. The mainline client accepts incoming encrypted connections, but makes unencrypted outgoing connections by default. We added support for that primarily for our users in unfriendly ISP environments. As I’ve said before, protocol encryption is at best a temporary hack around ISP rate limiting, until identification techniques are put in place which use transfer patterns rather than packet inspection to identify traffic. There are better approaches to evade traffic shaping, although we’re still trying to work productively with ISPs, who own the network after all. But if we can’t find a way to work together to provide a better experience for BitTorrent users, then the arms race will begin.

TorrentFreak: You said before that you’re not a big fan of encryption. What would you suggest as an alternative?

Bram Cohen: I say just leave things in the clear, and try to use caching technology to improve the ISP network. Or better yet, ISPs should lay more fiber and build bigger pipes.

The so-called ‘encryption’ of BitTorrent traffic isn’t really encryption, it’s obfuscation. It provides no anonymity whatsoever, and only temporarily evades traffic shaping. There are better approaches to obfuscation, and I’ve got a great team of engineers who are quite eager to fight that battle, but I’m hoping that everything can be resolved amicably without getting into a serious arms race.

TorrentFreak: What was the main reason behind the acquisition of uTorrent?

Bram Cohen: uTorrent has both an impressively clean codebase and large user community, although we were already working on our own C++ implementation. Moving forward, you’ll see announcements related to BitTorrent being embedded on silicon and on non-PC hardware thanks to the new C codebase we have (based on uTorrent and our protocol extensions).

TorrentFreak: Are their plans to remove any of the present features uTorrent has?

Bram Cohen: No, uTorrent users are quite happy with it, and we wish to keep things that way. In fact, be on the lookout for a Mac and Unix port, which we have the resources to do thanks to the size of our engineering team.

TorrentFreak: What will happen to the mainline client in the future?

Bram Cohen: Our mainline extensions and uTorrent’s will converge. However, we are still committed to offering an open source BitTorrent reference implementation.

TorrentFreak: Will the uTorrent client be integrated into the BitTorrent Video Store?

Bram Cohen: We’re going to launch our entertainment network with support for whichever BitTorrent client the user wishes to install.

TorrentFreak: Can you give us any details on the pricing of the products in the BitTorrent Video Store, and the quality of the video files?

Bram Cohen: We haven’t announced any firm pricing yet. The video quality will be the best possible with the available codecs. In addition to being a “store,” our site will be a destination for publishing and discovering digital entertainment, and will have plenty of free files in addition to the pay ones.

TorrentFreak: You said before that some of the content from the video store will be “protected” by Windows DRM. What is your personal view on DRM, do you see other, more user friendly alternatives?

Bram Cohen: Right now most of our content partners are insisting on DRM for the content we’re making available. It’s causing an awful lot of headaches, but we’re trying to minimize the impact on user experience and support.

TorrentFreak: Over the past year we’ve heard quite a lot of rumors about the arrangement between BitTorrent and the MPAA. Can you tell a little more about the nature of this agreement?

Bram Cohen: We support keeping copyright infringing material off of our site, and have deals with most of the MPAA member companies to make their content available through our entertainment network. The MPAA is actually a lot less of a hive mind than many people think. We’ve had to negotiate individually with each member company regarding business deals. We don’t currently have any investment from any of them.

TorrentFreak: Several other BitTorrent sites like mininova.org and torrentspy.com have the exact same policy, and remove infringing material whenever they are asked to. Though, they are often seen as the bad guys. The MPAA even sued torrentspy and isohunt, and refuses to start a dialogue, while they index the same torrents and bittorrent.com does. What’s your opinion about this?

Bram Cohen: It’s easy to make the mistake that thinking the exact letter of the law is all that matters in such situations. I have no legal opinion of what mininova and torrentspy are doing, since I’m not familiar with the exact details. But being antagonistic will result in predictable outcomes, regardless of how well defended one thinks one is legally.

TorrentFreak: Due to the arrangement with the MPAA most people might think that most of the content they search for on bittorrent.com is legal. However bittorrent.com does index a lot of copyrighted work. Don’t you think this might confuse some of the users of the site?

Bram Cohen: We’re cooperating to get copyrighted work out of our search index, and when our new site launches, much more emphasis will be placed on the self-published and licensed content within our own index, instead of the general Web search.

TorrentFreak: In March the MPAA urged the Swedish government to take down the site because it is linking to infringing material. bittorrent.com indexes the torrents from thepiratebay.org , a site that is often referred to as “Pirate Heaven”. Has the MPAA ever asked BitTorrent Inc to stop indexing The Pirate Bay?

Bram Cohen: The focus of takedown notices has primarily been on particular pieces of content, not so much where they came from.

TorrentFreak: Is there a future for BitTorrent in the development of streaming online content. For example, would it be possible for video streaming sites like YouTube to use (a modified version of) BitTorrent?

Bram Cohen: Yes, we’ve developed a streaming version of BitTorrent. Stay tuned for more details around the middle of this year.

TorrentFreak: BitTorrent is slowly starting to replace the video recorder, especially among younger people. Popular episodes of TV shows like LOST are downloaded (illegally) more than 500,000 times in just one week over BitTorrent. These figures clearly show the potential that BitTorrent has, and it’s an indication that TV as we know it is about to change. Do you think BitTorrent Inc can play a role in the future of TV? And what kind of product or business model do you think could compete with these pirated shows?

Bram Cohen: Our new site will launch with thousands of movies and TV shows, so yes, we clearly have a role in the future of video. As far as competing with the piracy experience, the better consumer experience we provide, the less people will feel the need to rely on piracy. To do that, we’ll be providing an extensive and valuable catalog of content at a good price. In the future, we’ll expand into free, ad-supported content as an integral part of our site. We’re also going to give independent publishers a platform to distribute, promote, and ultimately sell their own content as part of that experience.

TorrentFreak: If you look back at the past 5 years, what is the thing you’re most proud of?

Bram Cohen: Looking back at the past 5 years, I can still say that I’m proud of getting BitTorrent to work in the first place. When I first started working on it, nobody knew whether it was possible to overcome all the logistical problems of handling a flash crowd. It was challenging, but not only did I get it to work at all, but got it to work extremely efficiently. More recently, I’m proud of being part of the team that has worked hard to convince content publishers and enterprise businesses that unlike other p2p architectures, BitTorrent is a legitimate and incredibly powerful tool for content delivery.

TorrentFreak: Thanks for taking the time to answer these questions!

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

1. How to Make a Torrent
Torrents are great, they are the best way to share large files with your friends, or even with people you don’t know at all. But surprisingly enough, not many people create torrents when they need to share something.

2. How to find Torrents
10 Great Torrent Sites + Firefox Search Plugins.

3. How To Encrypt BitTorrent Traffic
More and more ISP’s are limiting and throttling BitTorrent traffic on their networks. By throttling BitTorrent traffic the speed of BitTorrent downloads decreases, and high speed downloads are out of the question.

4. How to Optimize Your BitTorrent Download Speed
BitTorrent can be fun, as long as you get decent speeds. Not satisfied with your current speeds? These suggestions might help yo optimize your download pleasure.

5. How to Speed Up Bitcomet and uTorrent
90% off all people use the default settings on their client, and that’s a problem.

6. How to Protect Your Torrent From Failing Trackers
Nothing is more frustrating than your download getting stuck. The fact that a torrent has stopped downloading can have several reasons.

7. How to Use RSS & BitTorrent to Download TV shows
Are you tired of scanning several BitTorrent sites for the latest episodes of your favorite TV show? You should definitely try using RSS feeds then. RSS and BitTorrent are a perfect match.

8. How to Make a Custom TV Torrent Feed
How to create a personalized TV torrent feed, and have all your favorite TV torrents in one feed.

9. How to Use Gmail to Search Torrents
Gmail is more than a useful email service. In just a few steps you can turn it into your personal torrent search engine. And by using labels and filters you can keep your inbox clean.

10. How to Run uTorrent on a USB Stick
A portable version of uTorrent may come in handy when you’re with friends, at school, or at work. It will fit perfectly on every usb-stick, iPod, mobile phone, or any other device that is recognized a “removable disk”.

11. How to Run uTorrent in Mac OS X
uTorrent is currently only available for Windows. But that doesn’t going to stop us from running it in OS X.

12. How to Use Firefox to Remotely Control uTorrent
The uTorrent WebUI can be used to access uTorrent from an external computer. This Firefox extension will make it even easier.

Have fun!

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

TorrentFreak: Where are you from, and what do you do when you aren’t running Opensubtitles?

Brano: First of all, I’d like to say hello to your readers and all movie fans out there. OK, back to your question. I am from Slovakia, currently working in a company as a SAP (ABAP) programmer. If I am not coding something for a company, I work on the Opensubtitles website. Apart from this, I go out, drink some beer, sometimes I watch movies (with subtitles ofcourse:), and I go to music parties…

TorrentFreak: When, why and how did you came up with the idea to start OpenSubtitles.org?

Brano: OpenSubtitles.org was established last year, at the beginning of 2005. I sat in some pub with my friends, talking about how hard it is to get subtitles, how bad subtitle web sites are, and what the perfect subtitle website would look like. We philosophized a bit about downloading subtitles, searching systems, and how good it will be if there would be a program that exactly knows which subtitles belongs to „my” movie.

Then, after some beers, we came up with the first idea , I decided to do something about it, and design the perfect subtitle website. We’re not there yet, but the project has the potential to change the whole system of finding and downloading subtitles.

TorrentFreak: Why the name OpenSubtitles.org?

Brano: Well, the main reason is that the content is open. This means every page on the site is available in XML format, just by adding /xml extension into URL. XML is far better for data processing than HTML. The main reason to use XML is for the translation of the site to other languages. Opensubtitles is currently available in 21 foreign languages, but we would like to have even more translations. The translating would not have been possible without the great help of our community!

When I created OpenSubtitles.org my target was to create an easy and understandable website. I didn’t want any flashing ads and banners and I hate registering, so almost all functions work without registration. And although the site may look simple, we so have some great features under the hood. For example, RSS and email results based on search criteria. There was a period in my life, when I used to downloaded subtitles before the movies, so I wanted feature like: find all subtitles in these languages, for thriller movies not older than 2 years, which have IMDB rating higher than 7. This all is possible, just click on this link Another cool feature is multisearch, just try this: make directory listing with movies (dir /b > out.txt), copy and paste this listing into the multisearch, and our server will list all subtitles found sorted by IMDB rating. IMDB is the basis of the whole website, so it is not possible to have the same movie saved under two different titles.

TorrentFreak: Are you currently collaborating with torrent sites?

Brano: I collaborate with mybittorent.com. For now this is only one site, but in the future it is possible to partner with more BitTorrent sites. I think that BitTorrent sites are missing subtitles for their movies. So it should be better for the users, if they can find/download matching subtitles directly from that site. It is possible to make unique identifier (imdb number/filesize). If there are torrent sites out there who are interested in cooperating, just contact me.

TorrentFreak: You only started a few months ago. How many visitors do you have at this point?

Brano: Good question. Immediately after launching website I saw, that one dedicated server is simple not enough. Right now we have two dedicated servers. Back to daily statistics. 40.000 Visitors and around 300.000 pageviews. Is it too few? For me – yes. Servers are still having some spare power than handle more, load is still around 1, so I’d like to see 1.000 visitors online at the same time in the future.

TorrentFreak: You offer a free subtitle manager called “SubDownloader” at your site. What is SubDownloader and why it so special?

Brano: SubDownloader is opensource program coded in python. The basic idea is: the user selects movie and SubDownloader downloads the matching subtitles for this movie. So users don’t need go to website and find the subtitles, the program will do this all for them.

Users are able to download subtitles for a movie, or they can select a directory on their hard drive where movies are stored, and the program will find all subtitles for them. It is based on unique (CRC64 + filesize), which is the same as hash used in MPC; but I’d suggest stronger one , based at least on MD5 or SHA1. Of course downloading is not the only one feature it has. Another important feature is that you’re able to upload subtitles to our server, so other people are able to download them. This is all automated, the program will automatically scan for an NFO file, and will extract other useful information from the filename for example.

TorrentFreak: When and how did you get the idea to open source the content of your website?

Brano: I like the idea of opensource. OpenSubtitles.org is not really opensource, we should call it opencontent. A month after the website was launched, Ivan Garcia from Spain (currently in Vietnam) contacted me a he volunteered to code a plugin to VLC player. Of course, I accepted his offer, because I made this site exactly for this. We discussed some details and we agreed on developing an opensource program, which will run on every operating system with a python interpreter. I coded XMLRPC interface for the website, and described functions. He wrote some basic routines and SubDownloader was slowly turning into a real application. The current version is 1.2.2, but I think 1.2.3 will be released very soon , the feedback we get is amazing.

TorrentFreak: What’s your message for future users of OpenSubtitles.org?

Brano: It is like P2P, but I call this system U2U , Users 2 Users. The more people will upload subtitles with SubDownloader, the more subtitles will be found correctly. We have further plans, making a commandline script (you will write something like subdownloader-console ,auto *.*) to autodownload subtitles for example. I am in in touch with XBOX community (XBMC), so they could make such a plugin. My dream is that the DirectShow filter will use this website, which would have similar functions as SubDownloader has , this should be a big progress , just open the movie and automatically download subtitles and watch movie immediately with them. I am a big fan of movies and so on, but dedicated servers cost some money, and I pay that from my own cash, I want to minimize the ads on the site. People who donate do this for a good cause. I also plan to make some t-shirts, so we could recognize each other on street. We are also looking for skilled programmers who can help us.

TorrentFreak: Thanks for the interview, and good luck with the website

Brano: You’re welcome.

Links:

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

If you navigate through your buddylist you will see what your friend and family share with you. If there’s something interesting, you just click the “download file” button, and the file will start downloading as soon as it is available.

The extension works pretty good, although the download process is still a little buggy. 20% of the files I tried to download stopped or disconnected for no apparent reason (friend was online), but hey, that’s why it’s a Beta.

Overall I’m absolutely positive, but I must admit that I expected more of Allpeers than it is at this point. In my opinion there are a couple of things missing (ability to download torrents) so I asked Matthew Gertner, Chief Technology Officer at Allpeers about their future plans.

TorrentFreak: A lot of people were assuming that allpeers could be used as a “regular” BitTorrent client (downloading torrents). Are you planning to integrate this functionality in a later stage?

Matthew: Actually we already support standard torrents. We haven’t added a user interface for this yet because: a) there a still a couple of issues we want to iron out and b) we still want to add features that make it competitive with leading BitTorrent clients (such as the ability to turn on/off individual files in a torrent). We’re 100% focused on getting out the AllPeers public beta and (soon afterwards) the 1.0 version. We’ll finalize our support for standard torrents after we’ve gotten this
squared away.

TorrentFreak: Are you considering releasing an “allpeers lite” extension, without the social stuff (just a client)?

Matthew: We haven’t made a decision about this but I certainly wouldn’t rule it out. In any case, we’re planning to open source AllPeers later this year, so I assume someone could do this themselves afterwards.

TorrentFreak: Is there any bandwidth managing going on “under the hood”, so you will have upload speed left to browse properly? Are you planning to integrate a settings/options menu so people van set this, and other options, manually?

Matthew: We don’t do any management of this type at present, but it’s a high priority for us. It won’t be in the first public beta, but the plan is for the 1.0 release to have full support for throttling both upload and download speed.

TorrentFreak: One of the great features of BitTorrent is that it “saves” bandwidth. For example, if A shares a file with B and C, and B will share with C as well if they download at the same time. Is this integrated in the extension?

Matthew: Yes, that’s exactly why we’re using BitTorrent. If I share a large video with my whole family, for example, everyone who has started to download will be available as a source for everyone else.

TorrentFreak: BitTorrent is designed to transfer files between large groups of people at once. Are you planning to integrate “open” and searchable groups in the future (the option for people to create open groups, and a searchable directory within the extension), so people can get the best out of BitTorrent?

Matthew: Absolutely. We have big plans for letting people set up peer-to-peer communities and share files within them. Once again, this won’t be in the 1.0 release but it is something that we are very excited about.

TorrentFreak: What are the selling points of Allpeers, and how does it differ from for example DirectConnect?

Matthew: AllPeers is designed for sharing specific files with specific people in your buddy list. When you share, metadata about all the files is sent to the recipient, so they can immediately see thumbnails, file sizes, etc. without having to search for anything. This approach is inherently ill-suited to sharing huge numbers of, say, MP3s with a bunch of people.
Note also that sharing copyrighted content is not allowed according to our Terms of Service. The bottom line is that people who are expecting AllPeers to be the ultimate darknet tool are going to be disappointed.

On the other hand, people who are looking for a way to share files conveniently and efficiently with their friends, family and colleagues will find it to be a very compelling product. We also understand that there are legitimate reasons why people might want to share lots of
files with lots of people, and we plan to add features specifically targeting this type of use later in the year (as I described earlier).

TorrentFreak: Thanks

Matthew: You’re welcome

Matthew’s answers took away my main concerns and t seems that the future looks bright for this extension. In March Allpeers received significant funding by two venture capital firms that also backed Skype in the early days. The Allpeers Beta program started this April, around the same time they were crowned “Guidewire Group Global Innovator” at the Innovate!Europe event.

You can sign up for the Beta program at Allpeers.com

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