Today’s report is based on data from over 17,221 unique users in a few dozen public BitTorrent swarms, collected by the Tribler P2P research team at Delft University of Technology.

The results in the table below show the market share for each individual client. In common with our previous reports, only 5 clients reached the 1% threshold, the remaining 14 that were encountered are grouped in the ‘other’ category. Some clients were not identified by libTorrent (rakshasa) and those ended up in the unknown ‘category’.

The changes in market share compared to our September report are also included, and these show some interesting trends. First of all, uTorrent extended its user base and now has a massive 60 percent market share. Vuze, BitComet and BitTorrent’s Mainline client all lost market share.

Transmission, on the other hand, keeps on growing. Its market share increased 23 percent and might take over BitComet’s fourth place soon. More on this in our December report.

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

Today we present our second report based on data from over 165,000 unique users in more than 400 public BitTorrent swarms. The data for this BitTorrent client comparison is collected by a researcher known as ‘xXx’ of the Tribler P2P research team at Delft University of Technology.

The results in the table below show the market share for each individual client. In common with the June report, only 5 clients reached the 1% threshold, the remaining 20 that were encountered are grouped in the ‘other’ category. Some clients were not identified by libTorrent (rakshasa) and those ended up the the unknown ‘category’.

The changes in market share compared to our June report are also included, and these show some interesting trends. First of all, uTorrent kept its dominant lead and even extended its market share to 56.81 percent. BitComet – ranked fourth again – is this month’s loser with a drop of 38 percent, falling from 6.50 to 4.71 percent market share.

On the winning side we see gains for Transmission and Vuze. Transmission’s market share increased to 44 percent and may move up a few spots if it maintains this growth rate. More on this in our October report.

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

In September 2006, Scott pleaded guilty to two charges – ‘conspiracy to commit copyright infringement’ and ‘criminal copyright infringement’. For his ‘crime’, Scott was sentenced to 5 months in jail and 5 months home confinement but his release didn’t mean his life was back to normal.

After his release in 2007, Scott was fitted with a monitoring ankle bracelet which restricted his freedom, but the government hadn’t finished limiting his life. Scott had to have special software installed on his computer to monitor his online activities, but since it was Windows only, he had to give up his beloved Ubuntu.

In the months that followed, Scott publicly shared details via his blog of his struggle to come to terms with his severe treatment for uploading a single movie, which at times made pretty upsetting reading. Thankfully his nightmare is now coming to an end.

It has been around 3 weeks since Scott was taken off the US government’s monitor list, which means that he is no longer on probation. Scott says things have been pretty good since and he can now do things we all take for granted – like being able to use Ubuntu instead of Windows.

TorrentFreak caught up with Scott who said he was happy to send a message to his friends and readers here to mark his official freedom.

“I have officially been off probation since July 12th. What a great feeling to finally be free from the clutches of evil (or the federal government). It was actually a really easy time on probation. It was 2 years, dealing once a month with my probation officer… who was really a great person,” he told us.

For those of us who remember the exact time and date of the EliteTorrents raid, it seems like only yesterday, but so much has happened since and as Scott puts it, his freedom has been a long time coming.

“I haven’t had a clear head since May 25th, 2005. Over 4 years of what I would call the worst period of my life is over,” he recalls.

But in the end the release from the nightmare comes from Scott himself and he is certainly trying to make the best of things now.

“I have been focusing a lot of time on my family. We bought a house in November, while I was still on home confinement. I am working at a local college, dealing with ERP implementations, specifically Oracle, and I am still actively participating in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, and MMA,” he told TorrentFreak.

As if these things won’t keep Scott busy enough, he’s looking forward to a brighter future and a very special occasion.

“I will be hopefully starting back to school for my MBA in the spring. And I am getting married in May 2010. Aside from the economy, I couldn’t ask for anything more.”

Scott told us that he felt his story is probably no longer worthy of news, so he will take this opportunity to move back into the shadows to get on with his new lease of life.

“This will be the last time most of you hear from me – although there is sk0t.com. The good majority of you have been really supportive… so thank you all for caring, and for
those of you who didn’t care… thanks also.”

I’m sure that the readers will join us in wishing Scott all the best for the future and every happiness in his forthcoming marriage. Good luck Scott.

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

Today we present a more robust report based on data from over 150,000 unique users in more than 400 public BitTorrent swarms. The data for this BitTorrent client comparison is collected by a researcher known as ‘xXx’ of the Tribler P2P research team at Delft University of Technology. The research team will continue to supply TorrentFreak with bi-monthly updates so we can discover new trends and shifts in the usage of the different clients.

The results in the table below give the market share for each individual client. Only 5 clients reached the 1% threshold, the remaining 19 that were encountered are grouped in the ‘other’ category. Some clients were not identified by libTorrent (rakshasa) and those ended up the the unknown ‘category’.

Both uTorrent and the third placed mainline client are developed by BitTorrent Inc, meaning that the company holds an impressive two thirds of the market. The only main contender at the moment is Vuze, formerly known as Azureus, with nearly 17 percent. BitComet, which used to be a major contender, is in fourth place with just 6.5 percent.

The data also gives us more insight into the size of the BitTorrent ‘network’. In December we reported that uTorrent had 28 million unique users a month, and based on this figure that might have grown even higher in the recent months. It is safe to say that there are roughly 50 million active BitTorrent users on the Internet.

It will be interesting to see how the market share of the clients changes over the coming months. Will uTorrent be able to keep its dominant lead? What will happen to Transmission’s market share when they release their Windows version? Will there be any new clients to compete with the top three? Lots of questions that we hope to answer in the future.

Stay tuned!

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

We don’t make (much) music here at the Free Software Foundation, so it’s natural for people to wonder why the FSF has been standing up for individuals targeted by lawsuits launched by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). Most recently we filed an *amicus curiae* brief in the case of *Sony BMG Music Entertainment, et al. v. Joel Tenenbaum* showing the RIAA’s theory of statutory damage awards to be unconstitutional.

Some would prefer that we refrain from fighting these lawsuits, suggesting that they are a distraction from the FSF’s core charter. But opposing them is actually an important part of our mission to support free software. First, these lawsuits represent a concerted attempt to rewrite copyright law in a way that threatens to undermine the ultimate goals of the free software movement. Second, a vocal minority in the entertainment industry uses these lawsuits as warrants to justify DRM technology and other measures to monitor and control the flow of information over the internet. Third, if unopposed, these lawsuits create a culture in which people are afraid to share, presuming sharing to be theft.

In their response to our brief, the RIAA says, “The FSF is not a neutral friend of the Court. Rather, FSF is an organization dedicated to eliminating restrictions on copying, redistribution, and modifying computer programs, classic intellectual property, much like the sound recordings at issue in this case [*sic*].” It’s unclear what legal aim the RIAA lawyers from the firms of Holme Roberts & Owen and Dwyer & Collora think they are accomplishing with this attack. Having an interest in the outcome of a case is the reason organizations file such briefs. William Rehnquist defined *amicus curiae* as, “a phrase that literally means ‘friend of the court’ — someone who is not a party to the litigation, but who believes that the court’s decision may affect its interest.”

But here, it is the public’s interest that we are defending, not our own. While we don’t agree — as the RIAA claims — that we are more “virulent” than an organization that intimidates everyone from the elderly to college students to the severely disabled into either paying “settlement” money or facing the crushing expenses of defending against unwarranted prosecution in faraway jurisdictions, the RIAA is correct that the FSF does have a position on copyright. Although we are primarily concerned not with music, but with how software can be made and shared so as to benefit and empower everyone, neither are the impacts of the RIAA’s actions restricted to the distribution of music. Their lawsuits are a deliberate campaign to rewrite copyright law through the courts. They are attempting to set precedents which will affect all works governed by copyright law, including software.

The RIAA, which in its litigation campaign represents exclusively EMI, Sony Music Entertainment, Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group, and their affiliates, would like to change copyright to be an ordinary physical property right. Through these lawsuits, they seek to establish near exclusive permanent control over each and every use of the recordings their members distribute, expanding the power of copyright owners to include things which are not part of the existing body of law, and extracting financial penalties from the largely defenseless individuals accused of disobeying them.

But copyright is not and was not intended to be a right like this. In fact, copyright requires that the public give up some of its rights, such as to free speech and free association, in order to promote another of its fundamental interests — progress in the sciences and useful arts. In “Misinterpreting Copyright,” FSF president Richard Stallman draws an analogy between this tradeoff and government procurement. When doing any kind of purchasing necessary to do the public’s work, the government seeks (if imperfectly) to minimize the amount of taxpayer money spent to obtain the needed goods. This means paying a price that suppliers will find acceptable, while avoiding being gouged by those suppliers who may claim that the goods are worth a lot more than they really are. When the U.S. Navy was accused of paying Lockheed $640 per toilet seat for some of its aircraft, people were understandably outraged, because the government had squandered the public’s money.

In the case of copyright, it’s the public’s freedom that the government is spending, to obtain in return for the public scientific and cultural goods. Right now, governments are squandering this freedom. They are spending far too much and getting far too little in return. Plenty of authors and artists are telling the government that works can and will be made without such expenditure. The international free software movement has been proving this for many years now, having successfully produced a fully functional operating system in GNU/Linux that can be freely used, shared and improved upon by anyone who wants to do so; and more recently there have been people doing similar things in encyclopedias, textbooks, and the world of the arts (including music).

Previously, because the required equipment was large and expensive, normal readers and listeners did not have the means to easily make copies. Restrictive copyright did not negatively affect them. But now, because so many more people do have the ability to easily exercise this freedom, the burden imposed by copyright restrictions on our society has become unacceptably heavy. Even while these restrictions have become more burdensome, they have become less necessary — with the cost of publishing so much lower now, less incentive is required. Instead of acknowledging this, the government has been taking the side of those who, out of greed akin to selling us $640 toilet seats, see an opportunity to freeze what should be a contingent and evolving bargain into a permanent and natural right for themselves, expanding ownership powers under copyright law far beyond its current and historical borders.

In the U.S., the new administration continues to side against the public. Vice President Joe Biden recently spoke at a MPAA luncheon. He adopted the entertainment industry’s loaded “piracy” language, saying, “It’s pure theft.” Biden also assured the MPAA that President Obama would find the “right” copyright czar. His attitude is not surprising, given his past eagerness as a senator to sponsor and support RIAA-backed legislation. He was, after all, one of four U.S. senators invited to a champagne celebration of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) hosted by the MPAA, RIAA, and the Business Software Alliance. Obama himself has already appointed Tom Perrelli and Donald Verrilli, both former lead attorneys for the RIAA, to be associate and deputy associate attorney general.

If we are going to achieve sane copyright law, we have to avoid confusing this institutionalization of corporate greed with “art.” In fact, it seems most artists disagree with the RIAA. Sony artists reportedly earn a tiny $0.045 for each song sold on iTunes, and most of them will never receive even that much from Sony. As one example among many, singer Courtney Love answers the charge of piracy by saying: “What is piracy? Piracy is the act of stealing an artist’s work without any intention of paying for it. I’m not talking about Napster-type software. I’m talking about major label recording contracts.”

The RIAA doesn’t stop at manipulating copyright law to gouge artists and the public. They also use their lawsuits as leverage to argue for control over any technology that could be used to distribute music. For example, they have pushed to require all wireless access points to be encrypted and closed, to restrict technologies like BitTorrent and other forms of peer-to-peer distribution, to impose bandwidth caps on home internet users, and to monitor traffic through service providers. Such efforts directly hurt free software. Because free software authors around the world work by collaboration, they rely on open distribution networks to move software, data, and conversation around. In particular, peer-to-peer technologies make this easier and cheaper for people with less bandwidth, and so are a powerful means of boosting grassroots free software distribution and development efforts.

The RIAA further attacks free software when they use these filesharing cases as ammunition to advocate DRM under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). It was the RIAA that attacked Princeton scientist Ed Felten for wanting to publish useful mathematical information, because this generally useful information might possibly be used to decrypt their specific DRM scheme. Sony saw no problem with secretly installing a rootkit on users’ computers, to facilitate spying on them and blocking certain activities. These efforts to turn computers against their users and to restrict technical information are on-face incompatible with free software. If we allow the RIAA to win outrageous damages in these lawsuits, then we are letting them manufacture evidence of losses due to illegal copying, which they will then use to demand from Congress more control over our technology.

Among both the government and the public, the RIAA lawsuits create a culture which frames these issues in terms that make it harder for free software to succeed, by creating a culture that fears sharing. This leads to confusion like the recent case of a schoolteacher who assumed that a student handing out GNU/Linux discs in class was breaking the law. One can hardly blame her for having this impression when the RIAA lawsuits and propaganda thoroughly permeate the news media, encouraging everyone to assume that sharing is wrong unless they are told otherwise.

The RIAA’s framing of the issue as “intellectual property” is another key way they foster this fear. They cite our opposition to this concept in their reply to our brief, and they are correct. The use of “intellectual property” language threatens to undermine the free software movement. The term lumps together disparate concepts like copyright, patents, and trademarks, which are legally distinct. The RIAA would like to lump them together because doing so increases the size of the gouge they can extract. By drawing an analogy with physical property, they erase the actual histories behind these specific areas of law and rationalize the obscene damages they are demanding. It skews discussion of the issues involved so that good solutions can’t be found, and if it is used in place of a clear discussion about copyright in the arena of music then people will accept it when discussing software as well.

The bottom line is that for art and software alike, sane copyright law should facilitate and promote sharing so that everyone can benefit from what is produced, and participate meaningfully in making it. For software, the easiest way to share is to put source code in the public domain, and not require any End User Licensing Agreement (EULA) or patent licenses. Anyone can then study and use the software, make changes to it, and redistribute changed versions to anyone they want. However, this leaves the door open for other people to use copyright law to make some changes to that software and strip away the freedom, redistributing their version without the freedoms that were originally there. Copyright law allows people to play middleman like this, intercepting works that are intended to be free and turning them into proprietary programs to control users.

To ensure that software written to be free remains free, the FSF uses a copyright license called the GNU General Public License (GPL). The GPL says that anyone is free to use, copy, change, and distribute modified versions of the software to which it is attached — as long as they pass on those same freedoms to whomever else they give the software. The GPL can do this because copyright law gives copyright holders the authority to outline those terms. Instead of using that authority to make copying illegal, the FSF uses that authority to make it illegal to make copying illegal.

Despite this, the FSF will continue working to reduce the power of copyright restrictions by fighting these lawsuits, filing briefs in specific cases, and collecting contributions to the RIAA Expert Witness Fund. We do not intend to shoot ourselves in the foot by supporting proposals to reduce the scope of copyright that would weaken the way the GPL protects freedom without simultaneously weakening the way companies like Microsoft and Apple use it as a weapon to take away freedom. But neither will we support the RIAA’s expansive approach to empowering copyright owners at the public’s expense on the grounds that it would make the GPL “stronger.” We will not accept losing the GPL as an effective shield unless as part of a plan that we could be confident would make software generally free. But neither will we confuse it with the end goal, which is a world where people are not called criminals when they want to see what the software on their computer is actually doing, or to share a copy with their neighbors, or to improve it and share their improvements.

Executives like Rolf Schmidt-Holtz of Sony Music Entertainment should get the message and back off. Although they claimed in December that they would stop filing lawsuits against individuals, the RIAA filed 62 more in the month of April alone. Citizens are tired of watching their governments squander their freedom to enrich this handful of corporations, and they are tired of being intimidated. We will continue our work to support this opposition to the War on Sharing, and to restore or replace copyright law for its intended purpose — progress in science and the arts, for everyone.

CC-BY-ND

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

We thought it would be interesting to compare the users of different operating systems on their sharing behavior. Therefore we decided to take a closer look at the share ratios of Windows, Mac and Linux software on The Pirate Bay. The results are quite interesting and indicate that Windows users share twice as much as their Mac counterparts.

In order to calculate the share ratio we simply looked at all the seeders (completed downloads) and leechers (still downloading) on the torrents in the software category on The Pirate Bay. The share ratio is the number of seeders divided by the number of leechers. So, the higher the ratio, the more users share.

In the table below you can see that there are much more torrents for Windows software, 49345 compared to 2952 for Mac software and 1271 for Linux. Nevertheless, those downloading Windows software tend to share the files for longer, even compared to the Linux users.

Not listed in the table, but worthy of note, are the average number of downloaders per torrent. Mac software is in the lead here with 22 downloaders, followed by Windows with 9 and Linux with a measly average of 4 peers per torrent. Although we can conclude that those who download Windows software share more compared to others, the ratios for Mac and Linux software aren’t bad either. It can get a lot worse – Xbox 360 downloaders don’t even make a 0.3 share ratio.

Of course, the term ‘pirate’ obviously doesn’t apply to all downloaders either, especially not for the Linux group. It is interesting to see the huge differences in share ratios between the different categories though; perhaps Microsoft should consider building their next campaign around these stats. Sharing is caring, right?

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

Among the early adopters of the BitTorrent protocol were several Linux projects, saving thousands of dollars in bandwidth costs. In 2005, Linuxtracker started to aggregate these Linux distributions, and it has been growing steadily over the years, racking up more than 130,000 unique visitors each month.

The site’s server currently tracks more than 40,000 peers and in the past 12 months it coordinated the distribution of 180 terabytes worth of Linux software. TorrentFreak caught up with Mark Angeli, the founder of the site, and we asked him what motivated him to create Linuxtracker.

“I was getting into the BitTorrent ‘movement’ downloading the shows I missed at night while at work. At this time I was also trying out new Linux distributions on a fairly regular basis and while I had decent download speeds, I wanted to find a better way to download and share Linux,” Mark told us.

“Some of the bigger distributions were beginning to use BitTorrent as a means of distribution, but the smaller ones were having a hard time. I wanted to make it easy for them, so I put up a site and a tracker,” he added.

The first Linux torrent Mark uploaded was for Slax 4.2.0. but it was only the beginning. Soon dozen of torrents followed, and with it their community of Linux enthusiasts started to expand. Mark told us that they have some exciting plans for the future, but these remain between him and the other admins of the site for now. One thing he did reveal is that they are looking to add a “lighter” version of the site for those on smaller devices like netbooks and smartphones.

One of the great advantages of the Linuxtracker community is that the seed/leech ratios are extremely good, even though the site doesn’t require users to register. The site is currently celebrating the month of February with some giveaways from their sponsors, so for all the Linux fans who haven’t discovered the site already, it’s well worth checking out.

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

When it comes to upgrading their OS, however, most users still rely on Ubuntu’s central servers. Because of this, the servers are overloaded with upgrade requests every time a big update is released, which often causes them to crash. The next Ubuntu update, version 8.10 aka Intrepid Ibex is scheduled to be released this week, and since the OS is more popular than ever, updating might be troublesome.

There is an easy solution to this problem though. One that not only prevents the Ubuntu servers from crashing, but also speeds up the update progress, because it uses BitTorrent. A bunch of TorrentFreak readers were kind enough to write a basic tutorial to guide you through the upgrade process, which we have posted below.

Update to Ubuntu ‘Intrepid Ibex’ using BitTorrent

Step 1: Setting sources.list to a close-local mirror

First off, it’s definitely recommended to reset to a local mirror. This way, you will download any needed files from a closer and supposedly faster source.

Either do an auto-check: System -> Administration -> Software Sources -> Download From: -> Other -> Select Best Server (It’ll run a couple hundred tests (takes less than five minutes) and select the best mirror for you. Make sure to remember which mirror it is, because you will need that later.)

Or select your local mirror yourself according to your country.

Step 2: Disable 3rd Parties repositories

It is also very much recommended to disable 3rd party repositories! If you don’t know exactly what you are doing, go to the 3rd Parties tab and deselect all of the entries there.

Step 3: Install apt-p2p

Next you need to install “apt-p2p”. Version 0.2.5 is needed because of a major bug in older versions. This is beta software, so it might not be stable for everybody. If it can’t download the file via BitTorrent, however, it will revert to http download.

As apt-p2p is not in the hardy repos yet, we have to fetch it from a server directly. Below I have have two scripts for 32-bit and 64-bit. Use the one that matches your OS.

For 32bit versions use this script, and for 64bit versions use this script.

Save the script file as “apt-p2p.sh” on your desktop. Then open a terminal (Applications > System > Terminal) and issue these commands (you’ll be prompted for your user password):

The scripts will create a apt-p2p folder in the /temp folder, enter that folder and download apt-p2p from the intrepid repositories (they work fine on hardy), including all dependencies. Finally, it will install everything in the required order.

Step 4: Prepare the sources.list

Once installed type the following:

Now you are looking at the sources.list file for Ubuntu; this specifies which servers to contact for updates and new programs. You should see a bunch of lines that look similar to this:

deb http://archive.canonical.com/ubuntu hardy partner
deb-src http://archive.canonical.com/ubuntu hardy partner
deb http://*mirror-address*/ubuntu/ hardy main universe restricted multiverse
deb-src http://*mirror-address*/ubuntu/ hardy main universe restricted multiverse

where **mirror-address** is the address of the mirror you chose earlier.

Don’t worry, you may not have all of these, and you may have more. However, you only want to change ones that are similar to these. You want to change these to look like this:

deb http://localhost:9977/archive.canonical.com/ubuntu hardy partner
deb-src http://localhost:9977/archive.canonical.com/ubuntu hardy partner
deb http://localhost:9977/*mirror-address*/ubuntu/ hardy main universe restricted multiverse
deb-src http://localhost:9977/*mirror-address*/ubuntu/ hardy main universe restricted multiverse

So basically just insert “localhost:9977″ after the “http://”. Now close the program and save the file. Note: If you messed anything up, go back to the terminal and run this command:

This WILL overwrite your sources.list file with your backup and we are almost done!

Step 5: Update the packages & upgrade to Intrepid

Back at the terminal, type the following command:

This will update the list of software, as well as fully integrate apt-p2p. If you get any errors, run the following commands (Warning: If not done carefully, these commands could destroy your system):

Once everything looks okay, you’ll want to forward the ports for apt-p2p to your system (if you have a router, see http://portforward.com, port for apt-p2p is 9977 TCP and UDP). At this point, you’re all set to receive regular updates via BitTorrent. If you want to upgrade to Intrepid ahead of time you may type one of the following commands in the terminal:

Click on the “upgrade” button on the top right of that window and follow the wizard. When asked, that no valid mirror was found and whether it shall replace hardy with intrepid, then select “Yes”.

or use

Note: When issuing a “dist-upgrade” in the terminal you will first need to manually alter the entries in the sources.list from “hardy” to “intrepid”.

Now you’re all set, and by using BitTorrent to update Ubuntu you will be updated much faster, and help relieve the strain on the update servers on launch day. As always, tips and suggestions are welcome in the comments.

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

With DistriBrute, distribution servers are no longer needed. The data doesn’t have to be distributed from one location, since all the workstations connected to the network actively help in the spreading the data. Every desktop in the system becomes a peer, and helps to send the data to other desktops. The result: faster distribution of updates and patches, and a significant cost reduction.

There are more selling points other than the cost reductions and speed improvement. Since servers tend to use a lot of energy, between 6000 and 7000 KWh a year, it can also be seen as a ‘green’ solution. This ‘green’ aspect has not gone unnoticed. Today, DistriBrute won the audience price of the Digikring Innovation Awards, an initiative that rewards environment friendly ICT solutions.

After winning the award, DistriBrute officially launched. Thus far, it had two successful test runs at large educational institutions in The Netherlands, and the initial results are promising. At INHOLLAND, a concept version of DistriBrute is now used to send software to 6500 desktop computers across 16 different locations. It thereby eliminates 20 servers that were used before to distribute 25.6 TBs of data across the network. Even more so, the P2P based solution speeded up this process significantly, from 4 days to only 4 hours.

The cost savings for those who use DistriBrute are immense. Leo Blom, co-founder of 4M88 told TorrentFreak that they were able to cut 50 servers at ROCMN, another Dutch educational institution. The costs to manage a server can get as high as $10,000 a year, but these will evaporate thanks to DistriBrute.

DistriBrute is one of the first commercial products for business use to reveal the true power of the BitTorrent protocol. For now, availability is limited to organizations in The Netherlands, in the first quarter of 2009 it will be released internationally.

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

After turning two other filesharing applications, Bearshare and iMesh, into pay services, a company called Discordia Ltd turned their attention to Shareaza. The company, which seems to be related to the recording industry hijacked the Shareaza domain and moved to seize the valuable Shareaza trademark as their own. Discordia even had the nerve to set their lawyers on the open source team. A summary of the entire scandalous story so far can be obtained here.

Back in May the Shareaza team announced “We’re fighting back!” and today we bring good news in the battle to neutralize the nefarious intentions of Discordia – the release of a brand new client. We interview Wout and Alex of Shareaza about their new baby: Project Panthera.

TF: The Shareaza client has enjoyed considerable success over the years. What inspired you to taper off the effort on the old software and embark on this huge effort of creating a whole new client?

Wout: Due to recent events beyond our scope of expertise, we were required to rethink our strategy surrounding Shareaza. Because we can count on the support of a massive userbase, we decided to create a new client, with some of the features requested most for Shareaza, but which we were never able to introduce.

TF: Shareaza is a very well known name in the P2P community – it’s been downloaded way in excess of 43 million times. What were the factors that led to the decision to create a fresh brand? (Project Panthera)

Wout: Well once again some people demonstrated how low a person is able to go. We learned that a company owned by Imesh (Discordia) filed for a trademark on the Shareaza brand name. Even though they have no ties to the program or the Shareaza brand. So in essence they are just doing it to benefit from the Shareaza name. This was also a factor in naming the application. We didn’t want them to benefit from our developers hard work yet again.

Alex: We basically got mugged by a gang armed with lawyers. This meant we had to reconsider our whole approach to managing Shareaza’s development to ensure the long term survival of the project. We can see a real danger that this may happen to other popular free software projects too.

Something interesting we’ve discovered: did you know that the United States Patent and Trademark Office aren’t connected to the Internet? When Discordia Ltd. filed for the trademark on our name, we wrote to the USPTO and pointed out that we’ve been using the Shareaza name for years. They said they can’t investigate sources external to their own database. We said “Couldn’t you just spend 30 seconds Googling the name of the application?” They said their procedures don’t allow them to do that. This rubbish is actually the basis of intellectual property law in the U.S. and many other western nations. Is it any wonder people are going out and creating their own licenses like the GPL and the various flavors of Creative Commons out of sheer bloody frustration with the IP laws?

According to Alex, “F**king heaps!” of time and effort have gone into the development of Panthera, “a massive job” which has been underway since April 2008, and in part personally financed by members of the team. As Panthera is (of course) an open source project and does not include any adware or bundled software, Wout told us that the team are counting on donations to help them make this software the best of its kind.

TF: What are the key features of ‘Panthera’ and why is this release superior to the ‘old’ software? Why should people switch?

Wout: Panthera has every feature Shareaza has and much more. Panthera includes decent BitTorrent support (libtorrent), skin support, proper Gnutella1 support, no use of the registry and a completely revamped media player. There is no denying it – we looked at Shareaza a lot when coding this app, and whenever we found some code that was interesting, we asked ourselves: “How can we make it better?”

TF: Panthera is a multi-network client, including BitTorrent. Tell us a bit more about the implementation and the support for other networks.

Wout: Panthera supports Gnutella1, Gnutella2, BitTorrent and ED2K (not in beta but it will be in final release). The BitTorrent in the beta release will be the default QT (more about this later) BitTorrent sample client. This is for testing purposes only. Once we have enough test data, we will replace this with Libtorrent from Rasterbar.

Alex: Shareaza has a long history with BitTorrent – we were the first client to experiment with decentralized torrents for example – but since the BitTorrent scene has just exploded, our home grown implementation has fallen behind the times which is why we’ve decided to implement the libtorrent library. One other reason is that as we’re free and open source, we figured it was about time we started taking advantage of our right to use other people’s free and open source code where its better than ours. Why reinvent the wheel when there is a perfectly good solution just sitting there waiting for people to use it under the same copyleft conditions we believe in?

TF: Panthera is multi-network, and multi-platform too. Tell us more about this.

Wout: Multi platform means more users, means more files, means more and faster downloads. No other P2P program allows to connect to virtually all the most popular networks on every operating system.

Alex: Linux especially is starting to become a viable alternative to Windows and many of our developers and supporters are either dual booting or have switched to Linux environments completely. The next logical step is native multi-platform support. As Wout says, broader coverage = win.

Clearly a project of such ambition can consume considerable resources. Wout and Alex agree that they will take all the help they can get, noting that they “absolutely need testers and feedback” and welcome anyone who is prepared to code, test or donate. In particular they would be very grateful for offers of help from developers – the program is based on the QT framework and is coded entirely in C++, and anyone with experience of Rasterbar’s Libtorrent.

It is possible that Discordia might just be successful in stealing the Shareaza brand name but the team remains upbeat and is full of enthusiasm for Panthera.

“It’s given us a chance to re-write a fantastic P2P app and make it even better,” says Alex, “which is a perfect example of the file-sharing Hydra in action.”

Panthera Project will be officially available on August 25th but in the meantime, temporary test builds are available here.

Anyone offering project support should contact the team on contribute@pantheraproject.com.

Those able to donate, should do so via donations@pantheraproject.com

Don’t forget, the real Shareaza project is located at http://sourceforge.net/projects/shareaza/

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

A little like a private tracker, you either have to be invited to an Alliance network – or help the hydra and make your own. It’s very easy to setup and scale your own decentralized network with BitTorrent-like ’swarming’ capabilities using Alliance, and as the software just reached V1.0 we thought it would be a good time to catch up with the creator for the lowdown.

TF: Tell us about the birth of AllianceP2P and why you decided to conceive it.

Maciek: I remember writing the first lines of code for Alliance back in 2005. It was cold and dark outside. In Sweden, where I live, it tends to be dark and cold during the end of the year. So I’m guessing it was around November 2005.

I was discussing the different p2p networks out there with a work colleague. There was nothing really good that guaranteed high security, was easy to use and had high download speeds (all truly secure p2p networks I know are really slow, to the point where they’re useless). We talked about many, many different solutions to the problem – I remember talking about DHTs and network coding.

Finally I got totally hooked on the idea of a network where you connect to people that you trust. You’d use encrypted connections and only connect to friends , this way safety would be guaranteed. You’d be able to connect to friends of your friends , if you knew you trust them. This way the network would grow. I’d use a BitTorrent-like download mechanism and direct connections (no tunneling). This way I could guarantee high download speeds. I’d make sure it was user friendly and easy to use. This way networks would grow fast.

Now, almost three years later, I’ve just released version 1.0! I’m really happy with this because I feel I have implemented my entire vision. I have a full time job so I coded Alliance during my spare time. At times it was pretty intense… Other times I didn’t code on Alliance for months.

TF: Who else is involved in the project?

Maciek: This being an open source project I’ve had help from others along the way:pontusm, mrund and deathfired on sourceforce.net to mention a few.

TF: What size is the AllianceP2P userbase and who are they?

Maciek: Since Alliance is free and open source there is no real target market. I simply developed a piece of software that I knew I’d love to use. And since it’s decentralized I don’t keep track on any user statistics (a part from the automatic error reports I get). I just released version 1.0. Before 1.0 the alpha/beta versions where downloaded over 50,000 times.

TF: How does the software work?

Maciek: Alliance is written in Java and runs on Windows, Mac OS and Linux. It has file-swarming capabilities like BitTorrent. Unlike BitTorrent it has an extensive built-in search, is completely decentralized and designed to be secure. Alliance is actually a friend-2-friend network. Within each network of friends is a community where users can download files from each other, chat and post new files in the chat.

TF: What are the most important aspects of Alliance?

As you only connect to people you know and all connections are encrypted, Alliance is very secure. Since there is no central server or single point of failure, the network gets strength by decentralization.

Alliance has great scalability , it has been tested to work with share sizes where each client shares one terabyte of data in approximately 50,000 files and it is very easy to use. Additionally, Alliance is, and will always remain, free and open source.

Alliance uses tiger hashes to identify files. All files that a user shares are automatically hashed and indexed in the background. This way Alliance can automatically identify a file that several users have and download from all those users simultaneously.

TF: Tell us about this latest version 1.0. Why should people install it?

Maciek: I actually took two weeks off of my normal job in order to complete version 1.0. I knew that I would not be able to finish it otherwise. I had over 3000 detailed automatic error reports sent to me during the last year. I sorted all error reports in order of “popularity” and started fixing them. One after another. It was a dirty job but someone had to do it =). Alliance 1.0 is the first stable release of a new kind of p2p software. A network that is fast AND secure.

TF: Thanks for speaking with us.

So, if you’d like to quickly create a secure, decentralized filesharing network with BitTorrent-like swarming, and a DirectConnect-style community to compliment your communications and sharing arsenal, Alliance could be your solution. Even when your favorite tracker goes down, Alliance will still be there, with all the peers intact. You can get it here.

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

Some people are using TED, which is a Java app running continuously which may cause resource issues for the under-powered computer. Others might choose to use directly the RSS support built into torrent clients, explained in this previous article, or go for software such as Miro.

But for those of you out there who like to get a little more hands-on and aren’t afraid of a basic command line, read on.

TorrentFreak reader Lipflip has come up with an alternative method for OSX and probably Linux users too. He told us that everything TVShows did can be achieved by using some freely available tools like cron and a script pyTVShows that is based on the original TVShows application.

pyTVShows does the actual work by checking tvrss.net for torrents and downloading them if new ones are available. Lipflip has published a simple tutorial on how to setup the different components so that everything is working as expected. Although you don’t have to be an uber-geek to follow the tutorial, Lipflip notes that some basic command line skills are required which should help users to get their shows until the new TVShows is released.

The original TVShows application consists of two parts:

1. A front-end for fetching a list of shows and for subscribing/unsubscribing.
2. A python script in the back-end, that regularly asks tvrss.net if new episodes for the subscribed shows are available.

Luckily TVShows is an open source application, so after the development of TVShows stood still for several months, the back-end forked away as the separate pyTVShows project. We’ll use this to build a system that fetches your favorite television shows automatically.

The installation consists of a few easy steps. Python already ships with Leopard, so you don’t have to hassle around with fink or other ways to bring Python onto your computer.

1. Preparation

Open Terminal.App and create a bin/ directory under your home. You can use this directory to store small scripts or little unix-like applications.

$ mkdir /Users/YOU/bin

Download pyTVShows, unzip it, and put it as pytvshows-0.2 in your bin/ directory.

Download feedparser, unzip it, and install it.

$ cd /Users/YOU/Downloads/feedparser-4/
$ python setup.py install

2. Create a preliminary configuration file

pytvshows settings are stored in /.pytvshows.cfg. Create it and add one or two shows for testing.

$ nano ~/.pytvshows.cfg

The format of the configuration file is pretty simple. The name of the show is enclosed by squared brackets, followed by the last season/episode you have seen.
So the next episode downloaded for Favorite Show from the example below will be Season 1, Episode 2. Try episode = 0 for catching the first episode of a new season.

[Favorite Show]
episode = 1
season = 1

[Another Show]
episode =1
season = 4

See pytvshows’ documentation for further details.

3. Create a little wrapper script

Create a little wrapper script that calls the actual pytvshows, but hides any command line arguments you might want to use. Don’t forget to make it executable.

$ nano ~/bin/tvshows.sh
$ chmod a+x ~/bin/tvshows.sh

A typical tvshows.sh might look like this:

#!/bin/bash
echo -n “tvshows.sh – “; date # log current date & time (cron.log)
/Users/YOU/bin/pytvshows-0.2/pytvshows –output_dir=/Users/YOU/Downloads/

This will call pytvshows and tell it to download new .torrents into Leopard’s Downloads folder. This folder is usually represented as a stack in your dock. You might consider configuring your favorite BitTorrent client to watch this folder for new .torrent files.

Check it for typos by executing the script:

$ ./bin/tvshows.sh

It should download unseen episodes of the shows configured in ./pytvshows.cfg.
If it doesn’t try running pytvshows with the parameter --verbose. The configuration file will be rewritten each time a .torrent was downloaded. So maybe it doesn’t download new episodes because it thinks it already did.

4. Run tvshows.sh periodically

Unix-like systems usually come with a time-based scheduling service called cron. It is driven by rather cryptic looking configuration files called crontabs. In this case we’ll tell cron to run our newly created tvshows.sh twice an hour.

Edit your crontab:

$ crontab -e

If you’re thrown into vi you may try export EDITOR=nano beforehand.

Your crontab should look like this:

# run twice an hour
12,42 * * * * /Users/YOU/bin/tvshows.sh >> $HOME/bin/cron.log 2>&1

This tells cron to call tvshows.sh on 12 resp. 42 minutes past the hour. All output (STDERR and STDOUT) should be send to /Users/YOU/bin/cron.log.
Take a look at man crontab for further information.

It’s strongly suggested to randomize the numbers above. Otherwise too many pytvshows might be querying tvrss.net simultaneously.

5. You’re probably done

Check your configuration by looking at ~/bin/cron.log.

Have fun!

Lipflip’s blog can be found here

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

This is why Tape It Off The Internet seemed like such a good idea until you actually started trying to use it. There are just not enough good shows being made to justify something as complicated and involved as TIOTI. Enter all your favorites and share them with strangers ‘just like you’ and discover… what? That there are only seven good shows in the world at any one time, you were already watching six of them, and they’re all in the Pirate Bay’s Top 100 anyway. When you strip away the hours of dross and advertising, the truth is that the world’s mighty entertainment infrastructure is only capable of producing half a dozen hours of passable content a week. Maybe it’s because they spend the rest of their time on lawsuits.

One of these rare hours is The Wire. If by some small chance you’re not mainlining it already, think yourself lucky. You have four back seasons to enjoy, of what is quite possibly the last great show television will produce before it’s entirely superseded by — well, by whatever is coming around the way.

I’m not sure anyone has ever attempted to make a show of this scope: The Wire’s by-all-accounts-not-very-nice creator David Simon (Homicide, The Corner) has said his theme over the series’ five years has been ‘the decline of the American empire’ — which means decay of its cities through poverty, of traditional jobs, of the education system, of the police force and of the media. For those getting restless at the back, the show’s also got the slickest, nastiest drug slingers you’ll see on screen and is so realistic that the Baltimore Police have apparently complained it reveals too much about how crimes are — or are not — solved; apparently real thugs love it as well.

Find it and download it — though probably David Simon doesn’t want you to and neither does HBO, which has been actively poisoning Torrents of its other shows. Tell everyone you know about it. Maybe those of them still rocking TVs will raise the show’s increasingly dismal viewing figures.

Or maybe that’s no longer the point. While I sympathise with the plight of the David Simons, David Milchs (Deadwood, John from Cincinnati) and Joss Whedons (Firefly) of this world, and would like to help them in future endeavors, I specifically do not sympathise with the plights of the craven, dim-witted, played-out producers that surround them on all sides. And by ‘playing fair’ and buying the DVD or the cable package, besides the fact that most of our money is not going to the creators and their families, aren’t we really saying we accept the meshwork of shit in order to get the two or three gems that occasionally sift through it? Aren’t we signalling the industry that there’s something we still find acceptable about their way of doing business?

Now I suppose this could seem a bit extreme to some. But again and again in blogs and comments about shows like The Wire you hear ‘I’d pay for this if…’ — if it wasn’t DRM’ed all to hell like HBO’s own online offering, if it was freely shareable, good to be watched whenever, wherever, on whatever, without constant interruption by adverts. The kicker is that we’re not only unable legally to liberate and re-distribute shows from the broken, corrupt mechanisms of television and DVD distribution: we also have no way of supporting creators like David Simon and crew outside of it.

This means that right now, people still stupid or unfortunate enough to sit in front of TVs watching months-old shows or paying massive cash-or-attention premiums for the new ones are heavily subsidising us P2Pers. This is genuinely immoral, because we’re really exploiting people less fortunate than ourselves. Instead, we should be helping them out of the wasteland, and thinking of new ways to get the creators we like creating outside the prison of mass distribution. It cannot be that we are able to figure out how to make GNU-Linux – a world-class operating system — together, but not to make a dozen decent shows a year.

The irony is that TV series really feel like they’re coming into their own, just as the media that spawned them is dying. From the ‘high art’ of Deadwood and John From Cincinnati to the epic modern-day myth of Lost to the (dare I call it) Beckettian dark comedy of Trailer Park Boys, the drawn out tales of our series (often consumed a ’season’ at a time: I know at least three people waiting for The Wire to finish before downloading it) are an undeniable core of our emerging P2P culture.

We are the most passionate viewers ever, talking and writing profusely about the media we love, analysing, promoting, hosting free screenings… And they need us as much as we need them — all of these shows, without exception, enjoy their primary life on the networks, through our blogs, comments, reviews, remixes and fan fiction. Lost in particular has learned that incorporating online feedback can make a great (if utterly Shaggy Dog) story.

Can we find a way to get the shows we want made without buying the goddamn DVD? I remember this guy talking really sensibly a couple years ago about how Joss Whedon could get to make another season of Firefly, and we got this project back up his musings. Why didn’t Whedon try it? Because someone else owned his ideas? Perhaps it could have worked otherwise, and maybe it could work for the future. If you’ve got ideas, throw them in the comments box below. And if you have time in between catching up on The Wire, read this by the venerable guru of Wired magazine, Kevin Kelly — I’m going to try to get him into the next installment of STEAL THIS FILM. See you around. I’ll be back in two weeks to pick up the pieces.

TorrentFreak welcomes Jamie King as our new bi-weekly columnist. Jamie is the Director of STEAL THIS FILM I & II and a member of the League of Noble Peers. He is currently working on a cinema release of STEAL THIS FILM and prototyping an experimental, post-P2P remuneration system for creators.

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.

So far, the problem appears to affect these clients:

– BitTorrent 6.0 (build 5535)
– uTorrent 1.7.5 (build 4602)
– uTorrent 1.8 (alpha 7834)

Luigi is reporting that earlier versions of these clients may also be vulnerable and this appears to have been confirmed by the uTorrent team. The problems are confirmed to exist on Windows versions of the software. As yet, Mac and Linux versions of the official BitTorrent client have not been tested.

The bug in detail (from Luigi’s site):

By default both the clients have the “Detailed Info” window active with the “General” section visible in it where are reported various informations about the status of the torrent and the trackers in use.

In this same window near “General” there is also the “Peers” section which is very useful since it showes many informations about the other connected clients like the percentage of availability of the shared torrent, their IP address, country, speed and amount of downloaded and uploaded data and moreover the version of their client (like “BitTorrent 6.0″, “Azureus 3.0.3.4″, “uTorrent 1.7.5″, “KTorrent 2.2.4″ and so on).

When this window is visualized by the user the unicode strings with the software versions of the connected clients are copied in the relative static buffers used for the visualization in the GUI through the wcscpy function.

If this string is too long a crash will occur immediately or in some cases (like on BitTorrent) could happen later or when the user watches the status of another torrent or leaves the “Peers” window. Code execution is not possible.

For exploiting the problem is enough that an external attacker connects to the random port opened on the client and sends the long client version and the SHA1 hash of the torrent currently in use and watched
on the target. Note that all these parameters (client IP, port and torrent’s hash) are
publicly available on the tracker.

The uTorrent team state the flaw affects all older uTorrent versions 1.6 and 1.7.x. too but have been quick to respond, releasing a new build – uTorrent 1.7.6 (build 7859) which has fixed the issue.

It can be downloaded here.

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

Back in July, we took a look at a beta version of the xbtit tracker package, which aimed to make owning and running a BitTorrent tracker a much easier, simplified experience. Created by BtiTeam, xbtit enables potential site administrators to quickly and easily set up their own BitTorrent tracker, something that was only previously accomplished by people with some coding skills. TorrentFreak decided to get to know a little more about this tracker and the people behind it.

xbtit Development Leader, Lupin

I have been in the BitTorrent scene since 2003 when I used TorrentTrader. In September 2004 the BtiTracker story began when Sqrtboy took the TorrentTrader development and transformed it. Many hacks became “premium” which meant paying for them. The other popular system was Tbdev (ex TorrentBits) which did not have a great look and lacked many features. I decided to give the opportunity to all tracker owners to have a good, complete, and easy system with which to manage their torrents. For 3 years I put many hours in the development while other developers came and went.

xbtit Project Leader, Locutius

LokiTorrent and Suprnova going down at the end of 2004 was shocking, there were big sites collapsing almost monthly. It was uncertain if filesharing was gonna survive, the sites I was frequenting were dead men walking. They knew it too. The USA would be clean of trackers within 6 months. That is the background in which I decided to open my own tracker. I found Lupin at btiteam.org was releasing an easy code base to install and manage with a feature set to rival the more complex systems.

TF: So what exactly is xbtit? Can you give us a little history?

Lupin: Early in 2006 we decided to create a new system which can handle many peers based on xbtt (by Olaf van der Spek). We wanted a great look and features that no other tracker system had. We really put in a lot of work, in this case we got the help of some very generous developers in our team.

Locutius: You already know how difficult it is to set up and run a tracker. You have to be a linux guru, fluent in PHP, a db admin, a security expert, and all that before you start to performance tune your httpd and iptables. I wanted an easy to set up and run system the size of LokiTorrent. Then I had an idea. What if everyone could have an easy system the size of Loki?

TF: Where does the name/acronym xbtit originate?

Locutius: The name for the project comes from the bringing together of xbtt and btit. The merger of the strongest backend with the strongest frontend, to make xbtit.

TF: So what would you say are xbtit’s main features? What does it offer which other trackers don’t?

Locutius: There is a design focus by Lupin and the dev team to make the system smart and capable. The template system allows single click installation of hacks, modifications, and styles. There are two tracker systems, the PHP tracker for platforms without access to system root, and xbtt capable of running millions of peers at very low overhead. There are two forum systems, an internal forum and Simple Machines Forum (SMF). There is an install script and an upgrade script from previous version. Lupin has included a phpmailer script so you can run your tracker from a Windows desktop at home!

TF: In the past your team has talked of how easy it is to install, setup and operate xbtit. How does xbtit compare to other trackers?

Lupin: I don’t like to compare myself with other work, but the users will, and with no doubt will choose xbtit because:

- easiest to manage (almost all tasks can be done via web admin interface)
- easy to hack, one click and you’re ready to go with hacks and new features
- modules system which will allow to extend the power and the features
- xbtt support, usually only done by hacking to allow the use of xbtt as backend, in our work it’s already done, so also no problem to upgrade an hacked version
- SMF support, if you like a “real forum” then no problem, you can use SMF
- internal forum with subforum support, the internal forum has been rewritten from scratch and is optimized

TF: Your site offers different ‘flavors’ of xbtit. What do these ‘flavors’ mean to the end user?

Locutius:The home of the code is btiteam.org, an open source support and development forum. The open source flavor is free.

Then we have the professionally supported flavors, xbtit PREMIUM and xbtit PRO. The difference is PRO includes VPS hosting for the code with the new tracker admin receiving the password to a fully installed site on his own private server. It doesn’t get easier to own a tracker than that.

www.xbtit.com is the showcase for the xbtit live demo and the home to the xbtit private members forum where it all happens. Buying xbtit PREMIUM or PRO gives you 10 support tickets and access to the private members forum where you can exchange the tickets for btiteam hacks, modifications, and styles (everything is nominally priced, hacks cost no more than 2 or 3 euros). Members of xbtit can also request private hacks and coding for their site. Eventually, all the hacks and styles on xbtit.com will be released into the open source community on btiteam.org.

The difference between btiteam.org and xbtit.com is the same difference as between Fedora and REDHAT. xbtit at biteam.org is like Fedora, it is exciting, it is free. xbtit at xbtit.com is like REDHAT, it is supported and you have privileged access to the dev team and first hit on the hacks. xbtit.com funds the free open source support and development at btiteam.org.

TF: You are also offering hosting with xbtit and this could have copyright implications. What’s your view on this?

Locutius: BitTorrent is strongly associated with filesharing and there is an issue there with the improper application of the technology by copyright pirates. But there are greater more important economic uses for the technology. Our enemies are Luddites but technology has never been criminalized and there is no issue with hosting torrent trackers if the owners keep 3 simple rules: adhere to the DMCA, only supply your own content, do not profit from another’s copyright.

Some of the content traversing the BitTorrent networks may come with a legacy copyright issue but that is to be expected when the global media industry is operating a monopoly.

TF: Perhaps as a backlash to this monopolistic control, Indie content is starting to explode on the internet. You see your team as having a part in this?

Locutius: Significantly, our technology is making it easier for independent publishing and distribution of privately created digital content, movies and music and software. By removing the traditional barriers to tracker ownership our technology can land in the creative hands of artists in a form they can adopt. I want to see a swarm of private trackers seeding creativity the world over.

TF: Thanks, and good luck in achieving that.

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

Other people get other problems such as torrents never finishing or when they watch a downloaded video it turns out to be completely the wrong thing – i.e the file was deliberately mislabeled. Sometimes the video download is of such poor quality it’s simply unwatchable and of course all this adds up to a lot of frustration and wasted time.

There are many techniques employed by experienced file-sharers to ensure that the torrent is what it says it is and of a good enough quality to even bother with. We’ll look at just a few of them here.

Remember that sharing certain types of media via BitTorrent may not be legal in your country.

1. Always read the comments

Before downloading any torrent, it’s always prudent to read the comments on the site. It only takes a few seconds but it’s time well spent. Very often there are requests from previous downloaders for a password to access the file or some might be asking where to download a special video player to view it. Movies should never come as .zip or an .exe file, if they do there is every chance the file comes with some sort of catch. If the movie won’t play with VLC Media Player there’s every chance it’s a fake. Any files needing 3WPlayer, DomPlayer or any that direct to other sites and ask you to fill in forms or install stuff, are also fake.

2. Can the source be trusted?

A good way to find out if a .torrent is real or not is to find out who uploaded the file. There are several well known users that always release new torrents on the same account, aXXo and EZTV are some good examples of such users. If the user is anonymous, you could look at the tracker, and see if it’s widely used. There is no guarantee that files on a well known trackers are safe, but you can almost be certain that files tracked by trackers such as bittorrent.isthebe.st are fake.

3. Is the file actually released already?

Many people use sites such as VCDQuality and Nforce.nl (sites that rates the quality of media releases on the internet) to not only ensure that the video is of a good quality, but also to weed out malfunctioning releases and identify real ones. Recently a movie producer was grateful to the BitTorrent community for spreading his movie ‘The Man From Earth‘, so we can use this movie as an example:

The VCDQ page shows a lot of information but let’s look at the box marked ‘folder’. Here you can see the release name. By copying and pasting this exact filename into Google, a list of almost guaranteed non-fake torrents appear.

4. TorrentSpam?

Another place to check is TorrentSpam. If you already have a torrent file in your possession, you can either paste the full name (or hash value, obtainable from the ‘general’ tab in uTorrent) into their search engine and if someone has reported this as a bad torrent, the results will be shown. Equally, if despite all the measures you still end up downloading a bad torrent, its possible to report this fact for the benefit of other TorrentSpam users in the future.

Do you have any tips or tricks not mentioned here that you would like to share? Feel free to leave a comment!

4. Other suggestions

We asked Matthijs from Mininova for some good tips on how to avoid downloading fake or scammy torrents and he came up with the following suggestions in addition to what we already posted.

In the end it’s experience alone that helps identify the fakes. Most people who have been file-sharing for a little while can easily spot these bad torrents but it’s clearly not so easy for the novice, judging by the number of emails we get at TorrentFreak each week. Let’s hope that number reduces soon.

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

We’ve carried articles in the past about the Scene. So legend goes, these people are ultra-secretive but of course there’s always a few who like to talk, despite being targeted by law enforcement in cases such as Operation Fastlink and Operation Buccaneer.

Last week, an administrator of a Topsite (an important guy, near to the top of the so-called ‘Piracy Pyramid‘) linked to some very famous release groups, broke cover in a very rare interview with Trond Bie of itavisen.no, seemingly giving away quite a few secrets such as the security techniques used by the Scene and the locations of some of their servers. He also explains why the Scene dislikes torrents and sites like The Pirate Bay, and reveals how some torrent sites manage to get Scene releases so quickly.

In the interview, the Site-Op mocks the efforts of Norwegian police in trying to shutdown the Norwegian Scene, joking that Norwegian law prevents them from being caught in the traditional ways. This attitude could’ve been the thing that attracted the eye of Espen Tondel, the aggressive MPAA/IFPI lawyer who also talked about action against torrent sites recently. RayJoha, a reader of TorrentFreak who did a lot of work on this article, contacted Tondel and asked him a few questions which you can read at the bottom of this article.

The Interview (translation from Norwegian, courtesy RayJoha)

The guy we talked to is one of the few administrators of a Topsite in Norway. He’s in his mid twenties, is a student of programming and has been a part of the Scene for many years. He first became a Topsite Site-Op in 2003 and has since been responsible for adding users, banning ruleset violators and programming automating IRC-scripts.

In addition to being a Site-Op he also has his own home-based server where he downloads movies, games and TV-shows to and from the Topsites. He has a very fast Internet connection which make it possible to download a DVD movie in minutes.

Everybody keeps everybody informed

In addition to categories such as games, software, music and movies we have a news category on the Topsites warning against raids. Lamers are also posted in this news category. It’s also possible to find out who leaks warez to trackers and the P2P community. Those who leak will be banned from the Scene. It is very easy for the police to find those people who are spreading torrents.

It’s not unusual to have 30 TerraBytes of warez on a Topsite. Last summer German police raided a Topsite which had 40 members. The following was posted on Topsites news sections to warn the entire Scene, (from German):

New police action in Germany. This morning 40 members got a visit from the BKA, (Bundes Kriminal Amt). All user accounts etc…. Everybody that has visited the site is in great danger!

I miss you

Laws must change?

Changing the laws will have no effect. The MP3 legislation… the only thing they do is make it difficult for ordinary downloaders/torrent users – those who download from a website, torrentsite, Limewire or with any other P2P software. It would be easier for the government if the police could create their own ‘entrapment servers’, but they could only hurt the Scene, not destroy it.

What’s the probability of getting caught?

HaHa, there’s almost no chance of getting caught in Norway. The Norwegian police cannot do anything illegal to get somebody. By law, they cannot set up servers to entice users to join. All the users in the network know each other. Members of the Scene have joined only through someone vouching for them. I do it because it’s a learning experience and fun. I learn a lot about running servers, programming, (C, C ++, Java and scripting). I started with this before I realized I could have a career in programming. When you learn a few programming languages it’s quite easy to pick up new ones.

His interest in file sharing has been there for years, but it took some time before he became a Topsite Site-Op. He reveals that there are lot of Norwegian ISPs, especially those that deliver fiber connections, that have Topsite servers as customers.

The first time I became a Site-Op it was 2003. I started setting up servers on my own, but at that time we had no affiliation with the Scene. There are lots of sites on Lyse, Hafslund and Sandefjord and I also know that servers are found around university campuses.

The Site-Op tells us that he has no plans of quitting piracy, even when he gets a real job in the software business.

It’s real hard to catch pirates, i’ve learned. I get to understand how it works, making it possible to protect myself against it. Anything that comes to market is cracked even before we post it. There’s no point for the industry in spending millions on copy protection.

The social side of the Scene

Is there a social environment in the Scene or is it just IRC chatting all the time?

Nobody sees anybody. The IRC OPs knows who the others are, but normally we don’t know who they are in real life. We only use nick names.

The Site-Op feels it’s easy to replace persons that are arrested in raids with some exceptions. Game crackers [people who remove copy protection] can’t easily be replaced. There’s just a few people with their skills around.

It’s correct that you can’t easily replace a cracker, it’s a real genius game. Sometimes we might lose everyone, but they’re real hard to catch. Let’s say they manage to cripple the Game-Scene, but they still have to deal with movies and music, and thats something Mr. anybody can do. [Rip movies and music]

The FBI are allowed to set up fake servers, but they are not successful in their endeavors. If the Norwegian police are going to catch anyone they have to adopt the same strategy. You can’t take down Topsites without resorting to illegality: they’d have to distribute copyrighted material. Actually doing something illegal. note: strictly prohibited in Norway

Site-Op’s responsibilities

I don’t know any informants, but there is a strong possibility there are some. If the Scene discovers this the individual will be banned with the help of Topsite news and barred from access to any resource within the Scene.

As a Site-Op he has a series of tasks perform in order for the site to work properly.

A Site-Op adds users and makes sure the ruleset are obeyed. He’s programming and scripting. Linux servers are almost always running glftpd.

Pre-Information

The Site-Op is one of a selected few who has pre-information. Pre-information is information about a specific warez that haven’t been shared with anyone yet. The different groups, (Razor1911, Fairlight etc), have their own folders on the Topsites with not yet released content. The competition is fierce when it comes to being the first to release a movie or a game.

When a “ware” is pre-released a so-called Race starts. A Race means that every Topsite tries to be the first to distribute. In this way the Scene is almost like an economy in itself. First to market doesn’t mean monetary survival but rather the gain of Respect.

There are unbelievably few people that has pre-information. Only Admins can browse all Pre-folders. One shouldn`t sneak a peak on a pre. It’s a rule not to browse on somebody else’s folder.

The Site-Op’s connections with the ‘Big’ people in the Scene

A Site-Op communicates with the real ‘big-wigs’ in the Scene – the ones that really puzzle the game and movie industries. The largest groups use their own IRC servers to communicate, while the Topsites often use Linknet with SSL.

We are in direct contact with Fairlight and the others. We talk to them on IRC. A great proportion of them are Linknet. The largest Topsites have their own servers giving them increased security.

Additionally, the Site-Op reveals that many Sceners post internal information on Wikipedia.

The scene harbours ill feelings towards the torrent community. According to the Scene they are stealing their warez and posting it on trackers. The Scene is of the opinion that it’s real easy to bust people that posts warez on torrent sites like The Pirate Bay.

What happens is that people leak from the Scene to torrent sites just before a release. That indicates that these lamers have access to early sites. And if you are the one of those that does this you are categorized as an Insecure user and therefore banned from the Scene. So, to be clear, this is the only connection we have to the torrent scene.

Dislike of The Pirate Bay

We, as Site-ops, have no fondness for The Pirate Bay. We do not want to talk to the press because it pressures the police to focus on us. As a software programmer I dislike file sharing, because of the small companies that suffers from it. Members of the Scene learn a lot and find it to be a fun experience. The top Sceners buy the music and the movies on DVD anyway.

As an example I have purchased, ( With money ), FlashFXP to support the developers. This is software I use a lot. If you follow this thinking the best thing to do is to get rid of all the file sharers, mainly because it`s so insecure. The police are able to just walk in and identify the sharers. END

Q+A: Espen Tondel, MPAA/IFPI lawyer

Q: Is there anything in this interview that gives you tips on how to get these guys?

Let me put it this way – we have a considerable amount of information about these sites. We know how they work.

Q :Do you think this article [the original interview] will make it easier to bring the Norwegian Scene to justice, considering that he reveals what kind of software and which ISPs they’re using?

From my point of view the Norwegian Scene will be brought to justice, we possess a lot of information.

Q: Norway has always been at the forefront of technology development. Do you think Hollywood should target Norway first?

Norway is obviously a good place for tech development and we have necessary legislation hence Norway is a good place for pursuing these kind of activities. We have the full backing of the Motion Picture Association in doing that.

Did this guy give away too many secrets or is Tondel simply bluffing? Time will tell.

Update: Some people are naturally questioning the authenticity of the guy claiming to be a Site-Op. The author of the original article, Trond Bie from Norway’s ITavisen has just confirmed that he conducted this interview at his home and all the time he was watching the Site-Op doing ‘administrative stuff’ on the topsite which he says, couldn’t be mistaken for anything else.

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

However, it didn’t stop there, a few weeks ago the Comcast story got renewed attention when the Associated Press published a test that again confirmed our initial reports. That really got the ball rolling – a memo leaked in which Comcast support was instructed to lie about the throttling issues ( the memo leaker is still being hunted down). Additionally Comcast told their employees that they can be fired if they don’t keep their mouth shut and to top it off Congressman Rick Boucher has even told Comcast to stop interfering with BitTorrent.

By now you would expect that Comcast would admit that they are messing with the BitTorrent connections of their customers, but they aren’t. Here’s a chatlog we received from Michael, a Comcast user who tried to get some more information on Comcast’s alleged BitTorrent interference. Seems like the Comcast support team is still in the denial phase.

user michael_ has entered room

Michael>
Does Comcast interfere with legal Bittorrent traffic?

analyst Stephanie has entered room

Stephanie>
Hello michael_, Thank you for contacting Comcast Live Chat Support. My name is Stephanie. Please give me one moment to review your information.

michael_>
Hi Stephanie, how are you?

Stephanie>
Thank you for contacting Comcast. I can answer your question today.

michael_>
I would greatly appreciate that.

Stephanie>
Comcast respects our customers’ privacy and we don’t monitor specific customer activities on the Internet or track individual online behavior, such as which websites you visit. Therefore, we do not know whether any individual user is visiting BitTorrent or any other site.

Stephanie>
Comcast does not block access to any applications, including BitTorrent.

michael_>
I’m not asking if applications are blocked. I’m asking if applications are interfered with in any way.

Stephanie>
We don’t monitor specific customer activities on the internet.

michael_>
But you must know the policies of your own company? Does Comcast actively engage in any interference of any protocols or applications?

Stephanie>
As far as I know, no.

michael_>
Who could give me a more definitive answer on the subject?

michael_>
I contacted technical support because I had assumed that you would know the technical details of Comcast’s network, such as equipment or software used to interfere with network traffic or applications used on your network.

Stephanie>
We rarely disclose our processes for operating our network for compeitive reasons and to protect against network abuse.

michael_>
You had told me you do not know definitively if any interference is occurring. Could you put me through to someone who would know that answer?

Stephanie>
As I have said, we rarely disclose processes for operating our network but we also do not monitor specific customer activity. As well, we are not blocking access to any applications such as BitTorrent.

michael_>
Maybe I’m not explaining myself clear enough. I use bittorrent to distribute custom linux distributions to my friends and colleagues. However, I find that I cannot seed these files. Is there any interference being caused by Comcast that could be causing this issue?

Stephanie>
We would not be blocking peer to peer access.

michael_>
It’s a “yes” or “no” question.

michael_>
Could my inability to seed be interference caused by Comcast?

Stephanie>
As I have said, we are not blocking peer to peer access.

michael_>
You are not answering my question though.

michael_>
Comcast is not blocking peer to peer connections, but is it interfering with the ability to seed torrents?

Stephanie>
The answer is no.

Stephanie>
I have confirmed this with a support agent, as well.

Stephanie>
Did you have any other questions for me today?

michael_>
No

michael_>
Have a good day

Stephanie>
Thank you for contacting Comcast Live Support, have a great day!

Stephanie>
Analyst has closed chat and left the room

The good news is that there are several ways to fight back and get BitTorrent up and running again. In this article summed up some of the workarounds that reportedly solve the throttling issues.

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

After his release from prison Scott was told by his Probation Officer that he has to install Windows so that the government can monitor his online activities. A cruel punishment for someone who’s used to Ubuntu GNU/Linux, and Scott has now decided to fight this decision in court.

“My lawyer is filing a motion to go back in front of the judge and find out what is next to happen,” Scott writes on his blog “It will either end in one of two ways: First, he could tell me to just suck it up and install windows, or he could say that no where in the Computer Monitoring Guidelines does it say that I have to use Windows, and it is the Probation Offices responsibility to be the Cyber Police and support all possible options.”

The court will now have to decide whether he can be forced by the US Government to use Windows. In the meantime, he is allowed to keep Ubuntu installed which means his online activities won’t be monitored.

Scott told TorrentFreak earlier: “I think that this whole situation is just one more way that they can impose their will onto me. It isn’t the fact that I have to be monitored that bothers me, it is the fact that I have restructure my life (different OS, different software on that OS) and that they would require (force) me to purchase software while I a currently unemployed and relatively unemployable with the 2 felonies that they gave me.”

Not all convicts like to use Windows, let’s hope this case will motivate the US government to develop multi-platform monitoring software. It can’t be that hard can it?

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