Those who take a few minutes to browse through the site will discover all kinds of other neat features. One of the latest additions to the site is the option to download files directly, through partner site httpTorrents.

The integration with httpTorrents gives users the option to download the files directly without having to use a BitTorrent client. Music tracks can also be streamed directly from the site itself. The service works in a similar way to most other files hosting services such as Rapidshare, but only works with torrents and doesn’t allow users to upload files themselves.

The owner of the site told TorrentFreak that direct http downloads may be useful to users who have restricted access to BitTorrent, such as those whose ISP or firewall blocks or slows down transfers. There are currently 4000 files available as a direct download, but this number is growing rapidly.

KickassTorrents’ users can submit a request for files that are not yet available as direct downloads. “If someone clicks on the http download button at KickassTorrents and the file is not available yet, it places it in the request queue at httpTorrents. Only popular torrents are downloaded during the beta stage,” TorrentFreak was told by the site’s owner.

“KickassTorrents and httpTorrents are not directly connected. However we use their API to get hashes of the torrents available for the direct download,” the owner said, adding that if the beta tests are successful this API will also be available to other torrent sites.

Everyone can use httpTorrents, but in the future the download speed and number of simultaneous downloads will be limited for free users. Those who want to use it more than occasionally will have the option to sign up for a premium account without restrictions.

Since the service is actually hosting files (on an external CDN) it might run into complaints from copyright holders. The owner of the site told TorrentFreak that he’s not too worried about the legal implications, and hopes that a takedown policy will prevent the site from running into trouble.

It will be interesting to see how the service develops in the future, and we will definitely be keeping a close eye on it. Although direct downloads may be preferred in some cases, for those looking for (free) high speed downloads, BitTorrent probably remains the best solution.

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

Just over a month has passed since the first stable public release of the software and PeerBlock has now managed to clock up more than 100,000 downloads. To mark this milestone, TorrentFreak caught up with Mark from the project for the lowdown.

Mark told us that the creation of PeerBlock was inspired by him upgrading his PC from 32 to 64 bit in order to utilize 6gb of RAM. Everything worked fine – until he tried to get PeerGuardian (another IP blocker) to work.

Having hacked away and jumped through hoops to get around driver-signing it would still only work half the time and often crashed without warning. As a software engineer who has worked in the commercial sector for more than 13 years, Mark – who admits to being “an arrogant bastard who truly believes he can do just about anything better than just about anybody,” decided he could find a solution. It was “put up or shut up time,” he told TorrentFreak.

Noticing that the PeerGuardian code was open-source but hadn’t been touched for a couple of years, Mark contacted another developer who had the same thing in mind, but having heard nothing back, he went at it alone.

“I started setting up a Sourceforge.net project for it so we could get free source-control, but they took too long to set it up for me so I instead created a project over at Google Code where it was ready within minutes,” he told us.

Having heard from a few people who were interested in helping out with the development side – “night_stalker_z” who’d earlier started trying to hack the PG2 code into shape, “DarC” / “DisCoStu” who wanted to help out with fixing up the installer, XhmikosR who rewrote the installer, and some testers, things moved forward.

After facing troubles due to the lack of a “signed driver” for 64-bit versions of Vista (which resulted in Mark having to set up a registered company before they were allowed to buy a $230 code-signing certificate), a couple of blogs wrote articles on PeerBlock which attracted some much-needed publicity to the project. This resulted in 10,000 downloads in just one weekend.

“We’re still getting donations from people and we now have enough to pay for next year’s annual code-signing certificate, and we’re saving up to be able to rent our own VPS with full root access etc, upon which we’ll be able to build a ‘real’ online-update system, a custom web-app to tie our forums/issue-tracker/website all together, and some other neat things,” Mark explains.

The first stable release of PeerBlock came out on September 27th, and as of November 5th had clocked up an impressive 100,000 downloads. The site now receives up to 7,000 visitors each day.

Aside from fixing one or two bugs, the team has lots of new features planned for PeerBlock. Anyone that has tried to surf the web with a blocklist in place will know how painful that can be, so PeerBlock will have some new features which allow the “whitelisting” of certain apps, such as a browser, the creation of a proxy server to let users configure PeerBlock to listen on certain ports, possibly an integral “AdMuncher” style ad-blocking feature on a per URL basis (as opposed to just an IP-address), and an encrypted chat feature.

TorrentFreak asked Mark why users should choose PeerBlock over the competition.

“Well, first off we need to ask ‘Who IS the competition?’ The only ones I’m really aware of are: Protowall by the folks over at Bluetack which is closed-source and I don’t believe was ever updated for Vista, and Outpost Firewall, which is closed-source and basically just a hack add-on to a more professional firewall product,” he responded, while noting that uTorrent’s built-in IP-filtering feature only handles one manually-updated list.

“We protect your entire machine, and give you the option to try out any P2P app you want – this freedom of choice is a very important thing, I think. And since it does everything automatically, including list-updates, it’s one less thing to think about,” he added.

Another important question relates to the blocklists that have to be used in conjunction with PeerBlock in order for it to block anything.

He told TorrentFreak that he’s a big fan of iblocklist, who serve up a staggering 10TB of blocklists every month for free. The site doesn’t create the lists, but does offer those from Bluetack, including the Level1 list (renamed to ‘P2P’ in PG2/PeerBlock, which contains both Gov and Anti-P2P IP-addresses) and others.

Mark admits that even in a best case scenario, the available blocklists aren’t 100% effective. That said, there have been studies which show that using blocklists along with software such as PeerBlock can help speed up downloads, but no-one knows how many of the potential “bad IPs” are covered by currently available blocklists.

P2P aside, Mark says there has been feedback to suggest that PeerBlock discovered a Conficker infection on a user’s machine that their anti-virus programs missed, and can also stop ads appearing in browsers that lack in-built blocking.

One other exciting thing for the future of PeerBlock is porting it to the Mac. Mark says they’re saving all the donations for additional development and this is the most-requested request right now.

Users of PeerBlock are encouraged to give as much feedback as possible to Mark’s team, via their forums, IRC (#peerblock on freenode.net) or email.

PeerBlock can be downloaded here.

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

When writing this article we were faced with a problem. Technically there isn’t really an alternative to Demonoid, as the site acted both as a private and public tracker with a library of hundreds of thousands of user uploaded torrent files. We have to admit that the sites listed here don’t quite compare to the ‘late’ Demonoid, but when combined they go someway to filling the gap for those struggling for ideas.

We previously listed 25 Pirate Bay alternatives. Because many of these could also serve as Demonoid replacements we decided not to include any duplicates here, hence the absence of sites such as Mininova, isoHunt and Torrentz. Here are some of the options that Demonoid users have while the site is down. If you’re looking for high speed downloads you could also consider to try Usenet instead (our Usenet guide).

Join another private tracker

The Internet is populated with thousands of smaller BitTorrent trackers that require users to signup, mostly through an invite system like Demonoid’s. Luckily for those new to the private tracker phenomenon, there are always a few dozen sites that allow newcomers to join without being invited. We’ve listed 5 of these sites below, more are available at Btracs.

1. TorrentZilla

2. TorrentsForAll

3. All4Nothin

4. Midnight-Torrents

5. ThePeerHub

Switch to Public BitTorrent Indexers and Meta-Search Engines

One of the downsides of most (smaller) private trackers is that they don’t offer as many torrents as Demonoid did. Those looking for more obscure or niche content are often better off at one of the public torrent indexes or meta-search engines. We’ve listed 5 lesser known torrent sites below. Although these are perfectly suited to find the latest torrents, we have to admit that their existence relies on other torrent sites like The Pirate Bay and Mininova (where they get torrents from), and public trackers such as OpenBitTorrent and PublicBT.

6. KickassTorrents

7. yourBitTorrent

8. TorrentDownloads

9. AliveTorrents

10. RSSTorrents

We understand that this list isn’t complete, we could have mentioned isoHunt’s new project Hexagon and there are many other torrent sites we could have included, but we have a secret weapon – the readers of TorrentFreak – who can list alternative sites by the dozen.

So, in the spirit of sharing, if you know a public or private site which is open for signups that is not already listed here or in our Pirate Bay alternative article, we encourage you to list it in the comment section below.

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

On the one hand users sometimes complain about slow download speeds, but most of all, Internet providers are not always happy with the heavy load BitTorrent transfers put on their networks.

The Swedish based company Peerialism hopes to tackle these problems and make BitTorrent future proof. Aside from their issues with GGF, they are currently working on the release of a new Open Source BitTorrent tracker based on the OpenTracker software currently in use at most of the larger public BitTorrent trackers.

Andreas Dahlström, the CTO and founder of the company explained to TorrentFreak that the key to solving BitTorrent’s main problems is to make the tracker location aware, so that peers first try to share files with other peers that are closer to them.

“In standard BitTorrent the tracker chooses a totally random number of peers for you. There are some good reasons for this since random actually gives some nice and robust network properties but in many cases this will force you to download for peers far away from you,” Dahlström said.

“This has two effects: slower download speed and unnecessary network traffic for the ISPs. And since BitTorrent traffic causes so much problems for ISPs many use traffic shaping, causing even slower download speeds,” he explained.

The solution to this problem according to Dahlström is to make the tracker select peers more intelligently, based on their geographical location. The initial tests of this new methodology are very promising, as they result in faster download speeds for BitTorrent users, and less traffic going outside the ISPs network.

“We have built p2p algorithms which actually map the entire Internet. We can use this to let a BitTorrent Tracker assign you to the peers closest to you. The effect for the downloader is 30-150% faster downloads and 20-50% less traffic for the ISPs,” Dahlström told TorrentFreak.

This sounds like a classic win-win situation. If it’s implemented by most of the leading BitTorrent trackers, ISPs will have less trouble handling BitTorrent traffic and thus less incentive to slow it down. On the other hand, BitTorrent users will see a boost in their download speeds.

There is a minor drawback to the plan though. The new trackers will use more CPU and memory, which means that more power is required than with the current setup. This means that the people who run the trackers will have to invest in new hardware.

“We work hard to together with Ergeist [the creator of the original OpenTracker software] to minimize the extra load,” Dahlström said. “We do believe the extra resources are well spent compared to the improved download speeds and less ISP traffic.”

If Peerialism can deliver what they are promising, their new tracker will be one of the most significant advancements to BitTorrent in years. Although they are not the first to come up with the idea of location based peer allocation, some might remember P4P, the solution they offer is superior since it requires no changes to the existing BitTorrent clients.

In addition, Peerialism is already working together with the developer behind the most widely used BitTorrent tracker software currently in use by The Pirate Bay, OpenBitTorrent and PublicBitTorrent trackers. Thus, they are as close to the fire as they can be.

The Open Source tracker, currently codenamed OpenTracker 2.0, is set to be released in September. If some of the larger trackers decide to use it we might see a huge drop in Global Internet traffic instantly, along with faster download speeds for most BitTorrent users.

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

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

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

Full Pirate Bay Alternatives

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

1. Torrentbox

2. 1337x

3. H33t

4. Demonoid (semi-private)

Torrent Indexers

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

5. Mininova

6. isoHunt

7. Torrentreactor

8. BTjunkie

Torrent Meta-Seach Engines

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

9. Torrentz

10. Nowtorrents

11. Qtorrents

12. Torrent-Finder

Private Trackers (open signup)

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

13. RTN

14. BiteMyTorrent

15. BitShock

16. TorrentIt

Standalone BitTorrent Trackers

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

17. OpenBitTorrent

18. PublicBitTorrent

19. The Hidden Tracker

20. Denis.Stalker

DIY Pirate Bay Alternatives

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

21. Pirate Bay Torrents Clone

22. Pirate Bay HTML Clone

23. Torrage: Torrent API

24. Tracker Software

Last but not Least

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

25. Google

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

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

BitTorrent: Attacked by Copyright Holders, Crushed by Courts, but Needed for Innovation.

The Pirate Bay and other P2P sites continually find themselves on the defensive. Copyright holders repeatedly threaten and sue them. Courts zealously document their contribution to copyright infringement. But copyright holders and courts ignore P2P’s vital role in fostering innovation. I would like to change that.

In my book, Innovation for the 21st Century: Harnessing the Power of Intellectual Property and Antitrust Law, I examine (1) why copyright holders continually seek to quash new technologies, (2) why courts fail to appreciate P2P, and (3) why we should lament these developments.

First, I trace the long history of copyright holders reacting with alarm to new technologies that threaten their business models. John Philip Sousa bemoaned the introduction of the player piano, which would lead to “a marked deterioration in American music.” Jack Valenti warned that the market for copyrighted movies would be “decimated, shrunken [and] collapsed” by the VCR. And the recording industry, lamenting a decline in CD sales, has sued numerous P2P services.

In fearing the potential of the new business models, copyright holders offer a classic example of market leaders that fail to appreciate disruptive innovation. A decade ago, the recording industry responded to Napster, which was striving to be “the online distribution channel for the record labels,” not by striking a deal that would have seamlessly transported the industry into the digital era, but by suing it. While the record labels may have won the battle in shutting down Napster, they began to lose the war, as former users migrated to other P2P networks.

Nor are copyright holders the only ones that fail to appreciate the new technologies. Courts also do. Why? Because of an innovation asymmetry. Courts downplay the future benefits of new technologies and overemphasize copyright owners’ present losses. Copyright owners offer evidence of losses from infringement on a silver platter.

In contrast, non-infringing uses are less tangible. It is difficult to put a dollar figure on the benefits of enhanced communication and interaction. And when a new technology is introduced, no one knows all of the beneficial uses to which it will eventually be put. I offer numerous examples of this (including, just to pick two, the telephone, which Alexander Graham Bell thought would be used to broadcast the daily news, and the phonograph, which Thomas Edison thought would “record the wishes of old men on their death beds”). This asymmetry, combined with costly litigation (which ensnares small technology makers in a web of complex tests and unaffordable lawsuits) explains why courts do not sufficiently appreciate P2P.

This lack of appreciation threatens innovation. As this site’s readers are well aware, BitTorrent and other P2P protocols offer revolutionary forms of interaction and distribution. By breaking up large files into many small pieces, BitTorrent speeds up transfer, allowing the distribution of numerous works, such as home movies, independent films, TV shows, video games, educational videos, computer software, and high-resolution images. Just a few of many examples discussed on this site that have utilized BitTorrent include (1) computer manufacturer Asus, which offers fast, cheap software updates, (2) the airing of a high-definition movie in Norway, and (3) FrostWire’s offering of a service that promotes music of new artists.

Courts’ failure to appreciate P2P and BitTorrent threatens to stifle the development of new business models that attempt to free participants from the shackles of traditional distribution methods. Independent artists would find it much more difficult to break away from mainstream record labels if they lacked an inexpensive method of rapidly and widely distributing their work. Independent filmmakers would no longer be able to reach the masses, instead having to rely on boutique movie theaters or direct DVD mailings.

And of course, we can only see the tip of the P2P innovation iceberg. To pick two of countless examples, in my book I explore potential P2P benefits in providing alternatives to the Google search engine and cloud computing.

In short, the trend—as typified by developments such as the Pirate Bay decision, Malaysia’s order to shut down the tracker LeechersLair, exorbitant statutory damage awards, and various “three strikes” legislative proposals—is to clamp down ever harder on any technology that could contribute in any way to copyright infringement. But in squeezing technologies in this infringement vise, courts and copyright holders threaten to suffocate P2P innovation.

Michael’s book ‘Innovation for the 21st Century: Harnessing the Power of Intellectual Property and Antitrust Law’ is available on Amazon.

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

With a net profit of close to a billion US dollars in 2008 Asus is one of the big players in the computer business. They are also no stranger to BitTorrent, as they’ve been making BitTorrent supported hardware for years, including the first BitTorrent router.

Recently the company decided to embrace BitTorrent even further, and use it to boost the download speeds on the tens of thousands of downloads they offer on their website. It is currently enabled on all larger downloads listed on the official website.

“In order to speed up software download process, ASUSTek is now implementing BitTorrent DNA technology. Through this technology, the software you need can be delivered to you with less time,” Asus informs their customers.

Consumers looking for drivers or software will now see a P2P download link next to the regular http downloads. When the P2P link is clicked Asus explains the process to first time users, after which they will be asked to download the BitTorrent DNA client.

Asus is offering BitTorrent boosted downloads

DNA stands for BitTorrent Delivery Network and is developed by BitTorrent, Inc. The software runs in the background on your computer and uses BitTorrent to speed up regular downloads, which means that customers will share the files they’ve downloaded with people who are downloading the same content.

Of course we would rather see regular .torrent links instead of the closed DNA software, and that is also the main disadvantage to Asus’s implementation. In the past BitTorrent’s DNA has been causing problems for some people and although these issues have reportedly been resolved, it still leaves a bad taste with some people.

Nevertheless, it is good to see that billion dollar companies are interested in, and willing to take advantage of BitTorrent. In the end it comes down to a classical win-win situation for both parties. Consumers get faster downloads and Asus a reduction in bandwidth costs.

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

On the one hand many copyright holders are virtually unmovable, steadfast in their belief that file-sharers are little more than thieves, undermining their livelihoods and stealing bread from their children’s mouths. The firm belief that they are dealing with criminals explains the draconian policies of the music and movie industry, they say.

On the other hand are millions upon millions of Internet users, desperate for their media fix in the most convenient forms, with as few restrictions as possible. Every download is not a lost sale, they say, indeed free downloads may even boost sales and treating file-sharers like criminals achieves nothing, with many declaring they will never stop downloading, never stop sharing.

Many champion disconnections for alleged pirates, while others say that access to the Internet and the information it provides is a fundamental right.

In the end, something will have to give.

In her speech to the Ludwig Erhard Lecture yesterday in Brussels, EU Commissioner for Telecoms and Media Viviane Reding joined the debate, focusing on the need for reconciliation between the almost warring factions.

Explaining that her number one priority is to make access to digital media easier and more attractive, Reding said this would drive the take-up of high speed Internet in Europe. However, the fact that both sides are reluctant to see the world from the perspective of the other, progress is being held back.

“While many right holders insist that every unauthorised download from the Internet is a violation of intellectual property rights and therefore illegal or even criminal, others stress that access to the Internet is a crucial fundamental right,” Reding explained.

“Let me be clear on this: Both sides are right. The drama is that after long and often fruitless battles, both camps have now dug themselves in their positions, without any signs of opening from either side.”

Of course, these entrenched positions do little to further the possibility of some kind of willing reconciliation, with many in the file-sharing community more determined than ever to preserve their activities and nurture their beloved hobby, often in a particularly proud way, a point not lost on Reding.

“In the meantime, Internet piracy appears to become more and more ’sexy’, in particular for the digital natives already, the young generation of intense Internet users between 16 and 24,” she told the lecture.

Noting that this age group should become the “foundation of our digital economy, of new innovation and new growth opportunities,” Reding outlined the difficulties in bringing the sides together. Quoting Eurostat figures, she claimed that 60% of 16-24 year-olds have downloaded audiovisual content from the Internet in recent months without paying. “And 28% state that they would not be willing to pay,” she added.

These figures, according to Reding, are indicative of the limitations of the present system;

“It is necessary to penalize those who are breaking the law. But are there really enough attractive and consumer-friendly legal offers on the market?” she mused, hitting on one of the biggest complaints from media consumers.

Highlighting the perceived gap between ’suits’ and citizens, Reding questioned if the current legal system for dealing with copyright meets the expectations of the younger, more tech-savvy Internet generation;

“Have we considered all alternative options to repression? Have we really looked at the issue through the eyes of a 16 year old? Or only from the perspective of law professors who grew up in the Gutenberg Age? In my view, growing Internet piracy is a vote of no-confidence in existing business models and legal solutions. It should be a wake-up call for policy-makers.”

Ask many on the file-sharing side of the debate and they will agree with Reding when she says that something must be done and done quickly too. If the media companies don’t make access to online media easier and more attractive “we could lose a whole generation as supporters of artistic creation and legal use of digital services. Economically, socially, and culturally, this would be a tragedy,” she said.

“Digital Europe can only be built with content creators on board,” Reding told the lecture, “and with the generation of digital natives as interested users and innovative consumers.”

In the end, people will have to talk. When all is said and done, legal action and disconnections will not solve this mess. Scaring people into becoming a customer is not a sustainable business model. In the end – just like flowing water – people will find the easiest route to the destination they require. It is up to the entertainment companies to ensure that the route Internet users take to media is via their door, and not to that of the nearest torrent site.

When that will be is anyone’s guess. My guess is no time soon.

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

Many BitTorrent users are looking for the holy grail that will boost their download speeds to the maximum, and tweaking your client can indeed help a bit. However, selecting the right torrents is far more important, and those are not necessarily the torrents with the most peers. Bram Cohen, the inventor of the BitTorrent protocol addresses this common misconception in a recent blog post.

“Cohen designed BitTorrent to be able to download files from many different sources [...] the more popular a file is, the faster a user will be able to download it, since many people will be downloading it at the same time, and these people will also be uploading the data to other users,” writes Cohen while quoting an erroneous article.

This is indeed an explanation we often hear – the more people who download a file the better – but unfortunately it’s not very accurate. Or to put it in Cohen’s words, this description of BitTorrent is “somewhere between grossly misleading and wrong.”

Cohen goes on to explain why: “There’s a classic fallacy because if one person stands up during a concert they get a better view, then if everybody stood up during a concert they’d all get a better view. This is of course is not true – they wind up slightly worse off by all standing, because they all compete with each other for a view.”

So how do you get the most out of BitTorrent then? Or to put it differently, what torrents perform the best and generally give you the fastest download times? We’ll try to explain it as simply as possible leaving math out as much as possible.

The fastest torrents will be those where downloaders (leechers) can tap into the most upload capacity. If you have a swarm (seeders and leechers) with a hundred people in total it will be faster when there are relatively more seeders. Why? Very simply it’s because seeders don’t download while their upload capacity is available for the leechers.

Many people understand these basics. A torrent with 30 seeders and 70 leechers (30% seeders) will go faster than one with 10 seeders and 90 leechers (10% seeders). However, it get confusing when you compare swarms of different sizes.

For example, a torrent with 30 seeders and 70 leechers (30% seeders) will generally be faster than one with 500 seeders and 2500 leechers (20% seeders). Why? Simply because the swarm has a smaller percentage of seeders. When picking the right torrents to download, the percentage of seeders that a swarm consists of is the most important thing to look at.

A higher percentage of seeders means that the average upload capacity available to the leechers will be higher. The fact that leechers also upload themselves is irrelevant because all peers have more download capacity than upload capacity. The seeders make the difference.

This is one of the reasons why private trackers generally have such great download speeds. Since users are required to seed as much as possible, they have torrents with 100 seeders and only two or three leechers.

So what can we learn from this? If you’re looking for fast torrents pick those with the best seeder/leecher ratio or the highest percentage of seeders. Or when you don’t have a choice, don’t complain about slow speeds when there are only a few seeders in a large swarm. Perhaps even more importantly, remember to seed as much as possible if you don’t need your upload speed for something else.

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

For the site’s owner PizzaTorrent was mostly a fun project and a way of giving something back to the BitTorrent community. All the money that went into it came directly from the pockets of the site’s founder.

In the first few months after going live the site’s popularity started to grow up to a point where it had more than 3 million page views a month. However, as time went by the fun started to fade as well, and this eventually led to the site’s closure.

“I didn’t receive any legal threats. All the difficulties really come from other kinds of attacks,” the PizzaTorrent founder explained to TorrentFreak. He said that with the growing number of visitors, DDoS and other attacks on the site increased.

“My feeling is that the search engine was very misunderstood. Or perhaps for the many people that liked it, there were just as many people that hated it. And they decided to destroy it,” the founder of the site said.

It is not clear to him where the attacks originated from. “I don’t know if these people are connected with any anti-piracy lobby or copyright industry, or just lone snipers. But in the end the system won,” he told TorrentFreak.

To end all the trouble PizzaTorrent was closed for good earlier today. There is simply no fun in running a project where you constantly have to evade attacks from unknown ‘enemies’. The founder is considering making the code public or giving it to another suitable party, so it’s not unlikely that PizzaTorrent will reappear one way or another.

“Remember, remember the fifth of November,” the PizzaTorrent founder said, fading into one of the dark corners of the Internet.

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

This type of file-sharing is very effective – indeed, it’s what BitTorrent is all about. However, there are those who would prefer to stop or hinder such P2P traffic – certain ISPs take measures to identify BitTorrent protocol traffic and slow it down with a process known as ‘throttling’.

While Furk.net (update: the site had some XSS vulnerabilities but these are fixed nos according to the admin) can simply be used as a torrent meta-search engine to trawl other sites for .torrent files, to combat throttling (and privacy concerns) Furk bills part of its service as a ‘BitTorrent Proxy’. This means that instead of searching for a torrent file and downloading in the usual manner via the BitTorrent protocol, instead Furk itself joins the swarm in question and downloads the material directly to their own servers.

Once completed, users can simply download that material directly from Furk’s super-fast network using the HTTP protocol in their regular web browser. Identical to standard web traffic, HTTP generally isn’t throttled by ISPs, allowing the user to download more quickly than with throttled BitTorrent. In the less likely event that an ISP tries to slow down HTTP, downloads can be made from Furk using HTTPs.

“By default all links are HTTPs,” Furk admin told TorrentFreak. “It helps to avoid content filtering systems and increase the level of anonymity. Also for every link the user can choose an alternative link with a non-standard port.” This element of the service is only available to premium users at a few euros per month but free users can still have fun with Furk.

It’s also possible to upload your own files and videos to the service, but Furk has another much more interesting trick up its sleeve – and it’s available to non-premium users. Instead of just keeping the content on their servers for material requested by you, Furk keeps the content requested by everyone. This means that Furk has a growing database of material culled from torrent sites, but offered via direct and immediate HTTP download. A search for ‘aXXo’ shows hundreds of releases, mostly available for direct download. Think of it like Rapidshare, but with a BitTorrent backend.

“Speed for premium users is unlimited. All of the servers are on a 1Gps network and we have plenty of unused bandwidth,” Furk admin told TorrentFreak. “Free downloads are currently limited only by restricting the number of download sessions, so download managers can be used only with premium accounts.”

However, even with no premium account, some impressive speeds can be achieved. We managed decent transfers from The Netherlands, Russia and the US, before finally maxing out a 20mbit Hungarian connection. It remains to be seen if these speeds can be maintained once the masses start hitting the service – probably not, since there needs to be something to draw users to the premium service, but time will tell.

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

One of the more recent attacks targets the weak spot of the average BitTorrent user, as it promises to increase the download speed of one’s torrents significantly. By registering hundreds of bogus accounts, BitTorrentBooster(.com) spammed the torrent comments on The Pirate Bay and other torrent sites with the same fake promises.

“Try BitTorrentBooster and increase you download speed by UP TO 100%,” they claim – all while quietly promoting their adware package, or they embed an image similar to the one below.

The moderators at The Pirate Bay told TorrentFreak that they do all they can to get rid on the spammers by banning IP-addresses, images and optimizing the spam filter. However, the BitTorrentBooster folks keep coming back with more aggressive and less obtrusive comments to promote their adware. Unfortunately, hundreds of naive BitTorrent users fall for their speed trap.

This magic speed increase is never going to happen of course. If a BitTorrent client is configured correctly, most users will easily max out their connection if the swarm is healthy enough, or they will at least come close to the average swarm speed. Simply put, there is no application that can miraculously boost your BitTorrent speed by 100% like BitTorrentBooster promises.

Nevertheless, there are always people who want to try these things out to see whether the application makes a difference or not. The site offers several memberships, including a free one that claims it will still increase your download speeds by 15%. However, that’s not all it does – the adware bundle that comes with it is guaranteed to annoy anyone who installs it.

As stated in the application’s EULA, every user agrees to receive all kinds of pop-up ads in their web browser and permit BitTorrentBooster to change the default search engine. As if that’s not enough, it will also turn all their users into their very own marketing machine.

“The Software may add to all computers’ outgoing and incoming emails, to forums and social networks posting, regardless of local or online service, one to Two text lines which carry advertisement information and a link to the advertiser,” the EULA reads.

This basically means that you allow the software vendors to add adverts to your outgoing and incoming emails, and even grant them the right to use your social networking accounts to post ads for them. According to the threat blog the software does indeed interact with Myspace’s “add comment” feature, and they’ve also confirmed that it attaches adverts to your outgoing email messages.

Needless to say the BitTorrentBooster people, who also host the wonderful “Smileys Toolbar” are not really concerned with making your downloads faster. They are spamming The Pirate Bay and other sites for only one reason – to make as much money as possible.

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

Early in 2008, the project was revived by Radical Software and one year later, Wyzo 3 is alive and kicking. The most recent Wyzo release is based on the latest Firefox 3 core, but with it comes with a brand new “chrome like” theme and a wide range of proprietary extensions.

The new version of FireTorrent has been completely rewritten and provides integrated support for torrent downloads. Downloading torrents with Wyzo is as simple as grabbing any other file and the speeds are comparable to most standalone BitTorrent clients. FireTorrent is also available as a Firefox extension and currently has 25,000 active daily users.

Another new extension that comes with the browser, FireDownload, provides multi-threaded acceleration to all regular http downloads. FireTray, a minimize to tray feature, allows all downloads to continue while the browser sits in the tray.

Wyzo also includes some other popular extensions such as Cooliris to enhance the users’ browsing experience. A full list of features can be found at the Wyzo site.

The latest version of the ‘BitTorrent browser’ is a great improvement and shows Radical Software mean business with Wyzo. TorrentFreak was told that here are other proprietary extensions in the development pipeline and Wyzo hopes to gain users by offering a rich media browsing experience.

Disclaimer: Wyzo is one of our sponsors. It’s always good to declare such things or you end up accused of being biased ;-)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More discussion in Israeli.

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

In order to get an accurate estimate of the tracker load a single person connected to three torrents is counted as three peers. In the picture below, we see that roughly 5 million peers are connected to a torrent that uses only The Pirate Bay (single). Another 5 million have more trackers in the announce list, but use The Pirate Bay as the primary tracker. For the remaining torrents The Pirate Bay was added as an additional (foreign) tracker.

The Pirate Bay is by far the largest BitTorrent tracker, followed at a distance by Sumotracker, Torrent.to and Torrentbox respectively. Unfortunately, this dominant position can result in a horror scenario if the Pirate Bay tracker fails.

Raynor told TorrentFreak that if The Pirate Bay goes down, many of the other trackers might collapse as well. “If The Pirate Bay goes down the load will automatically shift to others. This is because most of the Pirate Bay swarms also include other trackers. When Pirate Bay goes down it would overload others until they fall also. Meaning even more stress and further casualties. This is likely to end in a BitTorrent meltdown.”

So what’s the alternative? How can we fix this vulnerability? The obvious option is to rely less on the Pirate Bay’s trackers, but this is easier said than done. Although there are thousands of smaller trackers on the Internet, it has proven to be hard to convince people to actually use these.

Perhaps we should find an alternative for the traditional BitTorrent tracker then? A truly decentralized form of filesharing, that doesn’t rely on the philanthropy of three Swedish guys? Attempts have been made to decentralize trackers, and most of the major BitTorrent clients support “trackerless” torrents through DHT.

DHT is not the silver bullet though, as it is lacking in speed and efficiency according to Tribler founder Johan Pouwelse, and the mainline Bittorrent client “has a faulty DHT implementation and many people will be left in the cold”. Researchers of Tribler found several DHT flaws. One bug in a DHT sorting routine ensures that it can only “stumble upon success”, meaning torrent downloads will not start in seconds or minutes if Pirate Bay goes down in flames.

“The DHT concept is proven to be broken and just invites DDoS attacks,” Pouwelse added. “People have proposed repairs to the DHT, but only at the cost of too much performance or global trusted servers.”

Dr. Pouwelse says that there have been ideas to deal with BitTorrent’s Achilles’ heel, but none of these have materialized. This summer Raynor hopes to have an operational solution in their Tribler BitTorrent client. They think the trick is to include the SQLite database engine in every Tribler client. This enables abuse prevention and fast starts, however this complex task could be delayed until Christmas (of some year to come).

So is BitTorrent going to die? No, not by a long shot. However, this research does point out that the ecosystem depends on The Pirate Bay. If their trackers go down for whatever reason, others are likely to collapse because of the increasing load and many torrent download will slow down significantly or stop entirely. So please direct your prayers to trackers around the world. May they function in peace and prosperity.

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

Not so long ago we posted a technique to bring dead torrents back to life. Basically it involves adding new tracker URLs to an existing torrent so that it’s possible to track the same content on multiple trackers. However, it seems some people have been adding other trackers to new aXXo torrents as a matter of course (probably to try and speed up downloads), with some unpredictable results.

“I’ve seen on the mininova’s comments section some users telling each other to add trackers to a torrent. To add trackers to a torrent that are not included in the original release is the worst thing users can do,” said aXXo commenting on one of his latest releases. “Those trackers don’t know which are the real chunks of the file nor who have the right ones, the information they send to the clients is wrong and the download will be fucked up.”

If it’s not quite clear what aXXo is driving at from the above, it becomes clearer later on. He explains that other tracker URLs that people add to torrents may not be tracking exactly the right content. Peers there could deliberately send bad data in order to hinder people’s downloads, a tactic favored by anti-piracy companies such as MediaDefender. Their effectiveness with these methods on various torrent sites became public last year.

“..there are ’specialists’ manipulating torrents out there,” says aXXo while mentioning no names, warning, “ISPs nice letters are ready for those peers who follow that ‘technique’.”

“That’s my advice,” says aXXo. “Take it or leave it.”

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

Among other tools, M-Lab will run the Glasnost application developed by the Max Planck Institute. Last year, tests performed with the Glasnost tool revealed that Comcast and Cox were actively interfering with the BitTorrent transfers of their subscribers.

The Java applet developed by the Glasnost project uploads and downloads data via BitTorrent for a few seconds, and compares that to your regular download speed. It detects if your ISP is limiting all BitTorrent traffic, or just the flow of data through well known BitTorrent ports. All in all this tool should be able to tell you whether your ISP is messing with BitTorrent traffic or not.

In their quest for Net Neutrality, Google is backing the M-Lab project with 36 servers in 12 locations. Google will also provide network connectivity for the tools hosted on M-Lab. The servers Google has promised will be rolled out over the next few months, while the PlanetLab Consortium manages the tools hosted on the site.

The project aims to reveal the throttling practices of ISPs worldwide and put an end to all the secrecy. “Transparency has always been essential to the Internet’s success, and everyone can agree that Internet users deserve to be well-informed about what they’re getting when they sign up for broadband,” says M-Lab, explaining the ideals behind its website.

Among the other Net Neutrality tools hosted on M-Lab is a diagnostic tool which allows user to test their connection speed and receive sophisticated diagnosis of any slowdowns. More tools will be added soon, Google powered.

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

Most of the users of the service have reported great results. BitTorrent has proven to be an ideal marketing tool for musicians, writers and other creative minds who want to promote their work and engage fans. In fact, the Dutch Band ‘Silence is Sexy’ won the Interactive Award 2009 for releasing their album for free on Mininova.

Erik, co-founder of Mininova said in a response to the new milestone: “Content Distribution enables producers and artists to bring their work to the attention of the public, free of charge. It’s the perfect solution for bands that don’t have the means to bring out a record yet.”

“Through content distribution, we have already had about 5,800 uploads and 15 million downloads,” Erik commented. “That means some 40,000 downloads a day. The amount of data that has been downloaded equals a pile of CDs of about 30 kilometers high.”

Aside from the marketing aspect, sharing files on BitTorrent is also a great cost saver. Terabytes of data can be transferred without having to invest thousands of dollars in server capacity. If only Microsoft had used BitTorrent for its Windows 7 Beta release, they would not have been forced to delay the release and annoy thousands of eager early adopters, and could have even saved thousands of dollars at the same time.

Slowly, more established companies are realizing that BitTorrent is indeed a great way to reach out to a wide audience, for a fraction of the costs usually incurred. Last year, Canada’s public television broadcaster CBC used Mininova’s services to distribute one of its TV-shows, after they ran into distribution problems.

With BitTorrent’s ever growing popularity, Mininova is predicting a boom in the number of premium users in the coming year, as well as a steep growth in regular users. It might be a good idea for the entertainment industry to embrace these sites, rather than attempting to take them out.

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

The larger the demand and the greater numbers of people active on a torrent, the faster a file can potentially be distributed with BitTorrent, saving Microsoft money too.

This is not the first time that Microsoft has failed to see the benefits of BitTorrent though. This is merely a replay of what happened two years ago when the Vista Beta was posted, but obviously they haven’t learned from that earlier failure. At the time Microsoft said that “legal and privacy issues,” had prevented them from posting a torrent, but they didn’t explain why this was the case.

BitTorrent would have been the wise choice though. During recent years BitTorrent has proved itself as the ideal tool to get large files from A to B (C, D…) on the Internet. Linux distros all use BitTorrent, EA used BitTorrent to distribute the Warhammer Online Beta earlier this year, and even NASA embraced BitTorrent.

Although there is no official Microsoft torrent published, Windows 7 Beta is widely available on BitTorrent sites. And since people generally don’t like to wait for something that is already available elsewhere, many have turned to BitTorrent for this Beta, whether Microsoft likes it or not.

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

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

1. The Pirate Bay

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

2. Mininova

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

3. IsoHunt

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

4. Torrentz

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

5. TorrentReactor

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

6. Demonoid

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

7. BTjunkie

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

8. SumoTorrent

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

9. BTmon

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

10. TorrentPortal

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

Honorable mention: TorrentSpy

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

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

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