Avoid Downloading Fake Torrents and Spam with Vertor
Written by Ernesto on December 28, 2008With millions of potential targets, BitTorrent sites are a great arena for scammers and spammers. Vertor is a new BitTorrent site that aims to eliminate these threats. Every torrent on the site is checked for viruses, DRM and password protected archives by Vertor’s software, and users are able to preview the contents of torrents before they download them.
It is no secret that badly moderated sites are often filled with spam, spyware and worse. The true power behind the best torrent sites are the moderators, since they are the ones who monitor all uploads and remove the bad apples by hand. Vertor.com, short for ‘verified torrents’, takes moderation a step further – the site actually downloads every file, to check for viruses, DRM and other inconveniences.
The site goes even further though. For every video file, Vertor takes several screenshots so users can verify that it is actually the film the title says it is. Similarly, for music torrents users can preview 20 seconds of the tracks, to avoid downloading the wrong files, wasting precious bandwidth.
Alex, the founder of Vertor explained to TorrentFreak: “If there is a video we extract screenshots, if there is a text file we save it on our server, if there is music we extract 20 second samples and if there is archive we open it and extract the list of files. Then we manually remove video files protected with DRM.” On an average day, 6000 torrents are downloaded, and between 2000 and 2500 torrents are verified and get published.
There is a downside to verifying all the torrents though. Since it takes some time to process, it can take one or two days before a fresh torrent appears on the site, which might be a problem for those who want to catch up with a TV-episode that aired yesterday. On the server side, the drawback is that these processes require some additional hardware. Alex told us that they use 6 Dual Xeons with 4 GB ram and 500GB of hard disk space.
It is therefore no surprise that it took a few weeks of verifying torrents before the Vertor project could go live. Currently there are 138439 torrents verified, and more than 5000 were removed because they contained a virus or a passworded archive. In addition, the site’s moderators blocked another 14445 torrents. Alex told us that they started to use new anti-virus software this week, which should be resulted in higher percentage of virus recognition.
Aside from the verification part, Vertor has another user friendly feature, as it allows users to download torrents in their browser with Bitlet, by clicking the “download from the web” button on the torrent detail page. For now, the site is completely ad-free, and Alex told us that he will try to keep it like that for as long as possible.
In summary, we think that Vertor has a lot of potential, especially for those people who are not familiar enough with BitTorrent to spot the bad stuff themselves.
Previously: Top 10 Most Popular Torrent Sites of 2008
Next: Top 10 Most Pirated Movies on BitTorrent
64 Responses
Do they track the torrents or do they merely download and then verify the torrents, and then host it if it is good? I suppose that it is the latter, but in either case, I guess it could be somewhat of use if one is too "inactive" to verify it for oneself.
We download torrent contents to verify that torrent is downloadable and to check its quality.
Which tracker are the torrent usually on?
Of course the most torrents are from TPB. I don't remember the whole list, but if you're really interested contact us through the contact form and we will send you top10 trackers breakdown.
We can't automaticly determine if torrent contains copyrighted material. Sometimes we get abuses regarding it, but this issue is solved 8-)
In which country is it hosted? I heard that in some countries, hosting torrent files might get one in trouble for copyright, even though it does not contain any copyrighted material.
So, I gather you guys rely on donations to finance bandwidth etc?
We have enough earnings from our other projects to keep it ad free for some time. And time will show what to do next.
We host it in NL at the moment.
Sounds *fantasticallyfabulustilly* good, will check it out for sure!
TF, a little typo:
"preview the the contents "
two "the"s above…
"We can't automaticly determine if torrent contains copyrighted material. Sometimes we get abuses regarding it, but this issue is solved 8-)"
Sounds good!
Would love to know more about how you guys managed this, wrote the scripts etc and using which languages/platforms, how many devs etc
Anyways, good job.. hope your next project is adding your own tracker ;)
Cheers!
http://www.eZee.se
Hey, thanks! Drop us a line through contact form and let's get in touch ;)
Will do, I think we can write a follow up article on http://www.eZee.seas well
Expect an email from me, although it might be a bit after the the new year as we have so damn much on our plate right now :(
Cheers!
Np, the same here. Will be waiting.
It would be interesting if you could extract technical information from the downloaded content. Like bitrate, format, resolution, codecs. Just running the files through ffmpeg, like <code>ffmpeg -i filename.avi 2>&1 | grep Stream</code> would do the trick and provide reliable information.
A SHORT video clip would be much appreciated so we can judge the SOUND as well as the picture quality, would be great. Thanks for this service as it is though Vertor! Much appreciated!!
Do you have a Firefox search plugin? can you create one if not?
Great idea! It would be good if you can contact us through contact form for detailed description.
Another great idea. Added to todo list. I hope we can back to it after holidays.
Sure we need to do it. We've just forgot it :(
All done, an e-mail is flying your way
Well, good luck anyway, seems like a very interesting and resource-hungry project. I'll sure keep an eye on it :)
Nice man definitly joining, hope u guys have plans to launch yor own tracker in the future. ;)
@Vertor: Why not design this as a P2P or decentralized system on its own?
Or, at least, let other people submit the torrent + details and a rating and become a kind of central torrent moderation authority. There's lot of torrent-reviewing sites out there that already have screenshots and so. Why not use that?
Vector, I did a search for "Curious Case of Benjamin Button" and became confused. In looking at one of the many results, of which one claimed "This torrent has been 100% downloaded on 2008-12-28 17:23:36. No viruses or password protected archives were found inside" (under Torrent verification). However, the _nine_ screenshots clearly show the PW page, thus indidcated it being password protected. Is there something I am missing? http://vertor.com/torrents/486698/Curious-Case-of...
Vertor
As a moderator on one of the biggest torrent website – i'd personally just love to know what do you guys do about these jerks: http://www.pay-per-install.org/
Running their torrents in any Anti Virus will come up clear (trust me)- but they are nasty nasty people and nasty files,they are VERY smart – how are you dealing with them? After looking on your site I can see a large number of PPI files already there.
Just love to know – Keep up the good work
"People" aren't as reliable as a system.
A system only needs to give one set of info to be reliable (since it is genuinely generetad from the content).
User reviews/rating/screenshots would need at least 2 for some reliability (the one who submitted the torrent could easily fake a review). Even then there you have difference in the quality of screenshots, types of info given etc.
the file isn't password protected nor is it a virus. As it's a video the screen shots are there to show roughly what the video is of.
And that looks like some crappy fake, "download and this video file will turn into something entiryly different"
Maybe they could have an image checker, if any 2/3 images from the screen shots are near enough the same (ie showing a stupid phishing scheme image) to red flag it.
Wow, that’s a really neat idea. Will be directing my not-so-techie friends there :)
So you really download everything? Oo
So if its something copyrighted, you download it?
If that isnt a sue-magnet….
Could you elaborate for those who know not what torrentsu.com is?
Aninhumer:
They are everyday users that upload torrent files – we ban their IP/torrent hash/email address and they just come back 3 minutes later with a new ones, they use 1,000's of proxy address
We have so many measures in place to handle these guys but they are actually like a team of soilders uploading PPI torrents night and day – they are almost impossible to spot too unless you know what you're looking for.
The torrents do not come from that site – so we can not just blacklist them.
They are smart and without us moderators on Mininova and TPB the sites would
be ruined.
Vertor – i'll send you a mail later on in the week – keep up the good work
500gig HD's? lol, sorry, but thats just for starters isn't it?
Never gotten a virus or anything bad in 5-6 years of bittorrent, or is it 7 years.. god time flies lots of years anyway..
common sence prevails, but ofcourse would be good for public trackers to be able to verify torrents for commoners with lack of common sence, however it would also be something antipirate/lobbying organisations will appriciate alot aswell..
They get torrents verified for free, with no work having to be done by themselves except go strait to "beingamafiaorganisationmode" with their extorsions or suing letters/demands,
then watch the money flow in as noone can afford to go to court and defend themselves even if it was a simple win..
hmm i think i began 98-99 or something, a bit more then 7 years then lol..
Im not drunk but im sure i cant think strait.. xD
Im assuming they aren't alllowing copyrighted content… Downloading that content would it not?
Of course, there is no easy way to tell whether any file is copyrighted, is there?
verified torrents eh……. Torrentz also has it…..superfundo.org also does the same thing for movies
fair enough, but wouldn't it be more virtuous if you did not state erroneously that "No viruses or password protected archives were found inside" when in fact there were?
Heard about these people as well, other than Vertor would like to know how you deal with it as well as you've mentioned you're an admin of a large torrent site…
torrenstu is a site that creates phony torrents with legit sounding titles. After you download the file and view it – it directs you to their site that for a fee will let you download a codec to "unlock" the movie. Usually its just a ad or some old tv show – not the file you where looking for. I tries 4 movies from Vector and all were of this ilk. So much for verifying a torrent!!
ok so its not for latest releases, but if im looking for some software thats been out for a while, i can save myself from sifting through the crap to find a working program and patch. huzzah!
Wow, now that sounds like a pretty cool tool!
Jamie
privacy-tools.at.tc
Im assuming they aren't alllowing copyrighted content…
Hah– I would bet you any amount of money that they don't verify the copyright at all. That would spoil their business model which is, as far as I can tell, to attract attention for their other projects so cool people will come and pay them real money. While there are some legit torrent sites, I wouldn't be surprised if more than 90% are devoted to avoiding paying the creators anything.
Sure there is. Look for a copyright notice. If there's a human legible notice, it's copyrighted. Now, their mechanism sounds pretty automated so I'm guessing that detecting copyright status is difficult for a computer algorithm. But it's not hard for a human — or anyone with a conscious.
The thing is that copyright notices, or the lack thereof, does not automatically signify the copyright status.
Whilst I dont want to take anything away from the concept I wouldn't treat torrents downloaded from this tracker with any less caution than any other public tracker. I have seen numerous examples over the past few days of files that are fake and/or contain malware content including a torrent proclaming to be an axxo Dark Knight rip that was 0.2 MB and an exe file to boot which was not removed for at least 2 days from Vertor.
Also I would be especially careful (as people should be anyways) of any exe files as it's not until they are run that crypted files can be detected as carrying a malware payload and even then if it's a new payload it may well not be detected at all still as scanner definitions haven't been updated prior to it being verified.
I would suggest that whatever verification system they are using needs vast improvement if a torrent is uploaded as an exe file, 0.2 MB in size that is named as a DVDrip of a full length movie. How much veriification is actually going on – judging by this not much at all and I would seriously question the claims of the owners based on this. I doubt if they're purposely scamming people or anything of that nature.
It was removed but as I said it was up for at least 2 days – so I would exercise caution and treat this as any other public tracker.
If you don't believe me check out this before it gets removed: http://vertor.com/torrents/486698/Curious-Case-of...
…the preview actually shoes a DRM (or password) protected file.
Here you can see our system in work – now you clearly see that this is DRM protected torrent. Moderator hasn't deleted this torrent yet, but anyway you won't download it as you're aware it's DRM.
Hm… Could you contact us through the contact for to discuss this issue. It seems me very important to find out solution how to avoid their torrents.
I will be waiting for your email!
If you're suggesting they write a new p2p protocol then you are insane.
That is of course a solution to that problem, but still a automatic system (or an admin system) will still be more reliable and easily maintaned than a userbase.
A different point is the hardware aspect, for this system they need considerable hardware power, and the speed of adding the torrents is slightly slower.
On the other hand, waiting for 1 day to get a perfectly good torrent or spend a day downloading crap before getting the right one.. I'd know my choice. (not including the fact that if you are slightly experienced you will be able to distinguish between most good and crap torrents.. but still).
Perhaps, though, there could still be one set of info, but also using people, with various indicators to indicate which is more or less reliable.
Spammers would just add something moving into the fake video to get around that check. User verification is probably much more effective, and reduces the amount of hardware checking needed.
"This would be difficult for videos that are not-quite-well-known or completely original, wouldn't it?"
Obviously, but having a ranking system would be beneficial, and better than not having one.
I would have thought a simple answer for well known virus/spam sources, to just blacklist any torrents from that site automatically?
I would rather opt for a community feature where people can flag torrents as "bad" or "good", so you can calculate a score that can be included in ranking torrents. Or, even better, having them show up on a moderator's radar for manual examination. The more people flag a torrent as "bad", the higher it will show up on a moderator's TODO list.
This would be difficult for videos that are not-quite-well-known or completely original, wouldn't it?
These guys look like they are in bed with torrentsu.com…be very wary
Like Dare said; “a short video clip would be much appreciated so that we can judge the sound as well as the picture quality, would be great.”
This sounds really good!
I personally tried this site and downloaded a copy of a prog. It was originally from TPB. After download was finished I ran it through anti virus and it kicked out a trojan warning and promptly quarantined it.
right…
It's a good idea, but scammers won't upload there.
I can't say it's a bad idea, but the same effect can be gained from having a good community surrounding a bittorrrent index. If a file is bad you can be sure that someone will alert all other potential downloaders.
I downloaded two movies, one was a password protected RAR that you had to sign up and pay another torrent site to get the password, the other was a FAKE aXXo. Not a great start to downloading from this site. I think I will stick with the Darksiderg, this is where you get aXXo original movies and I have never had any issues with spyware, virus fakes or password protected crap.
that site seems government ran
I like this website vertor for description and picture for every posted torrent. I know similar torrent website Absolutorrent.com , they select the best torrents.
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