Today, however, Tribler is more relevant than ever before.

Developed by a team of researchers at Delft University of Technology, the main goal is to come up with a robust implementation of BitTorrent that doesn’t rely on central servers. Instead, Tribler is designed to keep BitTorrent alive, even when all torrent search engines, indexes and trackers are pulled offline.

“Our key scientific quest is facilitating unbounded information sharing,” Tribler leader Dr. Pouwelse tells TorrentFreak.

“We simply don’t like unreliable servers. With Tribler we have achieved zero-seconds downtime over the past six years, all because we don’t rely on shaky foundations such as DNS, web servers or search portals.”

So how does it work?

Like many other BitTorrent clients, Tribler has a search box at the top of the application. However, the search results that appear when users type in a keyword don’t come from a central index. Instead, they come directly from other peers.

Downloading a torrent is also totally decentralized. When a user clicks on one of the search results, the meta-data is pulled in from another peer and the download starts immediately. Tribler is based on the standard BitTorrent protocol and uses regular BitTorrent trackers to communicate with other peers. But, it can also continue downloading when a central tracker goes down.

The same is true for spam control. Where most torrent sites have a team of moderators to delete viruses, malware and fake files, Tribler uses crowd-sourcing to keep the network clean. Content is verified by user generated “channels”, which can be “liked” by others. When more people like a channel, the associated torrents get a boost in the search results.

The latest addition to Tribler is a Wikipedia-style editing system dubbed “Open2Edit,” where users have the option to edit names and descriptions of torrents in public channels. All without a central server, totally decentralized.

According to Dr. Pouwelse, Tribler is fully capable of resisting any pressure from outside, and it will still work when all torrent sites and trackers are gone. It simply can’t be shutdown, blocked or censored, whatever laws politicians may come up with.

“The only way to take it down is to take The Internet down.” Pouwelse told us.

One thing that could theoretically cause issues, is the capability for starting users to find new peers. To be on the safe side the Tribler team is still looking for people who want to act as so called bootstraptribler peers. These users will act as superpeers, who distribute lists of active downloaders.

“Together with software bugs and a code cleanup, that is now our last known weakness,” says Pouwelse.

While the Tribler client only has a few thousand users at the moment, for avid file-sharers it must be a relief to know that it’s out there. No matter what crazy laws may pass in the future, people will always be able to share.

Those who want to give it a spin are welcome download Tribler here. It’s completely Open Source and with a version for Windows, Mac and Linux.

Source: Tribler Makes BitTorrent Impossible to Shut Down

Tens of thousands of musicians, from those just starting out to those already established, use BitTorrent to give away their music for free.

One of the BitTorrent clients that helps these artists to get noticed is FrostWire. In 2008, the client introduced its FrostClick service through which it promotes independent artists, and not without success.

With help from FrostWire, independent musicians reach a bigger audience than many of the artists signed by major labels. In the last year alone, 2.4 million people downloaded the albums promoted by FrostWire, and according to the artists who were featured, it pays off.

“FrostWire jumpstarted my music career by giving away my album for free to over 130,000 people,” says female rapper Kellee Maize in a comment. “Paying for that type of exposure would have cost me over $50,000 on other outlets such as taking out Facebook ads or Google Adsense.”

“Because of FrostWire I’ve accumulated over 100,000 Facebook and Twitter followers. During my FrostWire campaign, my website has received over 100,000 page views,” she adds.

Some of the critics of ‘free’ music say that it doesn’t convert to any sales at all, but Maize disagrees. The rapper says that thanks to releasing her music under a Creative Commons license through FrostWire, she’s now earning some decent money.

“I’ve been able to sell more albums on iTunes with this exposure and earn a sustainable income off of MP3 sales even though my music is part of Creative Commons,” says Maize.

She’s not alone either. Other artists that were promoted by FrostWire also praise the promotional success it gave them.

“We were truly delighted by the number of downloads we received after our EP was featured on FrostWire. It’s the most effective way we’ve found so far of getting the music out there,” says John from Azoora Feat. Graciellita.

This view is shared by Ryan Egan from The Ugly Club. “I never anticipated the kind of feedback we’ve received from music fans all over the world and it was a great decision to leave our record in the hands of the great people at FrostClick,” Egan says.

To celebrate 2.4 million downloads in 2011, FrostWire has released a compilation album as they also did in 2009. The A Side of the new album features 18 artists who’ve been promoted in the FrostWire client, and Side B is a hand-picked selection of 12 of the best artists who were featured on the FrostClick website.

All all the tracks are completely free to download and share. We’ve embedded Side A of FrostWire Creative Commons Mixtape below, and Side B is available here. For those who want more, here’s another 2.5 gigabyte compilation of some of the best Creative Commons music of 2011.

Enjoy.

Source: Musicians Praise BitTorrent and Creative Commons

Despite massive competition from cyberlockers, BitTorrent continues to expand year after year, and not just by a little. Today, BitTorrent Inc. announced that their two flagship clients increased their user base by 50 percent, to more than 150 million active users a month.

Most growth can be attributed to uTorrent, which more than quadrupled its number of monthly users in the last three years. The ‘tiny’ BitTorrent client went from 28 million monthly users in December 2008 to 132 million last month.

“This marks an amazing milestone for our company and we want to thank our loyal users and partners for their support. Our protocol and software clients have become some of the most pervasive pieces of technology in Internet history,” says BitTorrent Inc. CEO Eric Klinker.

“We look forward to another exciting year of growth and we continue expanding our product lines to meet the needs of consumers creating and consuming high-quality personal media files on a broad range of consumer electronics devices,” he adds.

The last comment ties in to a slew of other announcements released by BitTorrent today. The company is currently showcasing several “BitTorrent Certified” devices at CES, the world’s largest consumer electronics tradeshow in Las Vegas. Through these partnerships BitTorrent hopes to add an extra revenue stream, and widen its user base beyond the traditional computer.

Aside from showing off BitTorrent-enabled routers, TVs and network storage devices, BitTorrent will also launch the world’s first certified set-top box developed by the Slovakian company Antik. The set-top-box allows users to search, download and play torrent files directly on their TV.

The advantage of the BitTorrent Certified ecosystem is that it simplifies the downloading process for less tech-savvy people. Right now, many people drop out after installing a BitTorrent client because they find it too complicated to download and play content.

Whether these devices will be a success is yet to be seen, but there is certainly a large enough user base to tap into.

Based on the 150 million active monthly users BitTorrent Inc. reports for their clients, the total number of monthly BitTorrent users can be estimated at more than a quarter billion. And despite these already dazzling numbers, there is still plenty of room for growth.

Source: uTorrent & BitTorrent Surge to 150 Million Monthly Users

Dubbed “Share,” the new application is targeted at people who want to share large files with a private group of people, as opposed to uploading them via a public BitTorrent site for all the world to see. With the tagline “No more storage limits. No more fees” it also takes a stab at the increasingly popular cyberlockers.

Although the software uses BitTorrent under the hood, people are not required to create torrent files. Instead, they can select files on their computer, pick a person or group to share them with, and the application takes care of the rest.

According to BitTorrent’s chief strategist Shahi Ghanem the new application fits perfectly into a world where media files grow larger and larger by the day.

“With today’s consumer cameras/video recorders producing stunning quality, traditional media sharing requires concessions. With Share, you don’t have to crop photos, reduce resolutions or cut video length to easily share something with your friends, family and colleagues. It’s much faster than traditional ‘cloud’ solutions and easy for anyone,” says Ghanem.

Those with a keen eye for detail may see similarities between “Share” and the “Project Chrysalis” client that was released last year. The new application is an improvement over the Chrysalis client, directly based on input from users.

“After evaluating the user response and feedback, we realized we had the right goal, but users identified challenges with the implementation. Ultimately, we took what we learned and started again from scratch. Share was born,” Ghanem explains.

The Share project is currently in an early Alpha phase, but once it has matured the application will be integrated into the existing uTorrent and BitTorrent Mainline clients. Although some might find this useful, there is also a group of uTorrent users who would prefer to keep a lighter client.

In recent years uTorrent has been augmented with quite a few extra bells and whistles, features that some traditional BitTorrent users are not interested in. To address these concerns, we asked whether BitTorrent Inc. would consider releasing a more basic version of the popular client as well.

“We might consider it in the future – it’s definitely not out of the realm of possibility,” we were told. “Right now, even with the new features, the client is still very small and efficient on resources. We also review features very frequently, and if they aren’t being used, we are always open to removing them.”

A uTorrent “light” may indeed not be a bad idea to please the angry mob. Those who are less resistant to change are of course invited to give Share a spin.

Source: BitTorrent Releases New “Share” Application

In recent years uTorrent has transformed from a relatively ‘geeky’ and minimal application into a BitTorrent client that should appeal to a mainstream audience.

Another step in this direction has just been taken with the newly released stable build of uTorrent 3.1, now with a built-in media player. This player allows users to watch videos or listen to downloaded music without having to leave uTorrent.

Another new feature, one that was already present in early beta releases, is integration with external devices including the iPhone, iPad, PS3, Xbox 360 and Android hardware. This allows users to quickly sync downloaded content to these devices.

And that’s not all the uTorrent developers have been working on lately.

Aside from the new version of uTorrent ‘free,’ BitTorrent Inc. also released uTorrent Plus, a paid version of the client with additional features. As announced a few weeks ago, this new version of uTorrent costs $24.95 a year.

Plus enables users to convert videos to formats that are compatible with external devices. It also comes with built-in anti-virus, remote file-transfers and a built-in media player.

“Our goal was to enhance uTorrent to be a powerful tool that lets you free your personal content from the PC. Plus adds key features needed to accomplish this, and then adds security to keep you safer,” says uTorrent’s director of product management Jordy Berson.

Users who now visit the uTorrent website will see that they can choose between the free and the plus version of the BitTorrent client. Existing free users will also see an “upgrade to plus” banner in their clients, but this can be disabled. Aside from putting work in the Plus version, the uTorrent team will continue developing the free client in the coming years.

Are you a uTorrent user? Let us know what you think about the new free features and the Plus version in the comments.

Source: uTorrent Adds Media Player, Plus Goes Live…

Thus far all versions of uTorrent have been free of charge, but earlier this year uTorrent’s parent company announced the forthcoming release of ‘Plus’, a paid version of the client with additional features.

Plus will enable users to convert videos and transfer files to external devices. It also comes with built in anti-virus, remote file-transfers and a built in media player. Today BitTorrent Inc. announced that Plus will be released before the holidays and the client has been put on pre-sale for $24.95 a year.

“uTorrent Plus was specially designed to give our users access to often-requested features. If they are seeking a very easy way to convert files to popular formats to watch on other devices, plus a safer torrenting experience with integrated antivirus (and more), it’s a no-brainer,” BitTorrent spokesperson Allison Wagda told TorrentFreak.

“The free uTorrent client still offers all the essential functionality and continues to receive significant attention from the development team. uTorrent Plus is exactly what its name implies: everything you love about uTorrent *plus* great new features,” she added.

For the San Francisco company uTorrent Plus is a attempt to add an additional revenue stream aside from the money it makes from toolbar installs. How much is guesswork, but considering the target audience they will probably “suffer” a bit from piracy, although we doubt that they will complain much about that.

uTorrent is not the first mainstream file-sharing application to be launched with a paid version. Before it was shut down LimeWire sold a pro version, and uTorrent’s main competitor Vuze also sells a pro version of their client for $24.99 which enables users to burn DVDs.

Generally these pro-clients are not targeted towards savvy BitTorrent users, but to relative newcomers who are willing to pay a little bit to make their lives easier. That said, paid BitTorrent clients are certainly not the norm, so it will be interesting to see how uTorrent Plus will be received by the public.

Are you a uTorrent user? Let us know what you think about Plus in the comments.

Source: uTorrent Plus Goes on Pre-Sale for $24.95

Xunlei offers a searchable index of 3.7 billion media files which users can download with the proprietary Xunlei software. The company is partly owned by Google and in recent years has evolved into the leading player in the online file-sharing space.

According to in-house reports, the Xunlei client had 291 million active users in February 2011, which makes it the most-used BitTorrent client by far. And with an estimated 2.5 billion page views a month, Xunlei also takes the lead as the most visited file-sharing site on the Internet.

Earlier this year Xunlei announced that it would capitalize on its popularity and go public. Supported by prominent underwriters such as J.P. Morgan and Deutsche Bank, the company aimed for a listing on NASDAQ, the largest U.S stock market. The prospectus reveals that Xunlei aimed to raise $100 million from shareholders to further grow its business.

Xunlei’s plans were ambitious, especially for a company in the file-sharing space. As it turns out, they may have been a little bit too ambitious. This summer the IPO was put on hold, allegedly due to the poor economic climate, and last week the plans to go public were canceled completely.

Among the reasons cited for the pullback are concerns over copyright. In common with other file-sharing services, Xunlei indexes millions of copyrighted files, and is often portrayed as a “pirate haven” by the entertainment industries. These concerns were also raised in the prospectus, where the protection of third-party copyrights was listed as one of the main challenges.

Last year alone 126 copyright-related lawsuits were filed against Xunlei in China, and the company also reported that the U.S. based MPAA have raised their concerns.

“A law firm in the U.S. who claimed to represent the Motion Picture Association of America, or the MPAA, has recently notified us by phone that certain members of the MPAA may make claims of copyright infringement against us, and requested us to enter into a content protection agreement with these members,” the prospectus reads.

“We have engaged in discussions with the MPAA to understand their request. However, we may not be able to reach a content protection agreement with the MPAA on mutually satisfactory terms and the MPAA or its members may initiate a lawsuit or other proceedings against us, whether or not we enter into a content protection agreement with any of them,” it adds.

Another signal that the U.S. might not be the best market to turn to was given by Google earlier this year. Despite partly owning the file-sharing company, Google banned the term “Xunlei” from appearing in automatic search suggestions because it is heavily linked to piracy.

“While there is no silver bullet for infringement online, this measure is one of several that we have implemented to curb copyright infringement online,” Google spokesman Mistique Cano previously told TorrentFreak.

Considering the above, and the continued pressure from pro-copyright groups on U.S. lawmakers to adopt more stringent anti-piracy laws, the climate might not be ideal for a file-sharing company on NASDAQ. Whether Xunlei will come back later or try their luck elsewhere is unknown at this point.

Source: Google-Backed File-Sharing Empire Cancels NASDAQ IPO

“Free is basically taking head-on Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft for the games, Microsoft (again), Yahoo, Apple, Google and Boxee for the internet TV, Sony and countless other hardware manufacturers for the Blu-Ray player,” BusinessInsider declared on launch of the box.

Naturally the device has all the network options, including WiFi, ADSL and cable connections, and can browse the web via HTTP and grab files using FTP. But shock, horror, it also has another resident protocol – our friend BitTorrent. Entertainment chiefs, it appears, are not amused.

“We have already encountered problems with Free in the past but they have corrected it on the newsgroups in particular,” said Pascal Rogard, CEO of the Society of Dramatic Authors and Composers (SACD), on hearing news of protocol’s inclusion.

Under pressure from the industry, in 2008 Free agreed to censor its free Usenet service by partially blocking access to some groups allegedly containing infringing material.

“I’m sure Maxime Lombardini, chief executive of Iliad [Free's parent company], will be keen to address the [new] problem,” Rogard noted.

“We can have experts from the music and film industry to look at the new box to see possible solutions. I am sure that the company will modify the software to stop this service.”

But the complaints haven’t stopped there. According to the L’Express, Disney – who supply content for distribution via Free – were said to be surprised by the BitTorrent feature of the box, so too Warner.

Even French anti-piracy agency HADOPI are reportedly aware of the problem but have “not yet been led to investigate the matter.”

But perhaps most outspoken on the issue has been David El Sayegh, head of Legal Affairs at SNEP (Syndicat National de l’Édition Phonographique), the outfit which protects the interests of the French record industry.

“It’s amazing!” said El Sayegh. “This technology is not neutral, it clearly offers illegal downloading of content without a PC.”

El Sayegh says that current French law states that vendors cannot “make available to the public or communicate to the public, knowingly and in any form whatsoever, a program clearly intended for the provision of public works or unauthorized protected objects and knowingly encourage [its use], including through an advertisement.”

But El Sayegh’s interpretation in respect of this particularly issue is disputed by Guillaume Champeau of French tech-news outlet Numerama.

“For an offense to be proven it would need to be shown that Free has encouraged its customers to go to BitTorrent sites where pirated movies are indexed, or at the very least the company developed this tool with that in mind,” he writes, further noting that it has always been for Free’s users to decide how they use the tools provided to them.

The signals being piped into billions of television and radio sets around the world have traditionally provided huge revenue streams for entertainment companies. Maintaining control of these streams proved relatively easy for many years, whether that was via terrestrial, satellite or cable broadcasts. And then along came the Internet and shook everything up.

Demanding that BitTorrent should be removed from a device on legal grounds is as crazy as requiring the same for HTTP because it can be used to access RapidShare. But every file transfer mechanism not under the command of the entertainment companies has the potential to weaken their control, and they won’t like that, whether they carry infringing content or not.

Source: Media Chiefs Want BitTorrent Removed From Home Entertainment Player

The San Francisco based company claimed to have suffered significant losses and demanded compensation for the ongoing patent infringement.

The original patent at the center of the lawsuit is titled “Media file distribution with adaptive transmission protocols.” It describes a file-sharing system consisting of a file database, a transfer client and a distribution server.

“By making, operating, using and/or selling [uTorrent and BitTorrent Mainline] and or other software, BitTorrent has infringed and continues to infringe, contribute to the infringement, or induce the infringement of at least claim 1 of the ’944 patent,” the complaint read.

Judged by a layman’s eye the patent did not appear to apply to BitTorrent, but depending on the judge’s decision the case could have a disastrous impact on the BitTorrent community. More than 100 million people use uTorrent every month, half of all active BitTorrent users in the U.S. and Europe.

Luckily for them, it didn’t go that far.

Last week District Court Judge William Alsup signed a joint motion to dismiss the case with prejudice, meaning the case is closed and can’t be refiled in the future. Each party further agreed to bear its own attorney fees and other costs. Additional details on the motivations behind the dismissal were not provided.

BitTorrent Inc. is happy with the outcome but didn’t wish to comment any further on the case.

“We were very pleased that the plaintiff dismissed its case with prejudice,” was all the company’s spokesperson told TorrentFreak.

Tranz-Send Broadcasting Network have also dismissed the case against Kontiki Inc., who it accused of a similar patent violation.

Kontiki offers a media content delivery technology that is hybrid of central servers and P2P transfers. Unlike BitTorrent Inc, Kontiki’s user base mostly consists of businesses who can use the software to stream and distribute video. According to the complaint, this software also infringes on the aforementioned patent.

The dismissal comes as a surprise. Court documents filed two weeks ago show that Tranz-Send anticipated that the case would be heard by a jury during a full trial. BitTorrent and Kontiki on the other hand preferred an early summary judgment and requested compensation for the costs they incurred during the process.

Despite the above and for reasons unknown, all parties eventually decided that dismissing the case was the best option.

Source: Patent Violation Lawsuit Against BitTorrent / uTorrent Dropped

In recent years Vuze’s BitTorrent client has evolved into an all-in-one download solution. With built in search, DVD-burning capabilities and device integration the Vuze team has set itself aside from other popular BitTorrent clients.

Last year Vuze announced that device integration in particular is a highly appreciated and frequently used feature among users. Millions of people have already hooked up their Xbox 360, PS3, iPhone and Android devices to Vuze, and the developers have been working hard to support as many devices as possible.

This week Vuze made a giant step forward by adding DLNA support, which makes the BitTorrent client compatible with thousands of new devices. DLNA is a networking standard supported by all major consumer electronic brands. It can be found in many of the newer TVs, set-top boxes, tablets, NAS devices and more.

“Today, we’re continuing this crusade to unleash your content on your mobile and TV screens by adding all DLNA-supported devices, a few additional Android devices, and more,” the Vuze team announced.

“With this release, most DLNA-supported devices should now show up in your Vuze Sidebar – assuming they’re connected to the same home network as Vuze – making it possible to stream directly from Vuze to the DLNA device of your choice. Once you spot your device name under Device Playback in the Sidebar, simply drag-and-drop.”

With this update Vuze users can now easily stream movies to their DLNA supported TVs. It also makes it very easy to copy downloaded files to external hardware such as NAS storage devices, tablets, game consoles and laptops. A drag-and-drop is sufficient to transfer or stream the files.

The timing of the new Vuze release appears not to be totally coincidental. Earlier this week Vuze’s main competitor uTorrent introduced device integration in an early alpha release, supporting a handful devices. Vuze delivered their announcement sortly after, emphasizing that they’ve had this feature for more than two years already, and that Vuze is now compatible with tens of thousands of devices.

“Yes, we launched these features years ago, unlike some other very tiny clients that are just getting around to it now ;),” the Vuze team teased.

Source: Vuze Brings BitTorrent to Your TV, and Thousands of Other Devices

Despite the success story that it is, the uTorrent development team hasn’t been sitting still in recent years. The user interface is continuously being updated and new features are launched on a frequent basis, such as the BitTorrent App studio.

Today we can add another feature to the list, as BitTorrent quietly rolled out support for external devices in the latest uTorrent alpha release. Aside from the usual bug fixes, the new release allows users to drag and drop downloaded files to Apple and Android devices, as well as the PS3 and Xbox 360 game consoles.

In addition, the latest alpha also shows the option to convert files into the appropriate formats supported by the various devices. However, TorrentFreak has learned that this tease was put in by mistake and that it will be removed in the next update.

While the device integration will become part of the stable uTorrent release in a few months, conversion will only be available for people who upgrade to the premium uTorrent version, the upcoming uTorrent Plus.

As is the case with all change, not all users are happy with the multitude of developments uTorrent has gone through in recent months. Some complain about bugs, others don’t like the new interface, and there are users who are not charmed by all the new additional features.

The uTorrent developers, however, believe that they are on the right track to making their software appeal to a wider audience. TorrentFreak was informed by BitTorrent Inc. that a lot of users specifically demanded device integration, as well as other changes that were implemented recently.

That there indeed is a demand from BitTorrent users for integration with mobiles and game consoles has been shown by uTorrent’s main competitor, Vuze. A year after Vuze added device integration millions of users had turned on this feature, and together they converted more than 100 million videos. Whether people are as excited when they have to pay for the conversion remains to be seen.

The latest 3.1 alpha is available for download now, for those who are interested in giving it a spin.

Source: uTorrent Adds Android, iOS, PS3 and Xbox Integration

To gain more insight into BitTorrent’s usage we’ve previously looked at the market share of various BitTorrent clients to spot emerging trends, and today we revive this initiative. To see where things stand two years after our last report, TorrentFreak asked the Tribler P2P research team at Delft University of Technology to find out which clients are being used in various popular BitTorrent swarms.

Although the new results show some interesting shifts in market shares, uTorrent remains firmly in the lead. Nearly half of the 557,536 unique peers (48%) that were spotted in the sample were using a version of uTorrent. The mainline client, also developed by BitTorrent Inc., came in at third with a market share of 13 percent.

Vuze, formerly known as Azureus, secured second place with 22 percent of the total users. This is an all-time high for the client which had just 14 percent market share in our last report. One of the factors that contributed to this rise is FrostWire’s move to become a BitTorrent-only client based on the Azureus code base. This means that a few percent of the downloaders that identify as using Azureus, are in fact FrostWire users.

Another client that gained popularity is Transmission, which doubled its market share in recent months and is now at 7 percent. A respectable figure, especially because Transmission doesn’t have a native Windows client. BitComet, on the other hand, continued its downward spiral and is now stuck at little over one percent, down from the 6 percent it enjoyed two years ago.

We have to note that the comparisons above are relative. The number of BitTorrent users has grown significantly over the past two years, so in absolute numbers Transmission’s user base may have even quadrupled, or more.

Below is the full list of all clients that have a market share over 1 percent. Some clients were not identified by libTorrent (rakshasa) and those ended up in the unknown ‘category’. As before, the research focuses on popular swarms listed on English language BitTorrent sites, which means that ‘foreign’ clients such as Xunlei are underrepresented.

Source: uTorrent Keeps BitTorrent Lead, BitComet Fades Away

And there are the dozens of spin-offs, using the familiar “all white background” format. One of the companies that made an ad inspired by the Get a Mac campaign is BitTorrent Inc., and interestingly enough they targeted an Apple product.

The BitTorrent vs. iTunes ads, which were never officially released to the public, emphasize how people can get higher quality content on BitTorrent at much faster speeds. They were created in 2007, before the iTunes store offered the high-definition downloads that were already commonplace on BitTorrent.

To find out more about the origin of the campaign TorrentFreak got in touch with Alvir Navin, who wrote the scripts together with Nic Birondo. Alvir, brother of BitTorrent Inc. co-founder Ashwin Navin, was working as director of content services at BitTorrent at the time.

“Back in 2007, a lot of users were complaining that iTunes downloads weren’t that fast, especially during the holiday season when the iTunes servers were taxed by the popularity of the service. So we played on the ‘Mac vs PC’ ad campaign to highlight the difference between centralized and decentralized content delivery,” Alvir told us.

“This was really just a fun project for me and a few friends that allowed us to pay homage to a few of our favorite film genres, drive home a relevant point about new methods of content delivery, and throw in a few digs about closed ecosystems,” he added.

For reasons unknown the ad campaign was never released. We recently stumbled onto it at the portfolio page of director Lucas Abel but other than that the campaign had never received any exposure.

In total three clips were produced titled “Crowd Beatdown”, “Zombies vs. Ninjas” and “Director’s Chair”. All follow the same format as the ads from the original Get a Mac campaign. The full credits listing all the people who helped create the videos are available at Lucas Abel’s website.

Source: BitTorrent Crushes iTunes in Apple Inspired Ads

By using a certified application users can search for files that are shared on BitTorrent, download these files, and play them directly on their computers, TV or mobiles devices. Everything is bundled into one system and downloaders don’t have to worry about conversion, codecs or file-formats.

Today BitTorrent Inc. and TV manufacturer Vestel announce the launch of the first digital TV that will come with this built-in BitTorrent support. By embedding BitTorrent technology directly into the the TV hardware the two companies hope to appeal to a wide audience of people who are looking for an even more simple way to enjoy downloaded content in their living room.

“Consumers want all types of personal media and Internet content in their living rooms and the TV remains the most desired device for consuming this digital media, regardless of source,” Vestel’s Hakan Kutlu said commenting on the announcement.

“BitTorrent certification helps our TV line meet this consumer demand and ensures that Vestel products remain at the forefront of technology innovation and adoption,” Kutlu adds.

The first BitTorrent certified TV will be demoed tomorrow in Berlin, Germany at IFA, one of the world’s largest consumer trade shows.

Aside from convenience, the main reason for BitTorrent Inc. to develop the new BitTorrent ecosystem is to simplify the downloading process for less tech-savvy people. Right now, many people drop out after installing a BitTorrent client because they find it too complicated to download and play content.

“The world of digital media has become unnecessarily complex and results in an increasingly fragmented consumer experience. People want access to their entire content library – personal media, Internet files, and artist approved content – regardless of source, media type, or file format,” BitTorrent’s chief strategist Shahi Ghanem said.

BitTorrent told TorrentFreak that more certified devices running Chrysalis software will be announced this fall. Two years ago BitTorrent already partnered with device makers such as Netgear and D-Link to bring BitTorrent to set-top boxes and NAS devices, but these don’t run on Chrysalis yet.

BitTorrent’s efforts to simplify the user experience and become more integrated into devices doesn’t mean that the development of uTorrent will stagnate. The Chrysalis project has replaced the former mainline BitTorrent client, but uTorrent will continue to be developed separately. And with more than 100 million active users a month, that is probably a wise decision.

Source: World’s First BitTorrent Certified Digital TV Launches

Over the years uTorrent’s target audience has also changed. BitTorrent was still a geek thing in 2005, but today its users include hockey moms, grandparents and many others who are not generally classified as computer experts.

This wider appeal naturally translates into user growth. Today uTorrent’s parent company BitTorrent Inc. confirmed to TorrentFreak that uTorrent has officially surpassed 100 million active users a month. By comparison, this is more active users than the much-hyped social network Twitter, and almost quadruple the number of users uTorrent had three years ago.

“This is a big milestone for uTorrent and adds to what has been a tremendous year of growth for the client,” Shahi Ghanem, Chief Strategist at BitTorrent told TorrentFreak.

We’re grateful for our users and we want to thank our global community for their amazing support. We take every bit of user feedback to heart when building uT and we remain committed to keeping it the world’s fastest and lightest BitTorrent client,” Ghanem added.

Although the 100 million milestone is already quite an achievement, one of the main challenges in the future is to keep even more newcomers on board. Previously it was reported that hundreds of thousands of people download uTorrent every day, but that a significant percentage of this group don’t become regular users.

To tackle this problem of “bouncing” users, uTorrent has made changes to its client in recent months that aim to keep more novices on board. An example is the “simplified view,” allowing users to minimize parts of the uTorrent interface to focus attention on the most essential client features. And that’s just one of the many changes the company has made.

Later this year will see another change in course for uTorrent as BitTorrent Inc. launches a paid version of the client. Branded “uTorrent Plus,” this version of uTorrent will come with several added features including the ability to convert videos and transfer files to external devices. More details on this project are expected to come out in the coming weeks.

By reaching 100 million active monthly users the uTorrent brand is stronger than ever before. It is also an indication the BitTorrent’s popularity in general is still growing, despite fierce competition from direct download sites and streaming services. Indeed, BitTorrent is here to stay.

Source: uTorrent Breaks 100 Million Monthly Users

As it turns out, the operator of 1337x was forced to abandon the popular TCP-based tracker and trade it in for a more efficient one using the UDP protocol instead. This means that for millions of torrents the main trackers stopped working.

“Sadly we got turned away from 3 data centers in the last 2 months due to the massive amounts of bandwidth we were consuming. Sologigabit even called it a ‘broadcast-storm’ due to the massive number of concurrent connecting IP-addresses,” 1337x’s admin told TorrentFreak.

Apparently the huge amount of connections were crippling the various networks, and there was no cost-efficient alternative available through which the old trackers could continue.

“They put us on our own dedicated switch but could not handle our traffic effectively. So it was necessary for us to abandon the old TCP in favor of a new UDP based one,” the 1337x admin told us.

The decision to change to a UDP-only tracker means that older torrents will only work if users have DHT enabled. All new torrents downloaded from the 1337x website, however, are automatically updated with the new tracker address.

1337x is not the only tracker to have gone UDP only, OpenBitTorrent has also dropped TCP support to save resources. This means that two of the three major BitTorrent trackers no longer support TCP connections.

The admin of OpenBitTorrent told TorrentFreak that TCP trackers are killing central hosted services, and he suggests that BitTorrent clients should actively direct users to UDP in order to save resources.

“I would be great if BitTorrent clients could make a list of popular trackers and direct all queries to the UDP version. That would lower the demand in resources but still make the tracker dual protocol,” he added.

PublicBitTorrent is currently the largest tracker that still supports TCP, and it will continue to do so in the future.

The main reason to continue supporting TCP is to give torrent site owners an easy option to list seeder and leecher statistics. “A lot of torrent sites are only capable of getting the stats via http, so we keep both open which is quite expensive,” the PublicBitTorrent admin told TorrentFreak.

It means that they use five times more bandwidth than the other trackers, but PublicBitTorrent believes they offer a vital service to torrent site owners.

“We have no plans on going UDP only, simply because we want to make sure all the torrent sites can easily access the stats,” TorrentFreak was told.

For users, the switch to UDP is not going to have much of an effect. That is, if they make sure to use a recent version of a BitTorrent client that supports UDP tracker connections. According to the 1337x admin, this is not the case for everyone.

“I’m finding many people are still using the older clients that do not support UDP. There is really no advantage to staying with the older clients so all BitTorrent users should be encouraged to update their clients,” we were told.

BitTorrent users who want to check if their BitTorrent client supports UDP can take a look at this list. Also, it never hurts to have DHT enabled just in case one or more BitTorrent trackers go offline, something that still happens on a regular basis.

Source: Data Centers Crippled By BitTorrent ‘Broadcast-Storm’

The uTorrent team is currently finalizing a paid version of uTorrent that will extend the functionality of the current application. One of the key features of uTorrent Plus is the ability to convert videos and transfer files to external devices such as iPods and PSPs.

uTorrent Plus will launch as an invite-only beta before it rolls out its public release later this year. Further details on the exact specifications and capabilities of the paid uTorrent client are expected to be announced in the weeks to come.

Jordy Berson, Director of Product Management for uTorrent, told TorrentFreak that no price has been set for uTorrent Plus at this point. However, Berson assured us that the Plus variant will add new features and that no existing functionality will be stripped from the regular uTorrent version.

With uTorrent Plus BitTorrent Inc hopes to cater to the needs of many of its users, while making some extra revenue in the process.

“We think of it more as diversifying revenue sources. Some of the features will involve us paying licensing fees so it’s not like this is a pure profit business for us, although given our scale we’ll be able to negotiate good terms and pass on to customers a great value,” Berson told TorrentFreak.

One of the downsides to paid software, especially that targeted at BitTorrent users, is that it will probably be available to download for free on torrent sites. The uTorrent team is aware of this issue but doesn’t plan to include any extreme anti-piracy measures.

“We will use a pretty standard licensing system to unlock the Plus version,” Berson told TorrentFreak.

On the pre-release page of uTorrent Plus we further read that the client will offer “peace of mind with safer torrenting.” Exact details on this feature will be released at a later stage but TorrentFreak was told that it does not refer to increased anonymity, but to a type of protection that’s offered by anti-virus security suites.

uTorrent is not the first file-sharing application to be launched with a paid version. Before it was shut down LimeWire sold a pro version, and uTorrent’s main competitor Vuze also sells a pro version of their client. Interestingly, Vuze’s free version already supports video conversion and device integration, features that are expected to be added to uTorrent Plus.

Generally these pro-clients are not targeted towards savvy BitTorrent users, but to relative newcomers who are willing to pay a little bit to make their lives easier. That said, paid BitTorrent clients are certainly not the norm, so it will be interesting to see how uTorrent Plus will be received by the public.

Source: uTorrent To Launch a Paid Version

While BitTorrent was one of the first technologies to enable the easy downloading of very large video files, it now has some catching up to do. The masses want their video and music on demand, and if BitTorrent wants to remain the big player it is today it has to deliver just that.

To this end, during recent years many BitTorrent clients have introduced streaming functionality, and there are also a few web-based services that offer similar capabilities. The Torrent Stream Magic Player is a new streaming service that sets itself apart by offering a true video-on-demand look and feel through a browser add-on.

Developed by a team of Russian coders the free add-on, bundled with a windows streaming application (Mac and Linux will follow this autumn), adds a “view torrent online” option to the browser’s context menu. Once the add-on and app are installed and configured all the user has to do is right click on a .torrent link and a fancy player slides into the browser.

Providing the user has enough bandwidth and the torrent file is well seeded, the video or music track starts to play in just a few seconds. Additional controls also give the user the option to manage a playlist and pause the torrent file whenever needed.

The add-on is in an early stage of development and the developers told TorrentFreak that many new features will be added in the near future. Aside from obvious bugfixes users will get the option to style the player into a more personal look. The team is also working on decreasing buffering times to allow for even more instant gratification.

And then there’s another upcoming feature that will be a bit more controversial. The developers are working on an upgrade that will allows users to get relevant streams from various movie and music portals that don’t offer content themselves. This ‘magic button’ will appear when users browse a compatible site such as IMdB, and it will bring up suggested content to stream directly.

We tried the add-on and can confirm that it works as promised. Although the add-on can be improved on some small points it doesn’t have the clunky feel of some other browser-based torrent streaming solutions. It works well with both videos and music and is definitely worth a try.

Interested readers should be aware that aside from streaming, data is also saved on the local computer and has to be removed manually. More information, tips and tricks are available on the Torrent Stream Magic Player website.

Source: Stream Torrents in Your Web Browser With Magic Player

Today the news breaks that FrostWire will also leave the Gnutella network, an announcement that could be seen as the final nail in Gnutella’s coffin. Unable to cope with this increasingly spam-ridden network, Frostwire’s upcoming 5.0 release will be a BitTorrent-only affair.

“We decided to go all out with BitTorrent and spend our time making FrostWire the best BitTorrent client out there, and not fighting the endless spam battle. There are many opportunities to take in the realm of legal file-sharing and social networking that you will see happen as FrostWire 5 keeps evolving,” the FrostWire team told TorrentFreak.

When FrostWire was first released in 2004 it was nearly identical to its big brother LimeWire, using the Gnutella network to share files. In 2006 FrostWire first added BitTorrent support, but the client’s core user base continued to mainly use the Gnutella network.

However, in recent months spam took control over the Gnutella network, and the FrostWire team eventually decided to focus entirely on BitTorrent.

“The team decided to listen to what’s happening in the p2p world and to make FrostWire a great BitTorrent client that makes BitTorrent easy to use,” FrostWire states. “The Gnutella Protocol is an amazing piece of technology, but one which the team is no longer interested in or capable of developing further.”

With the upcoming release of FrostWire 5 its users will only be able to download files via BitTorrent. As can be seen in the screenshot above, users don’t have to leave the client as all search results are presented within FrostWire. In the latest beta build the search results come from various BitTorrent sites including isoHunt and BTJunkie.

By presenting the search results in FrostWire most users won’t have much trouble adapting to the massive underlying changes. On the other hand, for the existing BitTorrent community it means that a few million ForstWire users will be added to their swarms, which is generally a good thing.

With its large user base FrostWire will become one of the most-used BitTorrent clients once most of its users move over to the upcoming 5.0 release. For Gnutella, however, the future is looking more and more bleak. Although there are still a few Gnutella-based clients out there, its unclear how long they will remain usable.

For those developers who appreciate a challenge, the latest version of the Gnutella-based FrostWire client is available at the BitBucket repository.

Source: FrostWire ‘Kills’ Gnutella to Go All BitTorrent

But the MediaGet team wanted more. Earlier this year they translated the BitTorrent client into English, Spanish, French, German and Italian, and not without success.

As of today the BitTorrent client has been downloaded more than 18 million times, and the share of US and Western European users is growing steadily. The MediaGet team estimates that 70% of their current users still come from Russia and Ukraine, but other parts of the world are catching up quickly.

Judging from the features and a few trial runs, it is not hard to imagine that the client could appeal to a wide audience, especially those who prefer an all-in-one download application.

MediaGet is available to both Windows and Mac users and allows users to search, download and play files all from within the application. Although it has nearly all the features one would expect in a BitTorrent client, MediaGet is primarily targeted at novice users.

“Our software is made to be a BitTorrent client for ‘dummies’, who are looking to download movies, music and games. We provide built-in search which searches on various open torrent-trackers, and we have media player to watch movies on demand,” the MediaGet team told TorrentFreak.

One of the most notable features of MediaGet that most other clients lack is a built-in search engine. Aside from searching various public torrent sites including The Pirate Bay and isoHunt, in the future MediaGet plans to add an API so users can add other sites as well.

Whether the torrent sites, whose resources are users to power the search, will be very happy with the current implementation is a question that has to be answered another time.

On the privacy side MediaGet provides easy integration with the Faceless.me VPN service, in addition to regular proxy support for anonymity services like BTGuard. Other features worth mentioning are the uTorrent importer, the media player with streaming support, and the Android remote access interface.

Overall we have to say that MediaGet gives the impression of a mature and stable client that works out of the box. It works as advertised and is certainly a client worth keeping an eye on in the coming years.

Source: MediaGet BitTorrent Client Set To Conquer The West

During the past year many new features have been announced and tested, and nearly all of these are included in today’s first stable release of uTorrent 3.0.

The release introduces a wide range of new features and improvements that have been extensively tested over the past several months. With these additions, uTorrent parent company BitTorrent Inc. hopes that their flagship client will appeal to an even larger audience.

A new feature we already discussed when it was first added to the beta release is the option to rate and comment on torrent files. True to BitTorrent’s nature, this data is not hosted on a central server somewhere, but among downloaders.

All comments and ratings associated with a particular file are shared among members of that swarm. If another peer has a comment that you don’t have already, it will send it to you, and vice versa. The messages are sent through the tracker and don’t rely on DHT, which means they work on private torrent files too.

Together, the comments and star ratings are supposed to give downloaders information on the quality of the various files they’re downloading. And there are more ways to get social with uTorrent 3.0, the new uChat app for example.

With uChat users can create both private and public chat rooms to discuss file-sharing related issues and more. The new app also allows users to add buddies and to share files quickly by generating magnet links. Again, this is all supported by decentralized technology and no data is stored on a central server.

Besides the chatty additions, uTorrent 3.0 also has many other interesting capabilities. The option to stream video before the download finishes is one of the features now added to the core uTorrent functionality. Streaming can be used to preview video files or to watch while downloading.

And then there’s the user interface which has been revamped completely. Among other things a “simplified view” has been added, allowing users to minimize parts of the uTorrent interface to focus attention on the most essential client features. This should make uTorrent less ‘overwhelming’ to novices, who now often drop out because it looks too complex.

Other new features to keep novices on board are the “getting started” guides that now have a prominent placement in the client. Here, newcomers can find a beginner’s guide, tutorial videos and other tips and tricks to master BitTorrent quickly.

And that’s not all. Thanks to drag and drop sharing, creating and sharing torrents with uTorrent has never been easier.

Users will notice a “drop files to send” area in the bottom left-hand corner where they can drop files into. uTorrent will then automatically create the torrent and start seeding. Users can then get a link to share the torrent with their friends directly. Friends who don’t have uTorrent installed yet get the option to download the torrent bundled with a copy of uTorrent.

For BitTorrent-savvy users the new uTorrent also has plenty of new features in store. Aside from comments and ratings, uTorrent 3.0 also adds remote access to the core functionality. This means that people can securely control their torrents from smartphones and other devices. In addition, uTorrent now has a portable mode so users can carry it conveniently on a USB-stick.

Some users worry that some of these changes will bloat their favorite BitTorrent client, but uTorrent’s makers contest this and say they are dedicated to keeping uTorrent as light as possible.

“µTorrent’s popularity lies in its simplicity and power. As a result, we’re very selective in the features and apps we add, focusing on maintaining the lightness and speed our community expects,” Jordy Berson, uTorrent’s director of product management at BitTorrent Inc. said commenting on the new release.

Of course we’re also interested in the opinion of uTorrent users themselves also. What do you think? What are the best new features? Is there something you don’t like? Feel free to discuss below.

Source: uTorrent Gets Chatty With Milestone 3.0 Release

In April of this year BitComet was the first of all major BitTorrent clients to offer a stable 64-bit version. The 64-bit version allows for larger disk caches, something that may benefit heavy-duty downloaders.

A few months before that, BitComet introduced another noteworthy feature called VIP-downloading, which enables users to download torrents that are accelerated by BitComet’s servers. The service is basically a private connection to a high-speed seedbox which accelerates the downloading process of healthy swarms.

Today, this VIP service is expanded with the option to download all torrents anonymously. Instead of only accelerating regular BitTorrent transfers through Bitcomet’s servers, the “anonymous” downloads will be handled by BitComet’s VIP servers exclusively, hiding the IP-address of the user.

“If VIP members enable anonymous downloads our remote servers will initiate all peer and tracker communications and download the data on behalf of the VIP member, so the member’s actual IP address isn’t shared with any of the peers or trackers,” BitComet’s spokesperson told TorrentFreak

“Our VIP servers are state of the art commercial servers on some of the worlds fastest connections. There are no imposed speed limits, the only account restrictions are on a flat-rate basis,” TorrentFreak was told.

The catch, and yes there’s always one with anonymous downloading, is that the service comes at a cost. Aside from the free trial, BitComet offers plans with 10GB and 100GB limits for $4.99 and $19.99 respectively. Depending on one’s download behavior this could be a good deal, but heavy downloaders who are only interested in anonymity (and not acceleration) may be better off with an unlimited BitTorrent proxy or a VPN account.

Starting today, anonymous downloads are supported by the latest Beta versions of BitComet. Thus far there’s plenty of interest for the VIP service. In fact, huge demand for the VIP free-trial accounts initially crippled BitComet’s servers which forced the developers to temporarily limit the offer to long-time BitComet users. We assume that the demand will only increase with the added anonymity feature.

If no significant issues arise in the coming weeks, anonymous downloads will be added to the upcoming 1.28 release of BitComet.

Source: BitComet Adds Support for “Anonymous” Downloads

With their research, the researchers pointed out that gathering evidence on BitTorrent downloaders is full of pitfalls.

Perhaps not coincidentally the same research group is also behind the “privacy preserving” BitTorrent client OneSwarm, currently developed by Tomas Isdal and Michael Piatek, two PhD students at the University of Washington.

Unlike other regular BitTorrent clients, OneSwarm allows users to share files only with a selected group of friends. While regular and public BitTorrent downloads are also supported, the privacy settings allow users to obscure the source of a transfer by sending it through multiple intermediaries.

“Virtually everyone on the Internet is a content producer, but today we only have one model for sharing: sign over the rights to your work to a website, with the hope that it will respect your privacy,” researcher Michael Piatek told TorrentFreak commenting on the importance of privacy on BitTorrent.

“OneSwarm is an attempt to provide an alternative. Our view is that private data sharing is an essential service in free and open societies,” he added. How the various privacy settings work is explained in detail in the video below, posted by the OneSwarm team.

Although OneSwarm has been in development for a while, the researchers have made its source available on GitHub in an update this week. Binaries and the source code are available for Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X platforms.

We tested OneSwarm, and although the browser interface is something you have to get used to, the download speeds are more than reasonable. This is also confirmed in one of the academic papers published by the OneSwarm team (pdf). In a performance comparison they found that it outperformed other “private” sharing options such as Freenet and BitTorrent over Tor.

Users have to be aware though, that while using the ‘public’ mode transfers are not anonymized.

That said, an Open Source effort to allow more privacy controls for BitTorrent users is something that can only be encouraged. The next step many BitTorrent users are looking forward to is the arrival of a fully anonymized BitTorrent client with decent speeds.

Source: OneSwarm: The Privacy Aware BitTorrent Client

The BitTorrent mainline beta version, codenamed Chrysalis, debuted its new design in March. With a different, less complicated look, it was built to appeal to BitTorrent novices who otherwise might stop using the software.

Yesterday, the BitTorrent mainline client added another major feature that is supposed to appeal to a broad audience – personal content channels. In the latest beta users are now able to create channels where they can share content with a selected group of friends.

The new feature basically creates a small social network inside the BitTorrent client where people can share files no matter what the size is, something that’s not possible with existing social networks.

“Until recently, most of your personal files were small enough to email or post to social networks. Now, it’s really easy to shoot HD video with your smartphone or snap high-res photos from a digital SLR. What happens to these giant files? They sit orphaned on your computer, or over-edited to make them small enough to share,” BitTorrent’s CEO Eric Klinker explains.

“BitTorrent removes the size barrier and makes it simple for you to openly share your creations,” Klinker adds.

According to BitTorrent protocol inventor Bram Cohen, the new addition is a perfect match for the client. “BitTorrent’s distributed technology was built to accelerate the transfer of large files,” he says.

“Personal content channels are an ideal use case given the asymmetric nature of bandwidth and the costs of file hosting. The more friends you add to a channel, the faster your files will download. This is an emerging market and we’re excited to see the technology solve modern Internet challenges,” Cohen adds.

Although it will be hard to convince the hardcore BitTorrent users to adopt it, we can see the purpose of the personal content channels from a novice perspective. Setting up a channel only takes a few clicks and is pretty much dummy-proof, so in that regard the developers have done a great job.

That said, the announcement also came with the suggestion that these channels will not be completely free in the future, and that might be less appealing to most users. BitTorrent Inc. told TorrentFreak that they’re not sure what the cost will be, if there will be any at all, but that they’re keeping it open as an option.

The same is true for bringing these personal content channels to uTorrent. Right now they are only implemented in the BitTorrent mainline client, but this may change in the future.

“We’ll see how the channels work for the BitTorrent community and if it’s popular and makes sense, we’ll take a look at the idea. In that case, it would be implemented in a way that considers the needs and priorities of the uTorrent community,” TorrentFreak was told.

The last ‘cost’ we feel we have to highlight is privacy. Large files shared in ‘private’ personal content channels are in theory not easy to discover by others, but since they use DHT, there are some specialized search engines that may pick them up.

In other words, don’t share anything the rest of the Internet isn’t supposed to see. Once it’s posted on BitTorrent, there is no central place to take it down either, if other people are still seeding the file. Bottom line is, be cautious while sharing.

It’ll be interesting to see how the personal content channels will be picked up by the public and what changes will come along with them. If anything, BitTorrent Inc. can’t be blamed for not trying to innovate, which is gutsy in the generally change resistant BitTorrent community. Time will tell whether they’re right in doing so or not.

The latest BitTorrent beta is available here, and more info on how to get started can be found at the BitTorrent blog.

Source: BitTorrent Inc. Goes Social, But At What Cost?

Although the role of Twitter and Facebook in the recent revolutions in the Middle East is often exaggerated, the social Internet did bring an important change. Hashtags and Facebook groups don’t do much on their own, but new web services have certainly made it much easier for people on the streets to share information with the outside world.

A new project started by the P2P-evangelists at VODO is set to take another big step forward in this regard. They aim to make it possible for citizen journalists to broadcast video to an audience of millions, totally anonymously and virtually invulnerable to censorship.

Named SPARKD, the video streaming tool has joined Mozilla’s MoJo contest, which was set up to encourage novel approaches to news gathering and reporting. Through the contest SPARKD hopes to be awarded a fellowship with one of the participating news organizations which include the BBC and Al Jazeera.

In short, SPARKD allows the public to anonymously stream or upload video from whatever device they have available, and then share it on various decentralized indexes. The distribution of the streams is based on P2P technology and handled by peers, which means that it’s nearly impossible to shut down once the information is out.

According to VODO founder and Steal This Film director Jamie King, SPARKD can be an essential tool in a time where citizen journalists are increasingly silenced.

“It’s clear that public distribution of certain kinds of key information has the potential to contribute to social change. Look at the role of citizen journalists in Egypt, and how this fed through to public awareness of the situation, strengthening the local movement,” King told TorrentFreak.

“Or look at Wikileaks, and its recent role in revealing the oil motives behind the invasion of Iraq. That should make it harder, I hope, to sell war to the public in the future. But in both cases, the distribution infrastructure is somewhat shaky, and liable to attack,” he adds.

Indeed, one of the main news sources in the Middle East, Al Jazeera, was jammed both in Egypt and in Libya. Similarly, Wikileaks is under constant attack from the U.S. Government via a variety of methods. SPARKD aims to make this type of censorship much harder, or nearly impossible.

“This is why SPARKD, based on a properly decentralized, P2P distribution with BitTorrent and the developmental Swift protocol at its core, can be useful. With peers bearing the responsibility of distribution, and trackerless swarms as the main infrastructure, it’s a much harder channel to censor or attack,” King says.

“P2P is perhaps the most pure realisation of John Gilmore’s statement that ‘The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.’ Nowhere right now is it more important to demonstrate this practically than with citizen journalism,” he adds.

An overview of the details of the project are available on the contest website. One of the most essential aspects is to provide full anonymity for the sources, something that the SPARKD team will accomplish by putting proxies between the original source and the rest of the world.

“The idea is to use a proxy — probably one that the user can select, we have a couple of partners we could work with — to protect the initial uploader as they upload over HTTP. We can arrange it so that we don’t actually know the details of the uploader, so there’d be no point people coming after us to find out who it was,” King told TorrentFreak

Those who are interested helping out, or to pitch their own ideas and suggestions are welcome to contact the SPARKD team.

“If you’re a UI designer, we need you. If you are a P2P-savvy programmer, we need you. If you have an interest in merging social conversation with live video, we want you. We can just about make this happen by ourselves, but this isn’t the point. It’s always great to discover new people to work with,” King says.

The SPARKD team hopes that, by winning the contest, they can get a Beta version out to the public as soon as possible. But even if they don’t win, the project will continue to be developed as planned.

Besides the importance of SPARKD for citizen journalists, the flit technology that underlies it might also be useful for other types of video streaming where the source prefers to remain anonymous. SPARKD is clearly restricted to political purposes, but since flit will be open and available to anyone, we expect to see a few entertainment oriented spin-offs once it is released to the public.

Source: SPARKD: Anonymous BitTorrent Powered Video Streaming

Interestingly enough, these comments and ratings also work on torrent files that are shared on private trackers. Among some of the more privacy concious BitTorrent users this raised a few questions. Most importantly, where is this data stored and what information is attached to it?

To answer the above we got in touch with the uTorrent engineering team to find out how these comments and ratings are handled by the client.

Right away we were assured that none of the data is stored on a central server, and that the data can never be traced back to its source. Instead, the comments you see appearing in your client are sent as an extra piece of data, similar to how other files are shared with peers.

“µTorrent 3.0 adds an extension message for distributing comments within the swarm. All clients that support this extension message store all comments they have seen, per torrent,” the uTorrent engineering team informed TorrentFreak.

“When peer A joins a swarm, it will send a request for comments to peers that support this message, say peer B. If peer A already has some comments, it passes along a bloom-filter representing the set of all those comments. When peer B responds, it will not send comments that are already present in the bloom filter. This prevents duplicate comments.”

So basically, all comments and ratings associated with a particular file are shared among members of that swarm. If another peer has a comment that you don’t have already, it will send it to you, and vice versa. The messages are sent through the tracker and don’t rely on DHT, this means that they work on private torrent files as well.

The requests for comments are sent every 20 minutes by uTorrent, and this is how they are shared among peers. In the beginning when there is a relatively low percentage of users supporting the extension the comments and ratings will propagate slowly, but when uTorrent 3.0 becomes the stable release these issues will be gone.

The uTorrent engineer team further explained that comments are stored in the resume file for a torrent, which helps keeping comments alive across sessions. But other than on the computers of uTorrent users, the comments are never shared outside the swarm on a central server.

Although it’s good to know that uTorrent’s commenting and rating system is fully decentralized, it also introduces a new feature that may be less welcome. When comments and ratings become a new standard to check the quality of files in the future, there is no doubt that these features will be exploited by spammers to make fake torrents appear more legitimate.

Time will tell whether the ‘costs’ will outfit the benefits, and whether the unmoderated system will be able to handle the potential influx of trolls and spammers. In the meantime it’s a simple affair to paste a hash value into Google – or append it to the URL on sites like Torrentz – in order to double check.

Source: Where Are uTorrent’s Comments and Ratings Stored?

Today, the beta of uTorrent 3.0 was officially released. This version introduces a wide range of new features and improvements that have been extensively tested over the last months. uTorrent parent company BitTorrent Inc. hopes that through these additions their flagship client will appeal to an even larger audience.

One of the most anticipated new features is the option to rate and comment on torrent files added to uTorrent. Many users have asked for a commenting feature in the past making it the 4th most-requested function in the uTorrent “Idea Bank“. Although some fear that it will bloat the application and open the door for spammers, the majority see the addition of comments as a useful feature.

Aside from adding the option to comment on downloaded torrents, users of uTorrent 3.0 can also rate torrent files by awarding them one to five stars. Together, the comments and star ratings are supposed to give downloaders information on the quality of the various files they’re downloading.

Another feature new to uTorrent 3.0 is the option to stream video before the download finishes. A streaming feature was already introduced in some experimental uTorrent releases and will now be added to the core uTorrent functionality. Streaming can be used to preview video files or to watch while downloading.

Aside from the above features uTorrent 3.0 also has an updated look. The user interface has been revamped and a “simplified view” added, allowing users to minimize parts of the uTorrent interface to focus attention on the most essential client features. This should make uTorrent less ‘overwhelming’ to novices, who now often drop out because it looks too complex.

One of the features implemented to keep novices on board are the “getting started” guides that now have a prominent placement in the client. Here, newcomers can find a beginner’s guide, tutorial videos and other tips and tricks to master BitTorrent quickly.

Creating and sharing torrents has never been easier before with uTorrent either. Users will notice a “drop files to send” area in the bottom left-hand corner where they can drop files into. uTorrent will then automatically create the torrent and start seeding.

Users can then get a link to share the torrent with their friends directly. Friends who don’t have uTorrent installed yet get the option to download the torrent bundled with a copy of uTorrent.

For BitTorrent savvy users the new uTorrent also has plenty of new features in store. Aside from comments and ratings, uTorrent 3.0 also adds remote access to the core functionality. This means that people can securely control their torrents from smartphones and other devices. In addition, uTorrent now has a portable mode so users can carry it conveniently on a USB-stick.

“Our design goal is to simplify the way people interact with uTorrent while continuing to offer and expand features and expert capabilities,” BitTorrent’s VP of Product Management Simon Morris told TorrentFreak. “This will likely broaden the appeal for many users while maintaining the technical capabilities popular with power users.”

“From a functionality perspective, we’re taking two approaches. First, embed high-demand features like streaming, ratings and remote access that are valuable to many users. Second, creating the ability for people to add-on features via the Apps platform,” Morris added.

In the coming months uTorrent will continue to expand its features and capabilities, TorrentFreak was told.

“We have an active roadmap for uTorrent for 2011, and the company. We see uTorrent as offering an ideal file sharing experience with deep insight into the background data. Ideally, such a client would enable someone to find, get, play, send, and shift large files over the Internet,” he said.

“In particular, major initiatives are underway focused on sending or synching of large files, and introducing support for live streaming,” Morris added.

A full overview of all the new features in uTorrent 3.0 and the latest beta are available on the uTorrent website. Have you tried it? Please let us know what you think below.

Source: uTorrent 3.0 Adds Ratings, Comments and Streaming

Last month the punky girl-rock band Sick of Sarah decided to release their latest album ’2205′ to the public on BitTorrent, at no cost. In order to gain maximum exposure the band partnered with BitTorrent Inc. who helped to promote the free download through an app in the uTorrent BitTorrent client.

A critical record label executive might look at this idea and wonder “But why free?” According to Sick of Sarah’s bassist Jamie Holm, it’s simply a matter of weighing the benefits and costs.

“Releasing an album on BitTorrent is an incredible opportunity. We wanted to reach our fans on the Internet, and our fans use BitTorrent,” Holm said when the partnership was announced last month.

“While album sales will remain a critical element of success, we also believe BitTorrent will help us drive new fans to live concerts and purchase our merchandise,“ Holm added.

A month later, we can certainly conclude that the band has succeeded in their attempt to reach out to a new audience. In just 18 days the free album was downloaded by a million people, and a month after the initial release 1,365,453 BitTorrent users had copied it to their computers.

In addition to the massive number of downloads, Sick of Sarah also set a new BitTorrent record for the largest number of active seeders on a music album ever. Yesterday, the Clearbits tracker which is used for the release reported 82,943 seeders. To our knowledge, there has never been a music torrent with this many people actively seeding.

Even for all torrents ever released it may be close to a record. The largest BitTorrent swarm (seeds + peers) ever witnessed was ‘Heroes.S03E01.HDTV.XviD-0TV’ with a total of 144,663 peers, but it’s unsure how many of these were seeders.

Of course, all of the above would have never been possible without BitTorrent Inc. who bundled the album with the download of their popular BitTorrent clients. Everyone who downloaded the uTorrent or BitTorrent Mainline application during the last month, was automatically downloading the Sick of Sarah album unless they opted out. Needless to say, this, and other P2P promotions such as Frostclick, are the main reason the seeder record was set.

The album promotion was part of the “Artist Pilot” project of BitTorrent Inc. where independent artists can claim BitTorrent fame. As of yesterday Sick of Sarah traded in its spot for the promotion of the release of the independent movie Zenith.

Needless to say, the band is delighted with the million plus downloads, an achievement that went beyond all expectations. “Our success on the BitTorrent platform has been overwhelming,” said Jamie Holm in a response yesterday. “This technology and audience aren’t only the future, they’re here today.”

“We welcome all the new fans and hope our experiments with online distribution and fan engagement open up new doors for other artists,” the happy musician concluded.

Source: Indie Band Tops a Million Downloads, Breaks BitTorrent Record

Now available for download.

µTorrent for Mac Beta – New Features:

* µTorrent Remote: Simple, secure access to µTorrent from anywhere. No complicated network configuration required. Add and manage your torrents from any browser, mobile browser and even an Android native app.

* Feeds: Subscribe and follow torrent RSS feeds right inside µTorrent. Set up Smart Feeds to auto-magically fetch torrents and start downloads for you.

* Scheduler: Now you can set µTorrent to start, limit and stop activity at regular intervals throughout the week. This is a valuable feature for those of you stymied by metered and shared networks.

* Advanced controls and info: Want more control and information about what’s happening behind the scenes? Upgraded logging features include much more detail. Also, feel free to access the double-secret-super-advanced preferences (they’re hidden behind CMD+OPT+,). Use sparingly and wisely.

Source: uTorrent Mac Beta, Now With RSS Feeds

There is no doubt that BitTorrent’s user base is impressive, but there is still a lot of untapped potential. Both uTorrent and BitTorrent’s mainline client have a relatively large bounce rate. That is, a large number of new users try the software a few times, but don’t become regular users.

“During 2010 less than a third of new client downloads resulted in a new monthly active user,” BitTorrent’s Simon Morris told TorrentFreak. “Plenty of people download and install the client, but can’t figure out how to use it, and then uninstall it very quickly,” he added.

To change this, BitTorrent Inc. have been working on a new project with the aim of keeping those users on board. Today marks the release of the first Alpha version of this new client – codenamed project Chrysalis.

“The best products out there don’t have any significant educational hurdles – it is just obvious how they work. This is what we’re ultimately aiming for with this new project, although it will take time to get there. The client we’re releasing today is just a starting point,” Morris told us.

Today’s release is a very early Alpha, but it should give a good indication of where BitTorrent Inc. is going with their new client. By default it is filled with several prominently placed ‘apps’, such as those from TED and VODO, which provide access to downloads. This means that users will see content right away when they start the client

One of the main reasons why some users don’t come back to the client is a perceived lack of content. New users sometimes don’t know where to find content so the current version of Chrysalis should address this issue to some degree. In addition, the simplified user interface should be more welcoming to people who are new to BitTorrent.

Overall the Chrysalis client behaves quite intuitively. Downloads are added by a single click and show only basic information. Once a download is finished media files can be launched in a media player directly from the app. Starting, stopping and removing files can be done with a single click as well.

The client is built on the uTorrent v3.0 codebase but in the future new and unique features will be added as well.

“The first project Chrysalis beta is aiming at cleaning up the overall user experience and transforming a technical and data-rich experience into a cleaner more media-rich experience. This in itself will not be sufficient to solve the attrition problem, but we hope it will establish a new platform on which to build,” Morris said.

Another subtle change compared to the BitTorrent Mainline client is the more prominent placement of the search box. Users can type in search terms here and are, interestingly enough, redirected to a Google search for torrents. A surprising move, since Google just banned the words ‘uTorrent’ and ‘BitTorrent’ from some of its services.

Chrysalis is not intended for the more experienced BitTorrent user, but BitTorrent hopes it will appeal to a wider audience than their other clients do now. If all goes well, the dummy-proof client will completely replace the current Mainline client, which currently is a clone of uTorrent.

Time will tell whether this approach will be effective. Luckily, uTorrent users don’t have to panic as TorrentFreak is assured that their favorite client will always be available and developed separately. The Alpha release of Chrysalis is available for download starting today, currently limited to Windows operating systems.

Source: BitTorrent Inc. Releases Dummy Proof Download Client

The aim of BitMate is to drastically improve the download speeds of peers on low-bandwidth connection (5 to 20 KB/sec), to make BitTorrent more effective in places where people might need it the most. If we believe the claims of the researchers, they have succeeded in making a difference.

TorrentFreak contacted Dr.Umar Saif, Associate Professor and leader of the initiative, to learn more about the new BitTorrent client.

“We have spent close to 2 years experimenting with various tweaks in BitTorrent, using both real-world and synthetic swarms. BitMate is our first public release and is an ongoing project,” Saif said.

During the latest tests the researchers found that compared to traditional clients, the download speeds on low bandwith connections can receive up to a 70% boost with BitMate, while upload contributions may improve by up to 1000%.

“In our target conditions, Bitmate can almost double the download performance. At the same time, it performs at least as well as the traditional BitTorrent clients for high-bandwidth peers,” Saif noted.

The beauty of it all, is that other peers are not negatively affected by these improvements.

“BitMate enhances the performance of low-bandwidth nodes without cheating, circumventing the fairness policy of BitTorrent or adversely affecting the performance of other peers,” Saif told TorrentFreak.

Among other things, BitMate can establish this advantage by prioritizing connections to other slow peers, by minimizing cross-ISP traffic and by avoiding redundant downloads. Combined with several other optimizations, the Vuze-based BitMate client is able to speed up downloads on slow connections.

“Instead of wasting optimistic unchokes on high bandwidth peers, a BitMate client optimistically unchokes those peers that have a similar low-bandwidth. As a result, a BitMate client invests its scarce upload bandwidth on peers that are most likely to reciprocate.”

“At the same time, BiTMate leaves the tit-for-tat reciprocal unchoke policy untouched to uphold the fairness of BitTorrent. This leads to both increased performance and fairness since low-bandwidth clients can quickly form mutually beneficial peer-to-peer connections,” Saif said.

A win-win situation for all BitTorrent users, generously funded by the U.S. State Department. It’s almost too good to be true.

BitMate’s latest version was released to the public three days ago and can be downloaded for free. The source code of BitMate is available at GitHub. Although the project is aimed at developing countries, there are plenty of people in other parts of the world that are on a slow connection, and might benefit from BitMate.

Source: BitMate: A BitTorrent Client for Poor Bandwidth People

In recent years BitComet has been adding many features that have taken it way beyond being a regular BitTorrent client. It now has a full featured HTTP/FTP download manager, a VIP downloading feature, and its own proprietary file sharing protocol which the developers call long-term seeding.

Despite the wide range of features that have been implemented, BitComet has remained largely undiscussed in the English speaking part of the Internet. One of the main reasons for this is that none of the 20-people strong development team speaks English. So today, after working with a team of translators, we aim to bridge this gap and unravel a few mysteries by presenting our discussions with BitComet founder RnySmile.

“In the beginning I was using another BitTorrent client developed in Python,” RnySmile says, commenting on his motivation to start developing BitComet.

“After running a torrent all night long I noticed my harddrive was running like crazy, grinding away as the torrent progressed and I wondered why the developers didn’t use a disc cache to prevent the constant need for repeated read/writes. This client also didn’t have the ability to download more than one torrent at a time.”

“So, being a C++ programmer, I began development on a new client initially called “SimpleBT”, which was originally designed to simply run torrents and introduced a disc cache as well as the ability to download multiple torrents. This project eventually grew to be much more than a simple BitTorrent client so we eventually changed the name to BitComet,” he added.

Today, BitComet has grown far beyond being a one man operation. The current BitComet development team consists of approximately 20 people, who are all from China. These developers are obviously skilled in what they do, but the inherent language barrier also has some downsides.

During the early years there were quite a few controversies surrounding BitComet, which resulted in a bad reputation among many English speaking BitTorrent users. Although RnySmile acknowledges that some errors were made in the past, he believes that many of the reported issues were the result of a lack of communication.

“The criticism and rumors about BitComet that circulated through the English-speaking torrent community were largely unknown to us, at least not to the extent they were known in the English communities,” he says. “Being that BitComet is a free software product we haven’t had the resources to operate a public relations department to service our international users, issue press releases and communicate with the media.”

Although BitComet now has English volunteers who help out users in their native language, this type of support was mostly missing in the early years. In China, on the other hand, it was easier for the BitComet team to address and respond to concerns. “We have always operated a forum in China where we post updates and users can communicate with members of the development team,” RnySmile says.

For many in the English speaking BitTorrent community, the lack of communication resulted in a bad reputation. It all started in 2005 when BitComet was banned from several private BitTorrent trackers for ignoring the “private flag” – a feature that keeps private torrents, private. Even though this issue was resolved relatively quickly, the image of BitComet was permanently damaged.

In the years to come, more and more horror stories popped up, from spreading junk data, to disobeying BitTorrent rules. In 2007, BitTornado developer Shad0w even went as far as banning all BitComet users, because the client allegedly exploited super-seeds.

Around the same time, however, Robb Topolski, a networking and protocol expert with more than 25 years experience, researched most of the claims against BitComet. He concluded that the client was not best suited for initial seeding tasks but at the same time refuted all other claims.

“BitComet is a worthy download client, providing some advantageous features not found in any other current BitTorrent client. Some of these features are confusing and are poorly implemented, but they are not detrimental to a BitTorrent swarm, nor do they take unfair advantage,” Topolski wrote.

“None of the typical accusations against BitComet, those that are provided as reasons for trackers or users to ‘Ban BitComet’ have held true. It is my professional opinion that the bans of BitComet are based on misunderstandings and falsehoods, and not on good data,” he added.

BitComet founder RnySmile agrees with this assessment, and in his full response (linked below) he addresses several of the rumors and misunderstandings in detail. Although the bad press was unpleasant, the BitComet team wanted to look ahead and create an universal download application that goes beyond BitTorrent.

“One thing we wanted to do was make BitComet into more than just a BitTorrent client. We wanted our users to be able to use one program to do all their downloading, no matter what the source of the files was, or the protocol used to get them,’ RnySmile said.

Among other things BitComet has introduced a feature called VIP-downloading which enabled user to download torrent that are accelerated by BitComet’s servers. It’s basically a private connection to a hight speed seedbox which speeds up the downloading process.

Another unique feature to BitComet is the proprietary file sharing protocol which the developers call long-term seeding (LT-seeding). With LT-seeding BitComet users can choose to keep on sharing files with other LT-seeders when their regular download is stopped. However, normal BitTorrent swarms will always have priority over LT-seeding.

Finally, BitComet is also planning to introduce an anonymity feature in the near future, but this is still a work in progress. The above, and integrating many other features that have been implemented over the years, is BitComet’s greatest accomplishment according to RnySmile. “It was a long, hard, and ongoing task to get these new features to all work together and develop a stable product.”

One thing’s for certain, BitComet is here to stay. Although it’s steering in a slightly different direction than most other clients, with some pretty unusual features, we feel that the BitComet team deserves more credit than it generally gets.

—

The full response from the BitComet team was too long to publish in its entirety but can be read here (pdf). We want to thank everyone who helped in getting this interview ready for publication, including RnySmile, The UnUsual Suspect, the BitComet development team, Lucy26, Kluelos, Cassie, GreyWizard and Vasy.

Source: BitComet – A Bittorrent Client Stuck Behind a Language Barrier

BitTorrent Inc. has been slowly adding new apps over the past several months and they just rolled out a new one for uTorrent and the Mainline client. The new app features educational videos from the Khan Academy. With the app, BitTorrent users have easy access to over 2,000 award-winning educational videos, covering a wide variety of topics.

“BitTorrent is a great platform to help us fulfill our mission of providing world-class education to anyone, anywhere,” said Salman Khan, founder and executive director at the Khan Academy. “BitTorrent offers a unique opportunity to video creators and publishers.”

“Their technology allows users to download large video files quickly, plus it requires no costly hosting or infrastructure on our end – an important factor for a non-profit,” Khan added.

BitTorrent Inc. is equally enthusiastic about their new partnership, which allows them to show off a great ‘legal’ use case to its millions of users. The app is the 19th added to the App Studio, which also includes the Torrent Tweet VLC and uCast apps.

“We’re honored to support the Khan Academy’s vision of bringing knowledge and education to the world,” said Shahi Ghanem, chief strategist at BitTorrent. “The Khan Academy App is a perfect example of why we created our App Studio platform: to help content creators connect with our global user base.”

“In this instance we also enjoy the benefit of empowering a partner to provide tens of millions of people with free access to world-class educational content. This is a truly worthy cause. We look forward to continuing our work with the Khan Academy and other socially conscious content creators as we foster new content distribution models.”

For those who are interested in checking out the videos, the Khan Academy app is now available in the App Studio for both uTorrent and the Mainline client.

Source: BitTorrent Partners With Khan Academy to Distribute Education

About a year ago TorrentFreak caught up with RSS inventor Dave Winer, who noticed that the RSS feeds on most torrent sites were a ‘mess’. Nearly every site uses a different format, and this is problematic for application developers who want to create tools for BitTorrent users.

“It’s pretty much a mess,” Dave Winer told TorrentFreak while outlining some suggestions for a BitTorrent RSS namespace in a blog post. “Let’s clean it up,” Winer said, encouraging torrent site admins to join the discussion.

This call for action was soon picked up by various torrent site admins, and yesterday the EZTV team launched a BitTorrent RSS standard on their sister site ezRSS.

“The current RSS spec was rather limited when it came to torrent information and some of the methods other RSS feeds were doing in regards to torrents was just messy, by creating a bit torrent RSS namespace, we can now give more specific data to applications and users in a structured format,” EZTV’s Novaking told TorrentFreak.

“Dave Winer gave some good advice, and we have taken a lot of it on board. We still plan to expand on the spec, so far we just released version 0.1 xmlns.ezrss.it/0.1/ – xmlns.ezrss.it/0.1/dtd/ and version 0.2 is already in the pipeline,” he added.

Although the technicalities may not be of interest to most users, everyone who uses RSS feeds on BitTorrent sites will eventually benefit from standardization. It will allow applications to include more options and features, including magnet links and more advanced download ‘rules’ based on the number of seeds and peers.

EZTV’s Novaking further told us that this new standard has been developed with input from other key figures in the BitTorrent community, to guarantee a broad adoption among torrent sites.

“I have talked to quite a few other torrent admins and we are currently coding up an easy to use RSS builder which will generate the RSS feeds using this new namespace, this will allow easy implementation for anyone who wishes to use it,” he said.

The first version of the new spec is now live on ezRSS and users and fellow BitTorrent developers are encouraged to send in their feedback for the next version of the spec. If all goes well the new standard should lead to a wide range of new and exciting RSS tools for torrent users, to make downloading even more convenient and seamless than it already is.

Source: EZTV Introduces BitTorrent RSS Standard, With Magnets

However, a key characteristic of the young Internet is that it constantly evolves, and in 2005 video streaming was brought to the mainstream thanks to YouTube. This online video streaming revolution has hugely increased the use of bandwidth by individual consumers. At the same time it’s also resulting in huge bandwidth bills for streaming sites.

So as we near the 10th anniversary of BitTorrent its inventor Bram Cohen is finalizing a new protocol, this time aimed at P2P-live streaming. Although P2P-live streaming is not something new per se, Cohen thinks that his implementation will set itself apart from competitors with both its efficiency and extremely low latency.

“Doing live properly is a hard problem, and while I could have a working thing relatively quickly, I’m doing everything the ‘right’ way,” Bram Cohen told TorrentFreak last year when he announced his plans. He further explained that the BitTorrent protocol had to be redone to make it compatible with live streams, “including ditching TCP and using congestion control algorithms different from the ones we’ve made for UTP”

In the months that followed Cohen figured out most of this complex puzzle and the technology is now mature enough to show to the public. Although there’s still a lot of secrecy around the technical details, the BitTorrent team agreed to show TorrentFreak a demo in anticipation of the official release later this year.

Although it’s fascinating to see BitTorrent’s inventor waving at a computer, it is impossible to see how this compares to competing technologies without the option of testing a working version and having more technical details.

Over the years we’ve already seen a few working implementations and adaptations of the BitTorrent protocol that allow for P2P live streaming. Most notable is the SwarmPlayer, which has proven to work well with low latencies in real live tests, but usually supported by high bandwidth ‘fall-back peers’.

“The main areas of innovation relate to techniques he is using to manage latency at an unprecedented low while controlling network congestion,” BitTorrent’s VP of Product Management Simon Morris told TorrentFreak in our quest for more information.

“As outlined in the academic literature on live P2P content delivery, the management of live p2p streaming on the open internet requires split second reconfigurations to reroute content delivery in the fewest possible round trips between peers in the event of network hiccups.”

“Bram’s methods to manage network reconfiguration wrap rerouting together with a novel approach to congestion control. Obviously we’ll be happy to share more technical details in due course, but only once the technology reaches a level of maturity that it makes sense to share.”

This means that the wait continues, and we were told that the official release will take at least a few more months. For some reason we think that it might take until July, which makes sense PR-wise because the BitTorrent protocol then officially celebrates its tenth anniversary.

Source: BitTorrent Inventor Demos New P2P Live Streaming Protocol

The new application is part of project Chrysalis and a new ecosystem of BitTorrent certified products. Through the application users can search for files that are shared on BitTorrent, download these files, and play them directly on their computers, TV or mobiles devices. Everything is bundled into one system and downloaders don’t have to worry about conversion, codecs or file-formats.

“Today’s generation of consumer electronics devices are more powerful than ever before, but they still lack cohesiveness and ease of use for content playback,” BitTorrent’s chief strategist Shahi Ghanem said. “Consumers shouldn’t need to differentiate between codecs, file formats, bit rates, and other technology jargon. Content playback should just work – regardless of content type or source.”

The new application is expected to go live towards the end of the first quarter of 2011 and will replace the mainline BitTorrent client. uTorrent, the flagship of BitTorrent Inc and the source of the current mainline client, keeps its minimal footprint and will continue to be developed separately.

The Chrysalis project is an effort to keep more users on board than is currently the case. BitTorrent Inc. revealed earlier this week that uTorrent and the mainline client are downloaded 400,000 times a day, but a relatively small percentage of these new downloads result in recurring users due to the perceived complexity of the applications.

In addition to launching the all-in-one client, BitTorrent Inc. will start partnerships with makers of consumer electronics such as TVs, tablets and mobile phones to display a “BitTorrent Certified” logo. For this task the company signed up with Taiwan’s Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI) who previously helped DivX with their certification program.

“Partnering with BitTorrent to create the standards for a new generation of BitTorrent Certified chips, designs and devices fits perfectly with ITRI’s mission of accelerating the development of industry-enabling strategies and will certainly drive growth for Taiwan’s domestic technology industry,” ITRI’s Vice President Cheng-Wen Wu said.

TorrentFreak was assured that all the new software and standards will be fully compatible with the .torrent format as we know it now. For existing users little will change, but with the new system BitTorrent hopes to further expand the user base of its software while making it easier for existing users to play downloaded files on different devices.

Source: BitTorrent Inc. To Launch All-In-One BitTorrent Ecosystem

In the years that followed the original BitTorrent mainline client was gradually transformed into a rebranded version of uTorrent, and today BitTorrent Inc. announced that both clients combined now have more than 100 million active users a month. Users literally come from all over the world, with 20 million active daily users from over 220 countries.

“This is an exciting day for our team. Our vision is to build a complete technology ecosystem comprised of software, content and devices, designed to connect modern content creators with a massive digital audience,” BitTorrent CEO Eric Klinker said. “This milestone highlights the size of our user base and the power of our software.”

BitTorrent Inc.’s acquisition of uTorrent is without doubt the best decision the company has ever made. Where other projects such as the “movie store” and CDN-services failed miserably, uTorrent’s popularity kept on growing.

The irony is that the company which founded one of the most innovative technologies on the web in the last ten years, has not managed to build a new business model around it. Perhaps the BitTorrent powered movie store and CDN were ahead of its time, but the fact is that the company now relies on a toolbar to pay the salaries of its employees.

While there is no shame in relying on toolbars to keep million of BitTorrent users satisfied with an entirely free experience, we can only assume that the company had a greater plan in mind when it was founded back in 2004. That said, toolbars do bring in some serious money.

In addition to the millions of daily active users, the BitTorrent Mainline and uTorrent client are downloaded by 400,000 people a day according to BitTorrent Inc. An unknown percentage of these new downloads also choose to install the toolbar, which is good for millions of dollars in revenue a year.

This stable stream of revenue ensures that BitTorrent Inc. can continue the development of uTorrent in the future, and that’s a welcome message to at least 100 million BitTorrent users. TorrentFreak congratulates BitTorrent for reaching this impressible milestone, and we’re eager to see how far this number can increase in the future.

Source: uTorrent & BitTorrent Hit 100 Million Monthly Users

With a few dozen million downloads a year, the added browser toolbar has provided BitTorrent Inc and the uTorrent development team with a healthy and much needed revenue stream. Initially, the Ask toolbar was promoted but recently a switch was made to the Conduit toolbar.

In addition to offering the toolbar to users who do a fresh install of the uTorrent client, the new Conduit toolbar was also promoted to users who upgraded to the latest uTorrent 2.2 release. However, this process didn’t go as smoothly as it should for everyone, and several TorrentFreak readers reported serious issues during the upgrade process.

Instead of getting a popup notification asking the user if they wanted to install the Conduit browser toolbar, it was instead installed on some users’ computers without any notification at all. Another group of users did get the popup, but when they chose not to install the toolbar, the software was installed on their computers nonetheless.

Over the last few days the uTorrent forums have been filling up with several of these confused users, and others wrote blog posts addressing this unexpected behavior and their frustration.

Despite several complaints the issues seem to be relatively isolated. We’ve tried to reproduce the “bug” on several systems but at our end everything went fine. Simon Morris, Vice President of product management at BitTorrent Inc. told TorrentFreak that they have no idea what went wrong either, but that they are aware of isolated issues.

“It has not escaped our notice and it is obviously NOT our intent,” Morris said.

Initially BitTorrent Inc. and uTorrent’s forum moderators denied that there was a problem at all. Instead, they were convinced that users must have selected the wrong checkboxes, which can be perceived as deceptive by some. However, this position became harder to hold as time went by and complaints kept coming in.

“We have seen some isolated suggestions that the toolbar installed even though the checkboxes were unselected. If this is indeed true then we would consider it a very serious bug. If anyone can help us reproduce this type of bug then we will investigate it and fix it immediately. In spite of extensive tests we have been unable to reproduce this particular problem,” he added.

Morris further said that because of this massive rollout to all upgrading users, the level of attention is probably more amplified than usual. Many long time users see the toolbar offer for the first time and might be caught by surprise, or confused by the checkboxes. Although this is partially true, it would be wrong to simply deny that something went wrong during the upgrade process for some people.

The uTorrent team has promised to get to the bottom of the issue, and fix any errors that they come across.

“Both our team and Conduit’s team have been investigating further whether there is any problem with the install, but we have been unable to find any evidence that the toolbar will ever install if you deselect all 3 checkboxes. Conduit has found and is fixing one minor uninstall issue,” Morris said.

“We regret any dissatisfaction, and we welcome inputs on anything that may be going wrong. One thing is very clear – the offer is designed to be purely optional, such that if you deselect the offer checkboxes it will not install,” he added.

All uTorrent users who had the Conduit toolbar installed ‘accidentally’ can easily remove it via the Windows control panel where the software is listed as ‘Conduit’ and ‘uTorrent toolbar.’ Did you have any issues upgrading to the latest version of uTorrent or did it go smoothly? Please let us know and drop a comment.

Source: uTorrent Browser Toolbar Mystery Causes Confusion

“Un’organizzazione con una velata brama di potere,” we read on the uTorrent website.

For those who don’t speak Italian, Google translates this sentence to “An Organization With a Veiled Desire for Power.” Another translation provided by an Italian friend of TorrentFreak is “An Organization With a Slight Craving for Power.” Both translations have pretty much the same meaning, but they also have very little to do with a BitTorrent client.

So what organization is uTorrent actually referring to? Is uTorrent’s parent company BitTorrent Inc. craving for power? We’re lost here.

The answer to the above question is not very hard to find of course. Those who look at the english uTorrent website will see the tagline “A Powerhouse With a Tiny Appetite,” referring to the client’s minimal use of resources and full set of features.

Somehow, this tagline has been translated into something that has little to do with the intended meaning. We’re not really sure where the mistake was made either, because most of the automatic translations come up with a different result. It’s clear though that the tagline got lost in translation, to say the least.

The error was mentioned last week to the staffers in the uTorrent IRC-channel, but thus far hasn’t been corrected. We just notified BitTorrent Inc. about the unfortunate message on their Italian page and assume that this ‘bug’ will soon be fixed.

Let’s hope they check with a native speaker next time, before putting it out to millions of people.

Source: uTorrent: An Organization With A Slight Craving For Power

The first new app added to the ‘market’ this morning is the VLC player app. VLC is a popular media player among BitTorrent users, and not just because it is free. It also includes a huge number of video codecs so it can play virtually every video file available.

With the VLC app, uTorrent users now have a shortcut to play media files in VLC directly, without having to open folders or even extract archives. Users only have to click on the app and it will display a list of recently downloaded torrents which they can play in VLC with just a single click.

Admittedly this app is not a technological breakthrough but it does save on time and annoyances, especially for those who have never used VLC before. According to BitTorrent Inc. “..it’s a perfect match to the varied file types in the BitTorrent ecosystem,” a description we subscribe to.

The second app that was launched today, named uCast, adds a new and interesting feature to uTorrent. With uCast, uTorrent users have the option to create an RSS feed of the (selected) torrents they are downloading, and share this with friends who are also avid BitTorrent users.

This enables users to easily share a selection of torrents without having to lookup the original torrent download links. The RSS feed, which BitTorrent calls a TorrentCast (example), can be easily imported into uTorrent or any other client that supports RSS downloads.

One of the best features is that new torrents can be added to the uCast feed later, by simply selecting a recently downloaded torrent from within the app. This makes sharing torrents with friends easier and a lot more convenient than it is now. It’s can be compared to a torrent blog, or a living mixtape as BitTorrent Inc. describes it.

“Your TorrentCast is like a living mix tape, because you can add files at any time and your friends will instantly get them. You can also open up your TorrentCast to collaboration, so your friends can also add files to it,” BitTorrent Inc. writes.

In addition to maintaining these TorrentCasts alone, users can also invite others to collaborate on the feeds. By entering a password others have access to the feed, and the option to add or remove torrents. This added social layer and broadcast functionality is by far the most innovative app we’ve seen from BitTorrent Inc. thus far,

It will be interesting to see how the two new apps are received by the public, but they are certainly more useful and promising than some of those previously announced. The TorrentCast app uses the uca.st domain ‘short url service’, and you’re of course free to share yours below.

The VLC and uCast apps are available now in the app market and both require the latest stable version of uTorrent.

Source: uTorrent Adds VLC Media Player and Torrent Broadcast Apps

Besides these torrent sites, most BitTorrent downloads are still managed by so-called trackers. These servers coordinate the download process and make sure that people can find others who are sharing the files they want to download. To a certain degree, trackers are no longer needed with ‘trackerless’ technology such as DHT, but even DHT often uses a central server to get a torrent started.

Finally central servers are used by moderators to help hunt spam and malware. All file sharing programs without such central checking have become practically useless over time.

In the last years these ‘central server’ vulnerabilities have caused a number of minor inconveniences for torrent users. When trackers go offline, downloads usually slow down or may stop entirely, and when a torrent search engine such as The Pirate Bay has technical issues, users have to search for alternatives.

To address these issues, ideally BitTorrent downloads should no longer require a central server. P2P technology should not only facilitate the downloading and sharing process, but also the searching and storage of torrent files. This may sound like a technology that might only become available in the distant future, but in reality it already exists.

The latest version of the Tribler BitTorrent client (Win, Mac and Linux), released only a few minutes ago, is capable of all the above and many more things that could be described as quite revolutionary. The client combines a ‘zero-server’ approach with features such as instant video streaming, advanced spam control and personalized content channels, all bundled into a single application.

The Tribler team has come a long way to reach the point they’re at now. We first reported on the ‘tax-payer-funded’ BitTorrent client in 2006, and in the years that followed tens of millions of dollars have been spent on the client’s development resulting in the latest 5.3 release.

Despite the fact that only a few thousand people are using Tribler on a monthly basis, in technological terms it is one of the most advanced clients. People who install the client will notice that there’s a search box at the top of the application, similar to that offered by other clients. However, when one does a search the results don’t come from a central index. Instead, they come from other peers.

In fact, Tribler’s search functionality even has an auto-suggest function which is also built to work based on P2P data instead of a central server. Remarkably enough the response times for the searches and the auto suggest are both pretty fast, under a second in 99% of cases.

As for the downloads themselves, if one clicks on a ‘torrent’ in the search result, the meta-data is pulled in from another peer and the download starts immediately. Tribler is based on the standard BitTorrent protocol and uses regular BitTorrent trackers to communicate with other peers. But, it can also continue downloading when a central tracker goes down.

Tribler users can choose if they want to play the downloading file directly (if it’s video) with the built in VLC player, or wait for it to finish first. In addition to searching for files, users can also create their own channels or subscribe to those of others. Again, this is all based on technology that doesn’t require a central server. Other new features are subtitle integration, support for magnet links and advanced spam controls.

Spam control in a P2P program that actually works is something not seen before. The Tribler spam mechanism revolves around user generated “channels”, which may contain several thousands of torrents.
When people like a channel they can indicate this with “mark as favorite”. When more people like a channel, the associated torrents get a boost in the search results.

The idea is that spam and malware will automatically be pushed down to non-existence in search results and the majority of users will favor the channels they love. In scientific terms, this is a classic case of survival of the fittest and group selection at work. Again, this is done without central servers.

With the combination of P2P-based search, torrent downloads and moderation, BitTorrent sites have been almost rendered obsolete. Although we don’t see torrent sites going away any time soon it’s ‘assuring’ to see that there are alternatives. Tribler’s cutting edge technology allows users to search for torrents and download files without the need for any central server. A revolution, not only for BitTorrent but for P2P in general.

As mentioned before, the Tribler project is funded by tax payers money, most of which comes from EU grants. However, according to Dr. Johan Pouwelse, leader of the Tribler project at Delft University of Technology, those who complain that spending all this money on the development of a BitTorrent client is a waste, are wrong.

“Tax payer money is going into Internet research, which happens to use a very powerful technology called BitTorrent. That’s different. On a wider scale a few hundred million euros of research money is being spent on making computer networks more robust and improving video streaming. I think that is money well spent,” Pouwelse told TorrentFreak.

Eventually, Pouwelse and his team hope to shape the future of Internet-based video delivery, and this won’t just be limited to PCs either. “Our architecture has unbounded scalability and in principle can work on all TVs, phones and other devices in the world simultaneously,” he said.

“22 scientists are working full time in the P2P research team i’m coordinating at Delft University of Technology. A lot of the algorithms and Open Source code we write ends up in Tribler. Roughly 6 other universities or organisations contribute code regularly to Tribler. It’s by far the largest science-driven P2P effort around,” Pouwelse added.

Aside from the fact that the technology itself is both exciting and fully operational in the real world, there are some issues that have to be overcome. Due to the low userbase of Tribler, the total number of torrents that are findable is relatively low. About 20,000, which is quite low compared to the millions of torrents most BitTorrent sites index.

This means that most of the popular content is available but that obscure files will be harder to find. The only way to really change this is when more people start to use the client, which might take a few more domain seizures than we’ve seen thus far.

Update: A message from Dr. Johan Pouwelse.

Many readers wonder why this is new compared to Kazaa, Exeem, LimeWire, Gnutella, eMule. Well, that explanation is a bit technical, here it goes. All these client either contain spam or use servers. For instance, Limewire Cooperation was sending out digitally signed instructions to block anti-piracy companies and spammers in general (157 pages of details).

Tribler does not use spam protection that originates exclusively from some cooperate headquarter or Swedish moderator server and does not use servers for search. After launching Tribler it quickly fills its integrated SQL light engine (pdf) with discovered content. It has a bias to talk to peers with the same download taste. Similar to how Google keeps out the Spammers using PageRank, Tribler uses a distributed reputation system (pdf).

Update: As pointed out by readers, there are other P2P-technologies that work fully decentralized, such as Kademlia. The decentralized “revolution” is limited to BitTorrent only.

Source: Truly Decentralized BitTorrent Downloading Has Finally Arrived

The main focus of the client is to make it easier for people to find the various movie releases on BitTorrent. On startup users see a home screen where the most popular movies are featured, and on the side they can navigate through the ‘catalog’ of films by genre, actors, directors, countries and the year the film was released.

In addition to a catalog browser there is also an advanced movie torrent search engine built into zButterfly. Here, users can filter their searches based on production years, genres and IMDb ratings. In total, there are over 8200 films for which at least one torrent is available, but Philip Lamb, Marketing Director of zButterfly, told TorrentFreak that the catalog will continue to expand.

When users see a film they like they can continue to the movie download page where a wealth of information is presented. Various release formats, the film’s cast, its IMDb rating, trailers and recommendations for similar films are all available. Most of this meta-data seems to originate from IMDb. The actual downloads are torrentless, and rely solely on magnet links.

Although there is little doubt that there will be a subset of BitTorrent users who will be interested in using such a client, it is also a certainty that the MPAA will not be backing this project. zButterfly’s Philip Lamb agrees with this assessment but believes that they don’t do anything wrong.

“Trouble with the movie industry should be expected,” Lamb told us. “But legally we are a search engine. We do not copy the content on our servers, we do not operate a torrent tracker, we are just a mirror of the BitTorrent network. A mirror which is decorated with a catalog of movies.”

“All movies in our catalog were found with our automatic search robots. Any copyright holder may submit a request for removal, but there is no guarantee that the movie will not be added to our database in the future,” Lamb said, adding that search engines such as Google can also be used to find torrent files. “Legally we are not much different from Google.”

Up to a certain degree Lamb may be right. But judging from the movie industry’s lawsuits against torrent sites in the past years, we’ve learned that ‘intent’ is more important than technicalities. The MPAA would probably argue that zButterfly is promoting copyright infringement by featuring several blockbuster movies on their home screen.

The new client can be downloaded on the official site and all the project’s source files are available on Sourceforge.

Source: New Torrent Client Features Hollywood’s Latest Blockbusters

BitTorrent Apps is a web-based extensions framework to add new functionality without compromising the lightness of the core BitTorrent client. Similar to other apps, addons and extensions in today’s web browsers and phones, the Javascript-based Apps allow 3rd party developers to create applications that will integrate seamlessly with the client. They can be added to the client with a single click and are displayed using an embedded browser window.

Initially the Apps were only been available to a relatively small group of uTorrent users who downloaded the experimental ‘Griffin‘ client. In September this test audience was expanded to the users of BitTorrent Inc’s Mainline client, and today the “Apps Studio” is made available to all uTorrent users, 65 million in total. The release of uTorrent 2.2 includes the Apps Studio and comes with a handful of Apps that are approved by BitTorrent, but users can also install unofficial Apps such as the EZTV one we featured previously.

One of the official Apps that are included is that of VODO, a platform where independent filmmakers share their work for free. To celebrate the fact that Apps are now bundled with uTorrent, VODO is releasing two new films today – ‘Four Eyed Monsters’ and ‘Snowblind‘. For the producers of these films, BitTorrent provides an opportunity to have their works seen by millions of people without having to worry about distribution problems.

“The barriers to filmmaking have fallen, but the gates around distribution through traditional TV, theatrical and video-on-demand remain locked,” says Arin Crumley, creator and star of ‘>Four Eyed Monsters’. “With a user base of over 80 million [Mainline included], BitTorrent is exposing our film to an audience larger than many television networks and fostering a direct connection between audiences and filmmakers.”

“The creators who embrace this modern approach will encourage a new culture of audiences who support the production of movies they want to see and help distribute the ones in which they fall in love,” Crumley added.

Aside from the ‘Apps Studio’ and the release of the films through VODO, uTorrent 2.2 has several other features and enhancements in store. The skinning format which allows users to change the look of the client has been renewed, the client is now able to move files if you change the download location of a file, and there is now an add torrent dialog for magnet links.

On the privacy side there are also several much needed and demanded improvements. First of all, there was a huge security leak for the users of some proxy services. uTorrent users broadcasted their real IP-address instead of the secure one when they were connected to an UDP tracker (most proxy operators warned their users about this). This has now been fixed in the latest stable release. In addition, the latest release makes it easier for users of proxies to configure their client so they are indeed anonymous.

Source: uTorrent Apps Arrive, Plus Free Movies and Privacy Features

In this decade, Noah Bennet from Heroes wasn’t alone in returning to life after being shot since Nathan Petrelli also cheated the inevitability of the bullet with his own miraculous recovery. Going a little further back, anyone old enough to remember the 80s will recall that Bobby Ewing of Dallas evaded a permanent underground future by the fortuitous inclusion of a last-minute dream sequence.

Some characters that refuse to stay dead aren’t always friendly though. How many times has Friday the 13th’s Jason met his maker? What’s the body count if one adds together the celluloid heart-stoppages of Freddy Kruger and Michael Myers from Halloween? Was Fatal Attraction’s Glenn Close dead, or simply enjoying a relaxing bath? In any event, if it means making money, it seems that Hollywood is always happy to make evil breathe again.

That said, one monster Hollywood really hoped would stay dead after its drawn out torture and subsequent recent slaying was the hugely popular LimeWire file-sharing client. However, rather like the abuse suffered by the Black Knight in Monty Python and The Holy Grail, the sustained attack by the RIAA turned out to be a mere flesh wound.

Although alternatives are available and growing in popularity, a secret dev team remained focused on reanimating the lifeless corpse of LimeWire and like an irrepressible file-sharing zombie, the world’s favorite Gnutella client is back.

“On October 26 the remaining LimeWire developers were forced to shut down the company’s servers and modify remote settings in the filesharing client to try to harm the Gnutella network. They were then laid off,” a source told TorrentFreak.

“Shortly after, a horde of piratical monkeys climbed aboard the abandoned ship, mended its sails, polished its cannons, and released it free to the community.”

And so, LimeWire Pirate Edition (LPE) was born. Based on the LimeWire 5.6 beta that was briefly released earlier this year and then withdrawn when Lime Wire LLC lost its lawsuit, LPE is now in the wild. In many ways, it is better than the version killed by the RIAA.

“All dependencies on LimeWire LLC’s servers have been removed, all remote settings have been disabled, the Ask toolbar has been unbundled, and all features of LimeWire PRO have been activated for free,” our source explained.

“LimeWire Pirate Edition should work better than the last functioning version of LimeWire (5.5.10), and it should keep working for longer. There’s no adware or spyware: the piratical monkeys are doing this for the benefit of the community.”

Currently only available for Windows, in our tests LimeWire Pirate Edition functioned perfectly well and is already circulating on BitTorrent.

Next up, Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine and the Sinclair C5 but before anyone gets any ideas, let’s leave Kazaa where it is.

Source: LimeWire Resurrected By Secret Dev Team

Wikipedia (and indeed the whole Wikimedia Foundation) just announced that it has started to use BitTorrent to stream its videos. The foundation is using Swarmplayer from P2P-Next to try and cut down on bandwidth costs.

The Wikimedia Foundation is concerned about bandwidth costs, as video becomes more prevalent on their various project sites (like News, and Quotes and the more famous Wikipedia project). In an announcement this week the foundation stated: “Eventually bandwidth costs could saturate the foundation budget or leave less resources for other projects and programs. For this reason it is important to start exploring and experimenting with future content distribution platforms and partnerships.”

The system set up by Wikipedia uses a combination of webseeds and BitTorrent peers to spread the load. High priority pieces (like the start of the video) are pulled via more traditional HTTP sources, while later in the video where the data is of a lower priority it comes via the BitTorrent protocol. The process is described by P2Pnext in the following diagram;

Source - P2P Next

“I think it’s important as a technology and something that needs exploring,” Michael Dale, Kaltura Open Media Developer and Wikimedia admin told TorrentFreak. The 6000-or-so videos on the Wikimedia servers are all set to use the technology, as will any new ones that are added.

Currently, Swarmplayer is only available as a plugin for Firefox (3.x, it doesn’t work well with the version 4 betas). An Internet Explorer plug-in will be available within the next day or two and a Chrome plugin is planned as well, we are assured. Not so good news for the Opera and Safari users though, as there is no plugin currently planned for them. However, people are free to create their own as the code is open source. “We’re just counting on one hardcore Opera user to port it to Opera,” Dr Pouwelse of P2P-Next told TorrentFreak.

“This is another step in strengthening Web TV,” Pouwelse continued. “The long-term goal is to offer more choice, provide higher quality and increased reliability compared to traditional TV technology.”

Source: Wikipedia Adds BitTorrent Powered Video Streaming

Thus far there are only a handful of Apps listed in the official store and not all of them are equally usable. To stimulate the development of uTorrent Apps, BitTorrent Inc. started a developers challenge in August, awarding a $1000 prize to the best App to be submitted. Today the winner was announced.

The winning App is called Zulu Music and was developed by Steven Viola. The HTML and Javascript-based App enables users to search for and discover new artists among the 39,229 free albums that are currently available on the music sharing site Jamendo. All albums can be downloaded directly in uTorrent in high quality MP3 and OGG formats.

Zulu Music is a prime example of how free and legal content can be embedded in uTorrent. However, the developer of the App also released another, very similar App that might be of greater use to the average BitTorrent user – Zulu TV.

Zulu TV offers uTorrent users an easy way to find the latest TV-shows, without having to visit a torrent site. The App pulls torrents from EZTV and uses artwork published by TheTVDB and combines them into a nifty TV-torrent guide. With a single click users can subscribe to shows or download individual episodes.

Unlike with Zulu Music, not all copyright holders have given permission to download the content that’s linked to on Zulu TV, and this is most likely the reason why the App has not been given a mention by BitTorrent Inc. People who are interested in trying the App can add it to uTorrent manually by going to the developer’s site.

A third App that came out today is released in collaboration with the organization that hosts the TED conferences. This App enables users to browse through and download high quality copies of all the latest 18-minute TED talks.

“We’re thrilled to collaborate with BitTorrent to bring TEDTalks to millions of new viewers,” June Cohen, Executive Producer of TED Media said. “TED’s mission is to spread ideas, and BitTorrent’s new apps platform will amplify our work really powerfully, reaching a large and engaged audience who may be new to TED.”

A representative from EZTV informed TorrentFreak that he was thrilled about Zulu TV as well, but thus far he hasn’t heard anything from BitTorrent Inc. yet.

“EZTV’s mission is to spread TV-shows, and BitTorrent’s new apps platform will amplify our work really powerfully, reaching a large and engaged audience who may be new to EZTV,” we were told.

Source: uTorrent Gets an EZTV, TED and Jamendo App

Due to its similarities with uTorrent, this smaller brother makes an ideal platform for testing new features in the wild – features that will eventually appear in uTorrent as well. Thus far this opportunity hasn’t really been put to use as most of the Mainline features have been lagging behind uTorrent. Today, however, this changes as BitTorrent Inc. has decided to first launch the ‘Apps’ platform in the release candidate of the Mainline 7.1 client.

BitTorrent Apps is a web-based extensions framework to add new functionality without compromising the lightness of the core BitTorrent client. Similar to other apps, addons and extensions in today’s web browsers and phones, the Javascript-based Apps will allow 3rd party developers to create applications that will integrate seamlessly with the client. They can be added to the client with a single click and are displayed using an embedded browser window.

Thus far the Apps have only been available to a relatively small group of uTorrent users, those who downloaded the experimental ‘Griffin‘ client. This means that today’s release will be the first real test for the platform, as it will open up to an audience of more than twelve million users. It is likely that BitTorrent Inc. chose Mainline for the initial release as a final test before the Apps are added to the regular uTorrent client which has over 50 million users.

The Apps ‘store’ launches with 11 Apps that are featured in the client, but developers can make their own apps available on external sites as well. While the platform is open, BitTorrent Inc. is curating the Apps that will be featured in the client. Most likely this means that Apps which promote copyright infringement will be barred from being featured.

The word ‘store’ might not be the best term to describe the Apps section today, but this might change. All the Apps promoted in the client are currently free, but BitTorrent Inc. isn’t ruling out the possibility of paid Apps.

“We can’t rule out someday creating an official commerce platform for developers to use if they choose, however, with many in-app payment systems available to developers today, it’s not the priority. The priority is to create a truly unique and integrated experience so our users can add awesome new functionality,” BitTorrent Inc. told TorrentFreak.

For BitTorrent Inc. the Apps platform opens up some interesting possibilities to generate additional revenue. Commercial affiliate deals and potentially paid Apps could become a significant revenue stream aside from the toolbar installs the company makes most of its income from now.

At this point, however, it is hard to see where the Apps platform will go. With only 11 available Apps there is not much value yet. The success of the platform will therefore depend on what developers come up with, and how useful these Apps will be to BitTorrent users. Time will tell.

Starting today the first release candidate of BitTorrent Mainline 7.1, including the Apps, is available for download on BitTorrent.com. The final version is expected to be released in a week or two.

Source: BitTorrent Apps Arrive, But What’s in Store?

Fast forward another two years and a Linux version was announced. Voted as one of the top suggestions for uTorrent in the client’s ‘Idea Bank‘, the massive demand from users for a Linux client was impossible to ignore. In June of this year BitTorrent Inc. officially stated that it was working on Linux programs, and today the first one was released.

BitTorrent’s VP of Product Management Simon Morris realizes that the company pretty much owed this release to the community that played such a vital role in popularizing the protocol.

“If any group has embraced the possibilities and power of BitTorrent for distribution, it is the Linux community. Virtually every distribution is available via torrent download and many even ship with a BitTorrent client in the default configuration,” he says today.

“This morning, we are announcing a preview release of the first of two new products for Linux users,” Morris added. “uTorrent Server, an alpha version available immediately for download, is intended for users seeking a fast, powerful and lightweight BitTorrent client without the need of the full features and complexity of the native GUI.”

Labeled as an Alpha release, uTorrent Linux Server precedes a client with a full featured UI which is expected to be released in the coming weeks. Today’s release is aimed at more Linux users, who are encouraged to leave feedback so the development team can prepare releases for specific Linux distros in the future. The server can be managed through an HTTP API or the uTorrent Web UI pictured below, which is included in the release.

“Today’s version is only the first step, and we will continue to support the Linux user community with new versions in the near future. If you prefer to stick to more conventional user experience, rest assured we are working hard to build a full-featured client, coming soon,” Morris announced. There is currently no update on whether the company will make the “summer” deadline they set earlier.

With uTorrent Server, BitTorrent Inc’s main brand is now supported on Windows, Mac and Linux platforms in common with its main competitor, Vuze. Whether it will reach the massive marketshare it has on Windows with the two latter platforms has still to be seen though. Considering the late entrance, uTorrent has a lot of ground to make up.

Source: uTorrent Linux Server Released, Client Coming Soon

After the news about the vulnerability became public earlier this week, several pieces of exploit code surfaced, attacks that allow outsiders to take control over the PCs of users who run the affected applications.

Included in the list of vulnerable programs are familiar names such as Firefox, Adobe Photoshop, VLC and also the popular BitTorrent client uTorrent. Upon hearing the news the uTorrent developer team didn’t sit still and yesterday an essential update was released that should fix the DLL vulnerability.

“There is a DLL vulnerability in all versions of Windows affecting a great deal of software applications. Subsequently, attack code targeting the uTorrent client surfaced on a third-party website, and while so far no attacks have been reported to us, we have released uTorrent 2.0.4 to fix this vulnerability,” uTorrent Community Manager ‘Firon‘ explained.

“The new client disables loading of DLLs from the current working directory and prevents this exploit from functioning,” Firon said, adding an ensuring message for uTorrent users. “We take our user’s security very seriously, and we sincerely apologize for any inconvenience.”

It is needless to say that all uTorrent users are encouraged to update their clients to the most recent version. With a userbase of more than 50 million monthly users uTorrent is a major target for exploits, so it’s good to see that BitTorrent Inc. takes these security threats seriously.

Source: uTorrent Quickly Patches Windows DLL Vulnerability

Starting July, Valve – which is believed to control around 70% of the digital distribution market for video games – also began collecting data about the software installed on the machines of its customer base. Although participation is voluntary, the sampling potential is significant since the company is believed to service around 25 million users.

Valve has just published the results of its data harvesting for July from its Windows users and the stats make interesting reading. With 100% install rate, the top position is understandably dominated by the Steam client itself. In second place with a 96.79% install rate is Adobe’s Flash Player, with Acrobat (73.18%), Firefox (63.05%) and Office (57.26%) completing the top five places. Eight Microsoft packages pad out the rest of the top 20 along with just one product from Apple – Quicktime.

While Steam is the most famous official game delivery platform around, Apple’s iTunes takes that accolade in the music sector. According to the survey it is installed on 30.73% of respondents’ machines, a fairly impressive result.

Perhaps even more significant though is the achievement of the package sitting directly below iTunes – the tiny but mighty uTorrent. The BitTorrent Inc. client is installed on the machines of 29.41% of Steam users and is the most popular file-sharing client in the entire list.

This high percentage of uTorrent users even beats the market share of the client among all BitTorrent users worldwide. According to data gathered in December 2009 from 357 million BitTorrent peer IDs, uTorrent was the client of choice for 25.77% of all BitTorrent users.

The Mainline BitTorrent client, which is in use by 4.81% of all torrent users worldwide, is installed on 5.28% of Steam user’s machines.

The Vuze client, also known by its previous label Azureus, is the client of choice for 4.37% of Steam customers. When taking a worldwide perspective Vuze does considerably better and is installed on the machines of around 24% of BitTorrent users, but unlike the Steam survey this data was not limited to Windows users.

The 5th most popular client with all BitTorrent users worldwide is BitComet. Overall it has a 4.01% market share, which betters its 2.44% install rate among Steam users.

It is safe to conclude that more than a third of all Steam users are also BitTorrent users, with the vast majority preferring the uTorrent application over others. Compared to average Internet users, Steam gamers are undoubtedly avid BitTorrent users.

Nonetheless, the Steam survey also shows that having access to free games doesn’t hold these users back from paying for games on Steam.

The full survey results can be found here.

Source: Steam Gamers Are Avid BitTorrent Users