Visitors to the world’s largest adult BitTorrent tracker were met with a surprise this morning. According to Google and Firefox, users accessing Empornium.us are exposed to four trojan horses and three exploits. The malware doesn’t appear to be hosted by the site itself, but it is coming from outside sources.
Running a BitTorrent site can be quite costly. Most of the larger sites need over a dozen servers to keep everything running smoothly. There are some scalable alternatives for BitTorrent startups though. Two relatively unknown meta-search engines have taken a different route by using Google’s App Engine, which provides optimal scalability, for free.
Mininova, one of the leading BitTorrent sites, is testing a new technology which allows content producers to include subtle ads in their videos. By providing more opportunities to monetize free content, Mininova hopes to attract even more premium publishers.
A hacker has successfully changed the nameservers of the popular BitTorrent meta-search engine Torrentz.com. For a few hours the site was replaced with an Adbrite ad, and a link to a warez forum. To top it off, the hacker then contacted the Torrentz admin to brag about his hacking abilities.
Only a few days before the largest BitTorrent tracker will celebrate its 5th anniversary, the Pirate Bay reached a new milestone. The site now tracks 25 million peers, which is more than the entire populations of Sweden, Norway, Finland, Iceland and Denmark combined.
The chief executive of UK anti-piracy FAST says the chances of a completely voluntary agreement between rights holders and ISPs to tackle file-sharing is “unlikely”. John Lovelock, boss at the Federation Against Software Theft goes on to imply that what his outfit would really like is file-sharers’ names and addresses on demand, with no need for a court order. This would be “gold plating” he said.
TorrentValley, one of the larger BitTorrent sites with millions of visitors each month, has been shut down by Bulgarian authorities. The site’s servers were seized by a Cyber Crime Unit, which acted based upon evidence provided by the Bulgarian music industry.
Torrentz.com, the largest BitTorrent meta-search engine on the Internet, is currently dealing with a hostile attempt to take over the site’s domain name. The admin of Torrentz has posted a message to all its users to inform them about the situation, and is optimistic that the issue will be resolved soon.
The Pirate Bay has reached yet another milestone. Today, they track more than 20 million unique peers for the first time since the site was launched. It is estimated that the Pirate Bay tracks more than half of all BitTorrent users at any given point in time.
The Pirate Bay has always made it clear that they don’t obey takedown requests from content owners. That doesn’t stop Hollywood from going after the Pirate Bay’s users, however, and they do so on a large scale. The Pirate Bay is well aware of these pirate tracking outfits, and does what it can to give them a hard time. Reporting fake peers is one of the tricks they use.
‘Real-Time’ BitTorrent search engines are the trend of 2008, and new sites emerge every other week. It all started in January with the launch of YouTorrent, but soon after it went legal, other sites took over. We catch up with the founder of one of YouTorrent’s successors to find out more.
