ImageShack Starts Free BitTorrent Download Service
Written by Ernesto on April 05, 2008The popular media hosting website ImageShack just launched a new service that lets you download torrent files onto their servers. When the download is complete, you can download the files from ImageShack via an http link.
ImageShack’s torrent download service is still in Beta, but it works just fine. The only thing you need to do is point ImageShack to the torrent file and press start. The download will start immediately, and once it’s finished you can download the files via http onto your computer.
Services like this are not new, but up until now I haven’t seen one that doesn’t charge money. There are some limitations though. Per month you can download a maximum of 15GB to your computer, and the storage on ImageShack’s servers is also limited to 15GB.
Jack Levin, the founder of ImageShack told TorrentFreak: “We think its going to be a great service for users, especially in the light of ISPs ratelimiting torrent traffic.There is a lot of free and legal torrents out there, that people should have easy access too
to. We have the capacity to do it, and the world needs it.”
For those people who are concerned about the anonymity of the service (or think it’s a honeypot), Levin said: “We will not look at what you download and simply provide you, an account, with bandwidth and space. What you do with it is up to you. The DMCA applies, so, if we get reports from copyright owners to take down content, we will comply.”
The service comes with some great features. It supports selective downloading, which means that you can deselect files from the torrent if you don’t want to download them all. This can be quite useful if you only need one album from a complete discography for example.
ImageShack also provides some basic details about the progress of the downloads. Under the “status” link they list information about the download progress, connected seeds and leechers, share ratio and more.
The status reports are not yet working perfectly, as it keeps reporting that a torrent has stopped, while it was downloading just fine. However, the torrents I have tested were downloaded very fast, and I had no problem downloading the files from ImageShack onto my computer.
A more serious point of critique is that the torrent seems to disconnect as soon as the download has finished. This basically means that you will be sharing less than you should. I hope that ImageShack will add a sharing friendly feature in the future, and will at least continue seeding until the share ratio is 100%.
Levin told us, however, that there are no plans to include such a feature. They will offer (paid) premium accounts, but this will be only for bandwidth and storage upgrades.
Overall I must say that Imageshack’s new torrent download service looks very promising, especially for a free service. Decide for yourself, we think it’s worth a try.
This article was updated to include Jack Levin’s answers
Previously: Lawyer Who Threatened File-Sharers is Banned For 6 months
Next: BitTorrent Tracker Sends Takedown Request to Torrent Indexers
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this is fine, but they should at least offer a way to throttle the dl, so you can share to a better ratio. or set it to at LEAST share to a 1.0
Although i would pay for this service monthly if I didn’t have to worry about the upload stopping.
[quote comment="339023"]I can see several ways how this could be used to hurt pirates:
- solicitation to a crime: yes, Imageshack is the one breaking the law if they seed back, but you are the one who commits them to do that, so you *too* can be procecuted
- collecting IP’s and sharing them with MPAA&friends, who will look out for pirates with large amounts of downloads and sue the minute they catch one of them sharing back. Are you really going to court if besides that one upload they can prove that you’ve downloaded tons of other stuff? It might not be illegal, but it’s certainly amoral and won’t help your case.
- a clever idea to weaken the massive BT culture. Turn people back to using simple HTTP downloads and being ignorant about BT, Imageshack’s is seeding for only limited amount of time and thus contributing to the fast death of .torrents, users might get banned from trackers if they use IS’s services, users are the ones who’ll go through the trouble of finding the torrents to newest movies’n'warez. Why spend time digging out the newest leaks and trackers whose takedown would make most damage if you can let the pirates do it for you?
;)[/quote]
Ask yourself the question “what is in this for ImageShack?”
Those who use this “service” are naive at best.
@Impure (post 177)
- advertizing? I myself had quite forgatten ImageShack, having moved to XS.COM a long time ago due the slowness of IS’s servers. Now I recall them and might quite well consider using ‘em again.
- change in business direction? With all the picture hosts that’ve popped up why not move to a new terrain? They’ve got the servers and bandwidth, after all.
- more money from payed accounts? I’ve never bothered to check how they actually make their income (except for the ads on their pages), but a (partially) commercial proxy server/file hosting system combo specializing on BT does sound like something that could bring in some bucks.
From the POV of legal torrents the whole concept ain’t bad. I mean badly seeded torrents, like many old movies which are in the public domain, not Linux distros which indeed usually have dedicated servers guaranteeing availability. So I wouldn’t automatically dismiss the whole project as bogus, but did have to point out those quick thoughts why one should be atleast a little suspicious. And careful.
This is a great solution for downloading behind firwall
this is great for those who are being throttle
I got this working with a torrent from The Pirate Bay but it would not work with a Torrent from Demonoid (which is a private tracker). I thought my pass key was in the torrent file I download from private trackers and that if I gave this torrent file to ImageShack it would be able to do the downloading … but apparently not. Anyone get this service working with a private trackers torrents?
Thanks
how can you download your torrent using FTP or a download accelerator? I have tried to link to it and not a chance. I receive bad download speeds from this site
anyone getting bad video files using imageshack? (they are choppy)
if you can change your download rate to like say 1k and it still uploads at 20k you could get a bunch of accounts and set them up to help you seed your torrents. After awhile just log back into the accounts delete the torrent from your free space and reactivate it ,whilst never actually downloading via HTTP. could this work?
Maybe someone could setup a bot on their computer to do all the reactivating part in the imageshack torrent tool automatically and bingo all your torrent now have an extra 20k x how ever many accounts you got running per torrent
.
it is not free anymore.
minimum plan is 10$/month.
.
sucks.
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