Stop Downloading Fakes and Junk From BitTorrent
Written by enigmax on December 04, 2007Many experienced file-sharers can’t understand why relative novices manage to download so much junk from BitTorrent. Fake downloads that never finish, video files which refuse to play, movies that require special players and unwatchable video are easily avoided by those in the know. But how do they do it?
Although it’s quite a small problem, BitTorrent is sadly being used by a minority to generate money for scammers through trickery and deception. We’ve reported before how people download movies only to learn that they require a special media player to play it, or others which come with a payload of malware to infect their PC when they install it.
Other people get other problems such as torrents never finishing or when they watch a downloaded video it turns out to be completely the wrong thing - i.e the file was deliberately mislabeled. Sometimes the video download is of such poor quality it’s simply unwatchable and of course all this adds up to a lot of frustration and wasted time.
There are many techniques employed by experienced file-sharers to ensure that the torrent is what it says it is and of a good enough quality to even bother with. We’ll look at just a few of them here.
Remember that sharing certain types of media via BitTorrent may not be legal in your country.
1. Always read the comments
Before downloading any torrent, it’s always prudent to read the comments on the site. It only takes a few seconds but it’s time well spent. Very often there are requests from previous downloaders for a password to access the file or some might be asking where to download a special video player to view it. Movies should never come as .zip or an .exe file, if they do there is every chance the file comes with some sort of catch. If the movie won’t play with VLC Media Player there’s every chance it’s a fake. Any files needing 3WPlayer, DomPlayer or any that direct to other sites and ask you to fill in forms or install stuff, are also fake.
2. Can the source be trusted?
A good way to find out if a .torrent is real or not is to find out who uploaded the file. There are several well known users that always release new torrents on the same account, aXXo and EZTV are some good examples of such users. If the user is anonymous, you could look at the tracker, and see if it’s widely used. There is no guarantee that files on a well known trackers are safe, but you can almost be certain that files tracked by trackers such as bittorrent.isthebe.st are fake.
3. Is the file actually released already?
Many people use sites such as VCDQuality and Nforce.nl (sites that rates the quality of media releases on the internet) to not only ensure that the video is of a good quality, but also to weed out malfunctioning releases and identify real ones. Recently a movie producer was grateful to the BitTorrent community for spreading his movie ‘The Man From Earth‘, so we can use this movie as an example:
The VCDQ page shows a lot of information but let’s look at the box marked ‘folder’. Here you can see the release name. By copying and pasting this exact filename into Google, a list of almost guaranteed non-fake torrents appear.
4. TorrentSpam?
Another place to check is TorrentSpam. If you already have a torrent file in your possession, you can either paste the full name (or hash value, obtainable from the ‘general’ tab in uTorrent) into their search engine and if someone has reported this as a bad torrent, the results will be shown. Equally, if despite all the measures you still end up downloading a bad torrent, its possible to report this fact for the benefit of other TorrentSpam users in the future.
Do you have any tips or tricks not mentioned here that you would like to share? Feel free to leave a comment!
4. Other suggestions
We asked Matthijs from Mininova for some good tips on how to avoid downloading fake or scammy torrents and he came up with the following suggestions in addition to what we already posted.
In the end it’s experience alone that helps identify the fakes. Most people who have been file-sharing for a little while can easily spot these bad torrents but it’s clearly not so easy for the novice, judging by the number of emails we get at TorrentFreak each week. Let’s hope that number reduces soon.
Previously: MPA to Christmas Movie Pirates:”You’d Better Watch Out, You’d Better Not Try!”
Next: Donald Duck Is a Music Pirate, and His Nephews Too
135 Responses
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[quote comment="230537"]Unfortunately .rar or a series of .rar files doesn’t allow you to download small parts of a movie first to check it out[/quote]
You mean all this time when I’ve downloaded only the first file of a rar series (.rar or .part00.rar) extracted the episode (keep broken files option) and watched that little poortion (VLC) I really havn’t been able to do that? Darn :/
(Or as mentioned, download the sample when available)
This way I don’t need to wait for my random bytes to come in a big enough group to do a preview, and find that lucky spot of video. (Still need VLC to play it too)
Add the ability of a few .rar players, or winrars ability to extract to temp space, and no wasted HD space. Or just extract and delete when done
I know this is way tricky, so I see why the mass torrent community can’t handle it.
experience is the key word in this article. when i started using bt, i dl my share of fake files.
READ THE BLOODY COMMENTS!!!!!!!
Tricky? Is something that basic considered tricky? The bittorrent community sure have low standards.
let the stupid people download fakes and the people who actually give a shit and bother to work out how to use bittorrent properly get the good files, we deserve it.
let’s face it anyway, if you’re reading torrentfreak, you’re probably going to know your torrents.
I think that rar-partition is essential to big files, such as games and HD-rips.
Have you ever downloaded a 5Gb single_file with very low speed/connection and in the end you recognize that the 5Gb .iso file is corrupted and useless. I have…
In rar-partition that problem doesn’t exist. If there are any corrupted files, it’s easy and fast to replace them (15Mb).
Movies (700-1400Mb) i don’t care wether it’s rarred or not. Though, i prefer rarred rips.
[quote comment="230614"] Rars in torrents break selective downloading. EOS
Sincerely,
b[/quote]
Actually, Selective downloading breaks Torrents - Its a bad idea, and significantly slows down torrents. I believe its somewhere in the region of 30-50% slower, on average, because of selective downloading breaking the ‘rarest first’ philosophy that makes bittorrent such an efficient and effective transferer of files.
[quote comment="230568"]The best way to avoid being suckered is to download from trusted websites, public or private.[/quote]
Not necessarily, mostly not at all! Most fake torrents spread from public trackers and sometimes private trackers. Famous public trackers let the anonymous (or even newly registered) people to upload any tracker. Search engines such as Google index it and lead people directly to fake files. In private tracker it’s of course harder to upload but when it is uploaded, a lot of people trust and download.
Here are some of my bitter experience in downloading and thus avoiding downloading fake files. I use a very low speed (at most 7kB/s) so I have to learn carefully!
* Do not try to search for a file on Google, yahoo, etc. search engines to find torrents. It is a good idea to find “torrent sites” not “torrent files”. Try to stick with tow or three trusted torrent sites and search for your files from their own search engines. It is also beneficial to be familiar with the site so that if there’s any report on comments, etc. if there’s a fake file and you’ll notice right away.
* Too good is too bad! If you find a (rare) file with hundreds of seeders and leechers in the first place, there’s a good chance it is a fake file. A good reason to use torrent is that you don’t need to have numerous seeders to download a file. Once I downloaded a 4GB file with only 3 seeders and 2 peers.
* Previewing is always good. Find ways to preview files. Don’t give up if WMP always nag about not supporting. Try VLC Media Player, GOM Player and other editing software to work around and make them preview for you. VirtualDUB is a good one for avi files and MPEGVcr for mpg and VOB files (I’m talking about old MPEGVcr not the new versions).
* Always before previewing copy partial files to other folders and NEVER try to play with the original files as you could harm them forever. Specially while your torrent software id still downloading.
* (You can skip this one and go directly to next tip!) Movies shouldn’t come in RAR formats because of good reasons such as they don’t need to be RARed because movie file do not compress! Or the fact that it is better to share the torrent file while you are actually using it rather than keeping useless RAR archives on your precious HDD. I personally delete torrent files after downloading unless they are in their respected format (i.e. Mp3, Avi, pdf…). But unfortunately stupid people that download files from rapidshare, make torrent out of 100MB RARs or even more stupid ones spend half an hour to make a RAR out of beloved avi file! “Fakers” love these stupid people and use this way to upload junk. So we have to work around this and not fall into their trap:
* There’s a good way to preview RAR files: Wait until 10% of the file is downloaded. If it is a single rar file you probably have to download a more deal of data, but if 10 rar files in the torrent, tell your torrent app to not download 9 on them and only download the first one (If they are splitted the fist file ends in .rar). After downloading a little, copy the file to another place. Right click on the file and select “Extract files…” from Winrar’s menu. In the following box, check “Keep broken files” option and click OK. Wait until it is extracted and ignore any error report unless says there’s no archive or can’t extract so probably you need to download more before previewing. Then you can use your media player or other softwares to preview the avi, VOB, mpeg, whatever file to see if you must continue or go on and start from scratch for another file.
* There’s much doubt about a “RAR inside RAR”. If you extracted to find another RAR file, it is better to cancel downloading! Fakers use this way to prevent you from using above tip!!
* If there’s a read-me file in the extracted file always read it! Fakers suggest to go on a site to download/register/enter Email/f*ck their mother etc. in these read-me files!
* If you don’t have VLC Player, download it now!
* Don’t rush to download newly born torrents. Waiting a few hours would revel if the file is fake. There’s always royal users to come back and report.
* Teach torrent sites’ moderators to remove fake torrent at least after 24hours and not after everybody else downloaded it! Sometimes they are not moderator, only inactive users who are only interested in heavy traffic.
* Summarize this text and post it in another comment!!
I think there’s a bigger idea behind uploading fake files rather than simply a Trojan or scammers. It is not simply economic neither mony-wise nor time-wise to spread trojans, trap people into scams etc. using torrents! There’s always a good chance that it would be removed almost instantly and not a good chance of downloads more than 500.
The idea is to try to tire people from using torrent, specially new users. Recent behaviour of RIA and others and the history of fighting torrents in 2007 clearly shows that they want to play dirty. Because there’s no reasonable doubt to completely stop torrent sites and they do not have enough energy and money and power to stop it all around the world, they try every way it may come to their corrupted almost-look-like brains.
This is the reason we must keep up to date and torrent moderators to fight back.
Don’t forget: fake torrents don’t have 100% availability.
Its obvious these little poptarts have their brains toasted if they can’t grasp the advantages of WinRar. Read the instructions
no one has stated the obvious: multi-part .rar files (often) come from Usenet, as does much of Scene material on Bt.
oh and ‘b’, you may not be ‘Scene’ but seeing as they are the primary content provider, you have no choice but to abide-or at least tolerate-their rules/standards of release. feel free to start buying dvds if you don’t like it.
[quote comment="230777"]Its obvious these little poptarts have their brains toasted if they can’t grasp the advantages of WinRar. Read the instructions[/quote]
I think it is the other way around. The ones with their brains toasted would be the ones who think that rar actually add anything to bittorrent downloads (unless the data is the compressable).
[Quote]
Have you ever downloaded a 5Gb single_file with very low speed/connection and in the end you recognize that the 5Gb .iso file is corrupted and useless. I have…
[/quote]
Fortunally bittorrent is a modern protocol that features error correction, so this is a non-problem.
The error checking is completly automatic, but if you are paranoid or are suspecting corruption, you can recheck any data you have downloaded against the torrent file, and if any part is incorrect it will be refetched from the swarm.
[Quote]
Actually, Selective downloading breaks Torrents - Its a bad idea, and significantly slows down torrents.
[/Quote]
It only slows down the download for the one doing the download, since he will have a suboptimal offering of data. And what he doesn’t get, someone else gets. There only is so much upload bandwidth to go around.
Of course, when there are few seeders and leechers on a torrent, selective downloading can cause some problems, because pieces can become too rare or even go extinct.
Felt like I had to say a single good thing about RARed files:
* Often avoids fragmented files.
I had a 700mb movie with over 10′000+ fragments, and that was after I had defragmented the HDD (with O&O Defrag).
Well, that’s my point.
Yet another advantage or .rar files is that files greater than 4GB can be downloaded to fat32 drives. I keep all my drives except for one in NTFS but, the FAT32 drive was a lifesaver when my laptop hdd crashed and I was able to use Knoppix. NTFS support is still sketchy at best in linux distros.
this makes me miss demonoid :(
Id like to reiterate to my closest friends… That downloading that stupid play3w-all crap - Is obviously fake.. A novice would even eye that out!…
Well the bottom line is the scene will never change these rules. They have been put in place for some very good reasons. Don’t like it stick to your “NON-SCENE Releases”!
There are a lot of FAKE COMMENTS - many made by “one-post-wonders”. Wary downlaoders need to consider the history of any user making a comment insisting that a file is or is not genuine. Most sites list every users previous posting history as well as how many times that user has posted a comment. With a little digging, it’s not hard to figure out who’s lying and who’s telling the truth.
It’s well known that the first several releases of a new movie that appear on P2P are usually fake. Downloaders who simply wait a day or so until a verified release shows up can usually avoid all the fakes.
People new to using P2P should join an online community (forum or chatroom) where there will be plenty of others willing to help a novice in the finer points of file-sharing - and in particular, avoiding the ever-increasing amount of bogus files out there.
Even Mediadefender’s leaked emails show them openly admitting that their efforts to poison P2P have proved useless against the more educated filesharers.
this post is cute.
[quote comment="230814"]no one has stated the obvious: multi-part .rar files (often) come from Usenet, as does much of Scene material on Bt.
[/quote]
ACtually, most of the scene stuff on torrents comes via FTPs, not via newsgroups, and quite often it goes onto newsgroups from torrents.
There is a very good reason why torrents don’t come from newsgroups, and thats the fact that if you check something like mininova or piratebays irc chans, you can often see things appearing there before newsgroups, sometimes within minutes of the scene releases. Newsgroup posts are usually a bit slower.
This article is stepping somewhat out of the line. Now you are telling us what to do and what not? Think about it and stop doing it!
And think about how you got your experience - through trial and error. Allow those who are inexperienced to gain the same experience. Trackers then do their part i.e. by cleaning up their sites, to create quality and thereby competing with other trackers. It is going to work out fine.
And last but not least, there will always be junk. Even the best DVD rip can contain a junk movie. Where do you stop?
This list is USELESS and just dupes the novices again. EVEN IF you find the release on vcdquality, chances are its been altered by media defender… They can put out fake hash code and your movie ends up blank or not able to play at all. Use NEWSGROUPS and private sites where everything is moderated. And of course you wont get a nasty cease and desist letter by the big FOUR.
RARs for bit torrent are a lot like the Q-ray bracelet. If you are happy with them, fine. Just realize that the perceived benefits are all in your head.
Remember that sharing certain types of media via BitTorrent may not be legal in your country.
And you point is ?
On Torrentz.com, there are special “rankings” that can be attributed to torrents. Although completely transparent and easy to use, some people still seem to miss it.
- register with them (free, no funny stuff)
- read comments (some people are amazingly graphical with the labeling of both genuine and fake torrents) whenever someone says “fake”, don’t take the risk.
- compare “good quality torrent” count to “bad torrent” count.
- If a torrent is highlighted green in main search screen, it’s A-OK!
I surprised this isn’t mentioned.
Use Peerguardian (or similar prog) and import the lists from bluetack.co.uk
There are a lot of lists and many include IPs of people who upload spyware, bullshit files, viruses, etc. And of course, they also block many known **AA IPs as well.
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