Staff members at Norbits now refute these claims in a post on the weblog they recently launched. “There have been rumors that “MORRADi” has IP information on our users. This is not true. DDoS attacks don’t compromise security, it’s only the servers that are overloaded, ” they write.

In response to these “hacker” reports, several users of the tracker took their anger out on journalists who wrote about the site. Trond Bie, who writes for IT-Avisen, and commented on the case in other news outlets as well, was one of the main targets. NorBits staff have condemned these attacks, and say they will ban any users who engage in this kind of behavior.

“We condemn attacks on anyone who criticizes or speak about NorBits. We know that many have sent e-mails to public persons and journalists and we can’t emphasize clearly enough that these only are sent from a small number of our users.”

NorBits staff may have inadvertently motivated this minority, since they briefly replaced their frontpage with a caricature of Trond Bie, which they pulled from his Picasa photo album. This was meant to be a joke though, not an attack on his person, as they explain on the NorBits weblog. “When a journalist is starting to become so obsessed with a webpage that he/she writes about every little modification that is happening on it, that person must accept an humoristic response.”

The photo was removed shortly after it was posted, and for now, the Norbits domain is redirected to the website of Urospredere, an upcoming Norwegian documentary about filesharing. This documentary by Asbjørn Engedal and journalist Simon Eriksen Valvik discusses how filesharing can be made legal, the changes that are needed, and how it will all work. A good cause to support.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

Isohunt – the third largest BitTorrent site with 350.000.000 pageviews a month – is one of the older BitTorrent sites and predates both The Pirate Bay and Mininova. The site started in January 2003, and added support for torrents by the end of that year just a few months after the BitTorrent protocol went public.

At the time, no-one could have guessed that BitTorrent sites would ever become as dominant as they are now. Gary Fung, the founder of isoHunt didn’t foresee it either, as he told TorrentFreak: “I never expected the site to grow to this volume initially, until we started seeing explosive growth with the uptake of BitTorrent.”

About the future of his site Fung said: “By indexing any and all BitTorrent links, we expect to grow as much as usage of BitTorrent would.” Right now, there is no sign that BitTorrent’s usage will stop growing, so it is safe to say that like any other BitTorrent site, isoHunt will keep on growing.

Another interesting observation is that The Pirate Bay has outgrown Mininova traffic wise. For over a year Mininova has been the most visited BitTorrent site, but now – for the first time ever – The Pirate Bay is in the lead.

Update: apparently there was a glitch in the traffic rank numbers, they are back to normal right now and show that Mininova is still in the lead. We corrected the graph and the figures below. The title of the article is still correct, as it is based on direct reports.

Today’s rankings show that The Pirate Bay is 90th in the list of 100 120 most visited websites, Mininova 51st and isoHunt comes in 119th place. With the current growth rate of BitTorrent sites, Torrentz.com will probably join these three sites in a few weeks.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.