The data is collected by TorrentFreak, and is for informational and educational reference only. Currently both DVDrips and R5 rips are counted.

RSS feed for the weekly DVDrip chart.

As of September 1st, 2008…

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

Various forum threads, even on TorrentSpy, warn naive users about these clients. Still, TorrentSpy is actively advertising Get-Torrent, and infecting hundreds of their users’ computers, resulting in a torrent of annoying popups.

Unlike TorrentSpy, most BitTorrent site admins refuse to advertise these clients. The Pirate Bay and mininova successfully banned these malicious clients from advertising through Adbrite, and BTjunkie and many other sites wont let them on their site either.

The malware bundled with BitTorrent clients like Get-Torrent, Torrent101, TorrentQ and BitRoll is a sponsor program called “Cidhelp”. Apparently, it can be easily removed from the Windows Control Panel. However, in most cases your anti-spyware or anti-virus program damaged the files, leaving them impossible to uninstall, while they still cause numerous popups.

In April we ran a Google Adwords campaigns on the Bitroll, Torrent101 and Torrentq websites warning users not to install these clients. Even though it was fun and probably prevented a couple of hundred people from installing the clients, it is far from an ideal solution. The best way is to spread the word, start forum threads and write blog posts or emails to warn others.

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

In a response to the BitTorrent protocol encryption that is now supported by many BitTorrent clients, companies like Ipoque that provide bandwidth management hardware, claim that they found a way to detect and block these encrypted (obfuscated) transfers. Ipoque doesn’t provide any details on how they are able to detect encrypted BitTorrent traffic, and it is doubtful whether they can be sure that the traffic they block is indeed generated by BitTorrent.

In addition to the ability to throttle encrypted BitTorrent transfers, Ipoque’s bandwidth managing devices now also support the use of BitTorrent tracker whitelists. “Desired legal trackers such as tracker.opensuse.org can be registered in a whitelist so that their BitTorrent traffic is accepted. All other BitTorrent traffic can be blocked.”, says Ipoque in a press release.

Lately, more and more companies claim that they have found a way to detect encrypted BitTorrent traffic. The fact is however that none of these companies actually provides data on the effectiveness of these systems. Until they open up their methods I seriously doubt the effectiveness of these devices.

Interestingly, a few weeks ago, Canadian ISP Rogers even decided to throttle all encrypted traffic (not only BitTorrent). Apparently Rogers doesn’t need a device that is able to detect encrypted BitTorrent traffic on their network, they simply throttle everyone who is using encrypted transfers.

The cat-and-mouse game continues.

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

Why would the company open source uTorrent?
There are many reasons for them to do so. One of the many advantages would be to get it quickly and easily ported to other platforms such as OS X and Linux, a task the company has promised to get done. “[uTorrent is] lacking an implementation for Mac and Linux. We will improve uTorrent in these arenas,” said Ludvig Strigeus, the developer of uTorrent in an interview that followed the announcement. Until now he has refused to release non-Windows versions of the client. Also, if uTorrent were made Open Source it would be a lot less likely for its development to stagnate or slow down, there would always be someone ready to maintain and improve upon it.

Reasons not to open source uTorrent
The motivation behind BitTorrent Inc’s acquisition of uTorrent could very well be to have a client that can be customised and morphed to integrate with the upcoming BitTorrent Video Store. If the company were to open source uTorrent, it would not be able to stop users from creating a “clean” version of it, ie. without any Video Store-specific features. This “enhancing” of uTorrent is something users of the client are dreading. A reader of TorrentFreak posted a comment in reaction to the acquisition announcement, “R.I.P. uTorrent!” In a discussion here at TorrentFreak, we came to the conclusion that adding a content store to the client won’t affect most users’ decision to use the program or not. iTunes is a good example of people using a program because of its features, not the openness of its source code. After all, even Azureus will soon have a bundled content store.

By acquiring uTorrent, BitTorrent Inc now has almost 50% of all BitTorrent users in its grasp. They’ve probably paid a hefty price for the client and it’s only fair if they choose not to make it Open Source. The company said in an IRC discussion that followed the announcement that the source code of uTorrent will remain closed for now, but gave no clues as to what their future plans might look like.

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

So what’s the deal?

Torrent Swapper is an open sourced powerful, clean, fast, and easy-to-use BitTorrent client with special social abilities. That means you can get Amazon like recommendations from peers to find new and interesting files, and download double your current torrent download speed using uploading capabilities of your friends.

I haven’t tried “torrent swapper” myself, but I like the social functionalities. However, I also greatly value my privacy…

Torrent Swapper

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