Opentracker, the BitTorrent tracker software utilized by The Pirate Bay, is released under a beerware license, meaning that anyone who uses it and meets the developer should buy him or her a beer. To fulfill the license, the German Pirate Party donated 50 liters of beer to the main developer at the Chaos Communcation Congress.
Eventually, particularly when trying to download old torrents, most BitTorrent users find themselves with a transfer which stops due to the swarm having no seeds, not enough peers to cover the full release, or the tracker going down. btReAnnouncer is a handy site which could prove vital in reaching that magic 100%.
Some months back, Project Gazelle was launched. It was an attempt to build a new and improved BitTorrent tracker script. The ultimate goal is to produce a new framework for private torrent sites, faster than the common TB source, while being more secure from a code point of view, easier to modify, and more flexible.
After being spammed with takedown request from several companies, ELiTE-TEAM, a French private BitTorrent tracker recently asked several torrent indexers to remove their torrents, and not to accept any new ones. Unfortunately their effort is doomed to fail.
The Pirate Bay is without a doubt the most popular BitTorrent tracker. Unfortunately their current tracker system is not performing as it used to and has reached its effective limit. The TPB team is currently working on a more efficient Open Source tracker system that, among other things, will guarantee better protection against anti-piracy outfits.
In a renewed effort to put a halt to piracy, Spanish Police shut down two BitTorrent sites. Todotorrente.com and trackertdt.com were both taken offline and three administrators were arrested and accused of facilitating “copyright infringement”.
The BitTorrent bandwidth battle continues. Ipoque, a German based company that specializes in developing bandwidth managing solutions for Universities and ISPs, announced today that their products are now able to detect and throttle encrypted BitTorrent traffic. In addition, they introduce the option to maintain a “whitelist” of legal BitTorrent trackers that are allowed on the monitored network. You could call it the PeerGuardian for ISPs.
