Let’s start off with some screenshots.

The Installation Disk Image

Main Window with Downloads

Click to enlarge.

Speed
The main reason I like uTorrent so much is because downloads are considerably faster in it than in any other BitTorrent client. This held true when I compared uTorrent Mac to Transmission and Xtorrent. The downloads speeds in both couldn’t match uTorrent’s. Azureus was the only one that came close, just as I had expected.

Application Launch Time
uTorrent Mac, just like its Windows counterpart, is super-light. It launches immediately (not even 1 bounce in the Dock!). This is clearly one piece of well-coded software. Probably part of the reason why BitTorrent Inc decided to buy it.

Interface
uTorrent Mac has a simple, yet appealing interface that is easy to use and navigate. It’s not as stylish as Xtorrent’s, but then again, no one can create interfaces like David Watanabe.

Search
Though it may seem that uTorrent has some sort of built-in search functionality, currently only offered by BitRocket and Xtorrent on the Mac, it does not. Typing something such as “HDTV” into the search box and hitting return will merely open a BitTorrent.com search page in your default browser.

Conclusion
It’s too early to draw conclusions but it’s a great first impression, especially for a pre-release version.

It’s worth mentioning that some Mac users such as myself like uTorrent so much, we even prefer running it under emulation than using one of the available Mac BitTorrent clients. uTorrent is not only the most popular Windows BitTorrent client according to a poll we conducted last year, but also the winner of our BitTorrent clients comparison.

Many of you are probably dying to download uTorrent Mac. Hang in there, it’s coming real soon.

Source: uTorrent for Mac is Coming: An Early Review

Unfortunately, several popular torrent sites carried advertising for these bad clients but thankfully, sites like The Pirate Bay saw the damage these things can cause and removed the adverts. TPB’s brokep wrote, “We’re getting a lot of email about people downloading torrent clients that are advertised on the site. Do not download them! We have put a ban for the ad companies to sell ads for these clients on our site.” Mininova and Snarf-it also blocked the adverts.

In February, we reported on yet another client, TorrentQ after a tip-off from the owner of BT-Junkie. Of course, this wasn’t a new client but the old one with a new name.

In April, in order to try to save unsuspecting file-sharers from installing malware, we ran Google Adword campaigns on the BitRoll, Torrent101 and TorrentQ websites, informing people of just how bad these clients are. Google apparantly doesn’t like to be associated with bad news and a few days later, Adsense adverts disappeared from the sites.

Disappointingly, we are now exposed to yet another ‘new’ bad torrent client. Get-Torrent is the latest in a sequence of malware-laden torrent clients, cloned from the same infected DNA as BitRoll, Torrent101 and TorrentQ. As can be seen from the client’s ‘skinning’ pages, these products are identical;

As we promised in our earlier posts, every time a bad client appears we will do our best to let the BitTorrent community know about it. Anyone thinking of installing a BitTorrent client should stay away from these products and install a free, clean client, such as uTorrent.

Source: Malicious BitTorrent Clients: New Coat of Paint, Same Bad Story

The vulnerabilities were discovered in the components chunkcounter.cpp and torrent.cpp and can be exploited by getting a user to use a modified torrent file, resulting in the possible control of the OS with the same privileges as the Ktorrent user.

There is currently no work-around for the flaws but the situation can be remedied by upgrading to the latest version of Ktorrent, version 2.1.4.

KTorrent is a BitTorrent client written in C++ for KDE, offering mainline DHT and µTorrent compatible peer exchange, port forwarding via UPnP and protocol encryption for getting round those pesky traffic-shaping ISP’s.

KTorrent version 2.2 will be released later this month and will include new features such as multiple tabs, moving finished downloads to another directory, and diskspace preallocation. Another good reason to upgrade!

Source: Multiple Vulnerabilities Discovered in Ktorrent

In this early stage of development the configuration options of Firestorm are quite basic, but the most essential features like adjusting the up- and download speed are already in there.

Firestorm is based on the source code from the Official BitTorrent Client, which is modified to be integrated with Firefox. The developers plan to continue the development of the extension after the school project is finished, so they can add more features and keep the extension up-to date.

Frequent TorrentFreak readers probably know that Firestorm is not the first BitTorrent extension for Firefox, FoxTorrent and BitFox are similar projects that work on adding a BitTorrent download manager to Firefox. This is a good thing of course, a little competition will only benefit the users.

More screenshots over here.

Source: Firestorm Adds BitTorrent Support to Firefox

The report is based on data supplied by BigChampagne and PC Pitstop. BigChampagne is a company that tracks online media, it also provides provides Billboard online music charts. PC Pitstop gathers data by “inspecting” the computers of users that try their free online virus / spyware scanners. The data used in this report are collected from Windows registry and table entries of 1.5 million PC’s through these online diagnostic tests performed by PC Pitstop.

The results. The percentages in the table indicate the install base of the P2P applications:

In the report we further read that the once almighty “Kazaa family” is now only installed on 1.3% PCs. Newcomers like FrostWire and Pando are included in the report for the fist time with a 0.2% and 0.3% install rate respectively.

As said before, the usability of these figures are doubtful. Here are a few concerns. First of all, install rates do not equal usage. The fact that someone installed a P2P client does not mean that they actually use it. So the report can’t say much about the popularity of a filesharing network or application. They do not make these claims, but the way the data is presented is a bit misleading, to say the least.

For example, uTorrent is by far the most used BitTorrent client. Over 50% of the peers in an average BitTorrent swarm use uTorrent. It could be that uTorrent and BitTorrent Mainline are installed on almost an equal number of PCs, but that the BitTorrent mainline client is hardly ever used. For instance, novices may start with the mainline client, but move on to better BitTorrent clients later on.

Another remarkable point is the uTorrent data collection for this report. uTorrent doesn’t install itself, and even the installer doesn’t use the Windows registry. So how did they come up with these statistics on uTorrent then?

It is also funny to see mIRC in the top 10 of most installed filesharing application because it is so much more than this. Most people I know use mIRC for other purposes than sharing files.

The concerns raised here show that “power” is not always in numbers. They might have collected data from millions of users, but is this really valuable if you have no idea if they actually use the application? A survey among 10.000 users where you actually ask if, and how often they use these applications is probably more useful.

And on a final note, people who want to read the report, but don’t want to pay $195 might want to try Google’s backdoor. Doubtful statistics, doubtful security.

Source: LimeWire Most Installed P2P Application, BitTorrent Clients Runner up

Xtorrent, the new BitTorrent client for Mac OS X, just rolled out of the beta phase. In September, we reviewed the first public beta, which initially looked like a promising application. However, issues like the problematic libtransmission library, and the intrusive shareware policy make this client a lot less attractive.

The first major drawback of Xtorrent is that it is not free, which is extremely unusual and awkward for a BitTorrent client. In addition, Xtorrent has a very intrusive shareware policy. If you do not register the application, a floating window that you cannot close gets stuck on your screen, and searches randomly start to fail. To make things even worse, it seems like the application throttles the available bandwidth to 10kbps after an hour of usage.

The second drawback is that Xtorrent’s core is made up of the libtransmission library. This library is known to hammer trackers, and is banned from an increasing number of them, which makes Xtorrent useless for members of Oink, for example.

If you decide to buy Xtorrent you’re mostly paying for the (stunningly) beautiful user-interface, not because its download speeds are the best or because it is the lightest BitTorrent client available for the Mac. Azureus still leads by a wide margin in download speeds, and Transmission is hands down the lightest BitTorrent client for the Mac.

Xtorrent looks good, it integrates well with iTunes, has iPod support and subscribes to RSS feeds. But to be completely honest, it just doesn’t seem like it’s worth the money. Perhaps that’s just because I’m a Windows user. Paying for software just isn’t in my blood.

Source: Xtorrent 1.0 Review

I can’t really tell how accurate the stats for the swarm are. It looks like Poland, the country where p2pmonitor.com originates, is overrepresented. Apart from this, it is fun to see where all the bits and pieces come from, and it makes you realize how global a BitTorrent swarm actually is.

It would even be better if you were able to hook it up to your own BitTorrent client, so you can pay leechers a visit if their share ratio is not what it’s supposed to be. Perhaps an idea for a future release of this tool?

Try for yourself.

Source: Tracking a BitTorrent Swarm in Google Earth

The maximum upload speed is by far the most important setting. It might sound strange to some, but you should always cap your upload speed to reach the best download speeds. Your connection is (sort of) like a pipeline (or tube if you prefer), if you max out your upload speed the pipe will be fully used, which means there’s not enough space left for the files you are downloading. The calculator recommends to set it at 80% of your maximum, I agree with that. People with high-speed connections might go a bit higher, and set is at 85% or even 90%.

Some people find that when they are seeding, browsing the web becomes sluggish. This is due to a badly configured upload speed in their BitTorrent client. When you have the correct upload speed entered into your client, browsing the web is noticeably quicker and seeding becomes almost transparent.

How to configure your maximum upload speed?

uTorrent: options > preferences > connection
Azureus: tools > options > transfer
Bitcomet: try this ?

Here at TorrentFreak we also wrote some post about optimizing BitTorrent download speeds, might be worth the read if you want to know more.

Read more on optimizing your BitTorrent Speed.

Source: Calculate Your Optimal BitTorrent Settings

(Correct at 13:00GMT)

eMule Plus just missed the Top10, sitting where it does at number 11 with 21,018,700 downloads and is backed up by FTP project FileZilla at number 13 with 19,944,891 gets.

The seasoned file-sharer is only too aware of how important the Open Source software movement is to their cause and SourceForge’s stats appear to reinforce that. I wonder how long it will take the fresh-faced BitTorrent client Halite to break the Top 10? It’s currently ranked 8,117 with 8,848 downloads. 2008? 2009? Why not give it a try!

Source: P2P Projects Dominate SourceForge Top10

However, RedSwoosh assured us that future versions will embed perfectly within Firefox, more so than the open source equivalent BitFox. They see a bright future for the Firefox extension, as well as their desktop client. A RedSwoosh employee, who prefers to stay anonymous, told TorrentFreak that their client will be more popular than uTorrent, the popular Windows client that was recently acquired by BitTorrent Inc:

“One year from now, we’ll have the most popular torrent client on the planet. The fastest. The easiest. Hands down. We’ve basically rewritten the entire BT protocol. Bram [Cohen] is going to shit his pants when he takes our client for a spin.”

Personally I think that RedSwoosh is a bit overconfident. It might not be a good idea to downplay uTorrent and BitFox, before they have a working BitTorrent client themselves. Perhaps they are frustrated by the fact that BitTorrent managed to dominate P2P traffic in just a couple of years. I mean, stating that your company was founded before BitTorrent on your “about us” page wont impress many people. It might be a good idea to stop talking, and start coding. At least they will please Mark Cuban, one of the biggest investors in RedSwoosh, who doesn’t seem to be a BitTorrent fan himself.

It is hard to judge this extension from this initial beta version, but it’s good to see that people have started working on adding BitTorrent support to Firefox, something that Opera has had for months now.

In the meanwhile, feel free to test the internal beta release of FoxTorrent (Windows only).

Update: RedSwoosh CEO Travis Kalanick apologized for the statements released by one of his part-time employees.

Source: FoxTorrent: Another BitTorrent Firefox Extension

Once a torrent is downloaded, Ted will automatically launch it in your default BitTorrent client, in my case, Transmission. If your BitTorrent client has the option to delete the original torrent once it has been imported, the whole process can be made very clean, with no traces or files left behind.

The simplicity of Ted is reminiscent of LimeWire, the P2P application that made downloading mp3s easier than surfing the web. The only problem is that you need to have a BitTorrent client installed. I’m guessing that the Opera browser with its built-in BitTorrent functionality would do. Ubuntu users might have it the best, since the OS comes with a version of the mainline client pre-installed.

Ted is not yet perfect, and still needs some work. Something funny I noticed was that while setting it up, it asked me whether I wanted it to start minimised in the system tray. Mac OS X doesn’t have a system tray! It’s quite obvious that Ted was originally written for Windows.

Torrent Episode Downloader (Ted) is completely free and open source, and can be downloaded from the official site.

Source: Subscribe to TV Shows with Torrent Episode Downloader

The findings are quite shocking, but at the same time good news for filesharers who receive DMCA notices from their ISP. Ben found what some of us already expected. BayTSP only records who connects to the tracker, and has no proof that the alleged pirates actually tried to download infringing content. BayTSP merely collects IP addresses and forwards them to anti-piracy organizations. The anti-piracy then send a letter to your ISP, accusing you of sharing copyrighted material.

The really scary thing about this is that it is extremely easy for other people to make you receive a DMCA notice from your ISP, and possibly get disconnected if that happens more than once. As Ben points out, one way to make someone connect to a fake tracker (don’t try this at home) is by letting them click on a link like this:

http://tracker.com:12345/announce?info_hash=579CC43E4D6.

Their IP will then be recorded by the fake tracker, and they will probably receive an infringement notice soon after that. Even if they’ve never heard of BitTorrent at all! Another way to set someone up is by using “peer exchange“. All you have to do is enter someone else’s address, and the fake tracker will record it.

All this is actually good news for people who receive these DMCA notices. As Ben points out in his post: “If your ISP forwards a DMCA notice from these guys, point them here. This research suggests that they have no evidence of wrong-doing. If ISPs learn that the folks sending them DMCA notices are not being completely honest, they may be willing to reconsider their position about how they respond to the notices.”

Source: IP Harvesting: Filesharers Guilty Until Proven Innocent

Hey!Watch has really simplified the whole process of sharing a video over BitTorrent. Once you enter the YouTube URL on the site, it’ll fetch the video and create a torrent out of it. The only catch is that you must be using a BitTorrent client like Azureus or BitTornado, that supports the webseeding protocol.

How legal the service Hey!Watch offers is has yet to be questioned, but I doubt scraping video sharing sites like YouTube and offering videos for download, normally or over BitTorrent, is in accordance with those sites’ terms of service agreements. A while ago, Michael Arrington at TechCrunch was sent a cease and desist letter for putting up a YouTube download tool on his site.

The problem with Hey!Watch is that after you encode a certain number of videos, it asks you to upgrade your account, which costs, at a minimum, $4.99 a month. Free accounts are limited to 10 encodings per month, and all videos can’t be longer than 10 minutes. I guess I can see how something like this might be useful, but personally, I’d much rather just use the VideoDownloader Firefox extension or an application like PodTube. Everything doesn’t need BitTorrent.

Source: Create Torrents out of YouTube Videos

But now he goes on to say that although content creators can profit from BitTorrent, users are getting screwed. Why? Here are his reasons.

Conflicting Clients

End Users don’t understand how P2P works

The P2P model of seeding is a HUGE problem for those [...] with bandwidth constraints or per bit or per minute costs

There is a misconception that there is bandwidth savings for the end user

On conflicting clients he says, “When multiple clients are installed on a PC, not only does that create confusion among users, its a ‘last installed, first in charge’ approach. THat approach and lack of respect for other clients will lead to user configuration problems.”

Okay, number one, if you’re referring to file associations, ie. the most recently installed app is associated with the file type, then this “problem” is not limited to BitTorrent clients. Everything from graphic editors (Photoshop, Gimp) to music management applications (iTunes, WinAmp) do this. Secondly, if this causes confusion among users, then how do millions of people manage to get their music into iTunes and sync it to their iPods without accidentally having their mp3s added to the Windows Media Player library? This “lack of respect” isn’t so much about BitTorrent client developers trying to steal users from their competitors, as it is about how operating systems function today.

Onto point two. “End Users dont understand how P2P works, and once they do, they get concerned about giving up bandwidth.”

I hear BitTorrent transfers make up about one third of all traffic on the Internet these days. It seems rather likely that end users do in fact understand how P2P works. And unless their other online activities are hindered by BitTorrent or P2P, I don’t see users really having a problem with the uploads. Most don’t even bother uploading once their file has been download, and since the majority of users download torrents from public trackers, they aren’t forced to either.

Mark’s third point, “The P2P model of seeding is a HUGE problem for those using wireless broadband with bandwidth constraints or per bit or per minute costs. People are going to wake up and find that they owe Verizon, Sprint, whoever a lot more than they ever thought possible because they installed a client on their Laptops. That could lead to these networks blocking the protocol.”

Point three actually makes sense. The real problem here is miscommunication. In developing countries like India, ISPs milk customers for money by charging them for every MB downloaded, and in some cases, for every minute spent online. Some ISPs (Sify, for one) even lie about unlimited plans and have per-day limits (eg. 200 MB), which, if exceeded, cause the number of days the plan is valid for (usually a month) to be reduced every time the download limit is excedded. Someone I know actually ran up a bill of several hundred dollars because he thought he was on an unlimited plan, whereas in reality his ISP hadn’t processed his request to change plans. But as BitTorrent and P2P grow in popularity, users are quickly starting to demand ‘unlimited’ plans. If you look at the trend, ISPs are more likely to cash in on the P2P phenomenon and offer unlimited plans for a premium than start blocking protocols. And although per-bit and per-minute plans are widespread in developing countries, I don’t know how much of a problem they are to European, Australian and North American users.

Cuban’s last point is, “There is a misconception that there is bandwidth savings for the end user. If you want to download a 1gb size file, 1gb of data will be delivered to your PC. There is no savings of bandwidth on the client side. In fact, the client is charged a bandwidth premium because after they have received the entire file, they are asked to particpate in the peering by delivering parts of the file to other users.”

Guess what, the end user doesn’t care if he’s uploading bits while downloading. Unlike hosting providers, the user incurs no cost from constantly uploading data. It doesn’t matter, as long as he can go about his other activities. And unless he’s on a per-bit or per-minute plan, no “bandwidth premiums” are going to be charged to him. Also, no one is asking the user to “participate in the peering” (or simply, seed) once his download is complete. That is only a requirement of select private trackers.

When it comes to utilising BitTorrent in business, as part of a content store, I think Cuban’s looking at it the wrong way. When the various BitTorrent stores (BitTorrent.com, Zudeo.com) are up and running, content creators are not going to be getting a free ride. Users are not going to pay the same price they do at conventional stores like the iTunes Store and Amazon Unbox. Why should they? They’re acting as servers for content creators and are distributing content for no charge at all. But since money isn’t being deducted from their bank accounts, and seeding a torrent is not really affecting their web browsing, users are okay with uploading.

I’m open to the possibility that I’m dead wrong. I don’t know, maybe Cuban is right. Maybe BitTorrent is in fact doomed, and the video streaming technologies he pioneered with Broadcast.com in the 90s will make a major comeback. I mean, who uses BitTorrent these days? Just a bunch of pirates, soon to be exiled to metal platform in the middle of the North Sea. Right? Right.

What do you think? Are the days of P2P over? Is the the balkanisation of BitTorrent imminent?

Creative Commons photograph by kk+.

Source: Mark Cuban: BitTorrent is Doomed

Here’s what you need to do:

That’s it, you’re done. Now whenever you send your IM account that’s logged in at home a torrent file, it’ll automatically start downloading it! A simple, yet effective solution.

Have you already tried this, and has it worked for you?

Source: A Simple Way to Remotely Download Torrents on the Mac

Today’s mobile phones are often full featured media players, with enough space to store hundreds of songs, or several movies. Bluetooth and Wi-Fi connections make it easy to share these files with friends.

Matt Phillips, communications manager for the British anti-piracy organization BPI thinks this form of piracy is no real threat to the music industry yet. “While swapping songs via Bluetooth is a concern for the industry, it hasn’t caused the same problems as illegal p2p filesharing, as it’s copying on a one-to-one, rather than one-to-millions basis,” he said.

Sharing files via mobile phones has great potential. We’ve already reported on a BitTorrent client designed to run on a mobile phone. And BitTorrent founder Bram Cohen said that one of the reasons BitTorrent Inc acquired uTorrent was to port it to embedded systems on TVs, cellphones, and other non-PC platforms.

Source: Kids use their Phones to Share Music

“If this new technology works well, Fabchannel will not need more expensive datacenters, streaming servers and huge amounts of bandwidth to distribute live webcasts to the fast growing number of Fabchannel visitors from around the world,” says Bauke on the Fabchannel Blog.

Fabchannel used the Tribler BitTorrent client for the experiment. The Tribler team is planning to implement BitTorrent powered streaming service in their client, which could save popular streaming websites like YouTube or Google Video a lot of money. Johan Pouwelse, co-ordinator of the Tribler project told TorrentFreak that they are currently experimenting with “peer assisted” YouTube videos.

Source: Fabchannel experiments with BitTorrent-powered concerts