This level of coverage is a great accomplishment for a new torrent site, but the fun didn’t last very long. Those who took a closer look at the site could easily see that TaffyBox was simply using the resources of another torrent site, BTjunkie, without informing the site’s founder.

Needless to say, the BTjunkie team was not amused when they found out and they responded by preventing TaffyBox from accessing the site’s backend. As a result, the newly launched site no longer functions.

“Sites like TaffyBox drain costly resources without putting into the pot. Most sites that utilize our backend reciprocate and when they don’t we ban them,” the founder of BTjunkie told TorrentFreak. “He just ripped off the site and stripped the ads,” he added.

The disconnection which rendered TaffyBox useless didn’t go unnoticed by Jake who runs the site. Just minutes after BTjunkie disallowed the newcomer from using their resources he offered to link back to BTjunkie, but unfortunately for him that is not enough to earn a reprieve.

BTjunkie’s founder explained to TorrentFreak that those who want to use the search have to link to the site’s download page instead of hotlinking the torrents. “You would think the least he would do is put some reference to BTjunkie, not wait until I cut him off and offer to add one link,” he added.

What happened to TaffyBox is probably a good lesson for all the people that want to use existing torrent indexers to create their own torrent search engine. Sites like BTjunkie don’t see any problems in sharing some of their resources, as long as they get something in return. After all, BitTorrent is all about reciprocity.

Update: TaffyBox switched to The Pirate Day and seems to be working again.

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

“So this is my mission control, believe it or not I bought most of this stuff with baccarat winnings,” he told TorrentFreak, while sharing two pictures of his home base with us. Below he walks us through his current setup.

Desktop 1: My fastest desktop is a Dell XPS 630 with Intel® Core™2 E8400, 2GB RAM, 500GB SATA + 1TB external., and Dual nVidia GeForce 9800GT video card. This machine is hooked up to the very nice 25.5″ Samsung Syncmaster 2693HM monitor.

Desktop 2: The computer next to the XPS is a home built Athlon 64 3GHz, 1GB RAM, 250GB SATA, and it’s hooked up to 17″ Samsung SyncMaster 173P.

Laptop: The laptop is the Samsung X460: Intel Core2 Duo P7350, 3GB RAM, 14″ WXGA screen, and weighs only 1.29kg.

Server: The server I’m setting up to send to a data center is the IBM 326m with Opteron 280, 4GB RAM, 73GB 15K SCSI.

Misc: I have a little apple in my diet, I use my jail broken iphone for monitoring servers & tethering on the go. For all my paper work I use the Canon MP620. The speakers & sub are the Altec Lansing VS4221.

To top it off the BTjunkie founder told us that his Internet connection was just upgraded to a 30Mbit connection. Below are the pictures of his current setup and links to the larger sized images. In a few days we continue this series with the workstation of isoHunt’s Gary Fung.

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

Btswarm.org

Btswarm.org is a fast and clean BitTorrent site that is available in 5 different languages. The site currently indexes 107,907 torrents, which represents over 80TB of data. Btswarm supports search based RSS feeds, a great feature that every site should have in my opinion.

SumoTorrent.com

SumoTorrent who recently partnered with FileSoup, one of the oldest BitTorrent communities, collects the BitTorrent stats for our monthly stats post. But, they also serve torrents and offer not only .torrent links but also Azureus magnet links, and DHT links.

One of the things about SumoTorrent that I particularly like is that they have their own tracker, something more BitTorrent sites should do. At the moment 50% of all the torrents on public trackers are tracked by The Pirate Bay All hell would break loose if they were taken down.

FlixFlux.co.uk

FlixFlux is a BitTorrent site that focuses on movie releases. On the frontpage they list the US box office charts, DVD rental charts, and the UK box office charts. If you register you can also keep track of your favorite movies on the site. FlixFlux has a description for every film including the IMDB rating and plans to add movie trailers and for their torrents soon, which is an interesting feature.

A similar site also dedicated to movies torrents is Superfundo, they focus mainly on Scene and aXXo movie releases.

TorrentTAB.com

TorrentTAB is a new BitTorrent meta-search engine that displays the search results in a tabbed view. Personally I’m not a big fan of meta-search engines, but I know others like it. The tabbed searching works quite well. TorrentTAB site currently searches Isohunt, Mininova, Torrentz, BTjunkie, Meganova, and Torrentspy.

JunkNova.com

JunkNova is a torrent review site that keeps you up to date on all the stuff that’s available on BitTorrent, similar to sites like rlslog and hypoh. JunkNova is brought to you by the makers of TorrentScoop, a Google-powered BitTorent search engine.

MicroTor.org

The last site in our list is Microtor, a site that only indexes TV torrents. MicroTor allows you to browse through the available shows and seasons and they also have a brief plot outline for every TV show.

Do you know any new BitTorrent sites that are worth a visit? Feel free to leave a comment!

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

Of course these campaigns were just for “fun”. It was nice to turn their advertising strategy against them, and help some naive BitTorrent users along the way. However, the downside of it all is that they now make money off my ads, which allows them to advertise their crappy BitTorrent clients on other websites, so it’s not really an optimal solution.

Here’s an example of the TorrentFreak ad on the Torrent101 website. If people clicked the link, they were directed to this post about Torrent101.

Luckily, most BitTorrent site admins don’t allow ads for these shady clients on their sites. Brokep from The Pirate Bay said earlier “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.”, and the admins of mininova and btjunkie also banned all ads for these BitTorrent clients on their websites.

People need to be aware that these clients can seriously mess-up up your computer, and the Google adwords campaigns were a fun way to do this. I’m happy to see that Google search is giving a helping hand as well, for free.

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

Mavol immediately decided to relocate the site to a new server. His friends at http://btjunkie.org/ were kind enough to help him out for now. It might take some time for the DNS to update, but in the meantime TorrentScan.com can be accessed here.

Mavol is not the most lucky guy when it comes down to finding a good webhost. Only a few month ago he got screwed over by his (former) webhost who hijacked his domain, and took off. Let’s hope he has more luck with his next webhost, so things can get back to normal soon.

Update: Mavol resolved the dispute with the hosting company, they took the site down for “investigation”, but it’s now back up.

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

One of the btjunkie admins has found a unique way to identify trackers that host these fake files, which makes it easy to efficiently remove them.

Virtually all the servers that spread these fake files are located in Southern California and Las Vegas. The administrators of these servers follow patterns that make it easy to identify them. The content of the trackers and seed amounts make them stand out. There are more unique characteristics, but we wont reveal all the tricks because they could take counter measures. Here are some examples of servers that host and track fake torrents:

Tracker 1, Tracker 2, Tracker 3 & Tracker 4. (Screenshots: One & Two)

All the information was provided to me by one of the admins of btjunkie, who works together on this with other torrent site admins. He says that the MPAA and friends use a variety of tactics. The tracker will either stall everyone at around 90% or the content will just be a blank monochrome screen.

“I really think this is being done by professionals with a budget, that’s a lot of servers to setup and it takes some expertise to setup in the manner that they did it,” says the btjunkie admin. “I don’t think I really need to say who would spend money on something like this.”

Here are some good examples of how these fake torrents clutter up the search results. Virtually all of those X marked torrents are coming from the ip-ranges we mentioned, and are fake files. The good thing is that Torrentportal’s report system is well used by their users.

The server boxes that host these torrents fall in serveral ip-ranges. Here are a few of the ranges that were discovered recently. You can easily add these to the blocklist of your torrent client (if it supports one), filewall, or blocklist manager.

The anti-piracy servers use hostnames like 101tracker.dhcp.biz, aplustorrents.qhigh.com, bitnova.squirly.info, bittorment.ocry.com, and pirate-trakkrz.leet.la. All these hostnames can be traced back to the same IP Ranges, these ranges contain possibly hundreds of fake trackers, so feel free to block them:

A list of infohashes of fake torrents can be found over here.

Note that it’s not only MPAA material that is hosted on these fake trackers. It is more likely that the servers are owned and operated by an organization that logs IP addresses for several copyright owners and or anti-piracy organizations.

Update: according to one of out readers these ip-ranges belong to “Media Defender“, a company that is hired by copyright owners, to log IP-addresses. This reader, who worked for Media Defender until recently, confirmed that some of the torrents that were mentioned, are indeed on the MPAA’s list.

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

All three websites continued to grow in 2006, especially in the first half of the year. The graph below shows that they all entered the Alexa top 500 this spring, which means that they are among the 500 most visited websites on the Internet.

Over the past 6 months the traffic ranks began to stabilize. Here’s a graph of the traffic rank of October, November and December. As you can see, the traffic is quite stable in this period, apart from the returning spikes in the weekends.

Other BitTorrent sites that made it to the 1000 most popular sites on the Web in 2006 are:

329. Isohunt.com
454. Demonoid
642. Torrentz.com
962. Puretna.com (adult content)

The award for the most effective advertising campaign goes to BTjunkie. Overnight they jumped from a traffic rank of 20,000 to a spot among the 2,000 most visited sites, and they managed to keep the people in.

We reported before that BitTorrent sites are slowly taking over the Internet. And it is not only the larger search engines and trackers that continue to grow. I wouldn’t be surprised if the number of torrent sites in Alexa’s top 1000 doubles in 2007. Let’s see what the new year brings.

Note: Alexa’s data gathering is quite dubious. The exact figures may be not be completely accurate, but it is a great tool (especially the traffic rank) to compare sites within the same niche and to get a global impression of traffic shifts over time.

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