Today BitTorrent Inc. announced the first stable release of the more mature (1.5) branch of the Mac client, meaning that it has matured to a point where beta testing is no longer needed.

Compared to the initial release three years ago the client has come a long way, and feature wise it has become competitive to older Mac clients such as Transmission and Vuze.

One of the major updates in the new stable release is the ability to access uTorrent remotely, either in a different location or via a mobile interface such as the iPad.

Other new features include support for RSS feeds, a scheduler and advanced controls.

Coinciding with the new Mac release of uTorrent (and Mainline) BitTorrent Inc. also launched a completely revamped version of the web interface, which is now fully functional on the iPad as well.

The latest Mac release can be downloaded over here.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Now available for download.

µTorrent for Mac Beta – New Features:

* µTorrent Remote: Simple, secure access to µTorrent from anywhere. No complicated network configuration required. Add and manage your torrents from any browser, mobile browser and even an Android native app.

* Feeds: Subscribe and follow torrent RSS feeds right inside µTorrent. Set up Smart Feeds to auto-magically fetch torrents and start downloads for you.

* Scheduler: Now you can set µTorrent to start, limit and stop activity at regular intervals throughout the week. This is a valuable feature for those of you stymied by metered and shared networks.

* Advanced controls and info: Want more control and information about what’s happening behind the scenes? Upgraded logging features include much more detail. Also, feel free to access the double-secret-super-advanced preferences (they’re hidden behind CMD+OPT+,). Use sparingly and wisely.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

We thought it would be interesting to compare the users of different operating systems on their sharing behavior. Therefore we decided to take a closer look at the share ratios of Windows, Mac and Linux software on The Pirate Bay. The results are quite interesting and indicate that Windows users share twice as much as their Mac counterparts.

In order to calculate the share ratio we simply looked at all the seeders (completed downloads) and leechers (still downloading) on the torrents in the software category on The Pirate Bay. The share ratio is the number of seeders divided by the number of leechers. So, the higher the ratio, the more users share.

In the table below you can see that there are much more torrents for Windows software, 49345 compared to 2952 for Mac software and 1271 for Linux. Nevertheless, those downloading Windows software tend to share the files for longer, even compared to the Linux users.

Not listed in the table, but worthy of note, are the average number of downloaders per torrent. Mac software is in the lead here with 22 downloaders, followed by Windows with 9 and Linux with a measly average of 4 peers per torrent. Although we can conclude that those who download Windows software share more compared to others, the ratios for Mac and Linux software aren’t bad either. It can get a lot worse – Xbox 360 downloaders don’t even make a 0.3 share ratio.

Of course, the term ‘pirate’ obviously doesn’t apply to all downloaders either, especially not for the Linux group. It is interesting to see the huge differences in share ratios between the different categories though; perhaps Microsoft should consider building their next campaign around these stats. Sharing is caring, right?

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

In 2006, uTorrent was acquired by BitTorrent Inc., who continued to develop the application, and promised a Mac version.

The uTorrent for Mac projects started roughly two years ago. Initially it was based on libtorrent, but last year the development team decided to make the client a port of its Windows counterpart. A few months ago, an early Alpha release of the Mac version had leaked to the public, the official release, however, has some significant improvements and is much more mature.

The Mac release only runs on Leopard/Intel Macs at the moment, and is still in Beta. Simon Morris, BitTorrent’s VP of Product Management told TorrentFreak that they are working on getting the bugs in PowerPC fixed as well as back-porting to Tiger. “We’re obviously really psyched that we finally got this beta out there. This is indeed a port of the Utorrent source on top of OSX,” Simon said.

“On Windows, uTorrent is by far the best Bittorrent client out there on a power:performance basis. Following on from uTorrent’s roots, we have continued to focus on only features that users really want, and we have avoided bloating up on lots of clutter. We’re now looking forward to bringing that specialness to the world of Mac-lovers,” Simon added.

uTorrent for Mac can be downloaded over here. Since it is still in Beta, the uTorrent team encourages early adopters to post bugs and annoyances in the uTorrent forums.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

The Mac version came later than expected. One of the initial developers was taken off the project, and the others were focusing more on the Windows release. This August, however, uTorrent developer Greg Hazel told TorrentFreak that the first public Alpha version of the Mac release would be ready in a few weeks.

It now seems that someone has beat the uTorrent developers to it, as an early release was posted on The Pirate Bay a few hours ago. A leak of the BitTorrent client, developed in Cocoa, seemed to be inevitable. As mentioned before, it is an Alpha version, and not all the features seem to work like they should (search is broken), but it’s definitely a good start.

Simon Morris, BitTorrent’s VP of Product Management told TorrentFreak in a response to the leak: “Apparently an internal development build of uTorrent for Mac has been leaked publicly. It has been referred to as an “alpha” quality build. The unfortunate part is that we did not intentionally release this build and would strongly recommend folks not to use it as it isn’t yet complete or stable enough to be released to the public.”

“The good part is that this is a testament to the fact that we’re serious about releasing uTorrent for Mac in the near future. (And counter to recent rumors, this is indeed the uTorrent code-base ported onto OSX, not just Libtorrent with a Mac UI). Hopefully more news coming soon. We have a sign-up page on the uTorrent website.”

Most of the people who have tried the application are reporting that the application is fully functional, but that it’s clearly an Alpha release. Nevertheless, the first reviews are quite positive. “It seems like the uTorrent every Mac-owner has been waiting for is coming,” an early user told TorrentFreak.

We posted some screenshots of the leaked Alpha release below, click to enlarge.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Brokep, one of the site’s admins, released the widget in a post on the Pirate Bay blog. He also mentioned the opening up of the site in the near future, with the release of a public API. This will make it easy for developers to use data from the pirate bay in widgets like this, or other applications.

For those who haven’t seen it yet, BBC’s technology lifestyle program Click had an item on The Pirate Bay and interviewed Brokep (Peter) and TiAMO (Fredrik) in their natural habitat.

They once again stick it to the movie and music cartels, with Brokep commenting on the morality of downloading copyrighted content: “I don’t care, that’s the big thing, I don’t care. If I want it, I take it, ’cause I can. It might be moral to some people but I think it’s up to me to decide.” You can watch the full show over here.

Download The Pirate Bay Top 10 Dashboard widget (92kb ZIP)

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

David Watanabe, the developer, has now released Xtorrent 1.1 (beta). Here’s what’s new:

Interface changes
Xtorrent has gotten what the developer calls a “newly refreshed user interface”. New, sleeker-looking toolbar buttons that resemble those in the Leopard Finder, including a number of other interface tweaks have been added.

Selective Downloading
What was one of the most requested features, followed by encryption, is the ability to pick and choose which files you want to download from inside a torrent. Xtorrent finally lets you do this. Up until recently, Azureus was the only Mac BitTorrent client that could do this. Transmission added the feature a few weeks ago.

File Prioritisation
You can now tell Xtorrent which files in a torrent you want to give more priority to and have downloaded first. This was another oft-requested feature, according to Watanabe.

Xtorrent is quickly becoming the uTorrent of the Macintosh. Not uTorrent Mac, which we gave you a preview of, but the Mac equiavalent of uTorrent Windows. It’s light, has many important features and has a pretty UI. The only difference is that Xtorrent is shareware and uTorrent is not. But it’s widely known that the Mac community is a lot more open to shareware than most Windows users.

Unfortunately, Xtorrent still has its drawbacks. Its intrusive shareware policy is still very much there, rearing its ugly head at people without licenses. And some popular private trackers explicitly ban Xtorrent from connecting to torrents and downloading them. OiNK, possibly the most exclusive private BitTorrent site, whose invites are highly sought after, and till they banned the practise, were auctioned off on eBay for ridiculous amounts of dough, has banned Xtorrent. Here’s the message OiNK users who try to download with Xtorrent get:

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Shortly after we published, we had a contact from Milen Georgiev Dzhumerov, a regular reader of TorrentFreak and Mac software programmer. “When I saw the Tracker Checker I thought it was a great idea – so simple and useful” he said, “I’m waiting to start uni in October, I’ve got nothing better to do except write software! As I am a Mac user, I decided to create a Mac version of the app.”

The application arrives in .DMG format at just 221kb. Full installation instructions are included in the README file but it’s simply a question of dragging the software’s icon (created by YellowIcon) into the ‘Applications’ folder.

Launching is achieved by browsing to the app and double-clicking it. The .DMG file comes with a trackers.xml file (containing the tracker information) and is pre-configured with 67 trackers. Simply navigate to the .DMG, select the trackers.xml and import it.

There are 4 main buttons on the toolbar (created by Matt Ball Design):

Reload – Manually “reloads” all trackers
Add – Adds a new tracker to the list
Remove – Removes the currently selected tracker
Info – Opens the “Tracker Inspector” allowing the modification of tracker properties.

In the lower right corner there is a setting for selecting how many concurrent connections to open when checking the trackers. Tested on an 8mbit down connection, 15-20 connections produced ideal results.

Positive match type in the ‘Inspector’ is defined as marking the tracker as open if the find string is found and negative is just reversing the result of whatever the positive is returning, i.e if it doesn’t find the string you have selected negative, the tracker will be marked as open.

One of the criticisms leveled at the PC version of Tracker Checker 2 was that it checked sites for signups at a too regular interval of just 60 seconds. The Mac version addresses this with the chance for the user to choose the update interval.

Milen goes on to explain that he had another motive to develop the app: “The other reason for doing it was to actually see how good Cocoa stacks up against .NET/Java for simple applications like this one. I wanted to prove to myself that you can write applications in Cocoa rapidly. I would say that the app took me about a day/day and a half of proper work (I’m subtracting the time where I jumped in to play some games or watch a movie). I didn’t encounter any problems when using Apple’s well-designed frameworks and I’m very happy with how it turned out.”

More features are planned for the next release:

- Localization (definitely German + unconfirmed others)
- Growl support
- HTTP authentication and redirection support

Anyone wishing to translate the app, suggest features or report bugs, should get in touch with Milen on gamehack@gmail.com

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

The technical specifications of the device certainly make it possible. It has more than enough cpu power for it, assuming a nice, tightly coded client was written. The built in WiFi (802.11b/g) and use of the EDGE 2.75G wireless network data transfer system allows a fairly widespread availability of reception.

According to one of the developers of the ‘iPhone-binutil‘ project, going by the name ‘geohot’, the only obstacle stopping it from making an application like “iTorrent” happening is their current lack of coding ability for the iPhone. The file system is open, and media players already exist, if for nothing else than playing media from iTunes.

On of the downsides it that, for many, the 3.4Gb free on a brand new phone (or 7.4Gb, if you went for the bigger one) may not be enough to hold much data, but it all depends on what you torrent. Bigger problems are that the battery will last only in the region of 6-8 hours at best (according to Apple’s figures) which isn’t the greatest. Additionally, many users have reported the wifi connections being on the slow side as far as data transfers go. Using EDGE is a lot slower, about 30k/sec max.

Of course, the benefits are that you can carry it around with you, and you have the wide range of content available, with the benefits of torrent file’s typical pricing (free). Of course, time will tell. Meanwhile, the lack of MMS on the iPhone has been a small thorn in the side of many owners. However, there is help at hand in the form of a workaround. More details here

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Slyck posted an article in which they publish statistical data they received from an anonymous source. According to these statistics uTorrent is more than twice as fast as Azureus, something that I find hard to believe.

Here’s what Slyck’s source reports:

Azureus Mac
Max Rate Seen: 297 KB/s
Average Rate: 235 KB/s
Consumed RAM: 155 MB
Average CPU: 20%

µTorrent Mac
Max Rate Seen: 840KB/s
Average Rate: 698 KB/s
Consumed RAM: 14 MB
Average CPU: 6%

Slyck received these stats from an anonymous source. Probably someone working at BitTorrent Inc because these stats are a little subjective to say the least. It is hard to get differences like this without cheating the protocol, something that Gilles BianRosa, CEO of Azureus, agrees with:

“We are not aware of any such stats, and clearly would doubt their validity. BitTorrent is a standard, and clients have, by design, limited ways to optimize transfer speeds. We have implemented features to optimize “around” the protocol, such as PeerExchange, but getting such wide variations without “bastardizing” the protocol beyond recognition (and making it not compliant/compatible in the process) make these numbers look VERY suspicious, if not ridiculous.”

I’ve been in the position to test an Alpha version of the Mac version of BitTorrent and I also tested Azureus’ Mac version and I came up with figures that clearly favor uTorrent, but not as dramatically as the statistics provided by BitTorrent Inc the anonymous source.

I decided to run my own comparison test using the exact same setup for both clients. The results are based on downloading 3 .torrent files that differed in swarm size and file size. Here’s what I found :

Azureus Mac
Max Rate Seen: 1.42 MB/s
Average Rate: 769 KB/s
Consumed RAM: 130 MB
Average CPU: 18%

µTorrent Mac
Max Rate Seen: 1.28 MB/s
Average Rate: 788 KB/s
Consumed RAM: 16 MB
Average CPU: 7%

The results are quite clear. It is hard to conclude that downloads will go faster with Azureus or uTorrent. Perhaps a difference can be found in a scientific and controlled setting, but no significant difference is observed in a real-life setting. One thing is clear though, the huge difference in download speed reported by Slyck’s anonymous source doesn’t make sense.

What we can see from both comparisons is that uTorrent for Mac, just like its Windows counterpart, uses less CPU and RAM. This is definitely a reason for me, and probably a lot of other BitTorrent users with me, to try uTorrent as soon as it’s released.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.