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?

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

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.

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

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.

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

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)

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

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:

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

The widget is created by TyrantBuilt, he also included quick links to TorrentFreak’s latest articles, and the TorrentFreak homepage.

The widget currently supports the following sites:

* bitoogle.com
* BitTorrent.com
* fenopy.com
* btjunkie.org
* demonoid.com
* hypertorrent.com
* btmon.com
* mininova.org
* myBitTorrent.com
* newtorrents.info
* thepiratebay.org
* torrentportal.com
* torrentreactor.net
* torrentspy.com
* torrentz.com
* yotoshi.com

This is the first release of the widget, TyrantBuilt is planning to add more BitTorrent search engines in the near future. If you’re missing your favorite site, or if you want to suggest an option, please drop a comment and we will pass it through to him.

For now, enjoy.

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

Fenopy is constantly looking for features that may enhance the “user experience”, and usability of the site. Last month they implemented their “share on your blog” feature, a visually attractive way for bloggers to share torrents, without running a tracker.

TyrantBuilt, the developer of the widget told TorrentFreak that he will release updated versions on a weekly basis. He even offered to make a TorrentFreak widget for the latest articles, pretty cool.

Fenopy Widget (Macupdate)

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

uTorrent is currently only available for Windows. But that isn’t going to stop us from running it in OS X.

We currently have two ways of doing this. The first and more obvious way to do this would be to install Parallels and just run it as we would any other Windows program. The second is with an exciting new program (not so new for Linux users) called CrossOver. CrossOver is still in beta, but is already a very usable and stable alternative to installing a copy of the entire Windows operating system on your Mac, which is essentially what you’re doing when you run Parallels.

So, here’s what you need to do:
Sadly, CrossOver only works on Intel-Macs, so don’t try this on a PPC one (I won’t be responsible if it blows up in your face :-P).

1. First off, go download CrossOver Beta, it’s available as a free download on the developer’s site. Once you have it installed, you will be able to run quite a few Microsoft programs, as well as other small Windows programs within OS X. uTorrent is one of those other small programs.
2. Next, you need a copy of uTorrent. After you’ve downloaded the Windows executable (utorrent.exe), double-click it and CrossOver should start bouncing in the dock with the little .exe symbol displayed on it. After a few seconds uTorrent will load up.
3. That’s it, you’re done! You’re running uTorrent in Mac OS X!

Waitasecond, slow down. There are still some things you need to know…

The file structure that you see while trying to download a torrent is a tad confusing. You see, CrossOver tricks programs into believing that there’s a C: drive on your Mac, when there actually is none.
Make sure you do not save your files in the C: drive. You can get to your user folder by choosing:

Desktop > / > Users > Yourusername

Another annoying thing is the fact that you can’t just untick files you don’t want when trying to download selectively. You have to right-click on the file and choose “select” or “deselect.”

But seriously, do I really want to run a BitTorrent client that has to be emulated through CrossOver? No. For me this was just a fun side-project. Just like attempting to run IE6 in OS X. A major drawback is that CrossOver hogs too much RAM to be able to constantly run in the background. The day there’s something like Rosetta for Windows applications, it’ll open up a whole new market to developers. Even better would be a Mac-version of uTorrent, which is incidentally in the developer’s plan of action.

Have you tried running uTorrent in OS X? Do you think it’s worth the trouble? We want to know.

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

The interview:

TorrentFreak: What made you decide to develop BitRocket?

Julian: I wanted to develop a BitTorrent client for Mac OS for a while now. Just before I went to WWDC I had some spare time and started researching my options. Initially I thought using the libTransmission core would be a good base. I worked with that for a week or 2 and realized that it just wasn’t powerful enough for my needs. I have since scrapped all of that and rebuilt the client from scratch based around Rasterbar’s libtorrent core. That is what we see today as BitRocket.

TorrentFreak: Many people criticise libTransmission for being not up to the mark. What didn’t you find good/powerful enough about it?

Julian: It’s a very unfinished and unpolished library. There are some major tracker announce issues which are frowned upon by quite a few tracker site administrators. There is no UDP tracker support, no .torrent creation support, no multi-tracker support, no Kademlia DHT, no Selective Downloading, the list goes on.

TorrentFreak: Even as a beta release BitRocket is being praised for its intuitive user-interface and its many features. What do you think makes BitRocket different and better than any of other clients out there?

Julian: I don’t like to use the term “better”, it’s different that is for sure. BitRocket is not being built to be a slim client such as Mainline or Transmission. It’s out to be an alternative to advanced clients such as Azureus, that is the route I am headed.

TorrentFreak: A few bloggers have written about BitRocket and suggested features like searching without leaving the application. What new features do you plan to implement in upcoming releases?

Julian: I like the idea of searching within-side the application, however the thing that worries me is that it would rely on basically screen-scrapping torrent sites. This is bad because the BitRocket developers would always have to make sure that was working and if it failed because of a simple change to a torrent site then that would require an immediate “patch and release”. Personally I would like to see a DHT layer that allows for distributed horizonless torrent searching, however we have seen this fail with applications such as eXeem, but I believe it can be done effectively. Beyond this at some point most of the Azureus features should be implemented, it’s my role model.

TorrentFreak: Where are you from? Is BitRocket a side-project or are you working full-time on it?

Julian: I currently reside in the suburbs of Atlanta, Georgia. BitRocket is a side project, I work full time on the Mac OS version of Gizmo Project.

TorrentFreak: What’s your standpoint on file-sharing and the BitTorrent protocol?

Julian: Heh, it’s funny especially with Open Source software. Developers are all concerned about their licensing schemes and enforcing them, and on the flip side your building an application that in retrospect goes against licensing all together, for the most part. I fully support file-sharing and the BitTorrent protocol whether it is downloading the latest Ubuntu iso or the hot movie of the summer. Don’t get me wrong I have purchased and and currently own over 200 DVD’s, most of which were bought because I first downloaded the torrent. I think the mpaa needs to rethink their tactics, they still “do not get it”.

Stay tuned for our upcoming review of BitRocket.

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

Based on the feature list it looks like Bitrocket could give the existing BitTorrent clients some tough competition.

Bitrocket supports essential features like:

DHT: Support for “trackerless” torrents. DHT keeps the torrent alive if the tracker goes offline.
Torrent Creator: Create and share torrents.
RSS: Bitrocket has RSS support. With RSS you can automatically download your favorite torrents.
UPnP Port Mapping: If your router supports UPnP, you don’t need to forward any ports.

Other features like selective downloading, http-seeding, and multi tracker support are supported by the library Bitrocket uses might be implemented in the near future.

Stay tuned for a Bitrocket review.

Bitrocket Homepage

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

In this article we will highlight the most popular Mac BitTorrent applications and compare their features.

Let’s start with the granddaddy of them all, Bram Cohen’s self-titled BitTorrent application. It’s gotten kind of confusing since he named the protocol, his company and his application all BitTorrent. BitTorrent OSX is a very (and I mean very) basic application. It’s as feature-full as Safari’s download box and that’s not saying much. Now some people wouldn’t mind something like that, but if you’re looking for simplicity Transmission is a much better choice. BitTorrent OSX also takes an age to start up on my MacBook Pro.

Transmission is my current Mac B.T. client of choice. It’s an Open Source project, maintained by the developer of the popular Mac DVD ripping application, HandBrake. Transmission does its job well. A neat feature it offers is the ability to view download and upload rates in the dock, so I don’t even have to open up the program to check how my downloads are going. Another great thing Transmission does is copy the .torrent file to its support folder, then trash the original file from my desktop thereby leaving no mess of files behind for me to clean up. Now just like everything Transmission has its flaws, the biggest of which is that Demonoid, a leading BitTorrent directory has banned it on ocassion! They say it doesn’t adhere to set standards.

Azureus is a cross-platfrom BitTorrent client written in Java. It’s slightly slower than all the other native Mac B.T. applications, but has features none of the others can boast of. Therefore it remains one of the most popular clients, even on the Mac. The one reason I have both Azureus and Transmission installed at any given time is because Transmission doesn’t allow me to select which files I want from a particular torrent. We call the feature ‘Selective Downloading’ and Azureus is sadly the only popular Mac B.T. client that lets me do that! There are also a number of great plug-ins for Azureus that let you do all sorts of things like subscribe to RSS feeds with .torrent enclosures.

Tomato Torrent is a very plain alternative, seriously lacking in eye-candy and begging for a new icon (and maybe a new name too). It’s based on the official BitTorrent client. I think it desrves a mention because I know a few people who swear by it. It comes with an AppleScript file that you can place in folders you want to download to. When you want to download a torrent to a specific folder, you just drag the .torrent file onto the piece of AppleScript to initiate the transfer. One pro is that it’s an extremely light client that hogs very little RAM. It’s the closet thing to uTorrent on the Mac.

Bits on Wheels is a slightly out-dated (last updated Sep. ‘05), yet popular Mac BitTorrent client. It claims to be “the first 100% native BitTorrent client for the Macintosh” as it is written in Objective-C and Cocoa.

Bits on Wheels is freeware but not Open Source. One of its main features is a visual 3D Swarm with which you can observe what’s actually going on under the hood, how many seeders and leechers you’re connected to and the bits transferring between everyone. Bits on Wheels is very OSeXy (heh!), it’s how I’d imagine the default OS X BitTorrent downloader to look if there was one. If not to use the first native OS X B.T. client, I’d download it just to fly around in 3D chasing bits.

Conclusion
Clearly, feature-wise Azureus is the winner. Bits on Wheels and Transmission are both great alternatives to BitTorrent OSX. If only Bits on Wheels would be updated more often and Transmission become standards-compliant and both of them allow Selective Downloading, they might start taking back some market share. And lets not forget the light weighted tomato. Tomato Torrent could use a few more features and better interface, but it too is a great BitTorrent client.

Worthy Mentions
Acquisition is a Mac p2p program like Limewire that accesses popular file-sharing networks like Gnutella to search for files. It also doubles as a BitTorrent client. Although I have never been able to achieve superior download speeds that I do with Transmission or Azureus, it’s iTunes-integration is sweet.

From version 9 Opera the popular cross-platform browser has implemented a simple, built-in BitTorrent client. It’s supposedly “targeted at novice users.”

Windows Clients Comparison
BitTorrent Client Features (wiki)

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

The so called “internet investigator probably did a search on keywords like “microsoft” and “office” and didn’t even take a look at the actual torrents (probably automated).

The notice states “The information in this notice is accurate, and I hereby certify under penalty of perjury that I am authorized to act on behalf of Microsoft, the owner of the copyright(s) in the work(s) identified above. I have a good faith belief that none of the materials or activities listed above have been authorized by Microsoft, its agents, or the law.”

While sorting through the links that they demanded be removed administrators of myBitTorrent.com found themselves perplexed. Among the usual dozen or so Windows and Microsoft Office takedown requests were several for Xandros Linux, and other non-Microsoft products.

To start with myBitTorrent.com is not a torrent tracker site, rather it works similar to Google and simply caches the torrents and provides uses with a useful easy to search index of the majority of the torrents available throughout the web. Basically myBitTorrent.com provides links, to links (torrents) to files which may or may not be of copyright material, they simply have no idea of what the material is no more than Google really knows if a site or files they link to contains copyright material and/or links to copyright material.

Read More

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