TorrentFreak

Millions of BitTorrent users are unknowingly DDoSing websites because ‘publishers’ of popular torrents mistakenly add website URLs as trackers. The DDoSes drag websites down and their operators have very few options to mitigate these ‘attacks’. But, thanks to a new BitTorrent protocol enhancement this is about to change. This week Vuze becomes the first client to add support for DDoS protection alongside calls from one of the “victims” for other developers to follow suit.

After a brief leave of absence, the famous Denis.Stalker BitTorrent tracker has returned under a new name. Worries about the recent US domain seizures has resulted in the move from a .com domain to that of the well respected hacker group Chaos Computer Club. Meanwhile, The Pirate Bay is offering to reboot the new tracker by adding it to all their newly uploaded torrents.

A new Open Source BitTorrent tracker set to be released in September promises to boost download speeds by up to 150% and decrease the load BitTorrent users put on ISP networks by 20 to 50 percent. Based on the widely used OpenTracker software, the new BitTorrent tracker aims to overcome many of BitTorrent’s current limitations.

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.

The Pirate Bay has always made it clear that they don’t obey takedown requests from content owners. That doesn’t stop Hollywood from going after the Pirate Bay’s users, however, and they do so on a large scale. The Pirate Bay is well aware of these pirate tracking outfits, and does what it can to give them a hard time. Reporting fake peers is one of the tricks they use.

In an attempt to make BitTorrent more secure, and to reduce some of the load on their own tracker, The Pirate Bay has started to remove all duplicate, dead and anti-pirate trackers from the torrents they host. These changes will improve the trackers’ performance, and increase ‘security’ for its users.