The BitTorrent community is growing at an almost alarming rate, its popularity is surging and more people than ever before are discovering its wonders. The mighty Suprnova captured the imagination of millions around the world, giving huge momentum to this file-sharing phenomenon, collecting millions of daily hits before its demise.

Today, sites like Mininova and The Pirate Bay are enjoying unprecedented levels of interest. Mininova served up 1 billion torrents in their first 2 years of operations, then stormed to 2 billion in just a further 6 months whilst capturing almost double the daily traffic of Suprnova in its prime.

The Pirate Bay almost needs no introduction, such is its size and comparable infamy. A jaw-dropping BitTorrent behemoth, gathering thousands of visitors each day who between them download 4 million torrents. Its vistors make 86 searches per second, its servers handle 1150 requests in the same timeframe and it tracks 50% of the world’s torrents.

That’s 50% of ALL public torrents. That is a dangerously high number of eggs in a basket that’s frequently coming under an attack of one form or another.

With the authorities always looking to take the biggest scalps to grab the headlines, sites such as LokiTorrent and EliteTorrents stood no chance, especially considering the huge financial implications of residing in the USA. Major BitTorrent site admins realized this and mainly moved their operations to the Netherlands, a location which is now looking less of a safe haven. The Dutch situation is of particular concern – there are dozens of strategically important torrent sites hosted there.

So what is the solution? brokep of The Pirate Bay has some thoughts that I happen to completely agree with.

“There are too few sites and trackers right now” he said, “things have been to concentrated to the big sites and that really sucks!”

Although it’s great initially for the mainstream to have visible big ‘brands’ such as The Pirate Bay, Mininova and TorrentSpy, it’s a precarious situation to have such a top heavy structure to the BitTorrent community. It’s great having a ‘multi-headed hydra’ but not so great when just one of those heads carries half of all the public torrents. This situation must be addressed. Resources need to be spread around in a manner which ensures that a few ‘big bombs’ are unable to dismantle major parts of the infrastructure.

There is a solution, as brokep says, “I really love the small specialized sites, I hope to see more of them. I would love to help out with starting up more, but it’s also important that we who already run sites do not start more of them.”

He’s right. The more sites like The Pirate Bay provide what the BitTorrent community want, the less likely it is that people will venture out on their own to create their own sites. In the current environment, the hydra needs thousands of heads which are resource-hungry to target, not just a dozen juicy fat ones which stay nice and still, with the authorities just waiting for a subtle change in, or interpretation of, the law. A change which is inevitable, in both Sweden and the Netherlands.

TorrentFreak asked the admin of a US-based tracker how they manage to stay alive, despite having 20,000 members. “People are too hung up on MPAA and RIAA content. There’s an enormous library of material out there which you can track and no-one bothers you. We’ve got over 4000 torrents and we’ve had just two or three informal takedown requests in the last couple of years. If people want to start a tracker, indexing non-RIAA/MPAA content and specializing in something else is a great way to start building a community, even when you’re hosted in the States”

brokep gets the last words. Very wise words;

“So public message to people – start up your own torrent sites, make the internet the hydra it is and needs to be. If there’s hundreds of sites, they can’t all be shut down. And well, if they shut down the few that are today, there will be hundreds of sites, I’m sure, but let’s start them before so we can spread the word of them easier.”

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

Rather than manually trawling many torrent sites hunting for material, most will agree it’s much more convenient for the content to come to the user, especially when it’s possible to take advantage of the RSS feature built into many BitTorrent clients.

TVNanny is a site dedicated to indexing various torrent sites around the world and bringing the latest in TV torrents to its users, as quickly as possible after they appear on the web.

It’s easy to sign up to TVNanny. Simply enter a username and a password along with an email address (no validation required) and registration is complete.

Clicking on the ‘Shows’ button reveals a fairly comprehensive list of TV shows, currently numbering nearly 200. Popular shows are highlighted, as are shows which have new episodes freshly indexed during the previous 24 hours. Clicking on any show name displays a page giving some detail about the plot, the actors involved and other useful information. More comprehensive reading material is made easily available by the TV.com link provided at the bottom of each page.

Once the ‘Subscribe’ button is clicked, the ‘subscriptions’ page appears where it’s possible to indicate the season and episode numbers to be monitored, the desired quality (ranging from TVRip to HDTV) and a convenient release name filter. The page supplies the URL of a custom RSS feed tailored to the user’s subscriptions which can be entered into the RSS section of a BitTorrent client such as uTorrent or Azureus, providing automatic downloads as soon as the required episodes are indexed.

In the unlikely event that a certain show doesn’t appear, requests for the indexing of new shows can be made via the ‘Suggest a new show’ button.

For users who operate a client that doesn’t support the downloading of .torrent files via RSS, the TVNanny site provides a standalone piece of software which will work alongside the existing torrent client. Those using a client like uTorrent which already has RSS support can find additional information about the feature on the official uTorrent site.

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

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

Over the past years BREIN managed to shut down 131 sites that offered links to copyrighted content. Most of these sites were smaller BitTorrent sites, hosted on free hosting accounts or on a server box connected to a private DSL line.

You might wonder why BREIN is only picking on these smaller guys? Well, the answer is pretty simple, their intimidation tactics will not impress the larger torrent sites. Most of the larger BitTorrent sites and trackers have decent lawyers, and so far BREIN doesn’t have a strong case in court because BitTorrent sites are simply NOT illegal in The Netherlands.

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

The band’s second album “Our Earthly Pleasures” on Warp Records is not due for official release until April 2nd but has been available on torrent sites for some weeks.

Speaking to the BBC’s 6Music channel, Smith said “I’d like to strangle the person who did it” and with an air of inevitability continued “part of me says this is the way it happens these days.”

It appears that Mr Smith does have a point. Things like this do seem to happen a lot.

A resigned Smith said “People are online and searching it out and seeking it, and you can’t do much about it. I’m philosophical about it.”

Mr Smith will be comforted to know that the album X&Y by Coldplay was also pre-released and subsequently went straight to the top of the charts in 20 countries, including the UK (464,000 copies) and the US (737,000 copies) simultaneously, a feat matched only by a Beatles compilation in 2000.

Maxïmo Park are holding their album launch party in their home town of Newcastle on April 2nd. They should expect a lot of people to be singing along.

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

To make these traps more visible, Fenopy just introduced the FakeFinder. The FakeFinder lists the most popular fake torrents and the latest fake trackers. It also allows you to search for fake torrents by keyword or infohash.

The actual .torrent links for these fake files are blocked, and FakeFinder serves an informational purpose only. It is actually quite amusing to browse through these fake files and trackers. The companies that host these anti-piracy trackers came up with some interesting hostnames like “dirtydevils.cyberbox.com.br” and “bittorrent.isthebe.st“.

Although most of the IPs of these fake trackers are already blocked by blocklist software like PeerGuardian, they still manage to collect the IP addresses of thousands of users who do fall for this trap. Most torrent site admins are aware of these fakes, and remove them as soon as they are uploaded. It is kind of a paradox. On the one hand anti-piracy organizations send thousands of takedown requests to torrent sites, while they upload fake files with similar titles themselves.

Some might argue that downloading a fake file is not really a criminal offense. And yes, it is doubtful if this evidence will hold up in court. However, the job of organizations like the MPAA is to scare people, and that is often enough for them. The first thing they will probably do is send a letter to your ISP saying that you tried to download so-and-so file. And even if they take it a step further, they try to settle before these things are played out in court.

FakeFinder shows that BitTorrent site admins are trying to track down these fake torrents, and it’s a nice way to expose the darker side of anti-piracy organizations like the MPAA.

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

1. How to Make a Torrent
Torrents are great, they are the best way to share large files with your friends, or even with people you don’t know at all. But surprisingly enough, not many people create torrents when they need to share something.

2. How to find Torrents
10 Great Torrent Sites + Firefox Search Plugins.

3. How To Encrypt BitTorrent Traffic
More and more ISP’s are limiting and throttling BitTorrent traffic on their networks. By throttling BitTorrent traffic the speed of BitTorrent downloads decreases, and high speed downloads are out of the question.

4. How to Optimize Your BitTorrent Download Speed
BitTorrent can be fun, as long as you get decent speeds. Not satisfied with your current speeds? These suggestions might help yo optimize your download pleasure.

5. How to Speed Up Bitcomet and uTorrent
90% off all people use the default settings on their client, and that’s a problem.

6. How to Protect Your Torrent From Failing Trackers
Nothing is more frustrating than your download getting stuck. The fact that a torrent has stopped downloading can have several reasons.

7. How to Use RSS & BitTorrent to Download TV shows
Are you tired of scanning several BitTorrent sites for the latest episodes of your favorite TV show? You should definitely try using RSS feeds then. RSS and BitTorrent are a perfect match.

8. How to Make a Custom TV Torrent Feed
How to create a personalized TV torrent feed, and have all your favorite TV torrents in one feed.

9. How to Use Gmail to Search Torrents
Gmail is more than a useful email service. In just a few steps you can turn it into your personal torrent search engine. And by using labels and filters you can keep your inbox clean.

10. How to Run uTorrent on a USB Stick
A portable version of uTorrent may come in handy when you’re with friends, at school, or at work. It will fit perfectly on every usb-stick, iPod, mobile phone, or any other device that is recognized a “removable disk”.

11. How to Run uTorrent in Mac OS X
uTorrent is currently only available for Windows. But that doesn’t going to stop us from running it in OS X.

12. How to Use Firefox to Remotely Control uTorrent
The uTorrent WebUI can be used to access uTorrent from an external computer. This Firefox extension will make it even easier.

Have fun!

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

The Pirate Bay admins, working closely with Sweden’s pro-piracy organisation, PiratbyrÃ¥n are also encouraging other torrent sites to block the ISP. They have created a campaign page and published some PHP code that site admins can use to cut off Perspektiv customers. A message on the campaign page requests that all sites that decide to block Perspektiv let PiratbyrÃ¥n know by e-mailing them.

Here is a loose translation of The Pirate Bay’s Swedish press release:

As one of the largest websites in Sweden we will not sit silently and watch some of our basic rights be restricted. If we want a working and good society even on the Internet we must stand up for one another and show courage when it is needed.

After careful consideration, we have for the first time ever, decided to block an ISP because of their management. The ISP *Perspektiv Bredband* is a very controversial enterprise – in the way that they have shown to put the unrealistic ideas of some powerful media-companies over their own customers freedom of information – something which in our eyes is comparable with dictatorialness and censorship.

*Perspektiv Bredband* has every right in the world to block whichever site they want on their own net. And their customers have every right in the world to change to a new ISP which does not take upon itself the task of ensuring collective conscience.

Do you have any opinions on this? Call Perspektiv Bredband’s support line on 075-555-0030!”

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