The data for the most recent TV episodes are collected by TorrentFreak from a representative sample of BitTorrent sites and is for informational and educational reference only. A list of the most pirated TV-shows of 2008 was published two weeks ago.

Thanks to ShowInsider we now also include a list based on the total number of downloads (not only recent episodes) of all shows in the past week.

Source: Top 10 Most Pirated TV Shows on BitTorrent

Up until now, central servers have always been required in order to use BitTorrent effectively. Although the transfer of files via BitTorrent has always been decentralized, the .torrent files that are required to start sharing are always hosted on central servers, those of The Pirate Bay or Mininova for example.

The Tribler developers have found a way to make their client work, without having to rely on BitTorrent sites. Although others have tried to come up with similar solutions, such as the Cubit plugin for Vuze, Tribler is the first to understand that with decentralized BitTorrent search, there also has to be a way to moderate these decentralized torrents in order to avoid a flood of spam.

BuddyCast, the decentralized search feature of the Tribler client is able to do so. Tribler project leader Johan Pouwelse told TorrentFreak: “It has taken us many years to get the zero-server search infrastructure called ‘BuddyCast’ running fast and efficiently. We believe that today BuddyCast is the most efficient, scalable, and battle-hardened algorithm out there which is also ready for user tagging and ratings in true buzz-compliant 2.0 style.”

In addition to the decentralized torrent distribution and search capabilities, Tribler aims to make the BitTorrent experience more social. For instance, users will have the option to boost the download speed of friends, the client will give recommendations based on your download behavior, and it rewards users who are good sharers while punishing those who leech.

“Tribler peers all work together towards a common purpose: fast search and downloads,” Pouwelse explained. “Peers recognize fellow ‘tribe’ members and are pre-programmed with the notion that embracing mutual self-interest is good. This is a radical deviation from the core BitTorrent tit-for-tat mantra dictating pursuit of self-interest only and no memory of past experiences.”

Although this is only the first public implementation of the decentralized search feature, it seems to work pretty seamlessly. Obviously, the content is more limited than on the large BitTorrent sites, since it comes exclusively from other Tribler users, but this will grow as soon as more people start to use the client.

Decentralized BitTorrent search has the potential to make public BitTorrent sites no longer necessary. For now, we think that such a radical shift is not going to happen anytime soon, however, since the top-three BitTorrent sites are involved in legal action in some way or another, you never know when you might need it.

Source: Tribler Set to Make BitTorrent Sites Obsolete

The data presented here is collected by TorrentFreak from a representative sample of BitTorrent sites and is for informational and educational reference only.

Source: Top 10 Most Pirated TV Shows on BitTorrent

It’s Heroes that breaks all the records though. Our statistics show that, across all BitTorrent sites, the two episodes from Heroes’ season opening were downloaded well over a million times each – in just one day. The vast majority of the downloads come from outside the US (92%), where shows usually air weeks, months or even years later.

The show was downloaded the most in the UK (15%), where the official season opening is scheduled for October 1st. Canada, France and Australia complete the top 5. Although most TV-broadcasters won’t be happy to read these figures, one could argue that BitTorrent has actually helped TV-shows to build a stronger, broader, and more involved fanbase.

Jesse Alexander, the executive producer of ‘Heroes’ told TorrentFreak that he thinks this is indeed the case. “People watching shows such as Lost and Heroes on BitTorrent is the present world reality. TV networks have to recognize this, give their viewers more ways to interact with the shows, and find ways to generate revenue from every member of the global audience,” he said.

Let’s hope Alexander will be heard in Hollywood. Below is the TV-show download chart of the past week, Heroes is not included in the list, but it will surely appear in next week’s chart.

Top Downloads September 14 – September 21

Source: ‘Heroes’ Causes BitTorrent Boom

Like the other sites we mentioned, Instant-Torrents downloads the torrents to their servers. When the download is finished, users can download it to their computer. What’s different is that once a torrent is downloaded to Instant-Torrent, it will stay hosted on the server, and other users can find the files via the site’s search, and download them instantly.

Instant-Torrents is still low on content, but with enough users it will become unnecessary to add torrents by yourself, since most popular files will be hosted on the server anyway. The downside for the owners is of course that the MPAA, IFPI and RIAA will be keeping an eye on it as well.

Instant-Torrents shares all torrents till they have uploaded what they have downloaded, which makes it ‘share friendly’. Users are allowed to have 5 torrents running at the same time, and there is no limit in size or numbers for completed torrents. “As long as there’s enough disk space, people can download as much as they want,” ‘Zero Endorphine’, one of the Instant-Torrents co-founders told us.

The service also has an option to make a watch list, to downloads torrents based on specific keywords, as soon as they are available. In addition, the site has lists of the last added, most downloaded and most recommended torrents, and it allows users to recommend torrents to their friends.

Instant-Torrents is itself a free service, but in order to download you’ll have to get a VPN account at Ivacy. This is because the files can only be downloaded to your PC if you’re connected to the (private) Ivacy network. There is a free 1GB trial available, so potential users can play around with it for free. A paid account costs 0.50 Euro ($0.70) per GB, or 10 Euro ($14.20) a month for unlimited bandwidth.

‘Zero Endorphine’, one of the Instant-Torrents co-founders told us that they get a revenue share from Ivacy, to cover the expenses they incur, such as bandwidth and server costs. The site has only been up and running for a few weeks, and ‘Zero Endorphine’ ensured us that they will add more innovative features in the near future.

“We already added Usenet support, in a few days we will support Rapidshare downloads as well, and we’re also working on integrated BitTorrent tracker search,” ‘Zero Endorphine’ said. Instant-Torrents offers an interesting addition to the most basic BitTorrent download services. Although we prefer BitTorrent to be free, the private nature of the site, and the instant downloads might make it worthwhile for some.

Source: Download Torrents Instantly with Instant-Torrents

Other releases of the Olympics ceremony are popular as well, such as an iPod ready version of the first hour, a standard definition release of the opening ceremony, and a high definition capture of the torch lighting and fireworks. Three Olympic shows would have made it into our weekly TV-download chart, but we decided to count them as one.

The data of the TV-torrent chart is collected by TorrentFreak from a representative sample of BitTorrent sites and is for informational and educational reference only.

At the end of the year we will publish a list of most downloaded TV-shows for the entire year, like we did last December.

Top Downloads August 03 – August 10

Source: Millions Download Olympics Opening Ceremony via BitTorrent

Since there’s always a lot of debate about what works and what doesn’t, we decided to ask an expert to share his thoughts with us. Olivier Chalouhi, developer and CTO of Vuze (formerly known as Azureus) was kind enough to give us some of his own tips and tricks. Since Olivier was the person who initiated the Azureus Open Source project in 2003, which went on to create one of the most popular BitTorrent clients ever, if anyone knows how to get the best out of your torrent client, he does.

Here are some of Olivier’s tips for optimizing your torrent download speeds. There tips work with every BitTorrent client, except for the last one.

1. Seed.

Downloading speeds will be sub-optimal for everyone unless everyone plays their part and seeds. Private tracker sites are a great example of how the overall speed of the swarm increases when everyone is seeding and downloading in equal measure. So, play your part in seeding and tell others to as well.

2. Be connectable.

Make sure you’re not “firewalled” by opening up your incoming ports or by enabling UPnP in your router, otherwise you’ll be leaving bandwidth on the table.

3. Manage your upload speed.

It is all about striking a balance. You don’t want the upload speed to be too high, nor do you want it to be too low. Ideally you want to set your upload speed to be 80% of the maximum possible line speed.

TF note: Want an easy life? Try this handy settings calculator, works for all clients

4. Select the right torrents.

Your download will be faster if you choose to download a torrent where there is a good balance of seeds and peers. For instance, Vuze ranks its search results according to the number of seeds and peers to make this easier.

5. Be realistic.

Check the swarm average and if you’re already above average, then you just need to be patient. If you’re below average, go back and check some of these other things I’ve mentioned.

6. Get a Friend Boost.

I wouldn’t be a Vuze developer if I didn’t give a plug for the Friend Boost feature we recently developed :). When you create a network of Friends on Vuze, you agree to seed content to each other on a preferential basis. That is, if one of your friends has a torrent that you want, you will be able to directly use a portion of their bandwidth to get it. In most cases this will increase your download speed.

Obviously, ways in which to actually implement some of these tips will differ from client to client. If you want to find out how to do it on Vuze, you can check out our wiki.

Source: Speed Up Your Torrents, Tips from a BitTorrent Developer

When we reported about the 3 billionth download back in November, Erik from Mininova told TorrentFreak: “We hope to reach the 4 billion mark in 4 or 5 months from now”. He didn’t have to wait that long, as it only took 78 days before they got there. The TV-show category remains the most popular, approximately half of all downloads from Mininova are torrents relating to TV-episodes.

The popularity of Mininova became apparent a few weeks ago when the site was offline for nearly a day because of hardware issues. The millions of visitors had to go elsewhere to feed their BitTorrent habit, and as a result, other sites like Torrentz.com and SumoTorrent saw a huge traffic increase, and almost went down under the strain.

The Mininova team will continue to optimize the site in order to handle the continuous traffic increase. On top of this, they are also adding new services and features such as a content distribution platform for independent publishers, a music streaming feature, and more recently, video streaming.

From the looks of it, Mininova’s growth will not be halted anytime soon, unless there is outside intervention. Last week, the Dutch anti-piracy organization BREIN announced that it will take legal action against the site, not to take it down, but to force it to filter copyrighted content. Erik from Mininova said in a response they “will proceed to court with full confidence,” and they will continue to serve torrents.

Mininova downloads since 2005.

Source: Mininova, 5 Billion Downloads and Counting

The mininova team is working hard to get the site up and running again. The good news is that no data will be lost, the bad news is that it may take a while – possibly 12 hours – because it is a holiday in The Netherlands.

Mininova’s forums are not connected to the loadbalancer, and are still up and running. The same is true for the seeds of their featured content section. Mininova currently has well over 3 million unique visitors per day, and more than 15 million pageviews, which makes them the BitTorrent site with the most traffic.

Consequently, the downtime at Mininova has resulted in quite a few extra visitors for several other BitTorrent sites. Flippy, the admin of Torrentz.com told TorrentFreak that he’s seeing a 50% traffic increase, which works out at tens of thousands of visitors an hour. As a result, Flippy has had a tough time keeping his site running smoothly, and other BitTorrent site admins are reporting similar traffic boosts.

For now Torrentz is doing fine, except for a few server connection issues every now and then. It’s a pretty scary thought that server issues at mininova can almost bring down the fourth largest BitTorrent site. A whole ring of BitTorrent sites could potentially collapse like a house of cards.

update: SumoTorrent went down for 6 hours as well because the site was overloaded

Source: Mininova Downtime Puts BitTorrent Sites Under Pressure

This list of BitTorrent sites is not extensive, but it covers the three most popular torrent sites. A search for the recently released second part of Steal This Film returns quite a few results which are presented in a clean way. By default the results are ordered by popularity (seeds/peers), but they can be further sorted by date, size, and search engine.

If you can’t find what you were looking for you have the option to check for related and popular searches in the sidebar. At the moment the site has no ads and is pretty fast, but that might change in the future. Overall, for people who like meta search engines, I think that YouTorrent is worth a visit.

More useful BitTorrent sites can be found in our roundup of the 10 most popular BitTorrent sites of 2007. Do you know any other BitTorrent sites with some innovative features that we haven’t covered yet here at TorrentFreak? Let us know and leave a comment.

Source: YouTorrent: Great New BitTorrent Search Engine

The BitLet team promised upgrades were on the way, and after a few short months, the BitLet ‘Upload’ section is now complete. With this addition, BitLet users can not only download torrents but also create them too, all done online within a regular browser. Entering the ‘Upload’ page, the user is asked to enter a tracker of their choice. Bitlet conveniently provides the option to select the urls of four popular open trackers for some seriously easy torrent creation.

Once created, the automation of the torrent creation process doesn’t stop. BitLet Upload gives the option to send the .torrent file immediately to Mininova, which is great for advertising the content the user is about to make available. Automatically sending to other sites will be possible in the future.

This is an important new addition to the online BitLet experience. Offering convenience to those who prefer to use a browser or simply have no choice, BitLet Upload brings BitTorrent distribution another step closer to the complete novice.

Source: BitLet Evolves: Create and Upload Torrents Online

One of the benefits of offering media files for download via BitTorrent is that it takes the load off the server and decreases the chance of your site becoming inaccessible due to excessive bandwidth consumption.

Apparently HostGator doesn’t care, they want you to just store your podcasts, videos and other media files on their server instead of saving bandwidth by offering it as a .torrent file.

Unfortunately, it can become quite a costly affair if you surpass the bandwidth limit set by your host. Good for them of course, because that will increase your bandwidth bill, but not very customer friendly.

I can see that they don’t want you to run a BitTorrent tracker or a client on a shared server because these use quite a lot of resources, but there is absolutely no valid reason to simply ban .torrent files. As far as I can see this would only save bandwidth and thus resources.

And it gets even worse, you’re also not allowed to: “Participate in any file-sharing/peer-to-peer activities”

This is getting ridiculous, most webhosting companies at least have good reasons to disallow certain activities on their servers. But, just banning everything that’s related to filesharing like HostGator does is a little too much if you ask me.

Source: HostGator Doesn’t Allow Customers to Host Torrent Files

Moxie, a Comcast customer who replied to a post on Silicon Alley, points out that when you log your network activity with an application like Wireshark, you’ll notice that Comcast servers start sending reset messages as soon as a download is finished, exactly as we described it.

With Wireshark in the background run your BitTorrent application. Wait until completed and watch Wireshark, notice when it finishes seeding Comcast servers send out a reset command every second to your computer noted by the highlighted red line in Wireshark. It is 8:30 pm Monday pst and Comcast is still resting my BitTorrent connections. Maybe the PR guy didn’t get the email from the VP of Networking.

It might be that not every Comcast customer is equally affected, but a significant percentage is. Not only the 10+ users we talked to before we first reported this issue, but also hundreds of additional commenters here on TorrentFreak, and elsewhere. Some users even captured the throttling in progress on video (download), and anyone has to agree that this does look very suspicious.

More evidence comes from Robb Topolski, a networking and protocol expert with more than 25 years of experience, who first wrote about this issue on DSLReports. He told TorrentFreak: “We have had two Comcast techs confirm Sandvine in use, but neither confirmed or denied its connection with the RST interference. For me, seeding is possible. I can reach my upload speed limit, but there sure is a lot of interference. Since your article came out, I too have received many reports of seeding being impossible. I’m not sure if it’s regional, or what!”

For the networking savvy people among us, here’s an example of real RST interference on an unencrypted BitTorrent connection. In this case, it happens right after the bitfields are exchanged

Nevertheless Comcast spokesman Charlie Douglas said in a response to Light Reading: “We’re not blocking access to any application, and we don’t throttle any traffic”. He might be right here semantically speaking, they are not throttling anything, they just kill all outgoing connections when a clients starts to seed a file. But the fact is that Comcast is making it impossible for (at least some) customers to share files with non-Comcast users over BitTorrent.

Luckily there is a fix for this problem, and we know that at least two BitTorrent client developers are including this fix in their next update.

Source: Comcast Wrongfully Denies Interfering with BitTorrent

Pressure from anti-piracy lobbyists is not really a new phenomenon for the Swedish authorities. A month prior to the Pirate Bay raid, Executive Vice President of the MPAA wrote a letter (PDF) to Sweden’s State Secretary in which he stated:

“It is certainly not in Sweden’s best interests to earn a reputation among other nations and trading partners as a place where utter lawlessness with respect to intellectual property rights is tolerated.”

Perhaps even worse, after the raid it became apparent that the US had threatened to put Sweden on WTO’s blacklist because they didn’t take the Pirate Bay down.

However, these and other threats won’t solve the case. Unfortunately for some, the police need actual evidence if they want to take legal action against The Pirate Bay, something that they don’t have at this point. Even after more than a year, the police have nothing to go on.

Up until today, The Pirate Bay servers remain in custody and the police still hope to find something. In fact, prosecutor HÃ¥kan Roswall is still convinced that he will eventually press charges against the Pirate Bay admins. The Pirate Bay is not really impressed by this announced prosecution, and according to a leak within the Swedish police, they don’t have much to be afraid of.

Below is a copy of the letter sent last month on behalf of the Portuguese counterparts of the RIAA, BSA and MPAA.

Re: Pirate Bay
-
Dear Sir.
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We address yourself in our capacities of Directors of the Portuguese Artists and Musicians collecting society GDA. the Portuguese Antí-Piracy Video, Games, Cable Operators and local MPA Association, Fevip, and the local IFPI National Group, AFP (Record Producers), concerning the pirate Bay case.
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As you are aware, both physical and digital piracy is severely affecting the Music and Film industry worldwide and Portugal is no exception.
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The Portuguese music market, lost about 50% of its value during the last 5 years, as well as half of the sales and jobs, affecting the live hood of our Authors, Com posers , Artists, Musicians, Actors, Video and Record producers.
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One of the main reasons for this crisis is digital piracy, due lo poor enforcement of the law and the fact that more and more households have now broadband access (according lo Anacom, the Portuguese National Authority for Telecoms, 14.3% of the Portuguese households have now broadband access – 1st quarter 2007).
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Among the different digital threats, the most important are the services that use the Bit Torrent Protocol, due lo the fact that this type of service allows users to download films and the entire discography of an Artist within minutes.
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In the Portuguese courts there are now over 40 criminal claims against and some of them relate to the Bit Torrent Protocol, and we have reasons lo believe that some of the Torrents downloaded by the Portuguese torrent users may well come from Pirate Bay.
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The reason we write to you is the fact that this case In Sweden is pending for more than one year and during this time the Pirate Bay activities is affecting right holders around the world. We therefore kindly urge you to take the necessary steps to come lo a swift enforcement of the law in this case.
-
We trust you will understand our concerns and act accordingly in order to stop the effects this case has outside the Swedish borders.
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With kind regards,

Director General AFP
Director General FEVIP
Director General GDA

Source: Anti-Piracy Lobby Pressures Police to Take On The Pirate Bay

The owner of SumoTorrent told TorrentFreak that he discovered that A search on Google for sumotorrent now triggers the following message at the bottom of the results page:

“In response to a complaint we received under the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act, we have removed 1 result(s) from this page. If you wish, you may read the DMCA complaint that caused the removal(s) at ChillingEffects.org.”

A search for other BitTorrent sites like Torrentspy and Torrentreactor comes up with the same message (note. the sites are still indexed but some results are removed). Strangely enough, for torrentreactor it only shows up for a search on the .com domain.

According to Google the filtered search results are caused by DMCA complaints , but the owner of SumoTorrent is a little surprised by this. He has no clue why the “content owner” didn’t contact him directly because he generally processes takedown notices within 24 hours. Unfortunately the link Google provides to the complaint in question doesn’t work, and a search on ChillingEffects.org doesn’t really help much either.

One of the few BitTorrent related DMCA complaints Google received concerned Paris Hilton’s famous . This notice was sent by Jim Salomon, the brother of Rick Salomon who used to date Paris. The complaint is hilarious, Jim even complains why it takes Google more than 4 hours to remove the .torrent in question. Funny or not, eventually Google decided to remove the .torrent file in question from their search results.

What Google has done isn’t really that revolutionary because most administrators of BitTorrent sites take down torrent files themselves upon request. However, the main reason for this is that they don’t want endless legal battles. They see it as a service to the content owners to remove the .torrent files if a decent request is made. But I kind of hoped that Google would make a stand here, wishful thinking so it seems.So what do you think? Should Google filter their results like this?

Source: Google Filters Torrents From Search Results

A good way to check whether a torrent is legit or not is by looking at the comments. If people found the torrent to be fake, it will probably reported there. But up until now there was no central database for checking fake and spam torrents – TorrentSpam is trying to fill this gap. A search for the torrent name on TorrentSpam will return a list of torrents, and the score each torrent has indicates how likely it is that this torrent is actually SPAM.

Some administrators of BitTorrent sites (not all of them) already spend hours every day removing and blocking these fake or malware ridden torrents, but it is nearly impossible to have a 100% clean site at all times.

TorrentSpam will be really useful if admins of BitTorrent sites have access to their database, something that will happen in the near future. The site is currently working on an API section so all torrent sites can utilize TorrentSpam. In the meantime they obviously need you to fill (and check) the database.

Or as the admin of TorrentSpam puts it: “The more reported torrents the better the P2P experience! By letting people know of invalid torrents, the less data will be jamming the networks.”

Source: TorrentSpam: Report Fake and Malware Ridden Torrents

I’ve tried it with a couple of torrents and it seems to be working quite well, just enter the url of the .torrent file and you’re good to go. The download speeds are decent and doesn’t require any configuration, so it’s pretty much idiot-proof.

BitLet also has a very useful code generator so you can offer BitTorrent downloads on your blog or website so that people can easily download, even when they don’t have a BitTorrent client installed. If people click on the link a popup window will appear, and the download starts immediately. Here’s an example download link:

Steal This Film!

If everything works like it should you’ll get a popup window similar to the screenshot below, it currently shows the download speed, percentage completed, and even a status led that signals potential problems (green is good). BitLet uses the Sun Java platform, if you encounter any problems, try installing the latest Java Virtual Machine plugin from Sun.

Personally I think that BitLet is a great way to make BitTorrent available to the occasional downloader who is not familiar with it at all. It could also be very helpful if you want to download a torrent on a PC that doesn’t have a BitTorrent client installed, like work or school for some people. It’s not a replacement for the regular BitTorrent client, but it sure is a great addition.

Source: BitLet: A Cute Web-Based BitTorrent Client

Born March 18 1976, Marnie Stern is an American singer-songwriter and a great guitarist. In 2007 she launched her debut album ‘In Advance of the Broken Arm‘ which the New York Times called “the year’s most exciting rock ‘n’ roll album”.

During an interview with Pitchfork Media this week, she tells us about her favorite song (The Who’s “Baba O’Riley”), her most recent favorite book (The Listening Book) and even her favorite ringtone.

But Marnie is troubled. Marnie is troubled because she thinks she’s going to jail. What could a rock star have done to deserve this? Smashing up a hotel room? Drugs? Driving under the influence?

….try ‘downloading movies using BitTorrent’. That’s right; Marnie is a secret BitTorrent user.

When asked about the last great movie she saw, she responded “Since I’ve been here I have downloaded…I mean I feel I’m going to jail– well, I discovered the torrent– but I feel I’ve downloaded, I would say, honestly 40 or 50 movies, which I hear isn’t that bad, you know, for jail. But I mean, because I’ve pretty much been staying in the studio and a little bit with Zach [Hill], I have all of this time to just sit….”

Don’t worry Marnie! Downloading (or even uploading) movies in the United States is a civil issue (as long as you stay away from still-in-theater movies and pre-air TV shows), so you can relax – you won’t be going to jail for it. In the unlikely event that you’re caught in the act, you might get a notice from your Internet Service Provider demanding that you don’t do it again. In reality, this is usually as far as things go.

When asked about her favorite TV show, Marnie comes back to BitTorrent. “House! Now let me tell you, I missed three of the episodes– hello torrent! You just download them right away.”

Maybe Marnie will be automating everything in future after reading one of our guides.

Source: Rock Star: I Feel I’m Going to Jail for Downloading Torrents

Several topics are discussed including the new “anonymous P2P protocol”, which is not their secret project, that they are currently working on.

Making all transfers anonymous will be the future of filesharing according to Brokep. No more lawsuits and privacy for everyone.

Among other things, Brokep talks about censorship, copyright, lawsuits, Sealand and why we need more BitTorrent trackers to keep the community alive.

I could of course embed the video here, but I think The BitLord show deserves some credit. Check out the interview with Brokep over here.

Source: The Pirate Bay Interview (Video)

The Alexa 100 is a list of the domains that generate the most traffic on the Internet. The fact that Mininova managed the top 100 is even more impressive if you take into account that over 25 local Google domains are among these 100 domains. Other popular sites in the Alexa 100 are Yahoo!, YouTube, Myspace, Wikipedia and EBay.

A the moment Mininova has 2,000,000 daily visitors who generate nearly 20,000,000 pageviews. Mininova continues to grow and served over a billion .torrent downloads in less than six months.

Most other BitTorrent sites aren’t doing too bad either. The Pirate Bay, Torrentz and Demonoid are all listed among the top 500 most visited sites, and more sites will probably join them in the months to come. Even Isohunt and Torrentspy continued to grow last month, despite the negative publicity. Here’s a combined graph of the traffic rank of the five most popular BitTorrent sites at the moment.

Compared to last year, all these sites continued to grow and attracted more visitors. Will it ever stop?

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.

Source: Mininova Enters List of 100 Most Popular Sites on the Internet

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: BitTorrent Survival: The Way of the Hydra

TorrentFreak had a chance to talk to Ben, the owner of FlixFlux to ask him about his motivation to keep adding such features to his site, he said:

“Basically the whole reason I put FlixFlux together was to make it easy to find decent films to download. It’s not always easy to work out what a film is going to be like just from the plot summary and list of genres. With a trailer though you get a good idea of what a film’s going to be like. So I guess the reason I added them was to make it easier to find decent films to download”

Adding trailers to the site and listing the charts on the frontpage will almost certainly grab the attention of the MPAA. We asked Ben whether he thinks this will make him an easy target for the MPAA.

“It’s up to the users if they want to download the torrents or not, and that may or may not be illegal where they are. What the site provides is a list of box office hits, details about them and a list of available torrents. None of the movies are hosted by me, nor any of the torrents. So hopefully I’ll be safe from the MPAA.”

Easy target or not, FlixFlux will keep indexing the latest movie torrents and introduce more features to the site. “I want to make it even easier to find movies in the future”, Ben says “Instead of just listing the new releases it’d be nice to be able to say “show me a good horror from the last couple of months” or “list any comedy from the last couple of weeks.”

We’ll keep an eye on it.

Source: FlixFlux: BitTorrent Site Includes Movie Trailers

I’ve tried the latest stable version (0.1.2) which was released last month, and it works great. Simple, lightweight, and it doesn’t need a database. The WAP support is great and allows you to start and stop torrents with your mobile phone. w3btorrent currently has less features than its competitor TorrentFlux, but it does everything I want a BitTorrent client to do.

You can also install w3btorrent on a web hosting account to download and seed torrents. That is, if your webhosting company allows it.

A few months ago a customer of the popular hosting company Dreamhost tried to run the EFF’s Broadcast Machine on his Dreamhost account. However, Dreamhost said that BitTorrent was strictly forbidden, both as a client and as a tracker. Very strange because it is a great way to share podcasts and other large audio video files, and it even saves Dreamhost and its customers some bandwidth.

Some of the features of w3btorrent include:

Source: w3btorrent: A BitTorrent Client for your Web Server

Arrrrrrrrrrrr!

Thanks again to DeanSM for another great piece.

Source: BitTorrent Pirates vs MPAA Ninjas

Lilx.net seems to be inspired by this other popular TV-calendar. It does not (yet) list as many shows as the calendar at pogdesign, but the .torrent links are definitely a big plus.

The torrents indexed by the calendar are distributed by EZTV and VTV, two well known distribution groups.

Other useful BitTorrent resources:

How to make a custom TV-torrent feed

Subscribe to TV Shows with Torrent Episode Downloader

How to optimize your BitTorrent download speed

How to Organize your Torrents with uTorrent

Source: Calendar to Track TV Shows and TV Torrents

To celebrate this great accomplishment, the Pirate Bay crew decided to give the Swedish King a diploma. “The diploma is a congratulatory diploma about our joint efforts in making Sweden famous globally when it comes to technology and culture”, writes Brokep on the Pirate Bay blog.

Make no mistake, King Carl XVI Gustaf really deserves it. A few weeks ago the International Intellectual Property Alliance (IIPA) published a report in which Sweden was placed on their piracy watch list. The IIPA considers Sweden to be a save haven for pirates. The Pirate bay is also mentioned in the report, hate that The Pirate Bay admins “proudly flaunt their role in facilitating infringements, often taking pot shots at rights holders from whom they receive notices of infringing activity”.

It’s worth celebrating.

Source: The Pirate Bay’s Torrents Quadruple in a Year

Do you know a relatively unknown public BitTorrent site that should be in this list? Put it in the comments.

01. torrentvalley.com

02. yotoshi.com

03. extratorrent.com

04. bitenova.nl

05. torrentscan.com

06. fenopy.com

07. smaragdtorrent.org

08. torrentat.org

09. fulldls.com

10. worldnova.org

11. spynova.org

12. nova9.org

13. 2torrents.com

14. scrapetorrent.com

15. litebay.org

16. monova.org

17. torrents.to

18. torrentradar.org

19. bitdig.com

20. bittorrentshare.com

Source: Top 20 Less Known BitTorrent Sites

Once a torrent is downloaded, Ted will automatically launch it in your default BitTorrent client, in my case, Transmission. If your BitTorrent client has the option to delete the original torrent once it has been imported, the whole process can be made very clean, with no traces or files left behind.

The simplicity of Ted is reminiscent of LimeWire, the P2P application that made downloading mp3s easier than surfing the web. The only problem is that you need to have a BitTorrent client installed. I’m guessing that the Opera browser with its built-in BitTorrent functionality would do. Ubuntu users might have it the best, since the OS comes with a version of the mainline client pre-installed.

Ted is not yet perfect, and still needs some work. Something funny I noticed was that while setting it up, it asked me whether I wanted it to start minimised in the system tray. Mac OS X doesn’t have a system tray! It’s quite obvious that Ted was originally written for Windows.

Torrent Episode Downloader (Ted) is completely free and open source, and can be downloaded from the official site.

Source: Subscribe to TV Shows with Torrent Episode Downloader

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.

Source: MPAA Caught Uploading Fake Torrents

The torrents aren’t just made up of normal images, they’re either JPEG 2000 or ECW files. To read the data, you would need a GIS application like ER Viewer.

These files contain a lot of data and high resolution images, which makes them exceptionally large. The largest torrent on the site is just above 87 GB. Distributing them over standard web protocols like HTTP and FTP would border on the impossible, it would not be feasible. This is where BitTorrent comes in, and suddenly, the impossible becomes possible. The founder of geoTorrent.org, Richard Orchard writes in a forum post:

Using traditional means, electronic distribution of datasets this size is economically expensive and practically inefficient. If a single file is 5 GB in size, and 1000 people want to download it, 5 terabytes of information needs to be served. If there were 100 high demand files, this would equate to 500,000 gigabytes!”

Orchard says he sees his platform as proof that P2P technologies like BitTorrent aren’t just used to illegally transfer copyrighted content. “There is a lot of talk in the press about the evils of peer-to-peer technology. However, GeoTorrent demonstrates the benefits a practical, workable use of peer-to-peer technology. Without this technology the distribution of large datasets would not be viable.”

This isn’t the first time that BitTorrent has been used to distribute such data. NASA too uses BitTorrent for their ‘Visible Earth’ project, a massive library of high resolution images of the earth.

Source: geoTorrent.org Distributes Free Satellite Imagery

To list a few:

Azureus received commercial funding last month to support the “content layer” where commercial downloads will start to appear. The content layer will probably be implemented in version 3.0.0.0.0.0

You can view the complete changelog over here, and download Azureus 2.5.0.0 right away.

Source: Azureus reaches milestone

The great thing about the project is that the movie is made entirely using Open Source software.

The movie is 11 minutes, including the credits, and they offer an impressive high definition AC3 5.1 surround copy.

The graphics are absolutely stunning but I found the story a bit disappointing. You can grab the .torrent over here

elephantsdream.org

Source: Elephants Dream

This new law is adopted exactly two months after the German anti-piracy federation (GVU) busted some of the key players in “the scene”. But now it seems that not only the release groups have to worry, but everybody who tries to download something from the net that might be copyrighted. The new law comes into effect on january the 1st, 2007.

The law is widely debated and currently one of the toughest in Europe at the moment.

Patrick von Braunmühl, of the Federation of German Consumer Organisation was not pleased and said:

This sends a completely wrong signal to society. It criminalises consumers and will deeply disturb internet users

However, the German justice minister defended the law, and said:

The aim is not now to slap handcuffs on downloaders in the school playground. But if someone downloaded a film before it reached the cinemas it was obvious that they were responding to an illegal offer and breaking the law

Günther Krings, the Christian Democrat legal affairs spokesman responded:

There should be no legal distinction between stealing chewing gum from a shop and performing an illegal download

So if you steal a chewing gum in Germany you will face up to 2 years in prison? Or even 5 if you try to sell it?

We’re going to hear more about this…

Source: Two years in prison for downloading a movie

Source: Torrentspy lost their TV and Movie directory

Check out George and his Ipod

Bush: Beach Boys, Beatles, let’s see, Alan Jackson, Alan Jackson, Alejandro, Alison Krauss, the Angels, the Archies, Aretha Franklin, the Beatles, Dan McLean. Remember him?
Hume: Don McLean.
Bush: I mean, Don McLean.
Hume: Does “American Pie,” right?
Bush: Great song.
Hume: Yes, yes, great song.
Unidentified male: . . . which ones do you play?
Bush: All of these. I put it on shuffle. Dwight Yoakam. I’ve got the Shuffle, the, what is it called? The little.
Hume: Shuffle.
Bush: It looks like.
Hume: The Shuffle. That is the name of one of the models.
Bush: Yes, the Shuffle.
Hume: Called the Shuffle.
Bush: Lightweight, and crank it on, and you shuffle the Shuffle.
Hume: So you — it plays . . .
Bush: Put it in my pocket, got the ear things on.
Hume: So it plays them in a random order.
Bush: Yes.
Hume: So you don’t know what you’re going to going to get.
Bush: No.
Hume: But you know –
Bush: And if you don’t like it, you have got your little advance button. It’s pretty high-tech stuff.
Hume: . . . be good to have one of those at home, wouldn’t it?
Bush: Oh?
Hume: Yes, hit the button and whatever it is that’s in your head — gone.
Bush: . . . it’s a bad day, just say, get out of here.
Hume: Well, that probably is pretty . . .
Bush: That works, too. ( Laughter )
Hume: Yes, right.

But now about the torrents. The guys from Bushtorrent.com give you an impression what Bush his torrentsite would look like:

Have you ever thought what it would be like if the President of your country was using BitTorrent technology as we always do? What sites would he visit, what torrents would he download, what nickname would he use in forums?

The President isn’t afraid of MPAA, the torrents will be always seeded for him and passwords will be always known. All private trackers will be opened for the President with the highest downloading speed. Isn’t he the lucky one?

We tried to imagine what George Bush would do in such a situation and what in the world goes on in that mind of his. We are pleased to announce to you the new torrent site opened by George Bush President of United BitTorrents: http://www.bushtorrent.com

Bushtorrent

Source: George Bush’ Ipod and Torrents

This cost saving can be essential, especially for low-budget movies. Take a movie with a 2 million$ budget for example. Distributing the actual prints for wide release will be 100% or more of the total budget. This will never happen; the movie will go straight to TV or DVD instead. But by distributing the film though BitTorrent this will be no problem at all.

And it’s not only the distribution that’s cheaper (wiki):

Digital cinema has some big economic advantages over film, being very cheap compared to film. For instance Rick McCallum, a producer on Attack of the Clones, said that it cost US$16,000 for 220 hours of digital tape where a comparable amount of film would have cost US$1.8 million. Obviously this matters most to low-budget films which are often shot for a few million dollars or less.

Wait a second; am I going to watch a cheap xvid rip in a movie theatre?

No, not exactly. A proper digital movie will be around 120 GB per hour (33 MB/s). In order to send it the movie must be compressed and encrypted (see DCDM format). We need it to be save, we don’t want any 200GB movies showing up at mininova or the piratebay.

Proper specs.

But there is more. BitTorrent will not only be cost saving, it will be also a lot faster. Of course the movie theatres should get a decent line, but with a 100Mbps connection a 200GB movie would take less than 8 hours to distribute. Without BitTorrent online distribution would be nearly impossible, imagine 1000 theatres downloading a 200GB movie from 1 host.

So please stop complaining about piracy and decreasing sales and do something, welcome to the wonderfull world of BitTorrent.

Digital Cinema (wiki)
More Digital Cinema
More on DC Ditstribution

Source: The Movie Industry should embrace BitTorrent

Source: The BitTorrent Song

“The surprise vote caused outrage among record companies and film producers, who say illegal peer-to-peer (P2P) copying costs their industries millions of euros every year,” says the BBC. “It was an embarrassing defeat for the government, which had planned to introduce large fines and possible jail terms of up to three years for internet pirates.

“Seventeen year old Aziz Ridouan became so angry at the number of people already being taken to court that he started up his own pressure group.

“Today, the Audiosurfers Association has 6,000 members. It campaigns for a change in the law and helps defend those being prosecuted.”
Socialist MP Patrick Bloche, who helped draft the amendment, argues, “Rather than outlawing, punishing, and paradoxically maintaining to a certain extent an illegal system. Let’s make a different choice: authorising peer-to-peer downloading, but in return, putting in place a system allowing artists to be paid.”

Then the Big Four, Vivendi Universal (France), EMI, (Britain), Sony BMG (Japan, Germany) and Warner Music (US) pulled their well-worn trick of mobilising contracted performers such Johnny Hallyday, “to protest, arguing that revenue from a global licence wouldn’t compensate for the millions they say they risk losing through falling CD sales,” says the story.

Nonetheless, “The MPs’ vote in December sent the government scuttling off to redraft its bill,” says the BBC. “It has since spent two months in consultations with artists, industry representatives and internet users to try to reach a compromise. More than 13,000 musicians signed a petition in favour of the global licence. A website set up to encourage a debate on P2P copying was inundated with replies.”

France’s latest plan still rejects global licensing, “although it agrees that private copying should be allowed,” and, “The sanctions for illegal copying have been reduced considerably, with fines beginning at 38 euros (£26, about $46) ) for small-scale piracy.”

Meanwhile, people in France aren’t entitled to make personal copies of DVDs, even if they don’t distribute them, France’s highest court, the Cour de Cassation in Paris, has ruled, overturning an earlier decision by a lower court.

P2Pnet.net

Source: Record labels want to Kill French Filesharing law

1. Cap your upload (most important)

Limit your upload speed to approximately 80 percent of your maximum upload rate. You can check your upload speed over here (never trust your isp). Once you know your maximum upload speed, change the max upload (to 80%) speed in your torrent client’s preferences.

Don’t get me wrong, everyone should share as much as possible, but if your upload rate reached it’s max, your download rate suffers significantly.

2. Hack the max TCP connections

If you’re on XP sp2, your TCP connections are limited to a maximum of 10. This seriously hurts your downloading speed because it wont let you connect to a high amount of ip numbers. It is supposed to slow down viruses because their spreading strategy is to connect to a high amount of ip numbers, but it also cripples your torrent downloads.
A nice way to fix this is to download this patch, it allows you to set the maximum allowed connections to any number you want. Any number between 50 and 100 is ok (more on this).

3. Check seeds and peers

A simple tip, but o so important. Always look for torrents with the best seed/peer ratio. The more seeds (compared to peers) the better (in general). So 50 seeds and 50 peers is better than 500 seeds and 1000 peers. So, be selective.

4. Change the default port.

By default, BitTorrent uses a port 6881-6999. BitTorrent accounts for a lot of the total internet traffic (1/3), so isp’s like to limit the connection offered on the these ports. So, you should change these to another range. Good clients allow you to do this, just choose anything you like. If you’re behind a router, make sure you have the ports forwarded or UPnP enabled.

5. Disable Windows Firewall

It sucks. Windows Firewall hates P2P and often leads a life of it’s own. So disable it and get yourself a decent firewall, Kerio or Zone Alarm for example.

Last but not least… Buy a faster connection…

Read more on optimizing your BitTorrent Speed.

Here’s a list of 20 BitTorrent tips and tricks.

Source: Speed up your torrents