On Sunday we reported that the trackers were planning to come back after a much-needed improvement to the BitTorrent protocol, and they’ve kept their word.

Thanks to the improvement, which was coined by Pirate Bay co-founder Fredrik Neij, the trackers will enjoy a great reduction in bandwidth and resources.

“This is going to save us a considerable amount of money and will benefit the BitTorrent community in the long run. It’s a great step forward and guarantees the survival of open BitTorrent trackers,” OpenBitTorrent’s owner told us previously.

The protocol improvement, which will be implemented in the upcoming uTorrent release, also gives web admins the ability to prevent their sites being hammered by BitTorrent traffic.

OBT and PBT are the two largest BitTorrent trackers on the Internet. Both coordinate the downloads of millions of people at any given time.

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

Over the weekend, what.cd was upgraded, so that all of its roughly 43,000 members could try it. Whilst there were initial bugs, including a problem with IRC channel password keys, everything seems to be running smoothly now.

More of a problem was a DDOS the site experienced when it had just gone live to its members. The attack which lasted over 4 hours and pulled 100Mb/sec, frustrated a number of the site’s users.

Also a source of frustration for many was a misunderstanding over a ‘freeleech’ offer. Done as a stress test, it was canceled after 6 hours , the announcement about it said it could last 24.

Many users who grabbed stuff they wouldn’t have gotten otherwise in an attempt to increase their ratio, started downloads and still had them going when it was stopped, which lead to some friction between staff and users. As always, the golden rule is to never download something you don’t want in an attempt to boost ratio.

However, Gazelle is not just for music trackers. Another site, Ntorrents, will be changing over to it shortly, according to an administrator there. This will be as much of a test in many ways for Gazelle as this weekend’s launch on what.cd was. This time though, it will be testing its viability beyond music trackers.

The developers have not yet announced a release date beyond ‘when all the major bugs are fixed’. Stay tuned for more.

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

Amen…

For all the other believers out there, put your own aXXo prayer in the comments.

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 program currently supports 66 private trackers. If your favorite tracker is not in the list you have the option to add it manually in the “trackers.xml” file. The application is spyware and malware free. It does lag a bit when it checks the trackers, and some of the URLs are outdated. My suggestion would be to set the refresh interval to a couple of hours or even more, or just run the program occasionally.

Tracker Checker 1.2 is available at stamcar.com, and we have a mirror over here.

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