Recently, however, we have noticed an increase in ads for paid tutorials. A couple of months ago we posted about highspeedtorrent.com, a site that promised to boost download speeds up to 500% faster. Unfortunately they are still around, the only thing they have changed since then is their initial claim, they now promise a 475% increase in download speed.

The only thing these people are after is money from naive BitTorrent users, and they do this by advertising their ‘revolutionary’ tutorials on BitTorrent sites such as The Pirate Bay, Mininova and Isohunt, making thousands of dollars a month. Technically there is nothing illegal about selling something like this, but the absurd claims they make will only disappoint people who get tricked into paying up.

Luckily, most BitTorrent admins agree with this. The administrator of BTjunkie is the most active opponent perhaps, as he told us: “I don’t allow it on our site because it’s a scam. It’s like a bad infomercial for torrents.” He even went as far as complaining to Paypal and Adbrite to stop these people, so far without result. “I’ve had lots of backs and forths about this with Adbrite,” he said “They just keep telling me it’s not possible to permanently ban them unless you want to approve every ad that goes on your site.”

TorrentFreak contacted a few other admins, and they assured us that they will do everything they can to stop these ads from appearing on their sites. Pirate Bay’s Brokep told us: “We’re making sure they never comes back now, or I’ll tell Adbrite we need to kick them out.” We honestly hope that the others will follow this example, for now, this seems to be the only way to get rid of them.

The funny thing is, scammers are not only ripping off innocent BitTorrent users, they also rip each other off. Here is an email that the owners of fastspeedtorrents sent to a torrent site admin, pouring his heart out he wrote:

I own the site fastspeedtorrents.com. I’ve been trying to buy a flat rate ad on your site but it would always get declined. What happened was I bought the site highspeedtorrent.com and the person that sold me the site said that you were a main advertiser and to purchase flat rate ads. Well, something changed and I haven’t been able to buy an ad since I purchased the site. Then this person went and started a site called rocketspeedtorrent.com which is basically just a copy of a site that he sold me which he legally shouldn’t have done and now I see his ads on your site somehow.”

Poor guy…

Do you want those superfast downloads for free? Help yourself to some of our guides, hints and tips. There’s 20 more of the best right here.

All 100% free. Now that’s a guarantee.

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

1. How and Why BitTorrent Works

BitTorrent is often referred to as the best filesharing protocol for sharing large files. But why? What makes BitTorrent so unique? Well, lets take a sneak peek under the hood of your BitTorrent client, and list a couple of features that make BitTorrent as fast, stable, and robust as it is.

2. 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. We show you how.

3. uTorrent Beginners Guide

The uTorrent website has a great beginners guide for BitTorrent newbies. Worth a visit if you just started using BitTorrent.

4. Where to find Torrents

By now you probably know how BitTorrent works, now you need a good place to find .torrent files. Here’s a list of 10 great BitTorrent sites. There’s also a list of 20 less known BitTorrent sites.

Fight Throttling ISPs and be Anonymous

5. ISPs Who throttle BitTorrent Traffic

Some Internet providers try to slow you down when you use torrents. The Azureus wiki has list of ISPs who throttle BitTorrent traffic. It also suggests what encryption levels you should use.

6. 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. We show you some techniques that should help you evade some of these measures.

7. How To Tunnel BitTorrent over SSH

Sometimes it is impossible to use BitTorrent, if you’re at work, school, Comcast! or connected to a public hotspot for example. But there is an easy solution to overcome this problem. If you use a secure connection (SSH), you will be able to bypass almost every firewall.

8. How to make BitTorrent Transfers Anonymous

The Swedish Pirate Party introduced a completely anonymous (VPN) service called Relakks. Relakks makes it possible to browse the web, and use p2p-applications (like BitTorrent) without being monitored by your ISP or anti-piracy gangs like the MPAA and RIAA.

Speed up your BitTorrent Downloads

9. 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 you to optimize your download pleasures.

10. How to Speed Up Bitcomet and uTorrent

90% off all people use the default settings on their client, and that’s a problem. Azureus users might want to try this tutorial by Paul Stamatiou.

11. Calculate Your Optimal BitTorrent Settings

Configuring your BitTorrent client is extremely important if you want to get the best out of BitTorrent. However, the settings pane of the average BitTorrent client might be a bit overwhelming, and some people just don’t know where to start.

12. 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.

BitTorrent and RSS

13. 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 in HDTV? You should definitely try using RSS feeds then. RSS and BitTorrent are a perfect match.

14. 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.

15. Subscribe to TV Shows Using BitTorrent and TVNanny

TVNanny is a BitTorrent site specializing in the indexing of TV show torrents. Using a subscription based interface, it’s possible to automatically download your favorite TV show episodes to your PC, utilizing the RSS feature in your chosen torrent client.

16. 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.

uTorrent Tips and Tricks

17. 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”.

18. 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.

19. 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.

20. Use uTorrent to Organize Your BitTorrent Downloads

BitTorrent is great, but all those downloaded torrents have the habit of making a mess of your harddrive. Do you still have all your downloaded stuff in a single folder? Take action, organize your torrents.

Feel free to drop a comment if you have anything to add to this list. Happy torrenting!

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

1. Separate complete from incomplete files

Just for the sake of clarity. All my active downloads will go to /downloads/incomplete, once they are finished, uTorrent will automatically move them to the /downloads directory.

Go to options/preferences/downloads to enable it

I agree, this is not the most spectacular tweak, but it’s a good start, and it makes browsing though your downloads directory a bit easier.

2. Label torrents and automatically create separate folders

This is definitely one of my favorite features. uTorrent has the option to label torrents, and it will move the completed downloads to the corresponding directories.

go to options/preferences/advanced/user_interface here you can enter a set of persistent labels for your downloads. I use movies|tv|apps|docs|music, but you can create as many labels as you want.

next, go to options/preferences/downloads and tick the “append the torrent’s label to the directory name” box and you’re ready to go.

You can label torrents by right-clicking the torrent in the main window. You can also use this context menu to add new labels “on the fly”.

Great, now you know how to label your torrents, but there is more. Personally I like to see the labels in the main (download) window, so you’re able to check what and how you tagged your torrents. In order to do this you need to right-click the top bar and tick the label option. If the label is still too far to the right for you to see you need to drag it to the left (see pic)

3. Sub-labels for the real TorrentFreaks

Ok, lets say you have a movies label, but you download a lot of movies so you want subdirectories like movies/action and movies/documentary. No problem. Right-click on a download, go to label/new_label and enter movies\documentary etc.

That’s it!

Do you feel organized already?…. great ain’t it?

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

SqrtBoy is known for his work on Torrent Trader Lite, VBTT, IPBTT and other several BitTorrent tracker php/mysql scripts. It is great to see that someone is proposing a standard for BitTorrent rss feeds.

Every webmaster probably has his own thoughts about how the perfect rss feed would look, but this document is definitely a step forward.

SqrtBoy told TorrentFreak:

I have found that each rss feed was different from one site to another, and from a BitTorrent script to another. The multiplication and organization of different feeds formats was leading to confusion and was making it difficult to read in rss clients, and also some other feed indexing applications. The purpose of this document is to give some recommendations to webmasters on how a rss 2.0 BitTorrent related feed should be designed, so maybe we can see a standard appearing.

I think it is extremely important to have a proper standard for BitTorrent rss feeds, especially since the number of people that get their latest torrents though feedreaders, media players and BitTorrent clients is growing.

Using the same feed style will only benefit the usability of BitTorrent & rss, and their implementation in feed based TV players like Democracy, Fireant and IM.

BitTorrent RSS 2.0 Feed Specifications White Paper

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

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