TorrentSpam: Report Fake and Malware Ridden Torrents
Written by Ernesto on August 04, 2007The popularity of BitTorrent also has its downsides. Over the past months we reported about fake torrents, torrents that force you to download malware, and torrents that spy on your download behavior. TorrentSpam is a new service that allows you to report such scams, and clean up BitTorrent sites, bit by bit.
Unfortunately there still is a lot of torrent spam on most BitTorrent sites. Some torrents are uploaded by anti-piracy outfits that try to trace your IP. Others are from people that force you to download some shady video player to play the file you just downloaded. This video player (e.g. 3wPlayer) is of course filled with malware that infects your computer.
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.”
Previously: Xtorrent Gets New UI, Selective Downloading
Next: MPAA: Damage Caused By Uploader Can’t Be Measured in Money. Now Give Us Money
28 Responses
its so hard to get sites like this off the ground, im hoping it does though, make my life a bit easier so i wont have to search everywhere for good torrents
I download a lot of content, and have never experienced a fake torrent. Is this really a widespread problem?
Besides, who on earth would fall for “you have to install player XYZ to play this”?
Solution: Stop download from public trackers. It’s not that difficult to get into a low level private tracker.
Yea, I’ve never downloaded an infected/fake torrent.
Why not to use DHT to build the comment system but a centeral server ?
According to their front page, 3 of the top 5 spam torrents are linux distros (ubuntu being one of them).
So I searched on it (ubuntu) and they redirected me to PayPal, where they wanted to charge me $1.00 for the effort.
NUKED!!!
[quote comment="142214"]
So I searched on it (ubuntu) and they redirected me to PayPal, where they wanted to charge me $1.00 for the effort.[/quote]
I think you clicked on the donate button, instead of the search ;)
Apparently I did, but I wouldn’t open a Paypal account to donate a dollar, regardless of the cause.
I decided to try this again, so I searched on the ubuntu file name they had listed there, and the results tell you nothing specific (not even the file hash).
Wow… that’s so not impressive.
I clicked on + sign under options thinking to find out more of what’s going on, and it told me “Woot! Thanks for helping.”, and the score increased by +1. I had no idea what I just did and what it happened.
[quote comment="142268"]I clicked on + sign under options thinking to find out more of what’s going on, and it told me “Woot! Thanks for helping.”, and the score increased by +1. I had no idea what I just did and what it happened.[/quote]
That’s a bit unclear indeed. The site is obviously still work in progress and could use some improvements.
And about the ubuntu hits, some of those are mislabeled or invalid torrent files.
If you want to see how bad it is, type ‘ubuntu’ into the search box.
When I did it, there were 20 hits.
What I do is look at the comments and see what people say about it, or I hold my breath and hope it’s real. So far I never ran into a fake torrent, which is good!
Is it sure this is not a back door set up by the authorities?
I fail to see the point to this.
With an API available, either torrentspam or the site using the API is going to have to filter out a lot of chaff. Site A is not going to want the results for torrents on site B. More chaff means bigger databases and higher processing load on searches.
Another problem, every single report would still need manual checking because of the open nature of the reports. Anyone using every report to remove a torrent from their site could wake up one morning to find certain agencies have reported every one of their torrents (and thus they have none left).
Also, who is likely to use this site? Anyone who will go out of their way to report a fake torrent to a 3rd party is likely to have left a comment on the site concerned. People looking to download the torrent don’t need to load up another browser tab to see that info.
An internally handled “report torrent” button requires less work on the part of the coders, no irrelevant reports to be filtered, no bandwidth wastage connecting to a 3rd party site and no reliance on that 3rd party to be operational at any time.
Would be nice if you could search by file hash, but I suppose features will come when it gets off the ground.
its hard to verify torrents as fakes unless you donwload and check them..
BUT this is very usefull for reporting obvious fakes.. like fake aXXo release, DVDrips that have no dvd yet… etc etc..
TorrentSpam.com will be useless: the four-letter organizations will start reporting valid torrents as spam torrents.
Wouldn’t be a better idea if the Torrents clients could have access to these databases to warn users? Like eMule Plus?
How about tracker admins do their job and delete fake torrents.
Every tracker should have a “report torrent” link.
i hate people that say whats the point of this. theres a damn point if u cant understand that then go on blindly downloading torrents. some people have a hard time and need help spotting bs torrents.
Use a decent tracker and you don’t have to worry about “torrent spam”.
iv never come across a fake torrent either , i think the best way to avoid them is get them from a good source an to read the previous comments about said torrent.
The problem with relying on the comments alone is you do not know that some of the comments are plants to make you think that the torrent is good. I think torrentspam may be on to something.
If you can’t trust comments left by the public, then you can’t trust this site that allows anyone to report fake stuff.
Unlike the reports left on torrentspam though, comments on the actual site can be pulled if they are wrong.
They also have a better chance of having bad torrents removed.
what a load of BS:
that very site you link to torrentspam.com is full of the zlob trojan downloader/wareout/dns changer. forums>porn> click on a pix.
you will need to download a “codec” package to view the video. either its all BS (making p2p safe) or the admin’s are fast asleep.
I did not get a spyware torrent but I did download a torrent today that when I tried to open it it said that it was locked and I have to go to torrentpassword.org. After everything I read, this was a rouge torrent also. Sad too because it took me all day to download the torrent. Hell, there were a lot of people fooled by this one, there were over a 100 ppl downloading the torrent when I decided to dl it.
Just downloaded from mininova.org tvshow Prison.Break.S03E14.avi. VLC played it requesting for DivoCodec to continue!
Wikipedia says it’s a trojan virus!
Yes, it is. The problem is not to install and run player XYZ – if you're sane you'd not do it. The problem is you do not have any info about the problem before you finish downloading torrent.
Sites do not allow comments (requiring login) – there is no way to find it. I hope TorrentSpam will help here.
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