Let’s start off with some screenshots.

The Installation Disk Image

Main Window with Downloads

Click to enlarge.

Speed
The main reason I like uTorrent so much is because downloads are considerably faster in it than in any other BitTorrent client. This held true when I compared uTorrent Mac to Transmission and Xtorrent. The downloads speeds in both couldn’t match uTorrent’s. Azureus was the only one that came close, just as I had expected.

Application Launch Time
uTorrent Mac, just like its Windows counterpart, is super-light. It launches immediately (not even 1 bounce in the Dock!). This is clearly one piece of well-coded software. Probably part of the reason why BitTorrent Inc decided to buy it.

Interface
uTorrent Mac has a simple, yet appealing interface that is easy to use and navigate. It’s not as stylish as Xtorrent’s, but then again, no one can create interfaces like David Watanabe.

Search
Though it may seem that uTorrent has some sort of built-in search functionality, currently only offered by BitRocket and Xtorrent on the Mac, it does not. Typing something such as “HDTV” into the search box and hitting return will merely open a BitTorrent.com search page in your default browser.

Conclusion
It’s too early to draw conclusions but it’s a great first impression, especially for a pre-release version.

It’s worth mentioning that some Mac users such as myself like uTorrent so much, we even prefer running it under emulation than using one of the available Mac BitTorrent clients. uTorrent is not only the most popular Windows BitTorrent client according to a poll we conducted last year, but also the winner of our BitTorrent clients comparison.

Many of you are probably dying to download uTorrent Mac. Hang in there, it’s coming real soon.

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.

The vulnerabilities were discovered in the components chunkcounter.cpp and torrent.cpp and can be exploited by getting a user to use a modified torrent file, resulting in the possible control of the OS with the same privileges as the Ktorrent user.

There is currently no work-around for the flaws but the situation can be remedied by upgrading to the latest version of Ktorrent, version 2.1.4.

KTorrent is a BitTorrent client written in C++ for KDE, offering mainline DHT and µTorrent compatible peer exchange, port forwarding via UPnP and protocol encryption for getting round those pesky traffic-shaping ISP’s.

KTorrent version 2.2 will be released later this month and will include new features such as multiple tabs, moving finished downloads to another directory, and diskspace preallocation. Another good reason to upgrade!

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

In this early stage of development the configuration options of Firestorm are quite basic, but the most essential features like adjusting the up- and download speed are already in there.

Firestorm is based on the source code from the Official BitTorrent Client, which is modified to be integrated with Firefox. The developers plan to continue the development of the extension after the school project is finished, so they can add more features and keep the extension up-to date.

Frequent TorrentFreak readers probably know that Firestorm is not the first BitTorrent extension for Firefox, FoxTorrent and BitFox are similar projects that work on adding a BitTorrent download manager to Firefox. This is a good thing of course, a little competition will only benefit the users.

More screenshots over here.

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

The report is based on data supplied by BigChampagne and PC Pitstop. BigChampagne is a company that tracks online media, it also provides provides Billboard online music charts. PC Pitstop gathers data by “inspecting” the computers of users that try their free online virus / spyware scanners. The data used in this report are collected from Windows registry and table entries of 1.5 million PC’s through these online diagnostic tests performed by PC Pitstop.

The results. The percentages in the table indicate the install base of the P2P applications:

In the report we further read that the once almighty “Kazaa family” is now only installed on 1.3% PCs. Newcomers like FrostWire and Pando are included in the report for the fist time with a 0.2% and 0.3% install rate respectively.

As said before, the usability of these figures are doubtful. Here are a few concerns. First of all, install rates do not equal usage. The fact that someone installed a P2P client does not mean that they actually use it. So the report can’t say much about the popularity of a filesharing network or application. They do not make these claims, but the way the data is presented is a bit misleading, to say the least.

For example, uTorrent is by far the most used BitTorrent client. Over 50% of the peers in an average BitTorrent swarm use uTorrent. It could be that uTorrent and BitTorrent Mainline are installed on almost an equal number of PCs, but that the BitTorrent mainline client is hardly ever used. For instance, novices may start with the mainline client, but move on to better BitTorrent clients later on.

Another remarkable point is the uTorrent data collection for this report. uTorrent doesn’t install itself, and even the installer doesn’t use the Windows registry. So how did they come up with these statistics on uTorrent then?

It is also funny to see mIRC in the top 10 of most installed filesharing application because it is so much more than this. Most people I know use mIRC for other purposes than sharing files.

The concerns raised here show that “power” is not always in numbers. They might have collected data from millions of users, but is this really valuable if you have no idea if they actually use the application? A survey among 10.000 users where you actually ask if, and how often they use these applications is probably more useful.

And on a final note, people who want to read the report, but don’t want to pay $195 might want to try Google’s backdoor. Doubtful statistics, doubtful security.

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

Xtorrent, the new BitTorrent client for Mac OS X, just rolled out of the beta phase. In September, we reviewed the first public beta, which initially looked like a promising application. However, issues like the problematic libtransmission library, and the intrusive shareware policy make this client a lot less attractive.

The first major drawback of Xtorrent is that it is not free, which is extremely unusual and awkward for a BitTorrent client. In addition, Xtorrent has a very intrusive shareware policy. If you do not register the application, a floating window that you cannot close gets stuck on your screen, and searches randomly start to fail. To make things even worse, it seems like the application throttles the available bandwidth to 10kbps after an hour of usage.

The second drawback is that Xtorrent’s core is made up of the libtransmission library. This library is known to hammer trackers, and is banned from an increasing number of them, which makes Xtorrent useless for members of Oink, for example.

If you decide to buy Xtorrent you’re mostly paying for the (stunningly) beautiful user-interface, not because its download speeds are the best or because it is the lightest BitTorrent client available for the Mac. Azureus still leads by a wide margin in download speeds, and Transmission is hands down the lightest BitTorrent client for the Mac.

Xtorrent looks good, it integrates well with iTunes, has iPod support and subscribes to RSS feeds. But to be completely honest, it just doesn’t seem like it’s worth the money. Perhaps that’s just because I’m a Windows user. Paying for software just isn’t in my blood.

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

I can’t really tell how accurate the stats for the swarm are. It looks like Poland, the country where p2pmonitor.com originates, is overrepresented. Apart from this, it is fun to see where all the bits and pieces come from, and it makes you realize how global a BitTorrent swarm actually is.

It would even be better if you were able to hook it up to your own BitTorrent client, so you can pay leechers a visit if their share ratio is not what it’s supposed to be. Perhaps an idea for a future release of this tool?

Try for yourself.

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

The maximum upload speed is by far the most important setting. It might sound strange to some, but you should always cap your upload speed to reach the best download speeds. Your connection is (sort of) like a pipeline (or tube if you prefer), if you max out your upload speed the pipe will be fully used, which means there’s not enough space left for the files you are downloading. The calculator recommends to set it at 80% of your maximum, I agree with that. People with high-speed connections might go a bit higher, and set is at 85% or even 90%.

Some people find that when they are seeding, browsing the web becomes sluggish. This is due to a badly configured upload speed in their BitTorrent client. When you have the correct upload speed entered into your client, browsing the web is noticeably quicker and seeding becomes almost transparent.

How to configure your maximum upload speed?

uTorrent: options > preferences > connection
Azureus: tools > options > transfer
Bitcomet: try this ?

Here at TorrentFreak we also wrote some post about optimizing BitTorrent download speeds, might be worth the read if you want to know more.

Read more on optimizing your BitTorrent Speed.

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

(Correct at 13:00GMT)

eMule Plus just missed the Top10, sitting where it does at number 11 with 21,018,700 downloads and is backed up by FTP project FileZilla at number 13 with 19,944,891 gets.

The seasoned file-sharer is only too aware of how important the Open Source software movement is to their cause and SourceForge’s stats appear to reinforce that. I wonder how long it will take the fresh-faced BitTorrent client Halite to break the Top 10? It’s currently ranked 8,117 with 8,848 downloads. 2008? 2009? Why not give it a try!

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

However, RedSwoosh assured us that future versions will embed perfectly within Firefox, more so than the open source equivalent BitFox. They see a bright future for the Firefox extension, as well as their desktop client. A RedSwoosh employee, who prefers to stay anonymous, told TorrentFreak that their client will be more popular than uTorrent, the popular Windows client that was recently acquired by BitTorrent Inc:

“One year from now, we’ll have the most popular torrent client on the planet. The fastest. The easiest. Hands down. We’ve basically rewritten the entire BT protocol. Bram [Cohen] is going to shit his pants when he takes our client for a spin.”

Personally I think that RedSwoosh is a bit overconfident. It might not be a good idea to downplay uTorrent and BitFox, before they have a working BitTorrent client themselves. Perhaps they are frustrated by the fact that BitTorrent managed to dominate P2P traffic in just a couple of years. I mean, stating that your company was founded before BitTorrent on your “about us” page wont impress many people. It might be a good idea to stop talking, and start coding. At least they will please Mark Cuban, one of the biggest investors in RedSwoosh, who doesn’t seem to be a BitTorrent fan himself.

It is hard to judge this extension from this initial beta version, but it’s good to see that people have started working on adding BitTorrent support to Firefox, something that Opera has had for months now.

In the meanwhile, feel free to test the internal beta release of FoxTorrent (Windows only).

Update: RedSwoosh CEO Travis Kalanick apologized for the statements released by one of his part-time employees.

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