One torrent site that has been floating under the radar, relatively speaking, is now pushing back at these outfits with a rather unusual action. The Russian-based team of operators behind Vertor.com has sent special packages to six of the leading anti-piracy groups through which they hope to send a clear message.

The packages, containing the local brand of Vizit Overture aroma flavored condoms, are accompanied with a note that doesn’t allow for much speculation. “We wish your parents had used it,” the message reads, venting the frustration of the Vertor team and many of the site’s users.

The people behind Vertor informed TorrentFreak that their action is a joke, but one with a clear message. “I’m sure that every one of us would want to say something like this to these bloodsuckers, but not everyone has the opportunity to be heard,” an anonymous source from the Vertor team said.

The condom shipments were sent out yesterday are expected to arrive within a day at the anti-piracy offices. They are believed to be free of anthrax and other kinds of hazardous materials.

From Russia with love…

The UPS tracking numbers for the packages and scans of the shipping documents have also been posted on the Vertor blog.

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

The site goes even further though. For every video file, Vertor takes several screenshots so users can verify that it is actually the film the title says it is. Similarly, for music torrents users can preview 20 seconds of the tracks, to avoid downloading the wrong files, wasting precious bandwidth.

Alex, the founder of Vertor explained to TorrentFreak: “If there is a video we extract screenshots, if there is a text file we save it on our server, if there is music we extract 20 second samples and if there is archive we open it and extract the list of files. Then we manually remove video files protected with DRM.” On an average day, 6000 torrents are downloaded, and between 2000 and 2500 torrents are verified and get published.

There is a downside to verifying all the torrents though. Since it takes some time to process, it can take one or two days before a fresh torrent appears on the site, which might be a problem for those who want to catch up with a TV-episode that aired yesterday. On the server side, the drawback is that these processes require some additional hardware. Alex told us that they use 6 Dual Xeons with 4 GB ram and 500GB of hard disk space.

It is therefore no surprise that it took a few weeks of verifying torrents before the Vertor project could go live. Currently there are 138439 torrents verified, and more than 5000 were removed because they contained a virus or a passworded archive. In addition, the site’s moderators blocked another 14445 torrents. Alex told us that they started to use new anti-virus software this week, which should be resulted in higher percentage of virus recognition.

Aside from the verification part, Vertor has another user friendly feature, as it allows users to download torrents in their browser with Bitlet, by clicking the “download from the web” button on the torrent detail page. For now, the site is completely ad-free, and Alex told us that he will try to keep it like that for as long as possible.

In summary, we think that Vertor has a lot of potential, especially for those people who are not familiar enough with BitTorrent to spot the bad stuff themselves.

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