In recent years Vuze’s core BitTorrent client has evolved into an advanced download solution with every complex feature heavy BitTorrent users could wish for.

The downside of being so complete is that the application can be quite overwhelming to newcomers. In addition the application is somewhat of a resource hog. The Vuze team has taken these complaints to heart and coded “Vuze Leap,” a brand new client that is both simple and lightweight.

“We sought to deliver a simpler experience as a counterpart to the powerful, full-featured core Vuze BitTorrent Client that has pleased millions of users for years. Even with file-sharing being a part of internet usage for years, we continued to hear, from some users a desire to have a simpler experience that was less resource intensive,” Vuze’s Claude Tolbert tells TorrentFreak.

Today the first Vuze Leap beta is unveiled to the public. The torrent client works out of the box. Users are presented with a big search box which they can use to search for torrents without having to leave the application.

When a search term is entered, Vuze Leap will automatically search for matching content on Google, the Internet Archive and elsewhere. This can then be downloaded with a single click.

After a download is completed users can play media files directly from the client, or navigate to the download folder as they would do with other torrent clients. Vuze Leap automatically categorizes files into various categories to keep the library organized.

Vuze’s new BitTorrent client is best suited to less tech-savvy users who don’t necessarily need all the advanced features the core Vuze client has to offer. Through its simpler interface Vuze Leap should make BitTorrent more accessible to people who are new to torrents.

“We believe that Vuze Leap extends usability to users who may be new to filesharing or don’t require the power and functionality that the core Vuze BitTorrent Client provides. However, both provide an outstanding experience to users,” Tolbert says.

TorrentFreak tested the application and it works as advertised. It certainly feels much lighter and faster than the core Vuze client. The built-in search is handy as well, although users may have to scroll down to get the best search results, which often come from Google.

The application is currently only available for Windows but support for other operating systems is expected to follow in the future.

Those who are interested in taking Vuze Leap for a spin can download the latest beta release after signing up for the beta test. The download link comes with the confirmation email.

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

The revelations of former CIA technical assistant Edward Snowden, which come on the back of his four-year stint with contractors working with the National Security Agency, have seen him labeled a hero by the masses and a traitor by top U.S. officials.

For netizens it now seems that any dream of basic privacy is a thing of the past, especially for those using the services of Google, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, Yahoo, PalTalk, YouTube and Skype. Understandably the masses are outraged, with sentiments only being inflamed by carefully worded statements by those involved that seek to divert and do nothing to allay citizens’ fears.

As a result a coalition of 80 organizations and companies including EFF, Free Software Foundation, Mozilla, Demand Progress and Reddit have joined AccessNow to call on U.S. Congress to end the NSA’s spying.

Also getting in on the action are the makers of the open source torrent client Vuze, who have pledged their support to a campaign operated by the American Civil Liberties Union.

“The recent revelations about the National Security Agency’s surveillance apparatus, including using data from non-governmental business entities, if true, expose stunning abuses and violations of our basic Constitutional rights,” Vuze say.

The company states that it’s a supporter of civil liberties and the right to anonymity and privacy, and is against censorship, hate, oppression, punishment, reprisal and retaliation.

“Vuze supports the uses of tools to protect and safeguard those rights and uses, and against evil, from printed pamphlets to encryption to avoiding storing private data and communications on central servers,” they add.

In common with other torrent clients Vuze operates via a peer-to-peer infrastructure so naturally avoids most of the downfalls of central server operations such as those operated by the companies embroiled in the scandal. It also has features which enables users of VPNs to bind their connection to their encrypted tunnel in order to avoid privacy-threatening anonymity leaks.

“To be very clear, and we are very serious and don’t say this with a wink or a knowing nod, we are publicly coming out in support of these rights and tools for legitimate uses now because of these recent shocking (maybe not so shocking) revelations,” Vuze add.

Vuze conclude by noting that the company only supports the use of encryption tools for legitimate uses, which now appears to include the avoidance of government spying.

With Vuze support for encryption tools on the table, it’s perhaps no surprise that others have been expressing renewed interest in the technology following this week’s controversy. TorrentFreak spoke with a major VPN provider yesterday who confirmed that since news of the scandal broke, the number of users taking out subscriptions has increased.

In the current environment it may not be long before anonymous VPN services are considered a necessary tool for even the most ordinary Internet users.

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

However, getting a subscription doesn’t guarantee privacy. If for some reason the connection with the VPN is lost, BitTorrent downloads will simply continue from one’s residential IP-address.

Luckily there are ways to minimize this risk and make sure BitTorrent downloads only work when the VPN is connected. Vuze, for example, now has a “connect through VPN only” option built-in.

This new feature comes with Vuze’s updated proxy and VPN support in version 4.8.1.0. It notifies users via a pop-up and asks them whether they want to connect only when the VPN is running.

“Vuze now includes logic to detect when you are running over a VPN and prompts you explicitly to bind to its interface to increase privacy,” Vuze explains on its blog.

If the automatic detection doesn’t work, which is often the case, the feature can be activated manually in a few simple steps.

1. ‘Tools’ > ‘Options’ > set ‘Mode’ to advanced

2. Go to ‘Connection’ > ‘Advanced Network Settings’

3. Make sure that you are connected to the VPN. Select the right network interface from the list and enter the corresponding id in the “Bind to local IP address or interface” box. This varies per computer.

E.g. On Windows PPTP/L2TP generally goes through the WAN Miniport and OpenVPN uses the TAP-Win32 Adapter V9. Usually you will see the name or IP-address of the VPN listed.

4. Make sure the box “enforce IP bindings” is ticked at the bottom.

Then when everything is working correctly a green “routing” icon should appear in the bottom bar of the client.

To check whether it’s working you can simply disconnect the VPN. The “routing” icon should then turn red and all active downloads and uploads will be halted.

As far as we know Vuze is the only popular BitTorrent client that has a network interface binding feature. Many BitTorrent / uTorrent users have been asking for a similar privacy protecting option as well, but for now these clients only allow binding to static IP-addresses.

For those not using Vuze there are other options available though. The easiest, and perhaps most safe, is to install a general VPN monitoring tool. We’ve discussed these and other tips in a previous article on VPN security.

Do you have other tips or suggestions? Please post them in the comments.

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

Torrents appear. Click. Download. Easy enough.

However, if a BitTorrent user doesn’t really know what he or she is looking for and needs some ideas, a torrent site’s category view comes in useful to allow browsing of specific content such as videos, music or games.

But what if there was another mechanism through which to find new content, one that doesn’t involve visiting a torrent site? One that would find content to download based on the activities of other BitTorrent users that have downloaded, to some extent, the same or similar content as you?

Now all of that is possible with “Swarm Discoveries”, a new and intriguing feature added to the open source Vuze client this week. The feature uses the Vuze Distributed Hash Table (DHT) to anonymously relate one piece of downloaded content with another.

The problem

“For a long time users have been asking for a means to find more content that they might like, stuff similar to the kind of things they already download,” Paul Gardner from Vuze tells TorrentFreak.

“Existing sites tend not to offer anything beyond simple categorization (e.g. by format or genre), and only cover their own domain of content – users are looking for something that works ‘horizontally’, across sites, while at the same time zooming in on things that may be of interest.”

Striving towards solving this problem the Vuze team came up with Swarm Discoveries, a behavior-based torrent content discovery system. So what makes it tick?

“Given the lack of any standardized metadata for torrents, and the huge diversity of naming conventions, languages etc., any approach based on matching between static torrent data is difficult. So what we decided to concentrate on was the behavioral aspects of torrent selection,” Gardner reveals.

“Users are already way smarter than us at finding content they like, so why not use their expertise to raise everybody’s game?”

And this is where it gets both slightly more complex and much more interesting.

How relationships are formed

“Swarm Discoveries is based on the fact that if Alice downloads torrents A, B and C then, in some (unspecified) way there is a link between A, B and C. At the most abstract the link is that Alice likes A, B and C,” Gardner explains.

“Now if Bob downloads B, C and D this re-enforces the fact that B and C are somehow related, but between them we know nothing regarding A and D.”

Of course, when looking at the habits of just Alice and Bob the dataset is very small. However, millions of people are using the Distributed Hash Table which results in a much larger sample and the creation of ever more interesting links between content.

As a side note, Vuze (or Azureus as it was then) debuted the first ever BitTorrent DHT.

Taking Swarm Discoveries for a spin

TorrentFreak gave the feature a test drive, and this is what happened when we tested it on a Fuduntu Linux distro we planned to test in a VirtualBox virtual machine.

1. First we loaded up the Fuduntu torrent using Vuze’s inbuilt torrent search feature. Once underway a right-click revealed the Swarm Discovery option.

2. Once selected this short list of related content appeared.

Item 1 is for a Knoppix torrent. Knoppix is another Linux distro so the connection to our Fuduntu download is obvious.

Item 2 turns out to be Hiren’s Boot CD, a collection of fairly geeky system management tools which is (coincidentally or not) based on Knoppix.

3. At this point the discovery can continue simply by right clicking on any result and selecting “Discover Related”. If you want to do some research on the torrents already found, the same menu gives access to some research tools.

4. Digging down another level produced further related results.

Of course, the system doesn’t work only for Linux distros. In our tests popular video and music content hashes produced the richest and most complex results.

I don’t want to do anything, just make it work!

For those of you too busy (or lazy) to right-click on downloads to find explicit results you can sit back and let Vuze do the work for you. Over time Vuze builds up results in the main Swarm Discoveries tab (you’ll find it under ‘Plugins & Extras’) and ranks them – the more ways a torrent is related to your downloads the higher the rank it will be assigned (up to a max of 100).

If you’re bored with the current results then right-click on sidebar entry and select ‘delete all results’, Vuze will start generating a new set to inspire you.

Decentralized and anonymous

Although the Swarm Discoveries system might at first appear to be a privacy nightmare, concerned users can rest easy. There are no external databases and relationship data is anonymous. (Not to be confused with anonymous downloads of course, that would require a VPN or similar)

“Swarm Discoveries is entirely implemented using the Distributed Hash Table (DHT) and results are automatically generated by Vuze clients – there are no centralized components,” Gardner explains.

“In the same way that the DHT is used to relate content to peers during decentralized tracking it is also used to related one piece of content to another – this relationship is stored anonymously, so when a Vuze client reads a relationship the originator of the relationship is unknown.”

While Swarm Discoveries often produced fairly predictable results, such as supplying torrents to similar genres of music and movies, it also throws in the occasional curve ball – perfect for those who browse YouTube for pop videos and end up two hours later viewing the mating rituals of a rare breed of mountain goat.

Download the latest version of Vuze with Swarm Discoveries here.

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

But despite its undoubted capabilities, in years gone by when processing power and RAM were in relatively short supply, some users had little choice but to use a more lightweight client such as uTorrent.

These days, however, most seasoned BitTorrent users are blessed with more hardware resources than they need, so any ‘resource hog’ notions should be long gone. In fact, on our test machine Vuze uses up 30% less resources than Firefox with a couple of addons. If you haven’t tried it for a while, Vuze is absolutely worth another look, especially when you consider the impressive range of gadgets available (such as the Mainline DHT plugin) and the fact that it’s open source.

Today we take a look at a Vuze feature that might easily be overlooked, but one that offers some powerful functionality that could increase your productivity and transform your torrenting habits.

Vuze Categories

The categories feature in Vuze is very powerful and can be used to automate tasks and perform some very neat tricks.

Also known as tags in some clients, a category can be assigned to a torrent to classify it in some way, family videos or news items for example. Vuze currently supports a single category per torrent.

To manually assign a download to a category you can right click on it and select ‘Assign Category’ – this gives you the option to create a new category or select an existing one. (see large screenshot below)

So, categories are used to contain downloads. Once you have a category you can right-click on it to set category specific options.

You have per-category upload and download speed limits, ability to stop/start all the downloads in the category, and the Auto-Device option which we’ll come to in a little while.

Automatically Assign Categories to Subscription (RSS) Downloads

Some torrent sites and content producers provide RSS feeds for their torrents. When added to Vuze these are known as ‘subscriptions’.

Once added to Vuze, right-click on a subscription and select ‘Assign Category’ – all content downloaded through that subscription will be automatically assigned to that category. Then we can perform neat tricks, such as assigning that category for auto-transcoding to an external viewing device.

Assigning a category to auto-transcode to device

First, in the right hand pane make sure to switch on ‘Device Playback‘ and install the addon when prompted. Make sure your device is connected to your network and right click on category and select ‘auto-device’. Choose your device, and the encoding format, and all torrents in that category will be sent to your device automatically.

An example flow that uses the auto-device feature would be if you were using BitTorrent to share family movies and you wanted to put them onto your iPad to watch them. You would create a category for these movies (FamilyVids for example) and set the Auto-Device to be your new iPad.

Whenever you started downloading a new family video you could drag+drop it onto the FamilyVids category sidebar entry to assign it to that category. This will automatically queue it for transcode and transfer to your iPad. Interestingly, it will actually perform the transcoding in parallel with the download to minimize elapsed time, although this feature is still in beta.

Using an RSS feed to trigger remote downloads and transcoding to another device.

Although RSS feeds are offered by torrent sites, it’s also possible for regular users to create RSS feeds to automate the sharing of content with their friends.

To extend this example to include the assignment of a category to a Subscription, let’s say your brother was using Vuze and creating family videos.

First, he could create a MyVids category and use the ‘Sharing’ feature in Vuze to drag+drop his videos onto Vuze to automatically create torrents and seed them. Then he could assign these torrents to the MyVids category and use the ‘Create local RSS feed’ option on the category to create an RSS feed containing those videos.

He could then send you the RSS feed link and you would add that to your Vuze client as an RSS feed (known in Vuze as Subscriptions). You would then set the category for that RSS Feed to be FamilyVids.

Now, whenever your brother adds a new video to his Vuze’s MyVids category it will automatically end up on your iPad.

More Vuze power tips coming soon.

The Vuze BitTorrent client can be downloaded here and the Vuze wiki is available here.

Thanks to Dan Kochis, Paul Gardner and Arron Mogge at Vuze

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

In recent years Vuze’s BitTorrent client has evolved into an all-in-one download solution. With built in search, DVD-burning capabilities and device integration the Vuze team has set itself aside from other popular BitTorrent clients.

Last year Vuze announced that device integration in particular is a highly appreciated and frequently used feature among users. Millions of people have already hooked up their Xbox 360, PS3, iPhone and Android devices to Vuze, and the developers have been working hard to support as many devices as possible.

This week Vuze made a giant step forward by adding DLNA support, which makes the BitTorrent client compatible with thousands of new devices. DLNA is a networking standard supported by all major consumer electronic brands. It can be found in many of the newer TVs, set-top boxes, tablets, NAS devices and more.

“Today, we’re continuing this crusade to unleash your content on your mobile and TV screens by adding all DLNA-supported devices, a few additional Android devices, and more,” the Vuze team announced.

“With this release, most DLNA-supported devices should now show up in your Vuze Sidebar – assuming they’re connected to the same home network as Vuze – making it possible to stream directly from Vuze to the DLNA device of your choice. Once you spot your device name under Device Playback in the Sidebar, simply drag-and-drop.”

With this update Vuze users can now easily stream movies to their DLNA supported TVs. It also makes it very easy to copy downloaded files to external hardware such as NAS storage devices, tablets, game consoles and laptops. A drag-and-drop is sufficient to transfer or stream the files.

The timing of the new Vuze release appears not to be totally coincidental. Earlier this week Vuze’s main competitor uTorrent introduced device integration in an early alpha release, supporting a handful devices. Vuze delivered their announcement sortly after, emphasizing that they’ve had this feature for more than two years already, and that Vuze is now compatible with tens of thousands of devices.

“Yes, we launched these features years ago, unlike some other very tiny clients that are just getting around to it now ;),” the Vuze team teased.

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

To gain more insight into BitTorrent’s usage we’ve previously looked at the market share of various BitTorrent clients to spot emerging trends, and today we revive this initiative. To see where things stand two years after our last report, TorrentFreak asked the Tribler P2P research team at Delft University of Technology to find out which clients are being used in various popular BitTorrent swarms.

Although the new results show some interesting shifts in market shares, uTorrent remains firmly in the lead. Nearly half of the 557,536 unique peers (48%) that were spotted in the sample were using a version of uTorrent. The mainline client, also developed by BitTorrent Inc., came in at third with a market share of 13 percent.

Vuze, formerly known as Azureus, secured second place with 22 percent of the total users. This is an all-time high for the client which had just 14 percent market share in our last report. One of the factors that contributed to this rise is FrostWire’s move to become a BitTorrent-only client based on the Azureus code base. This means that a few percent of the downloaders that identify as using Azureus, are in fact FrostWire users.

Another client that gained popularity is Transmission, which doubled its market share in recent months and is now at 7 percent. A respectable figure, especially because Transmission doesn’t have a native Windows client. BitComet, on the other hand, continued its downward spiral and is now stuck at little over one percent, down from the 6 percent it enjoyed two years ago.

We have to note that the comparisons above are relative. The number of BitTorrent users has grown significantly over the past two years, so in absolute numbers Transmission’s user base may have even quadrupled, or more.

Below is the full list of all clients that have a market share over 1 percent. Some clients were not identified by libTorrent (rakshasa) and those ended up in the unknown ‘category’. As before, the research focuses on popular swarms listed on English language BitTorrent sites, which means that ‘foreign’ clients such as Xunlei are underrepresented.

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

But the MediaGet team wanted more. Earlier this year they translated the BitTorrent client into English, Spanish, French, German and Italian, and not without success.

As of today the BitTorrent client has been downloaded more than 18 million times, and the share of US and Western European users is growing steadily. The MediaGet team estimates that 70% of their current users still come from Russia and Ukraine, but other parts of the world are catching up quickly.

Judging from the features and a few trial runs, it is not hard to imagine that the client could appeal to a wide audience, especially those who prefer an all-in-one download application.

MediaGet is available to both Windows and Mac users and allows users to search, download and play files all from within the application. Although it has nearly all the features one would expect in a BitTorrent client, MediaGet is primarily targeted at novice users.

“Our software is made to be a BitTorrent client for ‘dummies’, who are looking to download movies, music and games. We provide built-in search which searches on various open torrent-trackers, and we have media player to watch movies on demand,” the MediaGet team told TorrentFreak.

One of the most notable features of MediaGet that most other clients lack is a built-in search engine. Aside from searching various public torrent sites including The Pirate Bay and isoHunt, in the future MediaGet plans to add an API so users can add other sites as well.

Whether the torrent sites, whose resources are users to power the search, will be very happy with the current implementation is a question that has to be answered another time.

On the privacy side MediaGet provides easy integration with the Faceless.me VPN service, in addition to regular proxy support for anonymity services like BTGuard. Other features worth mentioning are the uTorrent importer, the media player with streaming support, and the Android remote access interface.

Overall we have to say that MediaGet gives the impression of a mature and stable client that works out of the box. It works as advertised and is certainly a client worth keeping an eye on in the coming years.

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

“Vuze 4.6 has arrived! The release includes a brand new Play Now feature, faster downloads, and a completely redesigned Sidebar. At the end of the day, each of these features enhances your ability to quickly download and watch. Here at Vuze, we’re all about instant gratification.”

(Read more at Vuze)

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

The main focus of the client is to make it easier for people to find the various movie releases on BitTorrent. On startup users see a home screen where the most popular movies are featured, and on the side they can navigate through the ‘catalog’ of films by genre, actors, directors, countries and the year the film was released.

In addition to a catalog browser there is also an advanced movie torrent search engine built into zButterfly. Here, users can filter their searches based on production years, genres and IMDb ratings. In total, there are over 8200 films for which at least one torrent is available, but Philip Lamb, Marketing Director of zButterfly, told TorrentFreak that the catalog will continue to expand.

When users see a film they like they can continue to the movie download page where a wealth of information is presented. Various release formats, the film’s cast, its IMDb rating, trailers and recommendations for similar films are all available. Most of this meta-data seems to originate from IMDb. The actual downloads are torrentless, and rely solely on magnet links.

Although there is little doubt that there will be a subset of BitTorrent users who will be interested in using such a client, it is also a certainty that the MPAA will not be backing this project. zButterfly’s Philip Lamb agrees with this assessment but believes that they don’t do anything wrong.

“Trouble with the movie industry should be expected,” Lamb told us. “But legally we are a search engine. We do not copy the content on our servers, we do not operate a torrent tracker, we are just a mirror of the BitTorrent network. A mirror which is decorated with a catalog of movies.”

“All movies in our catalog were found with our automatic search robots. Any copyright holder may submit a request for removal, but there is no guarantee that the movie will not be added to our database in the future,” Lamb said, adding that search engines such as Google can also be used to find torrent files. “Legally we are not much different from Google.”

Up to a certain degree Lamb may be right. But judging from the movie industry’s lawsuits against torrent sites in the past years, we’ve learned that ‘intent’ is more important than technicalities. The MPAA would probably argue that zButterfly is promoting copyright infringement by featuring several blockbuster movies on their home screen.

The new client can be downloaded on the official site and all the project’s source files are available on Sourceforge.

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