Most often, companies such as BayTSP and MediaSentry are hired to connect to BitTorrent trackers, and send takedown notices to the users (via their ISP) who download movies, TV-shows or music albums of a company they represent. This is a fairly easy process, since BitTorrent is far from anonymous: Every user necessarily broadcasts his or her IP-address to other peers in the swarm.

Sometimes anti-piracy outfits use their own trackers to gather evidence. Last week we reported that The Pirate Bay started to actively remove these suspicious trackers from their torrents, with some help from torrenteditor.com. Running a tracker is not required though, to collect information from BitTorrent users. In fact, many attempt to use publicly available trackers such as The Pirate Bay to do so. However, the tracker owners are aware of this, and trick these tracking companies by polluting the list of IP-addresses the tracker returns. That is one of the techniques The Pirate Bay uses, just to show how flawed the evidence gathering is.

Polluting the evidence works like this. When a client asks for a list of peers who are downloading the same torrent, the tracker software automatically inserts several “random IP addresses” that are not in the swarm. They are based on existing sub-nets, but might be from people who may not even be aware that BitTorrent exists. This means that the evidence that’s being gathered by anti-piracy companies includes IPs that belong to people that were not downloading the movie or album they are accused of. Perfect deniability, as the people who coded the tracker software explain.

Of course, this doesn’t work when the pirate-tracking company requires itself to connect to the peer, before the IP-address is collected, since it is impossible to connect to a non-existing peer. A representative from BayTSP told TorrentFreak that they have such a requirement, but several others are less thorough, which makes their claims useless, and impossible to defend in court.

The best solution is of course to ban these anti-piracy companies from using the tracker in the first place. This is something The Pirate Bay is working on as well, and they have blocked many IP-ranges already, but it’s impossible to ban them all. Unlike most of the suits in Hollywood, the companies that go after illicit file-sharers are experts in their field, and know more about BitTorrent than many users. They try to circumvent blocklists such as PeerGuardian whenever possible, and change IPs when they are marked.

Pirate Bay co-founder TiAMO told TorrentFreak that he has several criteria on which he can pick out the suspicious users that might be collecting IP-addresses. He also said that he’s working on a automated warning system which will operate as a sniffer on a monitor port. That project is far from complete, but has the potential to detect suspicious behavior more easily.

Nevertheless, it is impossible (as the name might give away) to keep the prying eyes of Hollywood off public trackers. Even private trackers are far from secure, as most anti-piracy companies have accounts at the larger communities. The private in “private tracker” merely refers to the fact that you have to login, and has nothing to do with “security”. The Pirate Bay (and other tracker owners) take several measures to prevent their users from being tracked by anti-piracy outfits, but there’s only so much they can do.

Post from: TorrentFreak

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Pirate Bay Tricks Anti-Pirates with Fake Peers torrent downloads.

The “real-time” search approach YouTorrent introduced appealed to many users, and it is no surprise that most of the new meta-search engines that were inspired by it have been growing steadily. PizzaTorrent and NowTorrents serve hundreds and thousands of searches a day, and newcomers such as TorrentFly and the more basic looking Gpirate are picking up steam as well.

In March, we mentioned both PizzaTorrent and NowTorrents in our top 10 YouTorrent (meta-search) alternatives. Since then, a lot of things have changed, both in design and feature-wise. We decided to catch up with Godius, the founder of NowTorrents, to find out what’s happened since Spring.

“We recently re-coded and designed the whole website,” Godius told us. “The new site has a more user friendly layout and has a bunch of new features. For example it’s now possible to filter site-by-site results, filter keyword and categories, all in real-time. We also build a popular searches caching system, this has greatly improved loading times. And we added more personal search preference settings.”

One of the new features at NowTorrents (and Gpirate) is the BoxOffice listings. The MPAA probably won’t be too happy with such a feature, but the users love it according to Godius.

“We are planning to expand the BoxOffice torrents feature with a latest Games and Music Albums charts section. We have noticed that users greatly appreciate the BoxOffice section, so we feel that adding games and music charts will satisfy their needs even more. Many people don’t know what to search for; they just want to download the latest stuff that has just been released.”

Godius is not too worried about the MPAA showing up at his doorstep, as he told us: “Basically we are doing exactly what Google is doing only we do not list non-torrent related results. We feel as long as Google gets away with it, and the torrent sites we link to get away with it, we have nothing to worry about.”

One of the downsides of all these new meta-torrent search engines is that they all rely on a handful of BitTorrent trackers, and sites that actually host torrent files. Running a meta-search engine is easier, less costly, and probably safer from a legal point of view. Nevertheless, they become useless if there are no torrent files to index, or torrents to track.

Post from: TorrentFreak

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Real-Time BitTorrent Search Engines Expand torrent downloads.

Quietly and with little fuss, January 2007 saw the birth of TextBook Torrents, a relatively small site initially, offering a BitTorrent tracker dedicated to the indexing of textbooks. In 6 months the site had accumulated 10,000 members. Just 3 months later, the number of users had doubled to 20,000 and by January 2008 the membership doubled again to an impressive 40,000. By the end of June 2008, almost 70,000 members were registered at TextBook Torrents and more and more people were becoming aware of its existence.

On July 1st 2008, Jeff Young, a writer with The Chronicle of Higher Education, wrote an article entitled Textbook Piracy Grows Online, Prompting a Counterattack From Publishers. The article focused on TextBook Torrents and it quickly gained traction after being picked up by Slashdot and subsequently, many other mainstream publications. In this explosion of publicity the site’s membership grew rapidly, but almost inevitably, the anti-piracy hawks began to circle.

Within days, Textbook Torrents’ host and domain registrar received takedown requests. At the time, Geekman, the admin of the tracker told TorrentFreak: “We received a DMCA notice from Pearson Education a week or so prior, which we complied with, but it was a group of publishers that contacted our host.” On July 5th Dreamhost suspended Geekman’s account and refused to speak with him and it took a week to even transfer the domain. It took a month for the site to return.

“I want to see the textbook industry change such that we are no longer needed,” Geekman told TorrentFreak when we asked him in early August about his motivation to bring back the site.

Now, just 2 months later, visitors to the TextBook Torrents site this week were faced with the grim reality that the site has gone. “TextBook Torrents won’t be coming back,” Geekman told TorrentFreak. “I’ve been at it for two years and it has been an awesome two years, but i’m ready to step back and hopefully allow somebody else to rise up in our place.”

Geekman told us that he felt that when it became clear to the copyright owners that simple threats to the site and its host wouldn’t be sufficient to close down the tracker, he himself became the next logical target: “We got word from several credible sources that there was a lawsuit in the works against myself personally,” he explained.

Of course, when anyone invests a huge amount of work into a project, there will be some pain to endure when it comes to an end, and Geekman is no different. “It does hurt. Textbook Torrents was my baby and one of my proudest projects, both personally and certainly as Geekman. At the same time, running the site had become very demanding. Since the attention last summer the site nearly doubled in size in 4 months from 60,000 to over 100,000 members. In all honesty, it was all I could do to keep up with media interview requests.”

Geekman told us that he was sorry to have to shut down the site without notice, but in the absence of others immediately stepping up to take over the running of the site, he had no alternative. He also said that he was disappointed that nobody stepped in with a replacement site when TextBook Torrents was down for 3 weeks in August, but hopes that someone will do so now.

When asked if book publishers have learned anything from the whole affair, Geekman said he doubted that: “Intellectual property corporations are notorious for missing the point. Like I’ve said before, we were out to make a statement, to give out as much free stuff as possible, and I think we’ve made that statement - perhaps not as loudly as we could have given another few months and a little more perseverance - but certainly people have heard, and are talking. Piracy will never be sustainable for the textbook industry, but perhaps this is the first step towards a more sustainable model in the future.”

When a torrent site goes offline, especially when it’s quite a quick shutdown, it’s inevitable that users get nervous that somehow they could be implicated if the site’s logs fall into the wrong hands. However, ex-users of the site have absolutely nothing to fear in this respect: “Textbook Torrents files, including logs and backups, have been permanently removed from all servers where they were stored,” notes Geekman, “We no longer have any data on the site or its users.”

All donations made to the site have been secured for the possibility of mounting a legal defense, should the need arise. However, once it’s established that Geekman is in the clear, whatever money is left over will be donated to a textbook or education-related non-profit organization. For his part, Geekman says he will ceremonially take the last $12 for himself, to cover the only thing he ever paid for on the site - the domain registration.

“I’m an activist, I’ll freely admit it but I believe activism is about a lot more than parading around holding a sign,” Geekman told TorrentFreak. “There are far more effective ways to get peoples’ attention.”

There can be no denying that TextBook Torrents did just that.

Post from: TorrentFreak

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TextBook Torrents Turns The Final Page and Closes Down torrent downloads.

When this article is published, The Pirate Bay now tracks nearly 1,288,514 torrents and 14,786,539 unique peers. As a comparison, in December 2006 they tracked 576,080 torrents and 4,274,698 peers, so today’s figures represent quite an increase.

TiAMO, one of Pirate Bay’s co-founders and the one responsible for keeping the hardware up and running, is happy with the traffic increase, and writes:

“A big thanks to all our users helping to make the site what it is. We’ll keep growing for as long as you keep using the site, filing it with content, sharing.”

This traffic increase is apparently placing quite a lot of stress on their server park. In July, the site went offline for more than a day, as the server setup had trouble keeping up with the ever-growing demand. It is estimated that The Pirate Bay currently returns results to between 7 and 8 million searches per day, roughly 230 million a month.

The popularity of The Pirate Bay hasn’t gone unnoticed with artists either. Timbuktu, a well known Swedish rapper released his latest single exclusively on The Pirate Bay earlier today. Free of DRM, high quality and free to share and remix of course.

Post from: TorrentFreak

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The Pirate Bay Tops 15 Million Peers torrent downloads.

In BitTorrent terms, TorrentIt has quite a long history. The tracker started out in 2004 as 123Torrents. In early 2005, they lost the 123Torrents domain, and while negotiating to get it back, took on the domain torrentit.com. When negotiations failed, they decided to keep the TorrentIt name, and applied it to the newly created pirate theme for the site.

TorrentIt, which had 27,000 members at its peak, was known for having a large mix of scene and non-scene torrents, and for a very tight community. In April 2006, BREIN went after the original owner, who lived in the Netherlands, forcing the shutdown of the site under legal pressure. The TorrentIt crew decided it was better to take the site down than to have him take the heat, and took the site down.

Almost a year later in January 2007, some of the former staff members decided to bring the site back, under a new domain, one not attached to the original owner. The intention was to open by the end of May, but that never happened. The deadline was missed, and it took more than a year before the site was ready for its official relaunch.

BlastGT1, one of the original crew members, and an Admiral (equivalent to SysOp) at the new site told TorrentFreak: “Unfortunately, due to real life commitments, we missed that deadline, and after months of stagnation, I took it upon myself to find good coders within the torrent community who could help us finish the site, and try to repair the damage we had done to TiT’s good name.”

TorrentIt teamed up with the coders from DigitalHive, who were looking to start a new side project themselves, and this eventually led to the long awaited resurrection of the tracker. “Now, we’re back with a different domain, a different source and the drive to succeed,” BlastGT1 said.

“We don’t care about racing sites for pre times, we don’t care about having the biggest userbase. We care about having quality torrents, scene and non-scene, and most of all, we care about community. That is what made TorrentIt stand out before, and so many are already loving its return, finding their cabins kept warm and cozy,” BlastGT1 added.

The new and improved tracker changed its domain extension from .info to .eu, and now runs on Gazelle. Two days ago, they sent out almost 10K invites to former members, and many of them have joined the new site since. Unfortunately, an invite is needed to sign up, so not everybody will be able to celebrate and participate.

BlastGT1 has a word of advice for newcomers though: “Bide your time, get a good honest reputation elsewhere, have patience like people did once upon a time. Sooner or later you’ll make the right friend and snag an invite.”

Post from: TorrentFreak

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TorrentIt Makes Long Awaited Comeback torrent downloads.

DDoS attacks are not an unusual event for many private BitTorrent trackers. Although they are sometimes used as an excuse for server issues, most of the larger trackers have been subject to such attacks at least once.

Norbits is one of these trackers, a medium sized community with over 10,000 members, most of them from Norway. Norbits has suffered downtime because of DDoS attacks before, but this time the threat may be more serious than that.

In an NFO file obtained by by IT-Avisen, a group called MORRADi takes responsibility for the attack on Norbits. “Once again we show our power! Once again we show your foolishness! This is not the first time we have done it, and it won’t be the last,” they write (translated).

“Enough is enough, you are becoming a real nuisance, and you are also a bunch of idiots that try to hide, so it’s high time we punish you! P2P is not something we want, when will you understand that? Do we have to take it as far as publishing your user database online?”

The message seems to suggest that “sceners” are behind the hack and the attacks, since they don’t want their releases shared on BitTorrent trackers. IT-Avisen journalist Trond Bie thinks this is plausible, as he told Dagbladet: “I know that there are people on the FTP scene that don’t like Norbits. It’s not improbable that such a group wanted to attack the servers. It’s happened before.” Whether the group actually has access to all the IPs, usernames and transfer logs of Norbits users remains unclear.

This would not be the first time that a private BitTorrent tracker has been hacked. Earlier this year the IP-addresses of seedboxes and of top-users on some of the larger private trackers leaked to BitTorrent. Nevertheless, this kind of information is useless to anti-piracy organizations, as it is impossible to verify whether it is legit or not.

Post from: TorrentFreak

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Norbits Hackers Threaten to Release User Info torrent downloads.

CurlyFries has been running a tracker for around two years. His site is called ‘TorrentFries’ and already you’re reading this saying “Who? I’ve never heard of this site?” and quite rightly so. Although CurlyFries is a real site admin, (as are his pair of co-admins), for security reasons they’re using pseudonyms. CurlyFries describes himself as idealistic and unmotivated, OnionRings is a general Linux and security geek, while Ketchup is “the only one that isn’t too lazy busy to deal with the finances and research.”

TorrentFries is the codename for a medium-sized tracker that thousands are using right now, and the inspiration behind a brand new site which is a must-read for potential tracker owners of the future.

The TorrentFries blog is a unique insight into the inner-workings of running a tracker, via a retrospective look at the actual developments in the two year lifespan of a real-life site. “We need more trackers out there, and it’s up to you to make them,” says CurlyFries. “So, learn from my mistakes and the things I’ve accidentally done right and you’ll do just fine.”

The first post on TorrentFries sets the scene and provides some of the background, with further posts covering many aspects of running a BitTorrent tracker. From conception, to choosing the right software, staff management, contingency plans, finance, and techniques for getting traffic to the site. Further updates are promised at regular intervals.

TorrentFreak caught up with CurlyFries who told us: “I think it’s something that the torrent community has needed for a while.”

Indeed, the site truly is unique and a very interesting read, invaluable for anyone looking to expand their knowledge before taking the plunge into tracker ownership. TorrentFreak spoke with someone taking his first steps as a site admin and asked him what he thought of the site: “I’m pleased to see this blog. I’ve lurked on the TBDev site for a while but found it a bit intimidating and felt embarrassed of my noob-ness so I’m happy to get these tips.”

CurlyFries is promising an update every 5 days to the site, until he runs out of things to say.

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The Secrets of a Running A BitTorrent Tracker torrent downloads.

TorrentFreak covered Gazelle at various points along its development. From inception, through beta testing, to its public début on What.cd, we’ve followed the development and progress. That progress has now lead to what could arguably be the most important day in any product’s lifecycle – initial release day.

Yes, all those nay-sayers and early fans that have populated the comment sections of our previous stories on Gazelle can finally prove what they’ve been claiming, as the first public release candidate of the script is now available for download.

Reactions from those that have given the site a try, have been mostly positive. The main negative comments stem from the fact it’s not an intuitive install. Part of that comes from the memory caching software – memcached – which gives the project its ‘blazing speed’. Also, right now the system uses XBTT as a tracker, but we’re told that it will have its own (multithreaded) tracker ready for later versions, codenamed ‘Ocelot’.

Also, as things stand, while they hoped for around a doubling of capacity over the older TBsource script, in practice it’s become more like double that, meaning a 10,000 user site under TBSource can probably handle 40,000 without any major difference in site response or system load. Project head WhatMan told TorrentFreak: “We out-shot our initial projections by a very wide margin.”

Interest in Project Gazelle has been fairly strong, and at least half a dozen sites are now running the new script. Perhaps more interestingly, though, is that Gazelle isn’t JUST a torrent site. Due to its modular nature, it can be used for regular sites as well. It’s a bit like a content management system in that respect, and perhaps our earlier comparison to Diferior wasn’t all that far from the mark.

If you’re interested in getting your hands on the Gazelle code, then just head over to the project site and follow the instructions. The whole kit-and-caboodle is released under a modified version of the GPL, so have fun.

This is an article from: TorrentFreak

Gazelle Rejuvenates the BitTorrent Tracker Community

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Gazelle Rejuvenates the BitTorrent Tracker Community torrent downloads.

Usniff combines a great looking design with fast, real-time search results. The site currently allows users to search The Pirate Bay, Mininova, isoHunt and BitTorrent, and the search results can be sorted by file size, torrent name, search engine, upload date, peers and seeds.

TorrentFreak asked Samo, the founder of Usniff, why he started the site. “My inspiration was YouTorrent.com, before it sailed to clean waters,” he told us. “It is simple to use, responsive and has loads of good results for almost any search query. At that time I didn’t know about other similar meta-search engines, so I decided i’d try to make one myself - mostly for fun.”

The list of sites that can be searched through Usiff is currently limited to four, but Samo told us he plans to add more torrent sites in the near future. “I have not yet made a complete wish-list, but btmon.com, bitenova.nl and torrentbox.com will definitely be added in September,” he said.

Usniff does indeed have a similar look and feel as the old YouTorrent design. YouTorrent, launched in January 2008, quickly becoming the most successful new torrent site. The site initially indexed all the popular torrent sites, but switched to purely ‘verified’ torrents this April, after receiving legal threats.

Samo anticipates legal threats, but that’s not going to hold him back. “I actually do expect legal problems,” Samo told us. He thinks, however, that his site is completely legal, as it does not link to copyrighted material. “Worst case scenario is that i’ll have to move it to a server in a less strict country.”

We’ve seen a lot of new BitTorrent meta-search engines this year. Sites like this are a great resource to search multiple BitTorrent sites at once. Never forget though, that meta-search engines like this depend heavily on public trackers and sites that host the .torrent files - BitTorrent’s backbone. There aren’t too many of those left.

Usniff search results

This is an article from: TorrentFreak

Usniff, Torrent Search Made Easy

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Usniff, Torrent Search Made Easy torrent downloads.

The Textbook Torrents tracker is considered to be the largest library of textbooks on BitTorrent. The site had been flying under the radar for quite some time but this changed a month ago. On July 1st, The Chronicle of Higher Education ran a story on the site, which was picked up by Slashdot and later the LA Times blog.

All this attention led to thousands of new visitors to the tracker, but the publicity also had a downside. Geekman, the administrator of Textbook Torrents told TorrentFreak that their host, xlHost, and their domain registrar, Dreamhost, both received a takedown request a few days after all the press coverage. “We received a DMCA notice from Pearson Education a week or so prior, which we complied with, but it was a group of publishers that contacted our host,” he told us.

Although the tracker was pretty popular, with around 20,000 peers trading files at any given point in time, Geekman said he had never received takedown notices from big publishers before. “We had a couple of emails from individuals before, but nothing from organizations. One was an editor complaining about being cheated out of his 10¢ per copy commission.”

On July 5th Dreamhost suspended Geekman’s account, and despite his many efforts to contact them, they simply didn’t respond to his inquiries. It took more than a week before he was allowed to transfer the domain. Now, more than a month after the site went down, TextbookTorrents returns, and it’s not planning to go away anytime soon.

Geekman plans to focus on making the site’s resources redundant, to reduce vulnerability and to make sure the site remains online. In addition he will work on the legal issues and improve the privacy of the site’s users. One of the most drastic changes is the decision to stop the logging of IP-addresses, which means that the site will stop ratio tracking. Making the tracker public will ensure the privacy of the users, in case the server is compromised.

“I want to see the textbook industry change such that we are no longer needed,” Geekman says when we ask him about his main motivation to bring the site back, while mentioning cheap books and responsible business practices as examples of positive change.

He doesn’t think publishers should give away their books –even though some authors profit from doing so– but he does think most books are too expensive. “The companies may be corrupt, but they have a right to make money. They can’t be expected to give their material away for free. After all, there is a significant amount of work involved in the production of a textbook. We need a middle ground,” he says.

“I’m not naive enough to say that if something can be distributed in a digital form it should be free but there needs to be some adaptation here,” Geekman added. For now, however, all the publishers see is a threat to their revenue stream, as Allan Ryan of Harvard Business Publishing put it: “We have been fairly vigorous in monitoring these sites and in requesting that they take down our copyrighted content.”

They sure have something to monitor now, as TextbookTorrents has made its return…because you still can’t torrent beer. Currently, the site can only be accessed directly via the IP-address, however, the domain should be working again shortly.

This is an article from: TorrentFreak

Textbook Torrents Makes Long Awaited Comeback

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Textbook Torrents Makes Long Awaited Comeback torrent downloads.

For a commnunity more used to a certain calm, things have been quite turbulent in the Mac torrent scene recently. After hosting issues took down the BrokenStones tracker the mood was low. So, when another site, Vortex Network, offered much as a potential replacement but ultimately proved too controversial, the mood fell lower still.

What the community needs right now is less drama, a place to call home and some well-deserved fun. We spoke to a senior staffer at the brand new mac tracker, SaveTheCoratee.org, to get some answers on the important stuff - like what the hell a coratee is?

“A coratee is an animal that is similar to a manatee, its primary diet is sea cabbage” he told us. “It was hunted and killed by tuna companies and sold to you because they are easier to fish. They are slow and stupid animals that are loving and soft and on the brink of extinction, meaning they are in desperate need of saving.”

The BrokenStones community parallels are obvious - minus the “slow and stupid bit” perhaps. But, an equal (if not greater) amount of love, of course. And cabbage.

“We picked Save the Coratee because of two real reasons. One, I try to live my life and everything I do with a healthy sense of the ridiculous. Two, the mac community is a creative and innovative community. Hand them a fake animal with no description rather than ‘It’s kinda like a manatee’ and people love it. It builds community and creates a family feeling that is ‘fun’.”

So bizarre mammal protection aside, what inspired the staff to start the site? Our source told us: “When BrokenStones went down we started talking with people about getting a site up but Vortex beat us to it.” As we know, things didn’t go to plan at Vortex but in the background, slowly but surely, SaveTheCoratee was still in development. “We started talking and we were kinda moving slow, brain-storming etc. Then stuff started to go down hill at Vortex so we kicked it into gear,” the staff member said.

So, apart from all the regular categories and well-seeded torrents and cabbage-eating sea mammals one would expect at a site like this, what else is there to this site? Well, for a start, the site is based on the Project Gazelle codebase, but it’s been put together ‘in-house’. The team at What.cd weren’t involved beyond the initial development, although they did save the first coratee (a female), and managed to effect some sort of virgin birth and a successful breeding program. I didn’t pry any deeper.

Nevertheless, I was told that a big achievement during the development was that the coders managed to convert the music-based source of Gazelle into a multi-app, multi-purpose site in just 4 days, which certainly sounds like an achievement.

The staff member further told us that SaveTheCoratee hopes to develop into a small, dedicated group (5,000 members, maybe more) of users who love both Apple Computers and BitTorrent sites: “I never want the site to be big or to loose personality” he told us. The site currently has around 1000 members but it’s growing fast.

So what might convince potential users of the site to head over to their IRC channel with a big bucket of sea-cabbage bribes to smooth the entrance interview?

Our source told us: “We included a lot of…. how would I put this… win in the site……or love…….”

According to a message on the site, once you have loved a coratee, you cannot go back to a plain old manatee, because it will seem rough and stupid by comparison.

Sounds like a good time to stock up on sea-cabbage.

This is an article from: TorrentFreak

BitTorrent Mac Fans Try To Save the Coratee

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BitTorrent Mac Fans Try To Save the Coratee torrent downloads.

Although tags are fairly common for blogs and other online publications, The Pirate Bay is one of the first BitTorrent sites to implement this feature. The purpose is to make it easier for users to discover content they are interested in, and structure and organize torrents more easily.

The tag cloud still has to be filled, but when it does, Pirate Bay users will have the option to browse through tag based archives. In the days to come, support for tag based RSS feeds will be added, and the option to browse tags per category.

Among other things, the tags will allow users to form micro communities within the site, as Pirate Bay co-founder Peter Sunde explained: “Let’s say I run a small movie club or whatever, just tag the uploads with my club name and it will be on the same page. The new feature adds genres to all the stuff as well, and i’m making a tag browser per category.” Peter further told TorrentFreak that they will be introducing some more additions to the site this weekend.

The new tag feature marks the end of a turbulent week, with many hours of downtime, which should be over by now. In a few weeks, The Bay plans to move some servers, but until then, the site should remain up and running. Stay tuned for updates.

For those who are interested, The Pirate Bay “road movie”, documenting their trip with the Bureau of Piracy to Bolzano, is available for download now.

This is an article from: TorrentFreak

The Pirate Bay Now Supports Tagging

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The Pirate Bay Now Supports Tagging torrent downloads.

It turns out that the MPAA will do pretty much anything to obtain information about BitTorrent sites and its users. Back in 2006, they made a deal with a “hacker”, better known as Robert Anderson, to steal e-mail correspondence and trade secrets from TorrentSpy.

The hacker later admitted that this was indeed true, and in a surprising turn of events, he switched sides, and joined TorrentSpy. The court case between the MPAA and TorrentSpy eventually led to the downfall of TorrentSpy, but it turned out that the MPAA was also interested in intel on The Pirate Bay.

Cnet cites court documents showing that Anderson wrote to the MPAA: “We can provide the names, address, and phone (numbers) of the owners of Torrentspy.com and Thepiratebay.org — along with evidence, including correspondence between the two companies.”

In addition, the court documents reveal that MPAA’s Dean Garfield stated: “We were going to get information about the location and identity of the people who were running Torrentspy, as well as information related to a general conspiracy and relationship between Torrentspy and a number of other prominent services including ThePirateBay.”

The Pirate Bay has always been one of the main targets of the MPAA. In 2006, John Malcolm, Executive Vice President of the MPAA wrote a letter to Sweden’s State Secretary in which he urged the authorities to take action against the site: “It is certainly not in Sweden’s best interests to earn a reputation among other nations and trading partners as a place where utter lawlessness with respect to intellectual property rights is tolerated.”

It is of course interesting to see that the MPAA is interested in the identities of the Pirate Bay founders, but they could have easily done a Google search, because that info is pretty much public information. I guess they rather use a hacker.

The Pirate Bay website is offline at the moment, unrelated to this news, as they are doing some server maintenance.

This is an article from: TorrentFreak

MPAA Hacker Spied on The Pirate Bay

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MPAA Hacker Spied on The Pirate Bay torrent downloads.

Back in 2003, torrent sites came and went like the wind. Since most sites were hosted on home connections or shared hosting accounts, they were struggling to stay online. And, with the MPAA keeping a close eye on every newcomer, legal pressure ended the aspirations of some webmasters.

Nonetheless, during July 2003 a new BitTorrent site by the name of “Torrentz” was launched. Initially, Torrentz was hosting torrent files, the opposite of its position today. The first torrent file - “X-Files [1x01] - Pilot” - was uploaded July 24, 2003, 1:28PM, exactly 5 years ago. Although the torrent file is no longer available the site is still going strong and the visitor count is growing every day.

Torrentz went live only a week after torrentse.cx, one of the largest BitTorrent sites at the time, chose to pull the plug. Like many others, torrentse.cx decided to shut down their site after they received a warning. At the time, one of the administrators stated: “The site torrentse.cx received a cease and desist letter during the day of Wednesday, July 16, 2003 for copyright infringement. The entire website has been removed and will not return.”

Another popular BitTorrent site, bytemonsoon.com, threw in the towel around the same time. “Due to excessive bandwidth usage, lack of a stable host, consistent dos attacks, and lack of other options and as I’m leaving in 5 hours and haven’t slept yet, I have no other choice but to shut the site down,” the admin wrote. Those were turbulent times, and SuprNova.org was pretty much the only large site left. However, the sites that went down were soon replaced and these new sites were growing fast - so did Torrentz.

The screenshot below was taken in August 2003, only two weeks after the site went public. As you can see, most torrents had only a handful of peers. Now, five years later, Torrentz has over a million visitors a day, while it indexes more than 10 million pages.

Happy Birthday…

This is an article from: TorrentFreak

Torrentz Celebrates 5th Anniversary

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Torrentz Celebrates 5th Anniversary torrent downloads.

When we first wrote about YouTorrent, we never expected the site to grow in popularity as quickly as it did. A month after its launch the site was getting millions of visitors, and it continued to grow. In fact, no BitTorrent site had ever grown as fast as YouTorrent.

Unfortunately this astronomical growth didn’t last. In April the meta-search engine stopped indexing sites like The Pirate Bay, isoHunt, and other sources that provide links to unauthorized copyrighted files. They even considered selling the site at the time, but this never went though. Unsurprisingly, this change cost the site most of its visitors, who moved on to YouTorrent alternatives.

After a while however, the traffic stabilized, and a few weeks later it started to grow again. Today, four months after this drastic change, YouTorrent is ready to move on, as it launches the largest legal torrent search engine with tens of thousands of torrents adding up to a whopping 6TB of data.

“We feel that a full meta-search engine is a better experience for our users considering our switch to legal content,” Patrick, the co-founder of YouTorrent said. “We now return accurate seed and peer data and results are quick and easy to navigate, and more in line with traditional search engine result pages.”

The new site searches verified torrents on sites such as Jamendo, Vuze, BitTorrent, Legaltorrents, Legittorrents, Gameupdates, Wortharchiving, BT.etree and Mininova’s featured torrents section. By default the results are ordered by relevance, but they can also be sorted by number of seeds and peers, the size of the torrent, the upload dates and the number of total downloads so far.

For music files, YouTorrent has also included a link to the Bitlet streaming tool, so users can preview tracks before they decide whether or not they want to download them. Similar to the old design, there is a list of related searches in the sidebar, which may serve as inspiration. The YouTorrent blog has been updated, and has some great content as well.

Patrick further told us that they are currently working on a content distribution platform. This will allow individual publishers to upload files to the site, and YouTorrent will make sure that the files are seeded. The content distribution platform will be similar to Mininova’s CD, but Patrick assured us that it will include some great features that are unique to YouTorrent.

“Although we have lost some traffic we are still very popular and serving hundreds of thousands of searches a day,” Patrick said. “This is very encouraging and we believe with the new service this will continue to grow as our content aggregation reach and depth increases.”

Going legal has cost the site more than half of its traffic. The new interface and several other updates are aiming to get at least some of these visitors back, and make the site one of the big players in the “legal” torrent niche. Time will tell if they have made the right decision.

YouTorrent’s New Look

This is an article from: TorrentFreak

YouTorrent Relaunches with 67,170 Legal Torrents

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YouTorrent Relaunches with 67,170 Legal Torrents torrent downloads.

Importing torrents via RSS can be very useful if you’re at work, school, or at a friends place. With this new feature from mininova you only have to bookmark the torrent, and it will start downloading automatically when your BitTorrent client is running at home.

Here is how it works. First of all, you’ll have to be a registered user at Mininova to use the bookmarking feature. Then, when you come across a torrent you would like to download, simply click on the “Add to bookmarks” button. The torrent will then be added to your personal bookmarks page, which has its own RSS feed.

Next, you will have to add your personal bookmarks feed to your favorite BitTorrent client and then you’re all set. In addition you can customize the process a bit more, depending on the client you use. Some clients, for example, let you choose whether to download the torrent immediately, or start it later manually.

Mininova is not the first BitTorrent site to add bookmarking capabilities. Torrentz.com has had this feature for quite some time now. However, Mininova is the first site to combine it with an RSS feed that has BitTorrent enclosures, which makes it compatible with BitTorrent clients that support RSS downloading.

Mininova has covered their new bookmark feature, with some additional details, in their latest blog post. For those who are interested, we have some more RSS tutorials over here.

This is an article from: TorrentFreak

Download Torrents Remotely with Mininova Bookmarks

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Download Torrents Remotely with Mininova Bookmarks torrent downloads.

Last year the court decided that Leaseweb had to take down everlasting.nu and hand over the name and address of the owner because the site structurally facilitated copyright infringement, as pointed out by BREIN.

At the time Leaseweb was hosting dozens of torrent sites, including Demonoid, mybittorrent.com, btmon.com, btjunkie.org, seedpeer.com, what.cd and waffles.fm. Although Leaseweb decided to appeal the decision, the torrent sites were no longer welcome, and were asked to find a new ISP.

Yesterday the appeal was denied, as the Amsterdam court again ruled that everlasting.nu was facilitating copyright infringement by allowing their users to download copyrighted content via torrents hosted on their site.

Leaseweb’s defense argued that Everlasting was not facilitating copyright infringement, because the torrent files itself are not copyrighted. However, the judge ruled that this was irrelevant, since the files are an essential part of the download process.

Leaseweb’s lawyers further argued that the tracker is not necessary for the download process, that the torrents could be mislabeled, and that there are also BitTorrent clients that do not upload (downloading music and movies is legal in the Netherlands), but their arguments did not impress the judge either.

At the moment it is still unclear what this means for future cases, such as the upcoming court case between Mininova and BREIN. In the ruling the court places a lot of emphasis on the tracker, as an essential component of the infringement process. Mininova does not operate a BitTorrent tracker.

It is however very unlikely that Leaseweb will ever host a BitTorrent tracker again. The ISP that once was a safe haven for most torrent sites is most likely done fighting.

Source TorrentFreak

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BitTorrent Tracker Hosting Illegal Says Dutch Court torrent downloads.

It is hard to make a definite list of the most popular BitTorrent sites. Over the years we’ve made quite a few lists, and reported some of the latest trends. Most lists we published were based on Alexa’s ranking, mainly because it was pretty much the only traffic source that was available. Recently, however, Google started to rank websites as well, including a traffic estimate.

So, let’s see how well Google does, and how their traffic estimation and ranking compares to actual traffic data and Alexa’s ranking respectively.

One of the interesting features of Google’s site comparison is that it gives an estimation of the daily traffic when you’re logged in on a Google account. The data used for the traffic statistics comes from Google analytics, consumer panels, and other third-party market research.

The traffic data seem to be quite accurate, for some sites at least. The daily (absolute) unique visitors for Mininova, for example, is estimated to be slightly above 2 million a day, which matches with real traffic stats we got from the Mininova team.

As we look at the graph below we can clearly see that Mininova is in the lead judging by the number of visitors, followed by The Pirate Bay. isoHunt and Torrentz compete for the third place. After these four sites there is a huge gap to other BitTorrent sites such as BTjunkie, TorrentReactor and TorrentPortal.

It is interesting to see how many similarities there are between Google’s ranking, and the daily reach according to Alexa.

The regional differences in popularity of the sites are also worth mentioning. The Pirate Bay, for example, is more popular than Mininova in the US, and especially in Sweden. Torrentz, on the other hand, does really well in India, while isoHunt has a relatively large fanbase in Japan.

Overall it seems that BitTorrent sites are still growing, especially The Pirate Bay, since they nearly doubled their traffic in a yeah. This is pretty much in line with the growth in the number of peers on The Pirate Bay trackers, which went from 5 to well over 10 million in the last 12 months.

This is an article from: TorrentFreak

Top Torrent Sites Ranked by Google

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Top Torrent Sites Ranked by Google torrent downloads.

One of the reasons for isoHunt to implement SSL encryption, however, was a recent block by the Dubai government. isoHunt founder Gary Fung told TorrentFreak: “We decided to implement SSL to avoid eavesdropping on search, to bypass slow proxies, and to get around blocks like in Dubai.”

Earlier this year, Dubai started to block access to several BitTorrent sites, including isoHunt. With SSL, however, the site can be reached again, without any problems. There seems to be quite a demand for secure browsing as according to a poll on isoHunt, more than 80% of the users indicated that they will browse the site on an encrypted connection from now on.

Not only is isoHunt now accessible via SSL, its sister site TorrentBox, and the TorrentBox forums can also be reached over an encrypted connection. In the weeks to come, the isoHunt team will monitor how many users are browsing over SSL.

“We’ll be evaluating how much extra load this places on our servers over the next few weeks, and if there’s a large outpouring of people preferring to browse isoHunt or TorrentBox securely, we’ll be investing in some dedicated hardware to handle the SSL connections.”

For now, SSL is a great, and much needed, solution to censoring ISPs. Dubai is not the only country that blocks BitTorrent sites. Turkey does the same, so does a Danish ISP, and earlier this year the Kuwait government ordered ISPs to block access to 20 BitTorrent sites.

This is an article from: TorrentFreak

IsoHunt Goes Secure, Adds SSL Encryption

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IsoHunt Goes Secure, Adds SSL Encryption torrent downloads.

Suspects were taken to their local police station for questioning and required to provide DNA samples and fingerprints. Sources close to those arrested confirm that most accusations relate to the uploading of a single album by each suspect but despite the fact that uploading music is not a crime in the UK if done for no profit, somehow this civil issue had been transformed into allegations of serious crime, with police paying close attention to donations the suspects made to the site, presumably in an effort to find some financial motive.

Rather than the organized crime ring, they were told to expect, the police ended up questioning six regular people, terrified and mortified at being in trouble with the police for the first time in their lives. Eventually all six were released, and bailed to report back to police on July 1st. Alan Ellis himself is due to report on the same date, after his bail was extended not just once, but twice already.

Sources close to case have informed TorrentFreak that those arrested will report to the police next Tuesday and told that their bail will be extended. They will be ordered to reappear before police on Monday 28th July. No reason will be given for the delay in either releasing or charging those accused, but it is likely to increase speculation that the evidence in the case isn’t anywhere near as strong or as damning as the police were led to expect.

This is an article from: TorrentFreak

Arrested OiNK Uploaders Bail to be Extended

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Arrested OiNK Uploaders Bail to be Extended torrent downloads.

The government previously set a deadline of April 2009 for the parties to reach an agreement but according to sources, pressure is intensifying to deal with the issue sooner. A “top-level executive” gave an indication of the level of pressure stating: “The British government just put a gun to our head.”

According to what DMN describe as “top-level” and other “executive” sources, major ISPs including BT, Carphone Warehouse, Tiscali and Virgin Media are now in “serious negotiations” with the music industry to deal with what they perceive to be a serious threat to their business model.

Andy Burnham, Culture Secretary and Labour Member of Parliament is said to be playing a prominent role after tough comments earlier in the year: “Let me make it absolutely clear: this is a change of tone from the government,” Burnham told the FT. “It’s definitely serious legislative intent.”

At the London Calling event last week - billed as ‘the UK’s premier international music business event’ - sources confirmed meetings between the music industry and ISPs. It’s believed that ISPs are being negotiated with individually, rather than as a group. “All of the ISPs are at the table meeting with the rights holders, but it’s not a roundtable,” said a source.

Current CEO of British Music Rights and former pop star Feargal Sharkey said he was optimistic at the discussions between the music industry and ISPs: “At this moment, I am completely optimistic. Three months ago these guys wouldn’t even get into the same room.”

It’s unclear what could happen if the music industry and ISPs fail to reach an agreement, as Culture Secretary Andy Burnham has already stepped back from a government implemented ‘3 strikes and you’re out’ policy.

For their part, ISPs are only too aware of the profit they make from file-sharers. If the latest reports are to be believed, around 6 million Brits use their internet connection for file-sharing. Alienating them could be a huge strategic error.

This is an article from: TorrentFreak

Government “Holds a Gun to the Head” of ISPs Over P2P

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Government “Holds a Gun to the Head” of ISPs Over P2P torrent downloads.

One of these new developments has been the addition of increasing numbers of Creative Commons (CC) licensed material. Creative Commons media is licensed by the creator, to be shared - usually with some restrictions - and is the same license used by TorrentFreak. It’s not a niche license, instead it is becoming increasingly popular, with Nine Inch Nails having released their Ghosts album under a CC license earlier this year.

With this is mind, isoHunt has announced a partnership with Jamendo, a site that deals in Creative Commons licensed music. Reaching the 10,000 album milestone only days ago, content available on Jamendo is growing quickly and when you grow, it helps to be able to get the content out there. This is why isoHunt decided to partner with several BitTorrent sites. isoHunt’s owner, Gary Fung, has been a long time supporter of Creative Commons and public domain works, and has stated that there is a strong future in Creative Commons material at isoHunt.

Laurent Kratz, CEO of Jamendo told TorrentFreak “Jamendo uses the Creative Commons licensing scheme to keep the rules very straight forward : copy as much as you can eat, the artist, the right-holders are ok. The new thing about partnering with a torrent portal like isoHunt, is that Jamendo has started an editorial work on top.”

“We receive up to 500 new albums per week, from more than 60 countries in the world,” Kratz said. “In order to maximize the interest of millions using torrent search engines every day, it was critical to only highlight a subset of all the albums we receive every day. It’s not about discriminating one band from another, it’s about getting anonymous BitTorrent fans to Jamendo, and discovering unsigned bands from everywhere in the world.”

Jamendo is also partnering with SumoTorrent, and torrent.to, and has been experimenting with mininova. In addition, their torrents are also available through Vuze. What better way to “stick it to the **AA” as so many of our commenters put it, than to ignore their memberships product, and use sites like this instead.

This is an article from: TorrentFreak

IsoHunt adds 10.000 Free and Legal Albums

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IsoHunt adds 10.000 Free and Legal Albums torrent downloads.

These sort of problem - when users in one geographical location can access a site when others can’t - is usually down to DNS issues which generally resolve themselves in a short time. However, in the case of Demonoid, this doesn’t appear to offer the answer.

According to reports we’ve received, when users from the Netherlands try to access Demonoid all they get is a blank white page. However, should they try to access the site using a proxy or VPN making the visitor appear they are not from the Netherlands, the user can now gain access. The block happens on all the major ISPs, and are persistent.

Canadians, having been previously blocked, remain unblocked, presumably after Demonoid fell out of range of the CRIA. However, more recently reports indicate that not only are Dutch users blocked from Demonoid, but in an unlikely scenario, Brazilians appear to be blocked too. So what could be at the bottom of this?

There could be some purely technical issues with the web, but as time goes on, this seems less and less likely. It’s possible that there is a legal angle to these blocks, after all this type of action by Demonoid isn’t new. Around 12 months ago Demonoid blocked Dutch users for a while, as the pressure from BREIN increased quietly behind the scenes, and then later on very publicly blocked millions of Canadians following pressure from the CRIA, only to unblock them again after moving to ’safer’ Ukraine-based hosting.

But, if Ukraine is ’safe’ as a host country, why block the Netherlands, and why block Brazil of all places? As it turns out there is a Demonoid/Brazil link, in that the Demonoid.com domain has a protected WHOIS provided by the Brazilian-based Neurocube.com, which in turn is hosted in the Netherlands at Demonoid’s old host, LeaseWeb. And of course, Netherlands-based anti-piracy group BREIN aren’t the biggest supporters of Demonoid either - and have lots of resources - but whether or not they still hold anything over the site in order to force a block of an entire country is a matter of speculation.

In the absence of any announcement from the new admin of Demonoid (which seems incredibly unlikely), it’s some users of Demonoid who asked us to find out why they can’t access the site. Unfortunately, we don’t have the answer for them right now, maybe they will become more clear in the future.

In the meantime, please keep us updated with access reports from your country and we’ll try to keep people updated on the position for Dutch and Brazilian Demonoid fans.

This is an article from: TorrentFreak

Reports: Demonoid Blocking Countries

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Reports: Demonoid Blocking Countries torrent downloads.

Isohunt - the third largest BitTorrent site with 350.000 pageviews a month - is one of the older BitTorrent sites and predates both The Pirate Bay and Mininova. The site started in January 2003, and added support for torrents by the end of that year just a few months after the BitTorrent protocol went public.

At the time, no-one could have guessed that BitTorrent sites would ever become as dominant as they are now. Gary Fung, the founder of isoHunt didn’t foresee it either, as he told TorrentFreak: “I never expected the site to grow to this volume initially, until we started seeing explosive growth with the uptake of BitTorrent.”

About the future of his site Fung said: “By indexing any and all BitTorrent links, we expect to grow as much as usage of BitTorrent would.” Right now, there is no sign that BitTorrent’s usage will stop growing, so it is safe to say that like any other BitTorrent site, isoHunt will keep on growing.

Another interesting observation is that The Pirate Bay has outgrown Mininova traffic wise. For over a year Mininova has been the most visited BitTorrent site, but now - for the first time ever - The Pirate Bay is in the lead.

Today’s rankings show that The Pirate Bay is 62nd in the list of 100 most visited websites, Mininova 67th and isoHunt comes in 90th place. With the current growth rate of BitTorrent sites, Torrentz.com will probably join these three sites in a few weeks.

This is an article from: TorrentFreak

BitTorrent Trio Hit a Billion Pageviews a Month

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BitTorrent Trio Hit a Billion Pageviews a Month torrent downloads.

It seems to be an agreement that benefits both sides. MVGroup gets the exposure of EZTV’s fanbase, and several new seeders. EZTV on the other hand, expand their list of shows. This is particularly important at this time of year when most US shows have finished for the season, leaving them light on torrent releases, although EZTV admins claim this was incidental, and not planned.

MVGroup admins told TorrentFreak “[we] would like to take this opportunity to thank EZTV in helping us continue our founders legacy, to spread high quality educational material via p2p, to everyone, everywhere, for free and with no ratio.”

With the first shared releases out and available, we shall see with interest how well this works, especially if MVGroup sourced shows (what should we call them? MVTV? EZMV?) appear on our new Top TV shows lists.

This is an article from: TorrentFreak

EZTV and MVGroup Join Forces

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EZTV and MVGroup Join Forces torrent downloads.