The torrents that are included in the torrent archive will work without the Piratebay website and tracker (as the tracker provided by Openbittorrent.com is included in every torrent offered by the Piratebay) which is probably the number one reason for the archive in the first place.

The torrents are provided in a sqlite database that lists 873671 torrents. The script that has been used to mirror all torrents is also provided by the developer of the software.

A mockup website is also provided that can display torrents that are in the database.

This is a copy of the TPB index. I crawled their index and since I don’t have the hardware necessary to deploy it to the public, I have decided to release the database.

Remember that all torrents from TPB now have the new tracker openbittorrent.com included, so they will continue to track even after the TPB tracker shuts down.

I have included the program I made to crawl the index, and a mockup website that can read the database.
The database itself is an sqlite3 database.

The index has 873671 torrents, ranging from id 3211594 to 5051940 (2009-08-13). I only got 873671 torrents, but according to the website the tracker tracks over 2 million torrents. The discrepancy is most likely due to many torrent files including the TPB tracker but has not been uploaded to the web site.

All my code is in the public domain. Do whatever you want with it! I have included a public key in case I ever want to claim credit.

Users who are interested in downloading a huge chunk of Piratebay torrents can do so at the official Piratebay website.

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It is actually very easy to make uTorrent portable. All that is needed is a installation of uTorrent on the computer system. Now create a new file in the directory of the utorrent.exe and name it settings.dat. uTorrent will recognize the file and start using it instead of the settings file located in the application data folders.

Please be aware that old settings are not carried over and that it is needed to configure the client again. All torrents will be missing at the first start as well. You can easily add them again by selecting the correct locations for new and finished downloads in the client. The software will then automatically recognize the new torrents upon restart, perform checks and start downloading them again.

Running a portable version of uTorrent does make it easier to backup the Bittorrent client as well. All that is needed is to backup the files in this one directory (and in the unfinished downloads directory if those should be backed up as well).

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The developers, who were working on uTorrent 1.9 alpha initially have decided to skip 1.9 and move forward to version 2.0 directly. The release notes mention the following feature additions in the Bittorrent client besides many fixes and changes.

• We’ve added UDP tracker support!
• uTP has been improved significantly over the previous alpha, with many bugs fixed and performance improvements. It’s no longer hidden in Advanced settings.
• The setup dialog has been overhauled to make it much easier to use and with a built-in speed test. It’s still not quite complete yet, but this will give you a good taste of what we’re up to with it!
• A new transfer cap feature has been added to track bandwidth usage, along with graphs to show your usage.

UDP trackers are a different protocol for tracker communication that uses significantly less processing power on the tracker end. It’s important for us to support this because trackers have limited resources, so this should allow them to support many more users with their current hardware and not crash under the load.

Support for UDP trackers could be beneficial not only for torrent tracker administrators and owners but also users as the performance gain could be noticeable on the front end as well.

uTP is an alternative communication method for BitTorrent traffic that allows the client to automatically regulate its bandwidth usage to avoid adversely impacting your internet connection. This will allow you or other users on the network to download their torrents without killing your connection without any additional setup required.

This is probably the most exciting addition for users who like to run uTorrent 24/7.

The transfer cap settings were added in response to various users who have ISP-mandated caps on how much data they can download/upload in a month. Now you can track your usage in MB (with a handy graph to visualize it) and even configure µTorrent to stop torrenting once the limits are exceeded. Currently, you can configure the time interval, the data cap and whether it should stop based on only download, upload, or both combined.
As a privacy notice, this traffic data is not sent back to us or anyone.

The transfer cap settings can be very interesting for users with bandwidth caps but it can also be useful for users who like to keep an eye on their bandwidth usage.

The setup guide on the other hand has been changed as well. Currently only test servers that are located in the United States are accessible which makes it unsuitable for users from Europe and Asia.

Users who want to upgrade their version of uTorrent to version 2.0 beta can do so by visiting the uTorrent forums.

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The Torrentfreak website reports today that the new owners will introduce paid subscriptions to The Piratebay to pay the rights-owners with the money. There is no word yet on the exact amounts of money that users will have to pay to be able to share and download files at the website. The new owners seem to have a system in mind that rewards uploaders so that they have to pay less (up to nothing) depending on the files and bandwidth that they share.

The Piratebay has roughly 3.5 million registered users and many more who do not have an account but use the website to download torrents. It will be interesting to see how this new model will impact the userbase of the service. It is however very likely that a majority will leave the website to use free alternatives instead. Traffic levels are surely going to drop as soon as the new owners introduce the new subscription based scheme.

What’s your take on the issue?

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The two most important questions right now for the millions of users who use The Piratebay are these two: Who are Global Gaming Factory X and what are their intentions with the website. According to the company website “Global Gaming Factory X AB has the biggest network of internet cafés and gaming centers in the world and provides advertisers, software publishers and service providers with an unprecedented access to the large group of tourists and the large gamer community that visit these centers”.

Neither the new owners nor the Piratebay administrators revealed a lot about the changes that are about to happen to the website and business model. The only outlook can be found in the full press release:

“We would like to introduce models which entail that content providers and copyright owners get paid for content that is downloaded via the site.”

Paying the copyright owners for content that is downloaded via the site (which actually are only torrent files and not copyrighted content) can mean different things. They could share advertising revenue with copyright holders which would probably be the only revenue sharing model that would not have a huge impact on visitor numbers. It would surely be different if they would roll out a subscription based model.

We keep you updated on how things evolve from here. If you have any thoughts on the issue post a comment so that we can discuss the matter.

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A recent turn of events might explain why the founders have been found guilty: Mashable and various other sources are reporting that judge Tomas Norström has close ties and connections to the entertainment industry. The guys at Torrentfreak have created a list of his known connections:

• Swedish Association of Copyright (SFU) – The judge Tomas Norström is a member of this discussion forum that holds seminars, debates and releases the Nordic Intellectual Property Law Review. Other members of this outfit? Henrik Ponten (Swedish Anti-Piracy Bureau), Monique Wadsted (movie industry lawyer) and Peter Danowsky (IFPI) – the latter is also a member of the board of the association.
• Swedish Association for the Protection of Intellectual Property (SFIR) – The judge Tomas Norström sits on the board of this association that works for stronger copyright laws. Last year they held the Nordic Championships in Intellectual Property Rights Process Strategies.
• .SE (The Internet Infrastructure Foundation) – Tomas Norström works for the foundation that oversees the .se name domain and advises on domain name disputes. His colleague at the foundation? Monique Wadsted. Wadsted says she’s never met Norström although they have worked together.

The judge did not see a conflict of interest in his involvements. The judge’s opinion does not really matter in this case as judges are supposed to be impartial and a membership in an organization that favors or even promotes the prosecution’s viewpoints have to be considered a conflict of interest. The Pirate Bay lawyer’s have already stated that they will request a re-trial.

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Port forwarding can be configured in the router or traffic controlling device. It basically consists of telling the router route to send incoming traffic to a specific computer by specifying a port and IP address.

One of easiest ways to check if a port is properly forwarded is to use an online port checker like the one provided by uTorrent. To verify the port forwarding open the following url in your web browser http://www.utorrent.com/testport.php?port=1337 and change the number at the end to the port that you want to forward.

The script will check if the port is forwarded properly:

The above screen is displaying that the port forwarding has been properly configured. It will display that an error has occured. The port forwarding test can be repeated after adjusting the configuration settings.

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The OFF-System is a peer to peer networking system that is using a different approach than darknets like Freenet. Darknets anonymize user data while the Off-System creates randomized multi-used data blocks which means that it is not possible to map a data block to a single file on the network.

To retrieve data from the peer to peer network one would need to download all required blocks plus the so called retrieval url which is created when files are added to the network. Each block on its own is nothing but a set of random data which means that this data is not copyrighted by anyone.

The developers have a multi-page article on their website describing it in great detail. Users on the other hand can simply download the Open Source client of the Off-System which comes with a comfortable search function build in.

The options are quite extensive ranging from incoming and outgoing filters, security settings like trusted nodes to networking and advanced options. There is usually a overhead involved when replicating files which can range from a 50%-200% file increase on the receiving end.

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Trackerchecker is basically a website that lists hundreds of torrent sites on one page. The site regularly checks all websites and lists the registration status of each on the same site. Sites with a green icon are open for registration while red ones are closed.

There are also crossed out red icons which means that the site is not available at that time at all and blue icons which indicate timeouts. It basically boils down to checking the websites with green icons as all other sites are either down or closed for registration.

Trackerchecker will also list the time it last checked each website. If you create an account at the site you can select specific sites to track which makes things a bit easier. [via Torrentfreak]

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Naturally we’re not going to get into the legality of torrents.  But I will make this disclaimer that copywritten materials should not be downloaded unless you have express permission to do so.  With that being said, let’s take a look at how to get your “torrent on” with Trasmission.

Transmission can be started in one of two ways. The first is to go to the Internet sub-menu of the Applications menu where you will find the Transmission entry. The second method is to click on a torrent link from a web site which will prompt you if you want to automatically open the link with Transmission.

Open With...

If you know you are always going to use Transmission for your torrenting, click the “Do this automatically…” check box. This will make it so that you do not have to go through this step every time.

Once you click OK in this window two windows will open: Transmission’s Main window and Torrent Options window. The Torrent Options window will be the window with focus because you have to actually add the torrent to Transmission before it starts the downloading process.

The possible options are:

Options

Destination Folder – Choose where your torrent should be downloaded to.

Verify Local Data – This option is currently suffering from a bug and does not work 100%. I would not make use of this feature.

Start When Added – If you click this, the torrent will start downloaded as soon as it is added.

Move Source File to Trash – This will delete the seed file when the download is complete.

Once you have enabled all the options you want click Add to start your downloading. The Options window will disappear leaving only the Transmission main window.

Within the Transmission main window you will see your download progress. You can then select the download and click Pause to temporarily halt the download or you can remove the download. You can even close out transmission and, upon reopening the application the download will resume.

Main Window

Once the torrent is complete you will receive a notice it has finished. Once the download has complete, if you leave Transmission open, you will begin seeding other torrents. By seeding torrents your machine will be used so that others can torrent from you. If you have a problem with this you should close Transmission immediately.

Preferences

Out of the box, Transmission works like a champ. But there might be some tweaks you’ll need for your particular set up. If you go to the Edit menu you will see the Preferences entry. Click that to get to the the preferences goodies.

One of the more important preferences is the Block List (found under the Peers tab). This blocklist is a Blutack Level 1 Blocklist. You can actually place more blocklists in the the ~/.config/transmission/blocklist folder to make use of them.

There are many more options to get into, the blocklist should be the first you take care of. Make sure you check Enable Auto Updates for Blocklists.

Final Thoughts

Transmission is one of the easiest torrent clients available. And if you like the idea of a simple torrent client, but you use Mac you can have your Transmission as well. Give Transmission a go, you won’t regret it.

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The developer’s website does not really go into much detail about the optimization but it is safe to say that the uTorrent preferences are not changed by it. There is also information about a paid version upon which is said to improve the performance even more. Again without additional information on what is being optimized.

The test was conducted with two downloads of 201 and 34 Megabytes. The unaccelerated download reached an average download speed of 756.5 and 203.2 Megabytes while the accelerated download capped in at 654.2 and 142.8 Megabytes. The acceleration of the downloads had the opposite effect. It could be that the test system was already optimized way better than the software could do it or it could be attributed to different download sources. The last possibility would be that the software is not working as advertised.

It the uTorrent download accelerator working? Apparently not on the test system. It could be worth a try if you have abysmal download rates in the bittorrent client. What’s your take after trying the software?

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Of course, as gaming companies have gotten smarter, so have the gamers. Gaming piracy is still rampant on the Internet and torrents are one of the fastest ways a person can get hold of a pirated game. In fact, TorrentFreak recently released their list of the top 10 most pirated games of the year, which made for some interesting reading.

At the top of this unofficial list is Electronic Arts’ Spore. The game has been downloaded 1.7 millions times since it was released in September. The top position can be attributed to the game’s ridiculous DRM, which allowed a user who purchased a legitimate copy to install the game only three times. Spore also holds the distinction of being the most downloaded torrent on Piratebay for a full week, a rare feat for a game.

Other games released this year that have made it to the list include Fallout 3 (#8), Far Cry 2 (#9), and Pro Evolution Soccer (#10). The second to the seventh positions on the list are occupied by older games like the Sims 2, Crysis, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, etc. In most cases, these games were available on torrent sites well before their actual release.

The general trend in gaming piracy seems to be greater the copy protection, the more chance a game will be pirated. Price is also an issue that encourages piracy. If I’m paying $50 for one game, I wouldn’t want to have my gaming experience restricted in any way. Another factor that promotes piracy is that games are often not released worldwide at the same time. So while a U.S. resident gets first crack at a game, the same title may only be available for purchase to someone across the world after some months.

Ironically, piracy can sometimes be used as an indicator of a game’s popularity. Almost all of these games occupy a position in the ‘best-selling games list’ released by Amazon. What do you think of the top ten games on the list? Is there a game you expected to see on it? What would you like gaming companies to do to ensure that games don’t get pirated? Let me know in the comments.

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One person who has acted on this subject in the past is Joe Biden. Yes, the same guy who’s now the U.S. Vice President. In fact, he’s been pretty active in trying to defend the rights of media companies. Let’s take a look at his accomplishments.

Joe Biden’s earliest tryst against piracy came in 2002, when he drafted a letter to the Justice Department, urging action against people who ‘intentionally’ allow copying over p2p networks. Then last year, Biden supported an RIAA-led bill to restrict Americans from copying songs from Internet radio services. His efforts got him invited to the MPAA’s party in favor of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act.

In April of this year, Biden tried to get the US government to spend a billion dollars so that authorities could monitor p2p networks for illegal activity. What constitutes illegal activity, I have no idea.

Joe Biden has been pretty vocal about other aspects of the Internet as well, most notably a strong supporter of having Internet filters in place for schools. Another interesting tidbit is that at one time, the man also supported levying an Internet tax on people.

It remains to be seen what Joe Biden will do in his newfound political role as Vice President. However, going by his track record, it’s fair to say he’ll be on the media companies’ side most of the time.

What do you think of Joe Biden’s war against Internet piracy? Do you know of other political figures who have the same ideals? How do you think politics affects Internet legislation? Let me know in the comments.

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Torrentvalley is different from other BitTorrent services in that it’s not a file tracker like Pirate Bay. Instead, it’s a torrent indexer. That means Torrentvalley does not host any torrents itself. Rather, it acts like a search engine and attempts to locate the torrent across different trackers.

Another interesting fact is that Torrentvalley’s servers are located in Bulgaria, a country not particularly noted for targeting file-sharers. Unfortunately, that hasn’t lasted very long. Acting on the advice of the Bulgarian Association of Music Producers (BAMP), the Cyber Crime Unit raided Torrentvalley’s premises and shut down its servers.

The charge laid against Torrentvalley was copyright infringement. To quote Ina Kileva, the executive director of BAMP: “Torrentvalley was a major international source of copyright infringing material. This site was a gate towards more than 5 000 torrent-trackers from all over the world. The decisive action by the authorities shows that Bulgaria is no haven for copyright abuse in Internet and makes efforts to protect the rights of those involved in the creative industries.”

Torrentvalley certainly wasn’t the largest BitTorrent network out there. They had about 150,000 registered users but a fair number of people probably used the indexing service without registering. This does reinforce the fact that the authorities are always on the lookout for those that share copyrighted content.

Have you ever used Torrentvalley.com? What do you think about the site being shut down? Who do you think the next target will be? Let me know in the comments.

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As LimeWire is open-source, several forks of it exist. One of these forks is called FrostWire, a client which appears and works in a similar fashion but removes many limitations of the free version of LimeWire. FrostWire also has some features which LimeWire Pro lacks, such as BitTorrent support.

Unlike LimeWire Pro, FrostWire is completely free to use and download. FrostWire is based on LimeWire’s Java engine and as such, it works on OS X, Linux and Windows, providing Java 1.5 or above is installed.

FrostWire can identify files tagged as Creative Commons in searches, much like LimeWire does, it can filter out junk results like LimeWire, supports proxies, works well with iTunes and there’s no viruses or spyware with it. A more in-depth review is on my weblog, Webby’s World.

FrostWire is an easy way to save $35 if you really wanted to buy LimeWire Pro. It is also a way to ensure people do not profit from tools which mainly facilitate piracy!

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I don’t intend to start a debate on whether or not it’s the right course of action but it does bug me when innocent people get pulled up for something they did not do. And that’s exactly what happened to an elderly couple in the UK recently.

The couple, in their 50s were stunned to receive a letter from a UK-based law firm called Davenport Lyons, accusing them of uploading an Atari game. The letter demanded a compensation fee of 500 pounds as well as additional 25 pounds for copyright infringement. Of course, the crime was identified by tracing the IP address involved back to these people.

The victims vehemently denied the charges and yes, they were able to back it up. They did not own the game in question nor was any trace of P2P or other file-sharing software found on their computer. Neither did they have WiFi access so it’s unlikely that someone else hacked into an unsecured connection.

Thanks to the intervention of consumer group Which? Computing, the charges against these people were dropped. However, no one’s answering the most important question: how did they get hold of the victim’s IP address?

One theory is that it’s simply a goof-up. The other is that Atari decided to set an example and didn’t care who they targeted. What do you think of this situation? Is it justified? Let me know in the comments.

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The main application of PeerGuardian is blocking P2P traffic from sources that are known to invade the users privacy by logging the actions on P2P networks.

A user trying to update the lists or download the lists initially after downloading PeerGuardian might encounter the message “Error Contacting URL” which means that there was a connection problem between the user’s computer and the list. This is usually happening for the official lists hosted at Sourceforge.

The easiest way to overcome that error message is to find another source for that list and use that instead. PeerGuardian already provides access to the same list in the form of the level1 list on the Bluetack server. A selection of that should have the desired result.

Another option is to get the lists at the i-Blocklist website which mirrors them and provides access to several new lists that are not listed in the default PeerGuardian client.

Error Contacting URL can be a temporary error but if it is appearing continuously a user should think about switching to the alternative lists.

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As far as file-sharing protocols go, BitTorrent has emerged as one of the leading P2P technologies being used. μTorrent is one of the most popular BitTorrent apps around, largely because of its small size and ease of use. While μTorrent used to be an independent client, it has since been taken over by BitTorrent Inc. which has partnerships with almost all the major movie networks.

μTorrent has recently been found to contain a very serious security vulnerability. Apparently, there is a boundary error in the processing of ‘.torrent’ files, which can be exploited to cause a stack-based buffer overflow.

What this means is that someone can create a malicious torrent file and place his or her own code in the ‘created by’ section of the torrent. This code may be harmless or something serious like allowing the hacker access to the machine that runs the .torrent file.

Older versions of μTorrent do not limit the amount of data that can be present in the ‘created by’ section of a torrent file so this problem exists in all μTorrent version prior to 1.8. All users are requested to download μTorrent 1.8 Release Candidate 7, which has been patched to fix this problem.

While the security vulnerability sounds serious enough, I’m a little skeptical of how dangerous it actually is. A user would have to intentionally download a corrupt torrent file and run it. Plus, indexing sites list torrent contents including the creator of the torrent so you can easily avoid files that look suspicious.

Personally, I think this is another way for BitTorrent Inc. to convince users of old versions of μTorrent to upgrade to the newer one. Considering their links with the movie industry, it doesn’t sound so far-fetched.

Would you upgrade to the newest version of μTorrent? I’m using version 1.6 myself, which is the last version released before BitTorrent Inc. took over. Should I upgrade or stay with my old version? Let me know in the comments.

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Rapidshare is not without its disappointments, the major one being that there is no way for you to find a specific file that you are looking for. This is where all the Rapidshare file search engines come in. There are a variety of search engines that claim to be the best when it comes to searching for files on Rapidshare.

One of the better search engines I’ve seen is Rapidlibrary. Not only does it look good but it’s pretty effective as well. The initial interface of Rapidlibrary looks a lot like most of the torrent multi-search engines. You can type in your query and select if you you’re your search results in a specific category. The last 200 searches are also displayed on the site in case you’re just browsing around.

Search results can be sorted by size or in alphabetical order. Each result shows the full name of the file, the download link, search tags, and the size of the file. Files that have been deleted recently are also listed but they are grayed out so you don’t need to click on a file just to check if it’s still available for download.

I’m quite happy with Rapidlibrary. I liked the overall look and feel of the site and the search results were pretty impressive, even for some obscure files that I searched for. I don’t usually use Rapidshare but if I do, I’ll definitely use Rapidlibrary to search for my files.

How do you find Rapidlibrary? Is it better than the other sites you’ve used? What’s your favorite Rapidshare search engine? Let me know in the comments.

Update: Link to Rapidlibrary has been removed because of connection to Zango. Check out the list of Rapidshare search engines that I reviewed before to search Rapidshare safely and efficiently.

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Ever since BitTorrent first appeared on the scene, it has become one of the most popular file-sharing methods around. BitTorrent is fast because each file is split into very small chunks and can be downloaded from complete and partially downloaded files. This protocol is especially popular for new releases.

The service has its pros and cons. While piracy is rampant, let’s not forget that there are a lot of free, legally available torrent files as well. I won’t go into that whole argument since this isn’t the point of my post. Instead I’m going to focus on what seems to be the next stage in the evolution of torrent technology.

EZTV, a BitTorrent indexer for TV shows, has recently announced that it plans to use BitTorrent Video Streaming. They are using file-sharing technology from Tribler for this purpose. What this means is that you will be able to watch your video file while it is still downloading. That means no more waiting for those precious first and last chunks of files to download before you can preview the file.

To make video streaming possible, you will need a client called SwarmPlayer. This is nothing but a combination of a modified torrent client and VLC as the video player. Streaming torrent files will be provided in a special .tstream format but the player will also recognize and play standard .torrent files. SwarmPlayer is currently in beta mode.

If EZTV can actually pull this off, they could just start a new trend for the BitTorrent technology. The streaming obviously will not work if you have a slower connection but for people with super-fast connections, it will be a breeze. I expect other torrent indexers to start offering files in streaming format soon. In addition, the format will also have to be recognized by video players.

I’m not sure how well this will work. For one, streaming video takes up a lot of bandwidth although SwarmPlayer does claim to be bandwidth-efficient. Another concern is the possible legal issues that are going to show up. Would you be interested in torrent streaming? What are your thoughts on this technology? Let me know in the comments.

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