Do you suspect your ISP to be throttling Bittorrent traffic ? That the ISP is shaping traffic which reduces your upload and download bandwidth when using the Bittorrent network ? Want proof ? Without installing plugins or days of gathering data ? Then Glasnost is the solution. Glasnost was developed by the Max Planck Institute [...]

Update: Youtorrent 3 apparently stole the script from the website Nowtorrents, that’s at least what the search results at Youtorrent 3 are now claiming. This looks like a script protection put in place by the developers of the script. I’m a bit puzzled by the sudden increase in torrent search engines that search on multiple [...]

Explaining Bittorrent to users with little technical understanding can be a time consuming task. You might be up for it if friends or family members are concerned but what if you distribute your content via Bittorrent to thousands of strangers who want to download the content but have no clue what Bittorrent is or does [...]

Youtorrent is a website that provides a great search interface that provides access to several torrent website databases. The Youtorrent team decided to put the website up for sale though lately in a surprising move. The website which lately received up to 10 Million visitors per month was never monetized before. Still that’s not the [...]

Imageshack is widely known as a media hosting website offering free and subscription based accounts to upload and share images, videos and other files. In a somewhat surprising move they announced that they will be providing registered users with the option to download torrents from the Internet. Torrents can either be uploaded from the computer [...]

Your P2P experience can change drastically depending on the Internet Service Provider that you use to connect to the Internet. Some providers use technical measures to throttle the Bittorrent traffic of their complete user base without making any efforts to distinguish between clients that use Bittorrent for legal and illegal purposes. ISPs use a variety [...]

Torrent websites are much like Linux distributions, there are so many out there that it is easy to lose the track. Torrent search engines can be divided into two categories: Site search engines and meta search engines. Site search engines obviously only search the torrents that are hosted on one selected website while meta search engines crawl the databases of several torrent websites which often leads to better results.

I have been testing an application called Transporter P2P for the last few days which can be described as a elegant way to share files and chat with contacts using P2P connections. A main difference between Transporter P2P and Skype for instance is that the former is server independent which means more privacy and security. The setup on the other hand is a little bit complicated because of the serverless design.

The South by Southwest festival is one of the biggest festivals of its kind in the United States. Part of it is the Music Conference and Festival showcasing hundreds of artists over the course of several days. Many songs by those artists are offered as free downloads on the festival pages and as torrents.

The glorious idea to kick file sharers off the Internet, effectively banning them from accessing the Internet, seems to be in consideration in Australia in an effort to fight Internet piracy. It does not happen very often that I’m left totally speechless but this proposal succeeded. I really don’t know how to reply to such an idiotic proposal.

If you perform a search for the major torrent website The Pirate Bay you expect it to be the number one search result for its main keyword due to its popularity. If you search for The Pirate Bay (the Piratebay, Piratebay) on Google you will witness that it is indeed number 1 but if you perform the same search at Yahoo you will not find the domain in the results list at all.

Have you ever asked yourself how it is possible that users are tracked over months in P2P networks although their IP address is changing regularly ? We only hear reports about session based user identifications. Session based means that shared files of this session are analyzed and recorded opposed to tracking a user over months.

The news that European Internet Service Providers did not have to give up names of customers to members of the Music Industry and other organizations in civil cases hit the Internet by storm. Everyone seemed to think that this was a major victory for consumer rights. It probably is in some countries but let me explain how this is easily circumvented, at least in Germany.

I was under the impression that courts are ruled by fact and reason but it becomes apparent that some judges are not able to cope with technology and the fast changing online world. A court order issued on January 23th by the District court of Dusseldorf, Germany ordered Rapidshare to take preemptive measures against copyright infringement. This does look nicely on paper but once you take a look at the practical implementation it is a (nearly) impossible task.

Qtrax hype has reached a climax yesterday with reviews on many blogs and websites. The funny thing about this is that the client was not officially available yet and either all those reviewers had beta access or were simply using press material issued by Qtrax to review the service. Well, the client is available now but before I look at it I would like to describe Qtrax in a few words.

A new stable version of uTorrent has been released two days ago that fixes two remote crash bugs that were affecting several version of the popular Bittorrent client. Users who have not updated yet are advised to update as soon as possible to get rid of the security vulnerability.

It was only a matter of time before someone would up the first milestone release of Windows 7, the upcoming Microsoft operating system due out in late 2009, to the Internet. This version was uploaded to some popular torrent websites and gets currently spread there blazingly fast, once the ball is rolling there is no turning back.

Myspace we got a problem, a huge one that is. You might have heard about the vulnerability that allowed anyone to view pictures that have been set to private at Myspace ? You might have also heard that the vulnerability got fixed pretty fast by Myspace. Unfortunately though not fast enough because someone was able to run an automated script that leeched the pictures of more than 44000 private profiles before the security hole was fixed.

The business, RIAA, MAFIA, MPAA wants you to believe that putting content on the Internet is affecting sales of that content in a bad way, that companies sell less books, videos, movies, audio CDs because of pirates who download the media from the Internet. The funny thing is that more and more stories emerge that contradict this statement, one of these is the story about Pirate Coelho.

AT&T are currently evaluating if they should implement a system that would in effect monitor all traffic coming through their lines in an effort to stop sharing of copyrighted material on the Internet using P2P networks. AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson came up with a weak analogy to prove his point: “It’s like being in a store and watching someone steal a DVD. Do you act?”

A vulnerability in uTorrent and Bittorrent, which is using uTorrent’s core, was discovered today that effects the BitTorrent 6.0 client,
uTorrent 1.7.x, uTorrent 1.6.x and uTorrent 1.8-alpha-7834. The Denial of Service vulnerability is made possible by the way the clients handle user data.

If you do not want to download music from Bittorrent you now have an alternative that might suite you better. You can use the Bitlet Bittorrent Applet to stream the music contained in the torrent to your computer. The applet phrase hints that Java – not Javascript – is required to stream the music from torrent files to your computer.

I’m not a regular on torrent websites but I know that they all seem to have a similar layout. No eye candy, no Ajax, just simple searches and results. That’s fine with me but it feels like they are all missing some technology trends that emerged recently with Ajax for instance. Youtorrent is a torrent search engine that tries to be what Youtube is for videos and Youporn is for sex videos – the key player of the torrent search engines.

I think I heard about Wyzo the first time on Techcrunch and thought to myself at that time that no one would need a browser that would be able to download torrents and the files connected to them. But then it occurred to me that this approach would benefit many users, especially those that never came into contact with Bittorrent before.

You can’t say that those guys from The Pirate Bay are not inventive. Their newest addition to their website is a service called Show Detailed Artist Info which is available beneath every music release. When a user clicks on this link information about the artist or group are displayed below the initial torrent release.

Gigatribe is a software that creates a private Peer to Peer (P2P) network that offers a group of users, for example your friends and family, an easy way to share files securely. All communication is protected by a 256-bit Blowfish encryption so that no one can snoop on the files that you send and receive.

The soon to be released two hour special episode of Battlestar Galactica called Razor made its appearance on P2P networks almost three weeks before the movie start. American Gangster, the new Denzel Washington movie which debuted on 19 October was available eight days prior to its premiere.

So, you have received one of those much though after Hulu private invitations only to find out that you can’t watch a single movie on their website because of their geo-targeting ? Viewers who do not live in the United States get the following line whenever they try to watch a video at Hulu.

Windows XP with Service Pack 2 and Windows Vista have both a TCP/IP connection limit that limits the half-open connections of the system. If that limit is reached a new entry in the Event Viewer is created stating “EventID 4226: TCP/IP has reached the security limit imposed on the number of concurrent TCP connect attempts.”.

There is a lot of coverage going on at the moment on various sites that all report that the new Radiohead album In Rainbows which is exclusively available on a official In Rainbows website is spreading like any other major music album on Bittorrent. The main difficulties that the reporting sites have is that listeners may pay the price they like to purchase the album on the In Rainbows website which can be anything from $0 to hundreds of Dollars for the album plus a small service charge.

Media Defender, the company that is spreading fake releases to p2p networks such as edonkey or bittorrent in order to spread chaos amongst file sharers, has been hit by another devastating blow. First thousands of internal emails leaked on the Internet detailing information about fake releases, ways of spreading those releases and several other internal Media Defender internals.

Server operators who happen to have songs on their servers that are distributed illegally will have to pay the fine of 20000 Euro ($28000) per song: at least in Germany according to the district court in Hamburg. Private downloaders get it much cheaper though. They only have to pay 6000 Euro for the first song, 3000 for the second, 1500 for the third and 600 for all remaining ones. A cheap bargain don’t you think ?

It is important to know what to do if your Internet Service Provider decides to throttle or block certain ports that are used by applications that use the Bittorrent protocol. Comcast recently started using an application called Sandvine which uses a new way to throttle or block traffic. Sandvine uses something that is called session management which basically limits the number of open connections on your computer without caring about ports and protocols for instance.

Many private torrent websites have a user limit in place which makes it impossible for new users to sign up unless an old user gets kicked out of the system, deletes his account or the admins raise the user limit. It is a tedious task to visit those sites daily to make sure that you can sign up eventually.

Traffic Shaper XP is a free software that is able to limit the upload and download speed of your applications and ports. This is done by creating rules similar to those known from software firewalls. You select a network adapter, choose if the rule limits upload, download or both, select a protocol and specify local and remote ports.

Torrent Swapper is a bittorrent client with some interesting features that make it stick out of the crowd of bittorrent clients. First of all it was written in Python making it independent from any operating system. Several other clients offer this as well though and the main feature that distinguishes Torrent Swapper from other clients is the feature to share upload speed between computers.

I first read about Trimark at the Torrent Freak blog. This new anti-piracy solution targets websites and the Usenet by scanning the contents for serial numbers that have been implemented into the music files. An identified serial number would lead to the owner – the person that purchased the music – who will be held reliable for the damages caused by the spreading.

The article did not contain information about the technology behind Trimark other than that the “identification code maintains it’s integrity, despite copying or ripping.” This is a very bold statement and I personally don’t think that such a system will be possible unless they implement it in music that can be purchased in digital form only.

I personally think that is is very important to use anonymizers whenever possible for most of the tasks on the Internet. All of your movement and actions are tracked and can be easily traced back to you which is probably something that most users on the Internet are either unaware of or do not like at all if they know that this is the case.

One major problem are P2P networks where anonymity is not that easily achieved. If you do lack the technical background you will face severe difficulties on the road to anonymity. There is however a great solution if you want to be anonymous while downloading and sharing files on Bittorrent.

A reader was asking me if I knew of a program that would observe selected folders and move new files automatically from those folders into different ones. It took a while until I found an universal software that is able to observe an unlimited amount of folders and move new files that are either moved or created in that folder into another one.

FileWarper is a German freeware which is fortunately not difficulty to use. I took the liberty and translated all buttons and explanations into English. You need to configure the tool once and keep it running in the background. Let me explain the various settings, don’t worry, it is not much.

I always thought that it would be nice to administrate uTorrent from work as well. Do things like adding new torrents, deleting old ones and the like would be really comfortable. The great thing is that this is actually possible if you use uTorrent. All you need is to enable to so called WebUi and download a small additional rar file that will be placed on your local computer. I would suggest that you download the latest official version of uTorrent but you could also use the beta versions that are posted in the forum.

I’m always a bit worried when a respected news magazine tries to report about topics like Piracy for instance. Most of the time the articles are a bunch of assumptions taken from official biased sources like the RIAA to come to the conclusion how badly piracy affects businesses. Now it is Forbes trying to tell us why web pirates can’t be touched and it begins – who would have thought about that – with The Pirate Bay. They come to the conclusion that The Pirate Bay is shielded by Sweden’s lax copyright laws and international immunity. I personally think that it is a matter of perspective. The laws might be lax from the standpoint of an American company but tight for a Swedish one.

Two hours ago bkp made an announcement on the official The Pirate Bay blog confirming that some hackers have been able to use a security hole in the blog software to get access to the user database of The Pirate Bay. Information stored in there are the username, the password and the email address of the user who signed up. The password and the email address are encrypted which means that the hacker is most likely unable to receive any valuable information from the data.

Maybe you are one of the unfortunate who is not near a TV when AC Milan battles it out with Manchester United today or the matches Werder Bremen versus Espanyol Barcelona and Sevilla against Osasuna in the UEFA Cup. Even if your team did not make it this far you probably would like to watch these exciting matches. There is a way to watch Champions League and UEFA Cup live on the Internet by using Internet TV clients that stream the matches right to your computer.

NiN – Nine Inch Nails – added a new announcement on their website stating: “As a reward for stealing Year Zero, We’ve prepared the next batch of multitrack audio files for you to download”. Beneath the announcement are links to three of their songs, Capital G, My Violent Heart and Me, I’m not in Garageband / Logic Format for the Macintosh and a generic format for other applications. The interesting aspect of the generic format is that the links are actually torrent files that point to the Piratebay.

Running a Bittorrent client from a web server is a good way for sites like Jamendo to seed the torrents that they offer on their sites. This is also an excellent opportunity for authors of Open-Source and Freeware applications to cut their bandwidth costs by sharing the bandwidth with the users who are downloading the software. If you run a bittorent client from a web server you are plattform independent which means that you can access the client from every computer with Internet access – even from work or school to add new torrents to the queue, check the current downloads or administrate the client.

It is no secret that companies like Logistep are monitoring p2p networks to sue file sharers who are offering software from clients like Zuxxez, a German company who recently sued 500 British p2p users claiming that they illegally distributed the game Dream Pinball 3D. The website Torrentfreak got their hands on a copy of one of those letters that have been send out which details the process of how Logistep determines which users are illegally distributing the game.

Now if that is not a clever idea. Force DRM on the users for several years with a pricing scheme straight out of hell and then use a huge publicity machine to make the customers believe that DRM free music is the future raising prices once more. If you thought that everything would be good now that many labels decided to offer drm free music albums as well you could not be more wrong. What is happening now is that the Music Industry once again fools the customers by offering overpriced products.

I read an rather obvious article over at the TorrentFreak blog that was entitled “Piracy Investigators Infiltrate Private Torrent Sites” which confirmed that piracy investigators have been getting access to private torrent sites by either joining them when they were still open for registration or being invited from a man in the inside. It was always pretty obvious to me that private could not really mean private if the site owners did not know each of the users personally. This system was bound to fail right from the beginning and the article on TorrentFreak only confirms this.

Giganews which is in my opinion the best Usenet provider on the planet did it once again and upgraded their storage capacities to increase the retention of the Usenet files to 120 days. If you compare that to the retention level of other Usenet providers who sometimes offer a binary retention of 5-7 days you know the difference. If you never heard about the Usenet before let me give you a rough understanding of what it actually is.

A new beta version of the famous bittorrent client uTorrent has been released to the public yesterday. The biggest change should be full Windows Vista support but the changelog reports dozens of new features, changes and fixes for the new beta. I don’t want to list all of the changes that have been made, just take a look for yourself if you are interested. I do know that some of you will not use uTorrent anymore because of its affiliation with Bittorent, this is understandable and this post is mainly for those users who simply do not care about it or think it is not a big deal (yet).