Using p2p networks such as Emule or Bittorrent to download mp3 files is not as dangerous as the Music Industry tries to make it appear but there is still the chance that you might face consequences if you share copyrighted music. A much easier and safer way would be to simply use Google to find and download the music that you like. The Music Industry somehow does not seem to care that Google indexes more copyrighted mp3 files than the total number that is available on all p2p networks combined.

If you search the internet for tips to improve your download speeds with bittorrent clients such as Azureus and uTorrent you do find many tips that have one thing in common, all suggest different settings for maximum performance. There are several things that can influence download speeds in bittorrent including bad Seeds to Peer ratio and firewall settings. I would only change settings in my bittorrent client if I thought that my download speeds would be really bad, say 2K with a torrent that has 10+ seeders.

Most people don’t ever think that it is possible that free and legal torrent websites exist, they automatically assume that torrents equal illegality. The list of then free and legal torrent sites proves this assumption wrong. NewTeeVee did a great job of compiling the list which is just a tiny fraction of the whole torrent scene. I still think that it is a good beginning to show others who do not know that much about bittorrent that there are indeed legal applications.

A new kind of Trojan was discovered recently which targets only Japanese file-sharers. When executed the Trojan displays manga-like images with a reminder which differs depending on which image is displayed. The text however looks similar and always asks the user to stop using P2P networks. One of the messages for instance reads “”Ah, I see you are using P2P again…if you don’t stop in 0.5 seconds, I’m going to kill you.” Talk about a threat boy, jeeze.”

There has been a lot of controversy about the recent acquisition of uTorrent by Bram Cohen, the creator of the Bittorent protocol. Most users seem to be disturbed about the partnership between Bittorrent and the MPAA which started in fall 2005 with the agreement that illegal searches would be removed from its own Bittorrent search engine. The fear that the cooperation will affect the development of the popular uTorrent client seems to grow with every passing day.

I’m so glad that I made the change from bitcomet to uTorrent some time ago because uTorrent is by far the most efficient bittorrent client that I could get my fingers on until now. I receive great speeds, it does not use many resources on my computer, heck the client is only 173 KB in size.

Why would you need another program to block IP addresses if you already have a firewall ? A good question that can be answered easily. Peer Guardian uses a database of bad IP addresses and blocks them automatically as soon as the IP is added to the database of blocklist.org. A single user would have to know that a new IP (range) poses a thread and add it manually to his firewall.

Bitthief, as the name already implies, is a bittorrent client that leeches from the community without giving something back to it. It basically reminds me of those leecher mods for emule that have been popular a few years ago. Bitthief accomplishes this by reducing the upload speed to 0. The developer of Bitthief, the Distributed Computing Group at ETH Zurich puts it this way:

I finally decided to give uTorrent another try and switch from my favorite client Bitcomet to it. It seemed to me lately that Bitcomet was using more system resources than it was expected to use which is the main reason for the switch. Others are that the torrent community frowns upon Bitcomet naming it bandwidth stealer.

We all knew and heard about the common method to upload fake torrents into the torrent system to punish downloaders of copyrighted media files. The Torrentfreak blog reports that some torrent admins were able to identify some of the IP ranges that spread fake torrents and probably also the company that is behind it. The easiest way to cope with the situation would be to block the IP ranges either in your firewall or in a utility such as Peer Guardian. Below are the information for Peer Guardian 2, simply use the IP ranges if you want to block the IPs in your firewall.

You have some friends or business partners that you want to share data with but have no website with enough space and don’t want to use p2p as well ? One simple way to share files of any size is to use the HTTP File Server which emulates a basic file server on your home computer. The server can be run in public or private mode and it is normally a very good idea to run it in private mode.

Funny. I made the switch from BitComet to uTorrent two days ago and was using the first release candidate of uTorrent 1.6 with great pleasure. It´s faster and uses less system ressources than Bitcomet.

You might have heard that the Swedish police raided the internet company that hosted among others the piratebay.org servers. They managed to seize all servers hosted in the datacenter meaning not only servers that were connected to the piratebay were taken from the net but also servers of independent companies and individuals that were not connected to the piratebay by any means. Read about the aftermath here.

The German police searched the houses of more than 130 German edonkey users after logging actions on a popular edonkey server for more than two months. The police had a record of 40.000 IP addresses of which about 3500 could be traced back to German users. The police was not willed to reveal the servers name but admitted that the server itself was hosted in Germany.

One of the great features of Azureus is its plugin capability which is widely used by developers. Today more than 50 plugins are available for Azureus, zeropaid took a look at the most useful ones, let us take a look at the plugins they mention. The plugins mentioned can be categorised to belong either to cosmetic changes, statistics, security, communication and time management.

Bertelsmann will soon launch their decentralized peer-to-peer network GNAB (bang) to Germany by the end of the year and other countries in 2006. The source files will be hosted on centralized servers, consumers only have access to the system when they go through a particular partner or company.