A friend of mine has created his own huge home network with several computers throughout the house. Some act as servers, for example file servers and one of them is being used as a download server. It makes perfectly sense to let another server handle the downloads from P2P networks like Bittorrent or eDonkey to avoid slow downs on other computers.

He is using the program P2P Transfer to transfer torrents and hashes from all of his computers in the network to his download server. The advantage of P2P Transfer is the encrypted transfer of the files and that the files do not have to be copied manually or that a login session with the download server is required to load the new files and start the transfers.

Supported are ED2K,torrent and magnet currently. P2P Transfer can install a server and client application. The server application will be installed on the download server. A password has to be selected during installation which will later be used by the clients to authenticate themselves.

continue reading "Send Torrents and hashes from multiple computers to one Server"

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 for Software Systems to provide a simple test that would tell a user in a matter of minutes if his ISP is blocking, throttling, shaping or limiting Bittorrent traffic.

The web application is simulating a Bittorrent transfer between the user’s computer and the web server the application is running from to determine if the ISP is tampering with the Bittorrent traffic. The test can detect if the ISP is throttling all Bittorrent traffic, throttling all traffic at well known Bittorrent ports or throttling Bittorrent traffic at well known Bittorrent ports.

The user has the choice to perform a full test that takes roughly seven minutes or a fast test that lasts four minutes. The servers seem to be overrun currently by worldwide users and it might happen that you will receive a message that the servers are currently busy.

continue reading "Test if your ISP is throttling Bittorrent Traffic"

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 Bittorrent websites at once. It seems like new ones are popping up every day and that others vanish again after just a few days of operation. I really liked Youtorrent before the developers changed it from a useful torrent search engine to one that did not find anything anymore.

It was blazingly fast, searched several of the biggest and most important torrent websites, provided filters and ways to sort the results by date, size, name and several other factors. Youtorrent 3 feels like the same search engine. The interface looks similar and the speed is great. The search engine searches the databases of 13 torrent websites including Mininova, The Pirate Bay and Sumotorrent.

One feature that I really like is that every search result is categorized on top of the table so that the results can be filtered further to reduce the hits. The links lead directly to the download sites of the torrent search engine where the file can be downloaded.

continue reading "Youtorrent 3 takes over where Youtorrent left"

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 ? How about a simple application that uses the Bittorrent protocol to download a single file that requires zero configuration on client side ?

Bitcomet Lite is that application. It basically offers a way to create an executable that downloads one torrent from the Bittorrent network. That torrent is hard coded into the application which means that only this one release can be downloaded. The application on the client side basically consists of a progress bar and download button that has to be pressed to start the download. That’s it.

The seeder, or creator of the file has to compile the executable which is more or less an automatic process. A torrent file and some other data has to be specified and Bitcomet Lite will automatically create the executable which can be tested immediately and then distributed on a website or network.

continue reading "Bitcomet Lite"

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 only change to Youtorrent that was announced.

The Youtorrent team removed searches for all Torrent websites that would only index legal and free torrents. The move is somewhat surprising because this change will surely reduce the amount of visitors tremendously. Youtorrent currently indexes seven torrent websites including Legaltorrents, Bittorrent and vuze but fails to index the more popular torrent websites like The Pirate Bay.

This might be more appealing to possible buyers but those buyers on the other hand surely notice that traffic will decline with the removal of those torrent websites. Who will buy a website with a uncertain future traffic level ? Alternatives to Youtorrent are PizzatorrentLooktorrent for example.

continue reading "Youtorrent Alternatives"