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.
Fake Torrent Finder
Fake torrents are spread into the system by organizations for two reasons. The first and in my opinion dominant one is to unsettle the torrent users by lowering the rate of successful downloads. Nothing is more discouraging than downloading the latest blockbuster for days only to see that you downloaded only garbarge in that time. In addition to this the trackers that spread the fake torrents are recording every bit of information they can get their hands on.
Bittorrent client Bitthief spies on users
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:
Migrate from Bitcomet to uTorrent
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.
Tired of fake torrents ? Block the sources
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.
BitComet 0.80 has been released
While downloading the latest version of the bittorrent client BitComet it came to my mind that I never wrote an article about this excellent client here at ghacks. I have written about Azureus and uTorrent which I have tried both but not about the client that I’m personally using because I think it is the best one of the bunch. I like BitComet because of several reasons: speed, usability and because it is using low resources.
Relakks Revisited
Relakks had a few problems shortly after their start due to the amount of users that registered the service right after it was introduced. Connections have been really slow and I had no chance to further test the service and write about my experience with it. I’am currently writing this article while being connected to Relakks and everything is working fine so far. I’am able to open websites and surf the internet without problems. I’am able to check my email and download files using Relakks.
