An interrim beta version of PeerBlock was released today with several important enhancements that should all make it into the PeerBlock 1.0 final release that is expected to be released in the next week. Probably the most important addition in this beta release is a signed driver which helps 64-bit users of Windows Vista and Windows 7 who usually had some problems getting PeerBlock to work on their computer systems thanks to an unsigned driver. There is also no UAC warning prompt when trying to install PeerBlock on these systems anymore.

Mark, the main developer, has posted a huge list of additional improvements in a blog post announcing the beta release of PeerBlock. This includes better usability, warnings if Peer Guardian is running, auto update functionality, archiving improvements and copying over PeerGuardian 2 lists if available.

Check out the full blog post for all changes and known issues. Portable versions and installers are provided at the end of the blog post as well. Users who do not want to test the beta version are advised to wait until the final release is being made available on the website of the project.

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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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The Bittorrent client will display a dialog that will install the Ask Toolbar if the user does not uncheck those options in the setup. The only new feature that has been added is btsearch bundling which basically allows users to add Bittorrent search engines to the uTorrent search engine so that it is possible to search these sites from within the uTorrent client. The btsearch file is a XML file that adds search engines to the search box in the upper right corner of the Bittorrent client.

The search results will still be opened in a new tab of the default web browser. Below is an example on how to create a btsearch file for Mininova and The Piratebay.

<!--Start Code-->
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<OpenSearchDescription>
<ShortName>mininova</ShortName>
<Url template="http://www.mininova.org/search/?search="/>
</OpenSearchDescription>
<!--End Code-->

<!--Start Code-->
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<OpenSearchDescription>
<ShortName>mininova</ShortName>
<Url template="http://thepiratebay.org/search/"/>
</OpenSearchDescription>
<!--End Code-->

The only parameter that needs to be changed normally is the url that has to point to the site’s search engine. The files have to be saved as .btsearch files and can then be dragged and dropped into uTorrent. It is also possible to register the .btsearch extension with uTorrent in the options. You can download uTorrent 1.8.2. from the official website.

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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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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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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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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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Every user who is running the Faroo client contributes to the web search engine in two ways. So called words, some would say keywords, are stored on the user’s computer which are linked to websites. If another user of the system searches for those words they will be retrieved from the first user – or another user who is also hosting those words – and send to the user searching for them.

This means that every user has to contribute disk space to the Faroo project so that the words and information can be hosted. The disk space that is provided can be set in the options from 1 Gigabyte to unlimited storage space.

The second contribution of every user is the web surfing. If he visits a new website it will be added to the crawler to keep the index up to date.

Faroo is receiving additional information compared to convention search engines such as Google. Among that data is information like the time a user spend on a website and the users behavior on that site which are factors for the ranking calculations.

Faroo does not keep search logs and protects the privacy of its users. Search queries are encrypted which provides an interesting option for users in countries that like to censor search results.

Every search engine is only as good as its results. Can Faroo deliver the same search quality that Google or Yahoo are offering? Searching for names like ghacks, cnn or microsoft did return the correct results on the first pages.

The quality of two or three word queries on the other hand was not optimal yet and more often than not lead to mediocre results. This can be mainly attributed to the number of users who are currently actively using the search engine.

At the time of writing only 106 users were connected to the system which is obviously to low to crawl the entire World Wide Web and provide results for any search term one might enter in the search form.

If Faroo manages to attract enough users that fuel the engine it could become a contender in the search engine market.

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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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With all the new fangled torrent search engines available out there, it’s easy for new users to BitTorrent to get confused. After all, learning how the software works can be hard enough and then having to learn about its different search engines can be even more cumbersome.

Welcome to Speckly. The torrent search engine for the newbie BitTorrent user. The idea behind this search engine is to simplify the torrent experience over traditional torrent indexing sites. The home page is extremely bare-bones; just a search box and the site’s logo.

Using Speckly is as easy as it can get. The user types in a search term and is taken to a results page that looks just like a Google results page. Each result is categorized, has a list of seeders and leechers (displayed as full and partial sources), and the name of the indexing site. Speckly searches popular sites like MiniNova, isoHunt, Piratebay, LegitTorrents, SeedPeer, etc. It is also the only search engine I’ve seen so far that also searches Vuze. There are category links at the top of the page as well so you can click on the category which interests you.

Speckly is not perfect but it’s fast and effective. Results are pretty accurate and files with the most complete sources are listed first. The downside is that you cannot download the torrent directly. Clicking on a result will take you to the indexing site that has the torrent.

Although Speckly is targeted at the new user, people who are already familiar with BitTorrent can benefit from it as well. Personally, I won’t be using Speckly since I’m pretty happy with the search engines I’m currently using. What do you think of a search engine like Speckly? Do you find it easy to use? What other torrent search engines have you heard of? Let me know in the comments.

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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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Now the interesting question that arises is why they would want to educate their customers. My first assumption would be that they, as a cable provider, want to reduce the average bandwidth usage of their customers in an effort to maximize the profits from their infrastructure. Usually filesharers have a much higher bandwidth demand than the usual Internet user with the exception of video portal junkies maybe.

Reducing the amount of filesharers that are their customers would definitely reduce the bandwidth bill of the ISP. Cable is a shared connection as well which could increase the speed of all customers as well.

The interesting question will be how they will pick the customers that will receive the warnings. Will they actively monitor P2P networks, will they only react when the BPI sends them a list, will they verify those lists ? What about false positives ? Someone who is download music from Jamendo using the Bittorrent protocol. Will he receive a warning as well ? What about secure Usenet connections ? IRC, FTP, file hosts. How the hell will they be able to determine that a file that is being transferred is indeed a copyright violation ? Filenames alone are without doubt not the safest way of determining that. So, how will they do that ?

My second assumption would be that Virgin Media could have some ties with the BPI or a company that is a member of the BPI. I really do not have enough time to research this so if anyone could help me out it would be appreciated.

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The concept however is harder to explain to users who work with a computer but are not tech-savvy. Instead of telling them to install a Bittorrent client to load the torrent file to be able to download it it would be far easier and comfortable to present an executable file to them which would handle that on its own.

Torrent2exe (via Download Squad) is a web application that can turn any torrent file into an executable. The torrent can be selected from an url or from the computer of the user creating the executable.

The second option determines if the full client will be included in the executable or only part of it which would mean that the rest would be automatically downloaded from the web once the user starts the exe on his computer. The partial download does not make much sense in my opinion because the size of the full client is only about 500 Kilobytes. The size of the partial client was about a tenth of that figure.

After the download completes the program reminds the user to continue seeding. The default value is the size of the torrent that was downloaded but another size or time can be selected instead.

Torrent2exe is an excellent application especially for companies who would like to distribute large files without having to offer the downloads directly or having to explain and troubleshoot downloading via Bittorrent clients.

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