Torrent Fetcher uses a basic interface that contains both the torrents search engine and the results listings. It is possible to enter a search phrase and start the search for torrents right away or configure some of the advanced options like the number of results that should be retrieved, the torrent download directory or a specific category that should be searched to avoid that unrelated torrents are displayed in the search result listing. Up to 1000 results can be displayed by the software. Categories include the usual assortment of games, tv shows, movies, software and music that one finds in almost every torrent search engine on the Internet.

Torrents in the search results are displayed with their name, size, seeders, peers and date it was added to the database. Torrents are color coded so that the user can see on first glance if a torrent is well seeded or not.

A double-click on any file will download the torrent to the local computer system. Some Bittorrent clients can be configured to monitor directories for torrents. The programs could therefor be configured to start the downloads of the files right after the download of the torrent file has finished if the client supports it. There is also an option to automatically launch downloaded torrents which is another way of adding them directly after download the Bittorrent application.

The developer of Torrent Fetcher could improve the software program by adding the following features to it:

• The ability to retrieve additional information about a torrent. It is currently not possible to see where a torrent originated from.
• The option to download multiple torrents at once.
• Search filters like excluding words from the search results or searching for an exact phrase.

Torrent Fetcher is a comfortable alternative to searching for torrents on websites. It does not offer the same amount of information that those websites usually offer on the other hand. This is something that the developer should consider improving on.

The software program is available for download at the developer’s website. It is compatible with most versions of the Microsoft Windows operating system.

Related posts

• Youtorrent Alternatives (9)
• Youtorrent 3 takes over where Youtorrent left (5)
• uTorrent Download Accelerator (20)
• uTorrent 2.0 Beta Released (1)
• uTorrent 1.6 final released (0)

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).

Related posts

• uTorrent 2.0 Beta Released (1)
• uTorrent 1.8.2 Final (1)
• uTorrent 1.6 final released (0)
• Torrent2exe makes Bittorrent a tad easier (4)
• Tired of fake torrents ? Block the sources (8)

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?

Related posts

• The Piratebay Sold To Swedish Software Company (5)
• Tired of fake torrents ? Block the sources (8)
• Youtorrent (2)
• Torrent2exe makes Bittorrent a tad easier (4)
• The Piratebay Might Disappear But Their Torrents Stay (3)

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.

Related posts

• The Piratebay To Introduce Paid Subscriptions (14)
• Tired of fake torrents ? Block the sources (8)
• Youtorrent (2)
• Torrent2exe makes Bittorrent a tad easier (4)
• The Piratebay Might Disappear But Their Torrents Stay (3)

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.

Related posts

• Youtorrent 3 takes over where Youtorrent left (5)
• Torrent2exe makes Bittorrent a tad easier (4)
• Tired of fake torrents ? Block the sources (8)
• The Piratebay To Introduce Paid Subscriptions (14)
• The Piratebay Sold To Swedish Software Company (5)

Trackerchecker is basically a website that lists hundreds of torrent sites on one page. The site regularly checks all websites and lists the registration status of each on the same site. Sites with a green icon are open for registration while red ones are closed.

There are also crossed out red icons which means that the site is not available at that time at all and blue icons which indicate timeouts. It basically boils down to checking the websites with green icons as all other sites are either down or closed for registration.

Trackerchecker will also list the time it last checked each website. If you create an account at the site you can select specific sites to track which makes things a bit easier. [via Torrentfreak]

Related posts

• Youtorrent Alternatives (9)
• Youtorrent 3 takes over where Youtorrent left (5)
• uTorrent 1.6 final released (0)
• Torrent2exe makes Bittorrent a tad easier (4)
• Tired of fake torrents ? Block the sources (8)

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.

Related posts

• Privat Bittorrent Sites Open Registration Reminder (5)
• Tired of fake torrents ? Block the sources (8)
• The Piratebay To Introduce Paid Subscriptions (14)
• The Piratebay Sold To Swedish Software Company (5)
• Test if your ISP is throttling Bittorrent Traffic (3)

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.

The clients need the IP address of the server and the password to be able to transfer files to the server. Do not confuse the server with the application that will download the torrents or eDonkey files. Several Bittorrent applications can automatically load torrents that are saved in a specified folder, uTorrent has that option for instance.

P2P only transfers the torrents or hashes from multiple computers to a download server where they are processed by other applications.

Related posts

• Bittorrent client Bitthief spies on users (1)
• Youtorrent Alternatives (9)
• Youtorrent 3 takes over where Youtorrent left (5)
• uTorrent 1.6 final released (0)
• Trackerchecker Lists Open Invite Only Torrent Sites (1)

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.

If you take a look at the results map you will notice a high concentration of ISPs that are throttling Bittorrent traffic in the United States and Singapore.

All blocked transfers were observed in the upstream direction (i.e., when the client host attempted to upload data to one of our Glasnost servers). No host observed blocking for downstream BitTorrent transfers.

We found widespread blocking of BitTorrent transfers only in the U.S. and Singapore. Interestingly, even within these countries, blocking was observed by hosts belonging to a handful of large ISPs.

The Danes and Brits seem to have tested the web application intensively because their countries are almost not visible anymore. What about your ISP, is it throttling Bittorrent traffic ?

Related posts

• Bad ISPs sorted by Country (3)
• Torrent2exe makes Bittorrent a tad easier (4)
• Tired of fake torrents ? Block the sources (8)
• The Piratebay To Introduce Paid Subscriptions (14)
• The Piratebay Sold To Swedish Software Company (5)

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.

I cannot guarantee that this torrent search engine will be there i a week or two but it does look solid enough that it could stand the test of time.

Related posts

• Youtorrent (2)
• Youtorrent Alternatives (9)
• Pirate Bay Trial Judge Biased? (16)
• Yahoo bans The Pirate Bay (10)
• uTorrent 1.6 final released (0)

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.

The download can be interrupted anytime and the user has the option to save the part that he downloaded so far or remove the partial download from the system. Bitcomet Lite provides distributors with an interesting alternative to Torrent downloads by providing executables that download the files over the same network. It’s a little bit inflexible but great for files that do not change over time.

Related posts

• Torrent2exe makes Bittorrent a tad easier (4)
• Tired of fake torrents ? Block the sources (8)
• The Piratebay To Introduce Paid Subscriptions (14)
• The Piratebay Sold To Swedish Software Company (5)
• Test if your ISP is throttling Bittorrent Traffic (3)

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.

Know of other websites that could fill the gap ? Let me know about them.

Related posts

• Youtorrent 3 takes over where Youtorrent left (5)
• Youtorrent (2)
• uTorrent 1.6 final released (0)
• Trackerchecker Lists Open Invite Only Torrent Sites (1)
• Torrent2exe makes Bittorrent a tad easier (4)

The files of the torrent will then be downloaded to your Imageshack account and can be downloaded from there to a local computer. Free registered users have a monthly download and storage limit of 15 Gigabytes which should be sufficient for many users. Imageshack plans to provide premium accounts that allow users to download and store additional Gigabytes.

The service is – not surprisingly – experiencing some heavy usage which caught Imageshack by surprise. As a side note, are not those companies learning from the failures of other companies who got surprised in the past ? It’s happening all the time and one would think that once a company would be prepared if they announce a service that has everything it needs to become popular in no time.

Downloads seem to have been stopped at this point for new users until server capacities have been added. Now basically Imageshack provides users with a great way of downloading torrents. The service is especially useful for users with ISPs that use traffic shaping or other means of interfering with P2P downloads. It could also be a viable alternative for inexperienced users who just want to download this one file from Bittorrent without having to configure a software and probably their router.

Torrents stop seeding once they have been downloaded which is surely enough reason for some Bittorrent trackers to ban Imageshack completely. It would be great if they would offer some kind of virus scanner for finished torrents, maybe in cooperation with Virustotal to add safety to the download experience.

I personally think that this could be a great service for many users. Probably not for the hardcore Bittorrent users but for those with a few downloads each month and those that have troubles with their ISPs, countries or computers.

Related posts

• Youtorrent Alternatives (9)
• Youtorrent 3 takes over where Youtorrent left (5)
• uTorrent 1.6 final released (0)
• Trackerchecker Lists Open Invite Only Torrent Sites (1)
• Torrent2exe makes Bittorrent a tad easier (4)

I did cover the Open Registrations Checker before here at Ghacks and I just read the article over at Torrentfreak that explains how they pimped it up to contain the hottest Bittorrent sites around. You do need the Open Registration Reminder software and an updated sites file that contains the Bittorrent websites.

Download the Open Registration Reminder [link] from the developers homepage and the trackers.rar as well. The zip file has to be unpacked and put into two locations on your hard drive. For one in the installation directory of the Registration Checker and two C:\Documents and Settings\ [Your Computer Name].

The program currently supports 166 private Bittorrent websites that can be watched for open registrations.

Related posts

• Torrent2exe makes Bittorrent a tad easier (4)
• Zip Repair (3)
• Zen Key An All Purpose Application Manager (3)
• Youtube Batch Downloader (13)
• Youtorrent Alternatives (9)

ISPs use a variety of techniques to prevent their clients from using P2P networks like Bittorrent. Limiting the clients bandwidth is just one of them. Other techniques limit the bandwidth during a certain period of the day, prevent the user from downloading files with the .torrent extension, prevent seeding while some even cause unresolvable NAT problems.

The developers of the Bittorrent client Azureus have created a plugin for their application that gathers information “relating to network interference, in particular, to shed light on which ISPs are forging RST packets. Every ten minutes, the plug-in detects from your computer the number of reset tcp connections, and then displays the results to you.”

Those information can then be anonymously shared with a central server which in return leads to an updated table of Bad ISPs but also gives the Bittorrent community more firepower against those ISPs.

I like the second sentence on the page with the table, it says: “If you are using one of the following ISPs, please consider finding a new, better one.” That’s exactly what one should do and what I would consider doing even if I would not be affected by it.

The United States, Canada and the United Kingdom lead the table currently with several ISPs that impose some sort of restrictions on their users. Interesting read.

Related posts

• Test if your ISP is throttling Bittorrent Traffic (3)
• Torrent2exe makes Bittorrent a tad easier (4)
• Tired of fake torrents ? Block the sources (8)
• The Piratebay To Introduce Paid Subscriptions (14)
• The Piratebay Sold To Swedish Software Company (5)

The question is if this is only a glitch or if the website has been removed from the results page manually. A search with the site parameter reveals more than 500000 indexed pages of The Pirate Bay which means that it most likely was not kicked out of the index.

Has the result deliberately been removed by Yahoo ? We do not know for sure at this moment but it surely looks this way. If you search for the full domain name only thepiratebay.org Yahoo finds about 30 results. It leads to an interesting question if Yahoo did indeed remove the result manually.

Should search engines filter search engine results without a court order ? I guess we have to wait a little bit longer before we know what really is happening at the moment and why the result is not appearing anymore.

Related posts

• Youtorrent 3 takes over where Youtorrent left (5)
• Youtorrent (2)
• Tired of fake torrents ? Block the sources (8)
• The Piratebay To Introduce Paid Subscriptions (14)
• The Piratebay Sold To Swedish Software Company (5)

Miro can also download and play Bittorrent videos. The process is pretty easy and straightforward. All you need is a url that points to a torrent file that contains one or more videos. Click on file > download in Miro to download the files automatically with Miro which does all the configuration meaning that you do not have to fiddle with Bittorrent settings at all.

This is great for the majority of people who simply do not want to configure thousand options to be able to download torrents. You can configure a handful of options though in file > options by clicking on the downloads tab. You may limit the upload or download bandwidth, select the ports that should be used for Bittorrent transfers, automatically forward ports and select if you want to reject unencrypted connections.

Once a video has been downloaded it is available in your library where you can watch it or move it into one of your channels. Downloads can be paused or canceled at anytime and users have the option to stop seeding the video when it finished downloading.

Related posts

• Zattoo Insufficient Bandwidth Message (2)
• Youtorrent Alternatives (9)
• Youtorrent 3 takes over where Youtorrent left (5)
• Watch TV Over The Internet (2)
• Watch TV On Computer With RevoluTV (11)

Currently the formats mp3 and ogg are supported and the applet is finding and playing the music files automatically. All you need is the link to the torrent containing the music and a browser that has Java enabled. It works very well if the torrent has a lot of seeders but you can run into troubles with torrents that have only a few.

The first parts of the file are prioritized during the streaming to make sure that you can listen to the music as soon as possible. I personally think that this is an interesting concept that will surely find some users who will love it. It’s probably great if you want to preview a album or song before you download it.

via torrentfreak and bitlet

Related posts

• Spotify: Music legally on demand (27)
• How To Record Internet Radio With AIMP2 (4)
• Access 1010 free music albums with Jamendo (5)
• Winamp Auto Tagger (8)
• Winamp 5.5 lite vs. XMPlay Memory Management (13)

It searches in 12 torrent trackers and websites to find the best – and most – matches possible. It has a simple interface with no distractions, the search result pages are Ajax based which means you witness a nice effect when the search results pour in. The result pages use a clean interface as well displaying information like file name, size, seeders and peers plus the name and a link to the website that it found the torrent on.

A click on the link loads this website and you can download it from their interface. I was not able to spot advertisement yet on the Youtorrent website but it is only a few days old. Could be that they add advertisement later on but at the moment it is clean and fast as it can get.

The only criticism that I was able to come up with is the lack of boolean search parameters which will be added in an upcoming release according to the site owners. It would be really nice if you could download the torrents right from the Youtorrent website instead of having to load the original website first and download it from there. It is understandable however that the site owners of the original website would not like this that much.

Related posts

• Youtorrent 3 takes over where Youtorrent left (5)
• Tired of fake torrents ? Block the sources (8)
• The Piratebay To Introduce Paid Subscriptions (14)
• The Piratebay Sold To Swedish Software Company (5)
• Youtorrent Alternatives (9)

The first three websites of the list contain purely public domain torrents, those are Legal Torrents, Public Domain Torrents and Legit Torrents. Those sites have torrents of movies and documentations that have been released as public domain or whose copyright expired as well as the occasional free game and Linux distribution.

Bittorrent and Zudeo are the next in the list. Bittorrent features a mix of commercial torrents that have to be purchased and free torrents. You have to dig deep to find them though. Zudeo has a large selection of trailers and fan movies that make it worth a visit. It is probably going commercial soon, too.

The site lists two music torrent sites, namely Etree and the South by Southwest Festival one. Etree hosts many live recordings using the FLAC audio format, the South by Southwest Festival website offers a torrent with 739 mp3 files of showcasing artists.

I think they are missing Jamendo here, which is a great free music site that uses torrents to let their visitors download the albums they offer.

Related posts

• Youtorrent Alternatives (9)
• Youtorrent 3 takes over where Youtorrent left (5)
• uTorrent 1.6 final released (0)
• Trackerchecker Lists Open Invite Only Torrent Sites (1)
• Torrent2exe makes Bittorrent a tad easier (4)