Frostwire takes that concept and makes it available as a Bittorrent client. While you can use the p2p software like any other Bittorrent client, it is the built-in search that many users will find most useful. The program supports eight different torrent indexers, including The Pirate Bay, Mininova, Isohunt or BTJunkie.

All you need to do is to enter a search term and hit the enter key to search all or only selected torrent indexing sites. Filters allow you to limit the search results, for instance to only display audio or document results, or files with a specific minimum file size.

Results are displayed with their name, number of seeders, total file size, source, creation date and file extension with options to sort by all values. This can be helpful to sort from largest to lowest file size or seeder count for instance.

Once you have selected files you have options to download them all at once to your computer with a click on the download button or by double-clicking individual files. All downloads are added to the transfer display that is displayed beneath the search results. Controls at the bottom of the page are available to pause, resume or cancel file downloads, or to play media type directly in the interface.

All downloads are automatically available in the Library tab. Files are sorted into categories such as programs, images or audio with options to create audio playlists right in the program. A search is also provided to find files faster, which appears to be necessary as it is not possible to display files by download. The explore option, available in the bottom bar and on right-click, lets you open the folder containing the selected file in Windows Explorer.

Frostwire can transfer files to connected phones or tablets, the interface does not seem overly intuitive though. There is also a chat available for users who’d like to chat with the FrostWire community.

The options hold several interesting preferences. Users of Apple’s iTunes software can configure Frostwire to automatically import downloaded songs into iTunes. It is furthermore possible to add or remove folders that are included in the library, to configure keywords that should not be displayed in the search results (with an extra option to ignore adult contents), and to change Bittorrent related preferences like the port that is used for all connections.

Users who would like an all-in-one program should take a closer look at Frostwire. Combination of search and downloading makes it much more usable than comparable clients. Features offered by other Bittorrent clients like uTorrent are on the other hand not available. This includes the ability to play media while it is still downloading or a web client to manage downloads remotely.

The program will install the Ask Toolbar and another program during installation if you do not pay attention to the process.

Frostwire is available for Windows, Macintosh, Linux and Android 2.1+ operating systems.

The release notes are as usually available on the official forum. Version 3 of uTorrent adds features such as a portable mode, streaming, torrent ratings or drag and drop sending of files. The complete list of changes and fixes is available in the forum.

The drop files to send feature is incredibly easy to use. Just drop a file that you want to share on the drop area, and uTorrent will create the torrent for you. The program displays a tiny url link that the recipients of the file need to open. The torrent is then added to their uTorrent version. If they do not have uTorrent it is installed on their system.

Streaming needs to be activated in the uTorrent options before it becomes available. All suitable media players are automatically available for selection in the options.

The Stream button becomes then available in the torrent listing. A click on the button loads the stream url in the selected media player. It is then possible to play the media in the player directly, even if it has not been downloaded completely yet.

Depending on your previous version, you may see a different looking client with additional features that you had not had access to before. This includes uTorrent apps which more often than not provide access to media and file releases of companies and organizations. You find some apps among the available ones that add features to uTorrent, a chat for instance.

The getting started guide in the client seems to be new as well. It offers a step by step guide, a beginners guide and links to faqs and information about the program (correct me if I’m wrong here).

The developers have fixed a boat load full of issues, from crashes and stability issues over freezes and hangs to cpu optimizations.

Users should take a look at known issues before they update, if they want to make sure that the program works on their system without difficulties. The list displays confirmed problems and issues that are not fixed in the uTorrent 3.0 stable release.

Most of the bugs listed seem to be limited to display issues, only a few indicate stability issues.

On a personal note. I’m running uTorrent 3.0 since the first alpha and did not have a single problem ever since. The update to version 3.0 went without difficulties. Some users in the release thread are on the other hand reporting problems with the version.

Have you made the update to uTorrent 3.0 yet? What is your impression of the new version.

Torrents are seeded by the service until a ratio of 1:1,25 has been reached, which means that you share more than you download.

Fetch.io additionally supports file hosting websites such as Rapidshare, Filesonic or Megaupload besides torrents.

I do not want to rehash everything that has been said about Fetch.io, the Torrentfreak article and comment section covers this extensively already.

What I would like to do instead is to look at the service from a legal and business perspective.

The service is currently offering free beta accounts that give users 20 Gigabytes of storage and 40 Gigabytes of bandwidth. You can get your bandwidth reset by emailing the developers.

If you tried to use the service ever since it has been mentioned by Torrentfreak you may have noticed that it is not capable of handling the load currently. You may get error messages on various pages of the service. Some users have reported that they cannot add torrents at all at this point, others noted that while they were able to add torrents, they could not get Fetch.io to download them.

The developers mentioned that they are starting to add more server hardware to improve overall performance of the service for all beta users.

Plans are to launch a paid service after the beta phase. There will still be a free account available for users to test the service, but the storage and bandwidth will likely be reduced. The fact that both torrent and file hosting sites are supported makes the service attractive, the pricing and payment options will however determine if the service will become a success, or if it will disappear like many others before it.

While there is a market for services like this, it should be clear that only a minority of users are willing to pay for such a service. The main reason for that is that payments link their identity to the online account.

But what about legalities? I’m no lawyer, and I may be dead wrong here, but is not the service downloading and seeding those torrent files? What happens if the service seeds and downloads copyrighted media? Can the service be held accountable for that?

On the other hand, the torrents are selected by the user of the service. So who is infringing here? The user uploading the torrent, the service that is download and seeding the files, both, or none?

What’s your take on Fetch.io? Do you think that they will be around in a year?

Update: The Fetch.io website is currently not accessible. It can be that the product has been discontinued, or that the service is currently experiencing technical difficulties.

But you do not only get purple text, you also get purple borders, a purple BitTorrent logo and prominent feedback button. It also seems harder to concentrate on a single element of the interface because of that new color scheme.

The interface itself looks like a metro experiment gone wrong, with no options to change the design to an older layout or to make color changes.

Personal content channels is the big new feature in Bittorrent 8. It’s aim is to simply sharing files over Bittorrent, which is now possible even if you do not know what torrents are or how you create them.

You can create an unlimited number of channels and add files to them. Once you have done that you can invite friends, colleagues, family or the whole wide world to download files from that channel.

Here is how you configure your channel in detail. Click on the arrow icon next to My Files in the BitTorrent client interface.

You then have the option to add a name, channel title and icon.

The channel interface loads once you hit the save button. Each channel has three distinct content sections. First the header with options to write messages or add content, second the file and message listing and third the sharing sidebar.

Content can be added by selecting already downloaded torrents or new files from the computer’s hard drive. Selected files are automatically added to the channel’s content listing.

It is only possible to add one file at a time from the local hard drive, which might become tiresome if you want to add more than a handful of them.

The BitTorrent software handles the uploading and creation of the torrent files. This is especially helpful for users with little technical experience.

Users can be invited by email, with a direct link to the channel or by posting the news on Twitter or Facebook.

All invited users and the channel owner can post comments or messages, but only the channel owner can post new files. Comments and messages are updated in real-time.

The link points directly to the download of the latest version of the Bittorrent software. The software comes bundled with the custom content channnel.

The custom version will install BitTorrent on the system if it is not already installed. It will otherwise add the custom channel to the version of BitTorrent on the computer system.

Please note that there is no way to create private channels. Even though channels are not publicly advertised, they are publicly available if someone manages to get the right web address for a channel. That said, it should be clear that personal content channels should not be used for important or personal files, considering that third parties who should not be able to access them might.

It appears as if the files that you want to share are uploaded to BitTorrent servers. This is likely done to ensure their full availability even if the channel owner goes offline.

It is mentioned in the beta announcement that channels do not have a file size limit during beta, and that their creation is free. This suggests that paid plans are in development and available with the release of the final version.

Windows users can download the beta of BitTorrent 8.0 from the Chrysalis web page at BitTorrent.com.

Utorrent 3 adds several interesting features to the torrent client, some of which have already been available for some time in alpha versions. Among the changes is a new portable mode to run the Bittorrent client without installation and the option to stream media torrents while they are being downloaded.

You can click on the Stream button under Playback in the torrent listing to stream the media contents while downloading. The uTorrent client displays the time it will take before the stream becomes available on your computer.

The service opens the stream in the default media player that is installed on the system. This can be changed in the program’s settings. Here it is possible to select another media player for streaming.

Another interesting new option is the ability to send Torrents. You can right-click a torrent in the program and select Send Torrent to do that.

This creates a web link on the uTorrent website where recipients can download the torrent to their system and torrent client. Even better, users without a torrent client installed have the option to download a bundled version of uTorrent which reduces lots of the explaining that you may need to do if you send a torrent link to a first time user.

The drop files to send feature builds up on that. You can use it to create a torrent file by dragging and dropping files to the uTorrent interface. This opens the same Send Torrent wizard. This simplifies the creation and sharing of torrents noticeably.

Additional new features include torrent ratings, a new encrypted web user interface that requires almost no configuration.

You can download the 32-bit and 64-bit release of uTorrent 3.0 beta from the official forums (32-bit here, 64-bit here). The new web gui, called uTorrent Remote is accessible here. You need an account to use that feature. The beta is only offered for the Windows operating system. (via)

Torrent Turbo Search is a free Google Chrome extension that can be utilized to search multiple popular Bittorrent websites at once. The extension supports various sites including ThePirateBay, BTJunkie, Isohunt, Fenopy and a dozen or so others.

It adds an icon to the Chrome address bar on installation that launches a local search form to find downloads on all supported torrent websites.

All you need to do is to enter a search term in the form and hit enter afterwards. The results are listed in tabs. The first tab displays mixed results from all torrent sites that are supported by the search engine, the remaining results from individual sites.

The developer states that the search adds the best matches to the top of the results automatically.

When you look at the results you notice that the title, website address and description are displayed on the search results page. The date is displayed if the site supports it.

A click on a result opens the page on the torrent site where you can read through the comments or download the torrent information to your computer.

The search appears to support many different torrent search engines, a lot more than are displayed as tabs on the search results page. Many of them appear only in the main tab listing where all search results are mixed and the Rus tab that lists Russian torrent sites only.

The core question is this: Do you really need an extension like Torrent Turbo Search to search for downloads on multiple torrent sites? The answer is no, obviously. You can use one of the existing torrent meta search engines, for instance Metasearch or NowTorrents instead.

Still, some Chrome users may like the fact that the search engine is pretty fast and that it finds torrents on a lot of different indexing sites.

Chrome users who are interested in the popular extension can download it from the official Google Extensions repository.

One constant problem for Google was the suggestion of suggestions surrounding downloads. A search phrase followed by torrent, or a name of one of the larger file hosting websites often displayed links to copyrighted contents.

Up until now it was enough to enter a name and the first chars of the downloading service or method, for instance Simpsons To which would have been auto-completed to Simpsons Torrent.

That however is a thing of the past as Google has blocked several terms from its auto-completion feature. Among them Bittorrent, torrent, Rapidshare and Megaupload. The filter in its current stage would block suggestions for Linux torrents for instance.

The search results on the other hand remain untouched, only the user has to enter the full search term manually to make the search.

As Torrentfreak points out; It is very strange that only some keywords are blocked while others remain untouched. Other Bittorrent software like Bitcomet, torrent sharing sites like The Piratebay or Isohunt, and other file sharing services like 4Shared or Mediafire are still included in the suggestions and auto-completions.

Even worse for the companies blocked is that suggestions have also been disabled for their names. If you search for Rapidshare for instance you won’t see instant results, you won’t get suggestions and you won’t get auto-complete until the name has been fully entered into the search form.

This means that the affected companies will likely see a drop in traffic coming from Google.

Google is blocking suggestions regardless of legalities. They block suggestions for instance suggestion to find Ubuntu torrents or the homepage of Rapidshare or Megaupload. That alone should be reason enough to refine or remove the filter again. The second problem I see is that they only block some companies and websites. Is it explainable that some file sharing websites are blocked while others are not?

Maybe another reason to switch to Bing. What’s your take on the matter?

The company stayed deathly silent for eighteen months but have now finally announced that there have been 774,651 activations using the pirated key for their Avast Pro suite.

The key was originally issued to a small business in Arizona but has since been used right around the world including, according to an Avast spokesperson, “on two computers in Vatican City”.

The spokesperson went on to say “There is a paradox in computer users looking for ‘free’ antivirus programs at locations with a known reputation for spreading malware.”

Now the dodgy code is being used in over 200 countries and Avast have issued a pop-up warning on the relevant computers informing the user, who may be completely unsuspecting, of the situation and offering them the option to switch to a legitimate copy of either their free or paid-for anti-virus suites.

There’s no data yet on how many pirates have decided to go legit, but according to Avast “it’s going according to plan”.

Torrent Indexers such as Isohunt or Torrentz often index torrent files that are hosted at other websites. They may provide direct torrent downloads, but do not offer magnet links to add the torrents directly to the torrent client.

The Firefox add-on Magnetiser adds an option to those two sites to directly send a magnet link to the Bittorrent client to download the files directly without having to download the torrent first.

This speeds up the process quite a bit. Here is how it works. The Firefox add-on adds a Magnetise text link to the status bar.

Clicking on that link while on individual torrent pages will automatically pull the magnet link and send it to the Bittorrent client.

It is not clear yet if the developer plans to add more torrent sites to the program. As of now, Magnetiser can speed up the downloading of files for users that frequent Isohunt or Torrentz on a regular basis.

Users who do not want to install a Firefox add-on for that, can take a look at the Magnet Catcher and Magnet Tracker userscripts instead. They work on more sites and are only executed when the user visits those websites.

Update: The Magnetiser add-on has been discontinued.

A closer look at the standard process of downloading files via torrents reveals several factors and parties that are necessary for this. The user needs a Bittorrent client like uTorrent or Vuze, a torrent file that is usually downloaded from a Bittorrent server which functions as a tracker and torrent provider and of course other seeders and leechers of that torrent.

A Bittorrent magnet link contains all the information needed to start downloading the files from peers directly. It is a server-less way of retrieving the right information to start downloading the requested files. A magnet link therefor is theoretically all that is needed to download files from other peers in the Bittorrent network. Magnet links can be distributed by email, messaging and other forms of communication but are most often found on the torrent sites that usually offer both torrent and magnet links to their users.

A magnet consists of several parts:

• magnet: (This is the magnet link identifier)
• ?xt=urn:btih: (Defines a Bittorrent Info Hash, the Edonkey identifier would for instance look like this xt=urn:ed2k:)
• 5dee65101db281ac9c46344cd6b175cdcad53426 (The content hash)
• &dn=name (The name of the file)

The full magnet link would look like this magnet:?xt=urn:btih:5dee65101db281ac9c46344cd6b175cdcad53426&dn=download. Detailed information about additional Magnet Link parameters are listed on Wikipedia. One useful parameter that has not been mentioned yet is the as= parameter which contains encrypted information about a download source. This speeds up the process of finding the first peers.

Main Advantages of Magnet Links

The main advantage for Bittorrent indexers is that they do not have to store the torrents on their servers anymore which could be beneficial for them in several ways. It could reduce the pressure from the media creation industry and reduce hardware infrastructure expenses thanks to less tracking and downloading.

The end users on the other hand benefit from Magnet Links as well. All they need is the link to start downloading the files which makes them independent from torrent indexers. It also allows them to distribute the information more easily. Torrent indexers remain on the other hand the main source of information for new files that are available for download.

Magnet Links use DHT

A tracker less environment should raise a question of identification. How can a download be initiated ff there is no tracker to inform the Bittorrent user about other users who download and seed the file? The answer is DHT, Distributed hash tables. DHT is enabled by default in popular clients such as uTorrent or Vuze. Without going into to much detail, the hash of the magnet link is used to find peers using DHT.

Torrent files

Torrents are still essential for Bittorrent as they contain information about the download that need to be present in the swarm. The only aspect that is changing is the way the torrents are distributed which is shifting from Bittorrent trackers and indexers to the server-less DHT procedure.

Many popular Bittorrent clients support magnet links already. This includes uTorrent and Vuze for Windows and Transmission for Linux and Mac systems.

Torrent Magnifier comes in three different versions; A desktop search engine for Windows based operating systems, a gadget for Windows Vista and Windows 7 based operating systems and an accelerator for Microsoft’s Internet Explorer web browser.

The desktop torrent search engine can be used to quickly search for torrents about a keyword that is entered into the form at the top. Torrent Magnifier will automatically search multiple torrent sites including BTjunkie, Mininova and the Piratebay. The results are sorted by the amount of seeders with other information like the torrent’s name or tracker displayed in each line as well. A click on the Go button will open the website of the selected service in the default web browser. Here it is then possible to access additional information and to download the torrent to the local computer system.

The difference between the gadget and desktop edition is that more information are listed in the desktop edition. Everything else is identical. Torrent Magnifier offers a quick option to search multiple torrent websites for torrents. All three versions of the tool can be downloaded from the developer’s website

Update: Torrent Magnifier’s website and services are no longer available on the Internet. The website returns a 404 not found error and redirects to the hosting company’s website. Users interested in a desktop torrent search engine can take a closer look at Torrent Fetcher which provides a similar functionality. The program is only available for the Microsoft Windows operating system.

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.

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).

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?

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.

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.

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.

Update: Tracker Checker has been updated recently. The new version offers a large list of open, closed and offline trackers. Interested users find hundreds of Bittorrent trackers there, along with their web addresses, the last time they were verified by the Tracker Checker service and a history view which lists the service’s status history.

The tracker list is sorted alphabetically. Use your browser’s search to find a specific tracker name or url in the list. There is no option to sort the trackers based on their status.

Another issue is that Trackerchecker seems to only test tracker availability sporadically. The last checked data on the site currently was ten days ago.

Update: The Tracker Checker website is no longer available on the Internet. An alternative that is still up and working is Btracs

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.

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.

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 ?