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.

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The torrents that are included in the torrent archive will work without the Piratebay website and tracker (as the tracker provided by Openbittorrent.com is included in every torrent offered by the Piratebay) which is probably the number one reason for the archive in the first place.

The torrents are provided in a sqlite database that lists 873671 torrents. The script that has been used to mirror all torrents is also provided by the developer of the software.

A mockup website is also provided that can display torrents that are in the database.

This is a copy of the TPB index. I crawled their index and since I don’t have the hardware necessary to deploy it to the public, I have decided to release the database.

Remember that all torrents from TPB now have the new tracker openbittorrent.com included, so they will continue to track even after the TPB tracker shuts down.

I have included the program I made to crawl the index, and a mockup website that can read the database.
The database itself is an sqlite3 database.

The index has 873671 torrents, ranging from id 3211594 to 5051940 (2009-08-13). I only got 873671 torrents, but according to the website the tracker tracks over 2 million torrents. The discrepancy is most likely due to many torrent files including the TPB tracker but has not been uploaded to the web site.

All my code is in the public domain. Do whatever you want with it! I have included a public key in case I ever want to claim credit.

Users who are interested in downloading a huge chunk of Piratebay torrents can do so at the official Piratebay website.

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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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There are hundreds, if not thousands of content channels to choose from the latest movie trailers to the most popular Youtube videos to Ubuntu guides. It is also possible to add feeds that you discover that are not already included in Miro. These feeds will be handled just like any other feed.

It is possible to auto download new posts from the subscribed feeds or to download them manually. Miro offers a built in Torrent client as well which makes it possible to download audio and video torrents to watch them in the interface as well.

Version 2.5 of Miro comes with some serious (that’s what the developers call it) speed and memory usage improvements. It can be downloaded from the nightlies downloads page.

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Of course, as gaming companies have gotten smarter, so have the gamers. Gaming piracy is still rampant on the Internet and torrents are one of the fastest ways a person can get hold of a pirated game. In fact, TorrentFreak recently released their list of the top 10 most pirated games of the year, which made for some interesting reading.

At the top of this unofficial list is Electronic Arts’ Spore. The game has been downloaded 1.7 millions times since it was released in September. The top position can be attributed to the game’s ridiculous DRM, which allowed a user who purchased a legitimate copy to install the game only three times. Spore also holds the distinction of being the most downloaded torrent on Piratebay for a full week, a rare feat for a game.

Other games released this year that have made it to the list include Fallout 3 (#8), Far Cry 2 (#9), and Pro Evolution Soccer (#10). The second to the seventh positions on the list are occupied by older games like the Sims 2, Crysis, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, etc. In most cases, these games were available on torrent sites well before their actual release.

The general trend in gaming piracy seems to be greater the copy protection, the more chance a game will be pirated. Price is also an issue that encourages piracy. If I’m paying $50 for one game, I wouldn’t want to have my gaming experience restricted in any way. Another factor that promotes piracy is that games are often not released worldwide at the same time. So while a U.S. resident gets first crack at a game, the same title may only be available for purchase to someone across the world after some months.

Ironically, piracy can sometimes be used as an indicator of a game’s popularity. Almost all of these games occupy a position in the ‘best-selling games list’ released by Amazon. What do you think of the top ten games on the list? Is there a game you expected to see on it? What would you like gaming companies to do to ensure that games don’t get pirated? Let me know in the comments.

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It could be however an interesting option to preview the video before downloading it completely. Maybe it does make sense for users who do not want to download the videos but view them right at the moment only.

RarPlayer combines the media player VLC with a software that can download and process video torrents. It supports the most popular video formats like avi or mov but unfortunately cannot cope with archives that contain videos. This means the video has to be available in its original format and cannot be made available as an archive.

The program achieves this by downloading the first parts of the video at the beginning so that it can start playing after a short while. It obviously depends on the number of seeders on how fast the video can be played. It can happen that it stops somewhere in the middle because it needs to buffer again.

My main point of criticism would be the lack of controls of the player itself. I was not able to rewind which is probably because of the streaming process but it becomes terribly annoying if you watch for about a minute and notice that the player stops playing and starts buffering again. It would be nice to have some kind of buffer to rewind a short time to play the video again from a certain point.

It also seems to crash quite often if you feed it with torrents that point to unsupported file types.

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Ted, which stands for Torrent Episode Downloader, is probably the easiest way to download tv shows from Bittorrent. The application has been designed specifically for that purpose. It comes with a range of preconfigured shows (more than 100) that are displayed by default. Many popular tv shows are listed including 24, Battlestar Galactica, CSI and Lost among others.

It works like the following. The user picks a show from the list and Ted displays a description of that show along with a list of episodes that are currently available. Episodes are just listed as Season 2, Episode 4 which makes it a bit harder to find out if that is the show that you missed for example unless you want to download a full season.

Next to that is the original air date of that show and the availability on the network. The main advantage of Ted is that it is easy to use with close to zero configuration and has a wide assortment of shows in the list. Custom shows can be added to Ted as well. It does have some shortcomings though which I would like to address.

First of all not all episodes of the tv shows are listed which means that you will miss episodes if you use TED exclusively. If you use another Bittorrent client and Bittorrent websites for downloading those shows you could easily download everything from there right away which would make TED redundant.

There is not a lot of information available when downloading a show which is great for inexperienced users but experts will miss some details that they are used to analyse when downloading from Bittorrent.

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The best way to search for torrents is therefor in my opinion to use meta search engines unless you are on a private tracker or prefer to use only one torrent search engine and no other.

Meta torrent search engines can only be effective if they are fast and update their database regularly, real time updates being the optimum. The selection of torrent websites that are crawled is the second criteria for a good torrent meta search engine.

1. Youtorrent

Youtorrent came to light only recently. It currently supports ten torrent websites with the option to add another six in the preferences. The search is pretty fast and the related search terms are aiding the user in his search. Offers a Firefox plugin.

2. Pizzatorrent

Pizzatorrent supports 15 Bittorrent websites right out of the box. The search seems just a tad faster than that of Youtorrent and they divide the results in categories which is great if you are searching for broad terms. Offers a Firefox and Internet Explorer plugin plus a Facebook application.

3. Torrent Finder

Torrent Finder is the most comprehensive Bittorrent search engine which crawls more than a hundred torrent sites during a search. It is slower than the other two engines mentioned already and does not list all results in one frame but separates each torrent site in their own frame which means that users will have to click through dozens of sites which makes a comparison difficulty.

4. Multitorrent

Multitorrent is not really a meta crawler. It provides access to the database of several torrent websites but it is only possible to search one at a time. It does offer category searches though which the other engines don’t.

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What this means is that it is possible to upload the same file much faster effecting the download speed as well for trackers that reward users who have higher upload speeds. Next feature that differs is the so called recommendation feature. You click on a torrent and receive possible recommendations that you can download right from the menu.

Several minor features exist as well such as showing the location of all seeders on the world map with detailed information about them, priority queue system, multiple downloads and basically all the important features of a nice bittorrent client.

Torrent Swapper Main Window:

Torrent Swapper Geo Location:

Torrent Swapper Recommend Feature:

I’m not really sure what the Torrent collecting feature does when you look in the options which is why I did disable it. Other than that it looks pretty solid and is surely worth a look if you are looking for a new bittorrent client.

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The IP address can be used to identify users and sue them in the process for instance, still the main reason is to destablizie the system and make users leave it. One way to find fake torrents is to use the newly introduced Fake Finder which is a script that displays and lets you search for the latest fake torrents that are known to them. There is no 100% guarantee that the site lists all fake torrents and trackers but it lists many and you should consult it before you begin to download a file.

The list of torrent trackers that spread the fake torrents is large and you should use a program like peerguardian to block them all. This prevents the connection at all and should protect your privacy.

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