One user recently created a Perl script that dumped all of the site’s magnet links. The dump contains more than 1.5 million torrents indexed by The Pirate Bay website in a fairly simple format:

ID|Name|Size in bytes|Seeders|Leechers|Magnet Link Hash

The whole archive takes up 90 Megabytes in zipped format, and 164 Megabytes unpacked on the system. It is not clear why seeder and leecher information have been added, as they are constantly changing.

The magnet link only contains the hash, and not the necessary link structure to load it into a torrent downloader. You need to add magnet:?xt=urn:btih: in front of the hash for that to work correctly.

You need to load the archive in a program that is capable of loading a 164 Megabyte text document (Notepad++ is an option). You can use the text editor’s search to find the files you are looking for.

There is a discrepancy between the number of torrent links in the dump and the number of torrents listed on The Pirate Bay website. The footer lists 4.5 million torrents, of which not all are hosted by the site. It is also noteworthy that adult torrents have not been included in the dump.

The author of the script has released the script at Pastebin.

The dump is significant for a number of reasons. First that a large number of torrents fit in a small archive, and second that the archive will remain functional even if The Pirate Bay would shut down completely.

This archive could furthermore help if The Pirate Bay website is blocked in a network or country. (via Torrentfreak)

The idea behind You Have Downloaded is fairly simple. The service monitors world wide torrent traffic and adds all information that it finds to a database. The developers of the service state that they have records for more than 52 million users, nearly 2 million files and more than 110k torrent files.

The site will automatically check the IP that you are connecting from against the database to provide you with information about the downloads that have been recorded for that particular IP address.

You Have Downloaded lists all files that users behind that particular IP address have been downloading. This includes the name of the files, their size and the month and year in which it happened.

A search is provided that offers additional search and filtering options. It is for instance possible to search by IP address to find out if torrents have been downloaded by a particular IP address, by torrent to see all IP addresses that have downloaded the files or by filename to see the same information. The result pages list the trackers users have used to download the files from as well.

Users with dynamic IP addresses may see torrents that have been downloaded by other users of the Internet Service Provider in the past. The developers do however point out that they grab machine fingerprints using DHT and time stamps to link downloads directly to a particular computer system. Not all of the information are however displayed on the public site frontend.

The developer’s reveal part of their intentions on the service’s privacy policy page.

Baby, this is the Internet. There is no such a thing as privacy around here.

If you ask me, there are two scenarios for the service’s future. It first might be taken offline once the developers recognize that traffic does not pay for itself. The second possibility is that they are contacted by media representatives who would like to buy the database and technology.

Just head over to You Have Downloaded to see if they have records about your current IP in their database.

The report shows that Netflix accounts for 29.7% of traffic in the US at peak times, and 22% throughout the whole day. Torrenting topped out at 21%, and this time the number is even down from what it was last fall. The report shows Netflix and streaming of audio and video in general to have increased 445 within the last year or so. People are starting to consume their media online instead of watching it on TV.

Hollywood should approve of this. These numbers mean that people are beginning to stream their videos instead of torrenting. Because, of course, we all know that the only reason for bit torrent’s existence is piracy, right? Well, not quite, but that’s what Holly wood as a whole seems to believe. The fact that Netflix is getting bigger and torrenting has taken even a slight downturn should be thrilling.

The numbers show a trend toward more online streaming. This gives ISPs an idea of what they have to look forward to in the future. People are going to want more and more bandwidth as the way they consume entertainment changes.
The problem with this whole thing is that ISPs, mostly due to the few people who do torrent on a regular basis, have begun putting in caps. In the states, even the major ISPS who arguably have lots of bandwidth to spare are debating putting in caps anywhere from 150-250 GB.

Even in Canada, where Netflix has been hugely successful since it arrived in September, some of the major DSL ISPs are debating bandwidth caps of 25 GB. If you’re streaming video, you could go through that in a day. Netflix has already had to lower the quality of its streaming in Canada to deal with the bandwidth caps. Canadian ISPs say that the current infrastructure just isn’t meant to handle the amount of internet traffic people are asking for, and that problem is only going to get worse.

Netflix is becoming a major source of internet traffic in the US and in Canada, at least. The big movie companies are thrilled with this, because it means that their seven year battle to get movies off of the torrent sites might actually be showing results. But, partially as a reaction to that battle, ISPs are now putting in caps to control how much bandwidth one user can get. I’m thinking this isn’t quite the outcome the Hollywood companies expected …

What are your thoughts? Do you have bandwidth caps in place that make it difficult to do everything online that you would like? Do you watch a lot of online media? How much bandwidth do you think you use every month? What do you think would be a good solution for Netflix and the ISPs?

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.

Torrents are created right on the frontpage of the service. Just paste a web url pointing to a file in the form on the start page to create the torrent. The file is then processed by BurnBit. The processing time varies, and depends on parameters like the size of the file, the connection to the hosting provider and the load on the BurnBit server.

Once processed, the torrent of the file is offered for download on a newly created page on the website. You can download the torrent right away from the page, or share the page or torrent with friends.

Webmasters can embed download buttons on their websites which display the current number of seeders and leechers. These buttons can be customized with CSS. Torrents can be downloaded with a click on the button and loaded into any software that supports the Bittorrent protocol.

Additional HTTP mirrors can be added to increase the number of web seeds. This improves the availability, connectivity and download speed for all users significantly. Additional file mirrors are added the very same way as the initial file locations. BurnBit compares file hashes to make sure that files are identical.

All users can register to become a member of the site. Registration is free and comes with additional privileges, like monitoring and customizing torrents, or receiving notifications.

Creating a Torrent, Restrictions

Users have two options to create torrents. They can either use the homepage of the service to create the torrents, or embed the download script on their site to automatically create torrents. Regardless of the method, they always have to link to a file on the Internet to create the torrent. There are no size limitations for the files that can be turned into torrents. The largest file seen on site had a size of more than 16 Gigabytes.

Seen on site? Yes, BurnBit maintains a torrent directory on site where users can download torrents uploaded by other members of the site.

A few restrictions have been added. It is not allowed to create torrents of copyrighted or adult files. Users may also notice that some sites are blocked by the developers because of past abuse of the service.

File downloads in theory, should not take longer than direct http downloads. They may even be faster if enough seeders are available to push the download rate for downloading users. Webmasters can save lots of bandwidth provided that multiple users download files hosted on their sites. They won’t benefit from the service if only one user downloads a file using torrents.

BurnBit is used as the tracker for the torrent file. This could be problematic considering that downloads will stop working if the service goes offline or out of business. An option to add multiple trackers to each torrent needs to be implemented to put webmasters at ease.

BurnBit is an ingenious service, especially for webmasters who offer downloads on their websites, and users who want to distribute files as torrents instead of web downloads.

Torrific offers an interesting alternative to using seedboxes or downloading torrents directly to a local computer service. The free service can be used to create direct HTTP downloads of torrents. It basically works like this. The user adds a torrent file to the system. Torrific then uses its server to download the torrent, and make it available for download to the user of its service.

There are a few benefits of this, with the two most prominent ones the following: HTTP downloads are usually a lot faster than downloads from Bittorrent, and that’s true even with the added time that the downloads take before they are ready and available at Torrific.

The second advantage is that the user’s IP address does not appear in the P2P network at all. Torrific does all that, and it will be very interesting to see how they handle downloads of copyrighted media.

torrific

The download progress of each torrent that is added to the service is displayed on the user’s profile page. Having said that it should be noted that user accounts are mandatory but easy to setup and without verification whatsoever.

Torrents can either be added directly by pointing the service to a torrent url, or by using a keyword search, which makes use of a custom Google search form. It usually is faster to locate the torrent directly though, especially if the user has a few favorite sites for torrent downloads.

Email notifications can be configured, which dispatch an email whenever a torrent has been downloaded completely by the torrent downloading service.

Some torrents are available instantly, which is the case if another Torrific member already requested it and if it still resides on the servers of the torrent downloading service. The developers state that files are usually stored for a limited period of time, due to storage limitations. This currently seems to be less than a week. The oldest torrents expire first to make room for new torrent requests.

Premium accounts are available, which offer benefits like no wait time for large torrent downloads. The service is currently in alpha, and offers unlimited downloads for free users. It is likely that this is going to change over time. Everything else would simply be unreasonable, considering that the service has to pay for the bandwidth used by its users and the downloads of the torrents.

Check out Torrific if you want to give it a try.

Update: The Torrific website is no longer available. The latest version of uTorrent has made sharing a lot easier, I suggest you try it out as an alternative. You can also try the following two Torrific alternatives.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Utorrent will create a “uttorent” directory in the profile of the connected user under Windows. The easiest way to find this would be to open to hit Windows + R and paste “%AppData%\uTorrent” (without the “”) into the box. Now download the latest WebUi files that are always posted in this forum thread. I do not want to link directly to the file because it changes with every new release.

Copy that file into the uTorrent folder that just appeared when you pasted the string into it. Open uTorrent afterwards and click on Options > Preferences. Select Advanced and choose WebUi from the submenu. You will have to enable the Web Interface and select a username and password that is allowed to access it. To make things easier select the Alternative Listening Port as well. It is time to try if everything is working once you hit ok.

Open your favorite web browser (Internet Explorer 6 is not working) and type in the following URL: http://127.0.0.1:8080/gui/

If everything worked out fine you should see the main web interface. Please note that 127.0.0.1 can only be used from your local computer. You need to know your “real” IP to connect from remote computers to your local one. You could use my little IP checking script to find out your IP and write it down. Now replace 127.0.0.1 with the IP that was shown and you should still be able to access the interface.

Adding torrents is absolutely uncomplicated. Download the torrent to the computer you are working on and click on the Add Torrent button in the interface. Browse to the torrent and click on Add File. The torrent will be shown immediately in the list of torrents that are downloaded.

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.