File Sharing

AT&T considering spying on its users

AT&T are currently evaluating if they should implement a system that would in effect monitor all traffic coming through their lines in an effort to stop sharing of copyrighted material on the Internet using P2P networks. AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson came up with a weak analogy to prove his point: "It's like being in a store and watching someone steal a DVD. Do you act?"

DOS Vulnerability in uTorrent and Bittorrent

A vulnerability in uTorrent and Bittorrent, which is using uTorrent's core, was discovered today that effects the BitTorrent 6.0 client,
uTorrent 1.7.x, uTorrent 1.6.x and uTorrent 1.8-alpha-7834. The Denial of Service vulnerability is made possible by the way the clients handle user data.

Stream Music contained in torrent files

Wyzo an alternative to Bittorrent clients?

I think I heard about Wyzo the first time on Techcrunch and thought to myself at that time that no one would need a browser that would be able to download torrents and the files connected to them. But then it occurred to me that this approach would benefit many users, especially those that never came into contact with Bittorrent before.

25 Gigatribe Premium Accounts for Ghacks Readers

Gigatribe is a software that creates a private Peer to Peer (P2P) network that offers a group of users, for example your friends and family, an easy way to share files securely. All communication is protected by a 256-bit Blowfish encryption so that no one can snoop on the files that you send and receive.

Port Forwarding Tester

You might have encountered the term Port Forwarding when configuring bittorrent on your computer or analyzing slow or none existing traffic with bittorrent. One of the first answers of those helpful support guys in all forums is always check Port Forwarding, but what the heck is it ?

EventID 4226: TCP/IP has reached the security limit

Windows XP with Service Pack 2 and Windows Vista have both a TCP/IP connection limit that limits the half-open connections of the system. If that limit is reached a new entry in the Event Viewer is created stating "EventID 4226: TCP/IP has reached the security limit imposed on the number of concurrent TCP connect attempts.".

Radiohead, their album and Bittorrent

There is a lot of coverage going on at the moment on various sites that all report that the new Radiohead album In Rainbows which is exclusively available on a official In Rainbows website is spreading like any other major music album on Bittorrent. The main difficulties that the reporting sites have is that listeners may pay the price they like to purchase the album on the In Rainbows website which can be anything from $0 to hundreds of Dollars for the album plus a small service charge.

The Media Defender Story continues

Media Defender, the company that is spreading fake releases to p2p networks such as edonkey or bittorrent in order to spread chaos amongst file sharers, has been hit by another devastating blow. First thousands of internal emails leaked on the Internet detailing information about fake releases, ways of spreading those releases and several other internal Media Defender internals.

Media Defender email leak

More than 6500 internal emails from anti-piracy company Mediadefender have been leaked on the Internet as one big Mailbox file that can be imported into email clients. Mails give in depth information about tactics that have been used to spread fake releases, fake edonkey servers and their opinion about several bittorrent clients.

The IT Crowd Anti-Piracy Ad

The IT Crowd is one of the best British comedy series ever produced. It's up to the point, uses nerdy characters that remind me of many of my work colleagues.The IT Crowd is about three guys - actually two guys and their female boss - from the IT appartement and their daily life in the office.

What can I do if Bittorrent gets throttled or blocked

It is important to know what to do if your Internet Service Provider decides to throttle or block certain ports that are used by applications that use the Bittorrent protocol. Comcast recently started using an application called Sandvine which uses a new way to throttle or block traffic. Sandvine uses something that is called session management which basically limits the number of open connections on your computer without caring about ports and protocols for instance.

Check Sign up Availability of Private Torrent Sites

Many private torrent websites have a user limit in place which makes it impossible for new users to sign up unless an old user gets kicked out of the system, deletes his account or the admins raise the user limit. It is a tedious task to visit those sites daily to make sure that you can sign up eventually.

Torrent Swapper

Torrent Swapper is a bittorrent client with some interesting features that make it stick out of the crowd of bittorrent clients. First of all it was written in Python making it independent from any operating system. Several other clients offer this as well though and the main feature that distinguishes Torrent Swapper from other clients is the feature to share upload speed between computers.

Anonymous Bittorrent with I2PSnark

I personally think that is is very important to use anonymizers whenever possible for most of the tasks on the Internet. All of your movement and actions are tracked and can be easily traced back to you which is probably something that most users on the Internet are either unaware of or do not like at all if they know that this is the case.

One major problem are P2P networks where anonymity is not that easily achieved. If you do lack the technical background you will face severe difficulties on the road to anonymity. There is however a great solution if you want to be anonymous while downloading and sharing files on Bittorrent.

Control uTorrent from a Website

I always thought that it would be nice to administrate uTorrent from work as well. Do things like adding new torrents, deleting old ones and the like would be really comfortable. The great thing is that this is actually possible if you use uTorrent. All you need is to enable to so called WebUi and download a small additional rar file that will be placed on your local computer. I would suggest that you download the latest official version of uTorrent but you could also use the beta versions that are posted in the forum.

NiN upload some of their songs to the Piratebay

NiN - Nine Inch Nails - added a new announcement on their website stating: "As a reward for stealing Year Zero, We've prepared the next batch of multitrack audio files for you to download". Beneath the announcement are links to three of their songs, Capital G, My Violent Heart and Me, I'm not in Garageband / Logic Format for the Macintosh and a generic format for other applications. The interesting aspect of the generic format is that the links are actually torrent files that point to the Piratebay.

Running a Bittorrent client from a web server

Running a Bittorrent client from a web server is a good way for sites like Jamendo to seed the torrents that they offer on their sites. This is also an excellent opportunity for authors of Open-Source and Freeware applications to cut their bandwidth costs by sharing the bandwidth with the users who are downloading the software. If you run a bittorent client from a web server you are plattform independent which means that you can access the client from every computer with Internet access - even from work or school to add new torrents to the queue, check the current downloads or administrate the client.

How Logistep catches file sharers

It is no secret that companies like Logistep are monitoring p2p networks to sue file sharers who are offering software from clients like Zuxxez, a German company who recently sued 500 British p2p users claiming that they illegally distributed the game Dream Pinball 3D. The website Torrentfreak got their hands on a copy of one of those letters that have been send out which details the process of how Logistep determines which users are illegally distributing the game.

Private Torrent Sites are being infiltrated

I read an rather obvious article over at the TorrentFreak blog that was entitled "Piracy Investigators Infiltrate Private Torrent Sites" which confirmed that piracy investigators have been getting access to private torrent sites by either joining them when they were still open for registration or being invited from a man in the inside. It was always pretty obvious to me that private could not really mean private if the site owners did not know each of the users personally. This system was bound to fail right from the beginning and the article on TorrentFreak only confirms this.

Search for and download mp3 with Clickster

Using p2p networks such as Emule or Bittorrent to download mp3 files is not as dangerous as the Music Industry tries to make it appear but there is still the chance that you might face consequences if you share copyrighted music. A much easier and safer way would be to simply use Google to find and download the music that you like. The Music Industry somehow does not seem to care that Google indexes more copyrighted mp3 files than the total number that is available on all p2p networks combined.

Optimal Bittorent Settings

If you search the internet for tips to improve your download speeds with bittorrent clients such as Azureus and uTorrent you do find many tips that have one thing in common, all suggest different settings for maximum performance. There are several things that can influence download speeds in bittorrent including bad Seeds to Peer ratio and firewall settings. I would only change settings in my bittorrent client if I thought that my download speeds would be really bad, say 2K with a torrent that has 10+ seeders.

Securely share large files with Pando

Pando is a free online service that utilizes p2p technology to share large encrypted files by email and instant messenger. The sender selects files and folders that he wants to share. Those files are immediately uploaded to the Pando server where they are stored in encrypted form. The recipient receives an email that contains a small attachment which starts the download process when executed. Data will be send from the Pando server and other users who are currently online.

A list of Free and Legal Torrent Sites

Most people don't ever think that it is possible that free and legal torrent websites exist, they automatically assume that torrents equal illegality. The list of then free and legal torrent sites proves this assumption wrong. NewTeeVee did a great job of compiling the list which is just a tiny fraction of the whole torrent scene. I still think that it is a good beginning to show others who do not know that much about bittorrent that there are indeed legal applications.

Japanese P2P Trojan deletes Files

A new kind of Trojan was discovered recently which targets only Japanese file-sharers. When executed the Trojan displays manga-like images with a reminder which differs depending on which image is displayed. The text however looks similar and always asks the user to stop using P2P networks. One of the messages for instance reads ""Ah, I see you are using P2P again...if you don't stop in 0.5 seconds, I'm going to kill you." Talk about a threat boy, jeeze."

Alternatives to uTorrent

There has been a lot of controversy about the recent acquisition of uTorrent by Bram Cohen, the creator of the Bittorent protocol. Most users seem to be disturbed about the partnership between Bittorrent and the MPAA which started in fall 2005 with the agreement that illegal searches would be removed from its own Bittorrent search engine. The fear that the cooperation will affect the development of the popular uTorrent client seems to grow with every passing day.

uTorrent 1.6.1 update fixes remote exploit

I'm so glad that I made the change from bitcomet to uTorrent some time ago because uTorrent is by far the most efficient bittorrent client that I could get my fingers on until now. I receive great speeds, it does not use many resources on my computer, heck the client is only 173 KB in size.

Block IP addresses with Peer Guardian

Why would you need another program to block IP addresses if you already have a firewall ? A good question that can be answered easily. Peer Guardian uses a database of bad IP addresses and blocks them automatically as soon as the IP is added to the database of blocklist.org. A single user would have to know that a new IP (range) poses a thread and add it manually to his firewall.

Fake Torrent Finder

Fake torrents are spread into the system by organizations for two reasons. The first and in my opinion dominant one is to unsettle the torrent users by lowering the rate of successful downloads. Nothing is more discouraging than downloading the latest blockbuster for days only to see that you downloaded only garbarge in that time. In addition to this the trackers that spread the fake torrents are recording every bit of information they can get their hands on.

Bittorrent client Bitthief spies on users

Bitthief, as the name already implies, is a bittorrent client that leeches from the community without giving something back to it. It basically reminds me of those leecher mods for emule that have been popular a few years ago. Bitthief accomplishes this by reducing the upload speed to 0. The developer of Bitthief, the Distributed Computing Group at ETH Zurich puts it this way:

Migrate from Bitcomet to uTorrent

I finally decided to give uTorrent another try and switch from my favorite client Bitcomet to it. It seemed to me lately that Bitcomet was using more system resources than it was expected to use which is the main reason for the switch. Others are that the torrent community frowns upon Bitcomet naming it bandwidth stealer.

Tired of fake torrents? Block the source

We all knew and heard about the common method to upload fake torrents into the torrent system to punish downloaders of copyrighted media files. The Torrentfreak blog reports that some torrent admins were able to identify some of the IP ranges that spread fake torrents and probably also the company that is behind it. The easiest way to cope with the situation would be to block the IP ranges either in your firewall or in a utility such as Peer Guardian. Below are the information for Peer Guardian 2, simply use the IP ranges if you want to block the IPs in your firewall.

Share Files with HTTP File Server

You have some friends or business partners that you want to share data with but have no website with enough space and don't want to use p2p as well ? One simple way to share files of any size is to use the HTTP File Server which emulates a basic file server on your home computer. The server can be run in public or private mode and it is normally a very good idea to run it in private mode.

And so the Pirates win the day

It began with the ban of the Russian website allofmp3 by the internet provider Perspektiv. The Piratebay decided to ban users of the provider from accessing their website as a response of the ban against allofmp3. Guess what, Perspektiv announced today that they lifted the ban of the Russian website and the Piratebay in turn decided to lift their ban as well.

BitComet 0.80 has been released

While downloading the latest version of the bittorrent client BitComet it came to my mind that I never wrote an article about this excellent client here at ghacks. I have written about Azureus and uTorrent which I have tried both but not about the client that I'm personally using because I think it is the best one of the bunch. I like BitComet because of several reasons: speed, usability and because it is using low resources.

Azureus 2.5 is out

A new version of the popular bittorrent client Azureus has been released yesterday to the public. Azureus 2.5 introduces several new features such as Auto Upload Speed which automatically adjusts the upload speed by pinging other members that currently seed the torrent. The interface was improved as well adding new information like idle times and date added to it.

My first experience with Relakks

I signed up with Relakks yesterday and was satisfied with this clean and easy process. I had to provide only some information like name, email, password and username and was able to log on to their system. My status was inactive at that time because I did not make a purchase yet. I decided to try the service for one month and had to provide my credit card details in order to do so. One month would cost 6$ which is a good price if they live up to their promises which are a) anonymous internet experience and b) maximum speed.

uTorrent 1.6 final released

Funny. I made the switch from BitComet to uTorrent two days ago and was using the first release candidate of uTorrent 1.6 with great pleasure. It´s faster and uses less system ressources than Bitcomet.

Speed up your torrent downloads

I´am not using bittorrent that often anymore but it is still a great way of transfering large files. You see less complaints of people about low download speeds but certainly there are some that are having troubles downloading at a great speed. This can be of course torrent related, if you don´t have many seeders or only seeders with low upload speeds you will experience a slow download.

Useful Azureus / Vuze Plugins

One of the great features of Azureus is its plugin capability which is widely used by developers. Today more than 50 plugins are available for Azureus, zeropaid took a look at the most useful ones, let us take a look at the plugins they mention. The plugins mentioned can be categorised to belong either to cosmetic changes, statistics, security, communication and time management.