With plans to become a pay site soon, The Pirate Bay is viewed by many as a BitTorrent tracker that’s about to die. Surely, the world’s largest BitTorrent tracker becoming pay-to-leech would not do any good to file sharing. Or would it? (there are alternatives of course but it IS the largest tracker). As I see it, over reliance on a single tracker is never good for BitTorrent if it’s to survive on the long term. However this has already occurred (to a certain extent) with TPB’s tracker which tracks nearly half of world’s BitTorrent downloads. So what’s the silver lining in TPB’s demise (yet to happen)?. I for one think it’ll trigger the launch many smaller BitTorrent trackers, making it a nightmare for Anti piracy groups to take them down.

If you still aren’t aware of them, several such sites have already been launched; OpenBitTorrent (OBT), PublicBitTorrent (PBT) and Hidden Tracker. In contrast to most existing trackers, both OBT and PBT are not accompanied by a torrent index or a torrent search feature – they are stand alone trackers, free for anyone to use when creating a .torrent file (it doesn’t matter where the .torrent file will be hosted). This of course means it’d be a lot harder to challenge OpenBitTorrent/PublicBitTorrent’s legality in courts. Why? An explanation is given in OpenBitTorrent homepage:

Just to make it clear so people sending DMCA takedown notices understand:

• We do not have any content.
• We are not a bittorrent site, we are just a tracker, we can not see what content is behind an info_hash.
• We don't have any torrent files.
• We can't give you any IP addresses in any other way than normal tracker usage.
• We can't verify any claims when we have no data other than the info_hash.
• We can't block info_hash keys from being registered with the tracker.
• We don't have any logs or ways to trace previous connections, It's not technically possible to trace connection history due to the sheer volume of connections. The only information that is possible to keep is the current torrent swarm.

Then of course there is the new Hidden Tracker – a public BitTotrrent tracker that uses Tor anonymization network to conceal its location. Don’t get into a false sense of security because of the word ‘Anonymisation’. What really gets concealed from spies is the location of the tracker itself, not the peers connected to it. However this is an innovative concept and would surely give anti piracy agencies a hard time determining the tracker location (For more info on HT refer to this TorrentFreak article).

If whois information is correct, one of these trackers is hosted in Sweden and the other in Netherlands. The striking similarity between the user interface and homepages would suggest that both are run by the same folks – but this is not true. An interesting fact (observed before whoise information was masked) is that , OpenBitTorrent’s domain is registered under Fredrik Neij (aka TiAMO), a co-founder of TPB. Additionally, every single torrent on TPB is currently being tracked by OpenBitTorrent as well. PublicBT tracker on the other hand is run by folks behind BTJunkie. This is veteran BitTorrent admins setting an example for the rest of the world to follow – create more standalone trackers, grow more heads for the hydra.

In addition, if open trackers are combined with a 3rd party torrent storage service such as Torrage, it would be even harder to take them down. Here is a quote from Torrage’s Legal page”

We DO NOT have or track any information about what type of content the torrents point to.
We DO NOT have any type of search or listing system.
We DO NOT run our own trackers.
The original filename of the torrent is NOT saved.
We DO NOT log any IP adresses of uploaders.
You can ONLY download torrents if you ALREADY KNOW the INFO_HASH of the torrent file.
Torrent files are cached on disk in gzip format making it extremely time consuming to search for any data contained within the torrent files.

As you can see, even rumors of TPB’s demise has already created some much needed innovation in the BitTorrent community :)

How to create a torrent using OpenBitTorrent/PublicBT:

If you add any of the following trackers to your torrent during creation, it’ll be tracked by OPT/PBT/HT:

• http://tracker.publicbt.com:80/announce
  udp://tracker.publicbt.com:80/announce
• http://tracker.openbittorrent.com:80/announce
  udp://tracker.openbittorrent.com:80/announce
• http://z6gw6skubmo2pj43.onion:8080/announce (HiddenTracker – with Tor installed)
• http://z6gw6skubmo2pj43.tor2web.com:8080/announce (HiddenTracker – without Tor installed)

(UDP versions too were included as they will now be used more with uTorrent’s support for UDP)

[Click Here] to visit OpenBitTorrent homepage

[Click Here] to visit PublicBitTorrent homepage

Related Articles

• Pirate Bay alternatives – 12 BitTorrent trackers that could replace TPB

Read the rest of this article...

You’ve all heard about popular TV trackers such as TVTorrents.Com, BitMeTV and Freshon.tv. Apart from differences in community, download speeds, etc, all of these trackers have more or less the same content. How about a TV tracker that offers something different? TorrentsRMine (TRM) is one such private tracker that specializes in TV talk shows, documentaries and other TV series that are not readily available on other similar sites. Although it’s been open for signup before, public registrations for TRM are currently closed. However if you are interested in becoming a member, invites are available on their IRC channel.

When compared to leading TV trackers, TRM is a small community. However it indexes and tracks some of the rarest TV torrents around. How does TRM get hold of such content? They have their own ‘cappers’ – folks who capture television shows from sources HDTV, DSTV, etc (best examples are releases by NewWorld and bjdw). At the time this post is being written, TorrentsRmine tracks over 1250 active torrents, some of them being full TV season packs. Additionally, TRM has an excellent requests section with a high request fulfillment ratio. Check out the screenshot below which displays part of this tracker’s torrent index (more info on indexed shows can also be found in our old article located here):

Note that new members do not have access to all content on the tracker immediately after signup. To download some exclusive releases and season packs you need to be Power User rank or higher (getting promoted shouldn’t be too hard – minimum upload is 10GB and you only need to be a member for at least 1 day). And it’s worth mentioning that this is not an easy tracker to seed – since TRM requires you to maintain a minimum ratio, be very careful about what you download, especially at first (there are freeleech torrents of course) .

As mentioned earlier TRM is closed for signup and users can only get in via an invite. You can ask for invites on TRM’s IRC channel – you will however need to show ratio proofs from other private torrent trackers you are a member of. And when/if you do get invited, make sure you read the FAQ and Rules in full – TRM is not likely to give you a second chance if you screw up.

Site Name: torrentsRmine (http://www.torrentsrmine.org)

IRC Channel Details:

• Server: irc.purplesurge.com
• Channel: #torrentsrmine
• Key: trminers
• Direct Link: irc://irc.purplesurge.com/torrentsrmine?trminers

Special thanks to Bowser and the rest of TRM staff for the support given.

Read the rest of this article...

Interesting news for fans of the popular BitTorrent client uTorrent. uTorrent has released the first beta of the upcoming uTorrent 2.0 series of builds . The release was officially announced in uTorrent forums (“1.9 is now 2.0, and we've hit beta!”) and µTorrent 2.0 beta 16081 is now available to the public. One of the major new features implemented in this update is the support for UDP trackers. UDP is generally more efficient than HTTP based trackers and consumes less resources on the server that tracks torrent files [Read more on UDP]. UDP based trackers are not supported in any of the stable 1.X versions of uTorrent and are only supported in v2 beta.

Release notes for the new build are quoted below:

• 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!
• Transfer caps are now configurable, with usage tracking and graphs.

Apart from the above a number of minor features and bugfixes are included in this build – complete version can be found on this forum thread.

Download

uTorrent is free and is not bundled with any adware or spyware. However please keep in mind that v2.0 build 16081 is still a beta version – you may run into undiscovered bugs or stability issues while using it. User feedback for this build can be found on official thread for v2.0 beta on uTorrent forums.

[Click Here] to download uTorrent 2.0 beta build 16081 (Direct Download)

NOTE: If you are using private torrent trackers, make sure your tracker has uTorrent 2.0 beta in its allowed clients list. Using a non-allowed client version can result in your account getting banned.

One a side note, uTorrent does not seem to get bloated with every new release unlike most apps out there (Nero anyone?). –v2.0 (beta) is still very lightweight and the installer is only around 400kb in file size.

Looking for the latest stable build?

[Click Here] to download uTorrent 1.8.3 Stable (Direct Download)

Read the rest of this article...

Good news for HD fans and a welcome addition to our HD trackers section – HDStar (HDS) is open for signup. For those who don’t know what this site is all about, HDStar is a Chinese private torrent tracker specializing in movies, documentaries and TV series encoded in high definition formats. It’s right up there in the list of top HD trackers based in China along with CCFBits, CHDBits and HDChina. With a lot of English content indexed, HDS is one of the Chinese trackers that is friendly to international, English speaking users. Both scene and non scene releases are indexed on this site, including releases from their own internal encoder team.

With over 9400 users and over 6500 torrents, HDStar is by no means a small tracker. It’s a mature private tracker with an active user base and excellent download speeds on most of the torrents. When compared to other China based trackers such as HDChina and CCFBits, HDStar has a much cleaner interface which is more user friendly to international users. Site language is changeable and thankfully there is an English option available as well.

As mentioned above HDStar trackers movies, TV shows and documentaries in HD formats (obtained from Blu-ray, HD DVD, MiniBD, HDTV, DVDR sources and encoded using H.264, VC-1, Xvid, MPEG-2, DTS, AC-3 audio/video codecs). In addition to scene and p2p releases, HDStar has quite a few exclusive torrents released by their own internal encoder team ‘HDS’. Given below is an screenshot of part of this site’s torrent index:

 

As you can see the torrent index has color coded torrents – a different background color means the torrent is either free leech, 2x up, 2x up and free, 50% download recorded, 2x up + 50% download recorded, etc. Information on which colors mean which benefits can be found at the bottom of Browse.php page.

Also note that most torrents have Chinese characters in their name. We’ll give you the same advice we gave when we posted the review for CCFBits – don’t be fooled by this. Just because a torrent has Chinese characters doesn’t mean it’s dubbed in Chinese. In fact most of the releases on HDS have English audio – sometimes you’ll be able to know this for sure as ‘Spoken language’ is mentioned in the torrent description page of most releases.

For those interested in joining, HDStar is currently open for signup. We do not know till when the signups will remain open so get in when you can.

Site Name: HDStar (http://www.hdstar.org)

Signup URL: http://www.hdstar.org/signup.php

Special thanks to Jeffrey for the heads up.

Related Articles

• CCFBits – Chinese HD torrent tracker with English releases
• HDChina – Chinese BitTorrent tracker for US, UK and Asian HD content

Read the rest of this article...

If you are a hard core torrenter concerned about privacy and security of peer to peer file transfers, here is a program that can cover your ass to a certain extent. Surely, you must have heard about PeerGuardian (PG) - a program that blocks undesirable IP addresses from establishing connections with your machine. Albeit a hugely popular app, there had hardly been any updates to PeerGuardian core app in almost two years. This is where PeerBlock comes in – it’s a fork of PeerGuardian 2 with lots of updates to the core application and not just the list of filtered IP addresses.

Developer description of peerblock is quoted below:

Peer Block is a new version (aka a "fork") of the popular Peer Guardian 2 software. It blocks "known bad" computers from accessing yours, for example governments and corporations. Peer Block maintains the functionality of the original Peer Guardian 2 program, but will include fixes for various Windows Vista / Windows 7 issues that remain unaddressed in PG2.

Note that although software such as PeerBlock and PeerGuardian does provide some sort of added security to your p2p activities, they should not be mistaken for all-in-one magical solutions that will shield you from all kinds snoopers. Always be on the lookout for prying eyes – don’t let a sense of false security fool you.

Download

[Click Here] to download PeerBlock 0.9.2 (32-bit) from Google Code (Direct Download)

If you are new to this type of software, we strongly recommend you read the guide available online on the app homepage.

Read the rest of this article...

Just a quick update – Scene Inspired (S-I) is now open for signup. S-I is a general/0day tracker that has free leech enabled at all times on all torrents. It’s not a new entrant to the BitTorrent community – the site has been around for a few years. S-I is  one of those BitTorrent sites that focuses on community and not just the zero day releases uploaded to the site. It’s a tiny 0day tracker when compared to the likes of TorrentBytes, RevolutionTT or TorrentLeech but the S-I has a small but devoted set of users around it which probably is why the site has managed to survive this long.

Some of you might notice that the logo of S-I and the site layout is shockingly similar to that of SceneX.me which was featured yesterday here on this blog. This is because both these sites are based on the TBDEV script and default settings have not been customized a lot in both the trackers. However it’s a good thing that S-I switched to a more polished looking interface - their previous layout was cluttered and sucked hard IMHO.

As mentioned above Scene Inspired is a free leech tracker – the site is constantly in global free leech mode (some would argue that this is as good as being ratio free). However keep in mind that hit and run rules still apply – you need to seed each downloaded torrent to a specified ratio or keep them seeding for a certain period of time.

As you can see from the above screenshot, S-I tracks all sorts of content. Both download speeds and pre times are average on this tracker ( they are not lighting fast but are not painfully slow either). At time of this post, there were over 540 active torrents indexed.

If you are interested in joining, signups are currently open.

Site Name: Scene-Inspired (http://scene-inspired.com)

Signup URL: http://scene-inspired.com/signup.php

Read the rest of this article...

Yet another private tracker that shut down after the Pirate Bay ruling in Sweden has come back online, kicking the Swedish anti piracy agency in the nuts once more. Swebits, a highly popular Swedish BitTorrent site which closed its tracker operations back in April 2009, has now returned in grand style. Good news is that Swebit’s  user database and the huge torrent index do not appear to be harmed by the prolonged downtime. At the time it shut down operations, Swebits tracked close to 20000 torrents and had a user base in excess of 50000 members, making it one of the largest private trackers to be hosted in Sweden.

For those who were not members of this site, Swebits is a General/0Day tracker with both English and Swedish releases. It was/is popular among many Swedes for the large collection of Sweden based movies and TV series it tracked. There was lot of English content online as well and Swebits was not short of English speaking users as well. It must be noted that this is a very old private tracker that has been around for nearly 5 years.

Note that public signups are currently closed. However if you were a registered member back when the site was shut down, chances are high that your user account is still working.

Site Name: Swebits (http://swebits.org/)

Thanks to ‘mr disneey’ for the heads up.

Read the rest of this article...

Just noticed that SceneX (sX) is open for signup. This private torrent tracker had been closed for about a month and signup was only available via recruitment threads on various BitTorrent forums. SceneX is a scene releases only tracker that does not allow p2p uploads on the site (unless it’s a request being filled). It’s still a small but growing community that is relatively new to the BitTorrnt scene. sX is built on the new version of TBDEV torrent tracker script – not much customization is done and the appearance looks somewhat similar to other less customized TBDEV based trackers such as Scene Inspired, etc.

Launched back in April 2009, sX is roughly four months old. During this time around 700 torrents have been uploaded to the tracker (~300 active at time of this post). These stats are not bad by any means but if sX is to compete with other leading 0-day trackers the number of torrents uploaded in a day would need to be higher. Also, most of the indexed torrents are seeded only by the uploader – more leeching/seeding activity is needed and this would hopefully be rectified as the user base grows. If I remember correctly sX started out as a ratio free tracker. However a ratio system is now present on the site and it is not known if the site would go back to being ratioless anytime soon.

As mentioned earlier SceneX is a scene releases only tracker. Most of the major scene releases are indexed. Although there is a separate category for packs, currently it only has two torrents indexed. Below is a screenshot of sX’s torrent index (part of it):

Since sX is built on the new TBDEV script, all new featured associated with this template are available on the tracker.

Signups are currently open and all new members will receive 2GB upload credit, 200 free bonus points, 5 free leech slots and 1 free invite. Also note that sitewide free leech is enabled (at the time this post is written).

Site Name: SceneX (http://www.scenex.me)

Signup URL: http://www.scenex.me/signup.php

Read the rest of this article...

Just a day after FireFox 3.5.2 was released to the public, here comes the portable version from PortableApps.com. Portable Firefox is a modified version of the popular web browser that is extremely useful for those who are constantly on the move or work with multiple computers. You can carry this version around in your USB Flash drive (or any other storage medium) along with your saved passwords, extensions, bookmarks and other personal settings. And if the machine at your workplace/university/school has restricted installing new applications, you no longer have to rely on crappy IE – Portable Firefox does not need to be installed.

Developer Description

Mozilla Firefox Portable Edition is a fully functional package of Firefox optimized for use on a USB key drive. It has some specially-selected optimizations to make it perform faster and extend the life of your USB key as well as a specialized launcher that will allow most of your favorite extensions to work as you switch computers. It will also work from a CDRW drive (in packet mode), ZIP drives, external hard drives, some MP3 players, flash RAM cards and more.

Download

[Click Here] to download Portable Firefox 3.5.2 from SourceForge (Direct Download)

Read the rest of this article...

Majority of the music torrent trackers recently featured here on FILEnetworks Blog specialized in relatively new music releases from scene and P2P groups. However if you are looking for non mainstream, obscure music releases that are not readily available on most music trackers, check out Shellife. Mini description on Shellife’s signup page gives a pretty good explanation of what this site is all about: “Shellife is dedicated for non mainstream music. Have a common sense what music fit! No mainstream. No MTV. No radio heroes. No hypes. No Radiohead fans. No shit”.

If the description above was not enough, a list of most popular music genres available on the site are displayed on the signup page itself. Percentage of releases (torrents) indexed under each category is also displayed. Statistics at time of this post are quoted below: (Note that this is not a complete list of music genres available on Shellife. These are the top 12 categories with most number of torrents).

• Indie Pop 17.6%
• Indie Rock 15.7%
• Ambient 11.7%
• Shoegaze 10.5%
• Experimental 9.5%
• Twee Pop 8.3%
• Post-Rock 7.9%
• Psychedelic Rock 7.1%
• Downtempo 5.1%
• IDM 5.1%
• Dreampop 4.8%
• Alt. Rock 3.9%

In the Browse page, torrents are categorized under 12 main music genres; Indie Rock, Indie Pop, Pop, Rock, Punk, Metal, Electronic, Industrial, Classical, Jazz, Folk and Misc. Each of these are then divided into a number of different sub-genres. A total of 10500+ torrents spanning across all music genres are indexed and tracked by Shellife (stats as of 5/08/09). Following screenshot captures part of the torrent index:

In addition to the usual set of music albums, Shellife indexes Discographies, Packs, Videos and Fanzines all of which are easily accessible from the top right hand corner of the browse page. Note that you’ll only find music in MP3 and FLAC formats on Shellife.

As mentioned in the title of this article, this tracker is now open for signup. Since open registrations could close at any time, get in when you can.

Site Name: Shellife (http://shellife.eu)

Signup URL: http://shellife.eu/new_account.php

You may also like:

• Download unreleased audio and video recordings from HungerCity Tracker – Signups open
• Dimeadozen – BitTorrent tracker for live music & unofficial audio/video recordings (ROIO)

Read the rest of this article...