Archive for the ‘Bittorrent’ Category
There are so many torrent search engines in the market and as we all know most of them are considered illegal by all major media companies. I find it funny that these torrent search engines are normally just indexing where files are stores online in the same way as Google, and not even hosting the files on their own servers.
The newest torrent search engine on the market is KickassTorrents. KickassTorrents has a great user interface that is very easy to use and search through. Additionally, the site has an amazing index of music, files, documents, movies, games, tv shows, applications and more.
The community around KickassTorrents seems to also be on the rise as they have a growing number of leechers and seeders on the site. Plus, they have additions like a Firefox addon, Vuze addon and others.
If you are looking for a Torrent Search engine that is on the rise and is already in the top 5,000 alexa, then KickassTorrents is for you!
Bittorrent is currently a huge market on the internet. Tribler P2P research team at Delft University of Technology has reported the current marketshare numbers between the top bittorrent clients available at the moment.
uTorrent remains the client of choice for over 60% of all BitTorrent users. Vuze is in second place, but its market share has dropped to 14%. Transmission, on the other hand, continues to gain ground, with the client’s market share increasing by 23% in the last two months.
The data is based from over 17,221 unique user in a few dozen public Bittorrent swarms. Bittorrent is still by far the lading file-sharing technology with millions of people using the protocol every day.
BitTorrent Client Market Share, October 2009
| Ranking |
Client |
Market Share % |
Change % |
Platform |
|
| 1 |
uTorrent |
60.16% |
+5.90% |
Windows, Mac |
| 2 |
Vuze |
14.22% |
-21.56% |
Windows, Mac, Linux |
| 3 |
BitTorrent Mainline |
8.65% |
-26.63% |
Windows, Mac, Linux |
| 4 |
BitComet |
4.43% |
-5.95% |
Windows |
| 5 |
Transmission |
3.65% |
+23.73% |
Mac, Linux |
| * |
Unknown |
7.97% |
+89.31% |
na. |
| * |
Other |
0.92% |
-34.29% |
na. |
BitSnoop is a new torrent search engine that is supposedly better than its rivals because of a new tactic it uses when searching for torrents; indexing and combining of torrents and getting rid of duplicated ones.The torrents are generated by Tracker Match. It locates all the relevant trackers to your search and removes duplicated torrents or ‘bad’ torrents to avoid slow downloads.
I think that the homepage which you can see above is quite nice as it’s minimalistic – after all it’s there for one purpose and one purpose only. Google has had much by employing the purposeful look by using minimal text and images. The results, seen below, are also well presented and spaced out; again a minimalistic look.
Overall, I thought it was okay. I didn’t really notice much of a change in my regular download speed but the fact that it was taking away duplicated torrents was comforting, I guess. Check it out for yourself here.
Previously we talked about Torrents.to in which allows users search various torrent search engines in one place. On of our readers has let us know about TorrentScan, in which is another torrent meta search engine but it has a lot of great features that some others dont.
TorrentScan is a torrent meta search engine which allows users to search across various torrent search engines all in one place. TorrentScan allows you to search Mininova, SumoTorrent, BTjunkie, Isohunt, Fenopy, Torrentz and more. TorrentScan also lets you customise your search and even the entire look and feel of the site itself. With a simple click you are able to see your search results between the torrent search engines.
If you are looking for an easy and simple way to search through multiple torrent sites at once, then TorrentScan should be your first option.
With the emergency of the Pirate Party in Sweden in which won a European Parliamentary place at the last elections, I just wanted to run through what countries currently have a Pirate Party.
The Pirate Party – Sweden
The Pirate Party – Canada
The Pirate Party – UK
The Pirate Party – Germany
The Pirate Party – Finland
Our friends over at TorrentFreak have put together an amazing list of Pirate Bay alternatives in a variety of areas. Here is the basic list.
Full Pirate Bay Alternatives
The only full Pirate Bay alternatives are sites that index torrent files, are open to everyone and also have a working tracker. Unfortunately, there are only a few sites out there that offer this full package -there are four of them below. We decided to include Demonoid here because it tracks many public torrents.
4. Demonoid (semi-private)
Torrent Indexers
Torrent indexers are sites that have a searchable directory of torrent files, but don’t host a (public) tracker of their own. Mininova has a tracker, but they only allow ‘featured’ torrents uploaded through their content distribution service. The most used torrent indexers are:
Torrent Meta-Seach Engines
BitTorrent meta-search engines are yet another brand of torrent sites. They don’t have a tracker and don’t host any torrent files on their servers. Instead they search for and link to torrents hosted on third party sites.
Private Trackers (open signup)
Most of the larger private trackers require an invite to join, but there are always a few that allow new members. Below are four of these (open) private trackers and more can be found on Btracs.
Standalone BitTorrent Trackers
Torrent indexers and meta-search engines can be used to find torrents, but none of them will be of much use without a stable BitTorrent tracker. Standalone BitTorrent trackers are much needed, they handle the communication between downloaders but don’t index any torrents themselves.
DIY Pirate Bay Alternatives
The last category of Pirate Bay alternatives are the do-it-yourself projects. By using the three ingredients below The Pirate Bay can be easily rebuilt. It might take a few hours, but then the path to world domination is clear.
Last but not Least
Google, the mother of all search engines has a filetype:torrent search command that allows you to find torrent files scattered across the Internet. Don’t tell the MPAA and RIAA.
Last week isoHunt updated its indexing code and performed a thorough re-crawl of the indexed sites, resulting in an increase from 1.65 million to 3.49 million torrents. This week the team tackled another problem, namely, how to find the right torrent more effectively.
isoHunt’s founder Gary Fung mentioned that they made several changes to the search algorithms resulting in a superior quality of the search results. The changes should make it easier for the site’s users to find what they are looking for.
Aside from the improved results, the team also added option to narrow down the results to a specific source, Gary explained on Facebook.
isoHunt is currently the third largest torrent site ranked by the number of daily users.
Pirate Bay, a site that “helps users commit copyright infringement’ is now under more heavy fire than ever with ruling made by a Dutch court ordering all access to the site be shut off in the Netherlands within the next ten days.
The case was made against the sites three founders who were not even present, nor aware of the proceedings. When they found they sent a letter to have the ruling dismissed as they are currently seeking to make an appeal.
As it stands, if they do not comply with the ruling and remove all access to the site in Holland
within the next ten days then the company will be fined three million Euros. They will also be fined 30,000 Euro for
every day that the site remains up and running in the Netherlands.
In April, the three owners, Fredrik Neij, Peter Sunde, and Gottfrid Svartholm Warg along with a financer in Sweden were ordered to pay around 3 million in damages to various production companies and were to serve a year behind bars. Currently, a company called Global Gaming Factory has plans to buy Pirate Bay, which is only adding to the pandemonium.
It was reported that The Pirate Bay was sold last month for $7.8 million. In the past few days there has been a lot more news about how The Pirate Bay will change within the new ownership and how they plan to turn the site into a legal entity.
The new owners GGF have appointed a new CEO Wayne Rosso who has previous experience in failing p2p services – came out with a few crucial additional details on the site’s future business model. osso said that under the new management, the 3.7 million Pirate Bay users (or whatever userbase remains) will have to pay a monthly fee to access the site.
The money collected from user subscriptions and advertising revenue will then be used to pay off the copyright holders. The exact monthly fee is yet to be decided, but Rosso did confirm that the more files people share, the lower it will be.
“The more of your computer resources you contribute to the network, the less you pay down to zero,” Rosso told Cnet.
I dont really think that new owners GGF understand the concept behind The Pirate Bay and that the only reason the community uses the site is because it is free. Thus a Pirate Bay in which users have to pay is going to do little or no traffic compared to the current numbers and thus will have an impact on advertising revenues, thus them not being able to pay copyright holders and then losing content.
I think The Pirate Bay guys have the right idea about selling the site and then moving on to a completely new project like The Video Bay.
Vuze is a handy piece of kit that lets you stream or download videos from the internet. Similar to services already available such as MegaVideo, only now you have the added functionality of a media player, library and subscription services for podcasts and specific genres.
You download Vuze here (less than 10Mb) and install it in under five minutes. No need to restart your PC or do any complicated set up, so already it was in my good books. Upon opening the program for the first time I was greeted by a fairly simple interface that the average computer user could navigate. Search Bar, Library, Current Downloads and even a helpful ‘Getting Started’ section to guide you through the stages (although you really shouldn’t need it).
One thing that caught my eye was HD. Lucky for me, my new laptop was indeed HD compatible so I decided to search for a HD clip. I typed in ‘Public Enemies’ into the search bar and up popped a load of results. I could either watch the whole movie or simply a trailer. The HD quality was outstanding which surprised me as the download took less than a minute. Sound and playback quality was also top notch. No jumpy movies like you get with browser players.
Another section is ‘Devices’. Now, Vuze is fully compatible with a host of portable devices such as your iPod, iPhone, laptop, and other portables. It also works a treat on the PS3 and XBOX 360.
If you’re a videographer you can also publish your content on the Vuze network. This is great for publicizing your stuff to a large audience and also for Podcasts looking to branch out. It’s really easy to upload etc.. There are also special packages available for those uploading load of content to give them priority and good exposure on the Vuze Network.
One area I think that Vuze could improve is with the extra content. There should be a minimal browser built in to allow you to view the community pages without having to kick-start Firefox. This would give it a seamless affect and just be handy in general.
All things considered however, this is a spectacular piece of software and one I’ll be using a lot from now on. I think web based video torrents are having their final farewells. 9/10
It has been confirmed by the guys at The Pirate Bay that they are in the process of selling their site. Gaming company Global Gaming Factory X is in the process of acquiring The Pirate bay for $7.8 million (SEK 60 million). The acquisition is scheduled to be completed by August and will see the site launch new business models to compensate content providers and copyright owners.
The story was broken by Torrentfreak and they are going to keep updating everyone once new information comes to light.
Global Gaming Factory X will not just acquire The Pirate Bay site but they will also acquire the file-sharing technology company Peerialism. Global Gaming Factory X claims to have the biggest network of internet cafés and gaming centers in the world, so this technology will be a great addition to their company.
Global Gaming Factory X is also very interested in changing The Pirate Bay’s business model which will allow the compensation to the content providers and copyright owners.
“We would like to introduce models which entail that content providers and copyright owners get paid for content that is downloaded via the site,” said Hans Pandeya, CEO Global Gaming Factory X.
“The Pirate Bay is a site that is among the top 100 most visited Internet sites in the world. However, in order to live on, The Pirate Bay requires a new business model, which satisfies the requirements and needs of all parties, content providers, broadband operators, end users, and the judiciary,” said Pandeya.
File-sharing technology company Peerialism will also be acquired by Global Gaming Factory X for a total of SEK 100 million, of which at least SEK 50 million will be in cash.
I find the amount of $7.8 million to be a little low, based upon The Pirate Bay having similar traffic numbers to Mininova which have 727 million pageviews per month. If each pageview could be monetized at $1.00 CPM (per 1000 views), then The Pirate Bay would be making $727,000 per month.
There are so many little search engine out there that help users search multiple sites in one simple search box. Here is a new search engine called File Snatcher. File Snatcher lets users search fiel sharing sites like Rapidshare, Badongo, Mediafire all for free. The search engine run through all of these sites and search for Mp3’s, videos, softare, movies, documents and photos.
The search engine itself isnt very accurate and they dont seem to have too much indexed, but it is a nice way to search for the files you are looking for very quickly. I like how at the bottom of the search engine they specifically says “this search engine is in no way intended for illegal downloads”. Now seriously im sure they are aware of why exactly this search engine is used!
