The big news this morning is that the Pirate Bay is closing down their torrent tracker for good. After launching the torrent tracker back in 2003 it quickly became one of the worlds largest Bittorrent trackers on the Internet, with some 25 million peers using the service. The Pirate Bay was launched by a few friends in Sweden and was never supposed to turn into a business, and never really did (probably the ultimate open source project).
Despite this success, The Pirate Bay operators today decided to pull the plug and close down the tracker permanently. The evolution of the BitTorrent protocol has made trackers redundant they say, as BitTorrent downloads work well with trackerless solutions such as DHT and PEX.
“Now that the decentralized system for finding peers is so well developed, TPB has decided that there is no need to run a tracker anymore, so it will remain down! It’s the end of an era, but the era is no longer up2date. We have put a server in a museum already, and now the tracking can be put there as well,” the Pirate Bay crew write on their blog.
Additionally, Torrentfreak has learned that The Pirate Bay operators are talking to other Bittorrent site ownwers to encourage them to follow suit and completely ditch torrents in the future. BitTorrent has reached a point where trackers and torrents are no longer needed to download files successfully. Supported by all of the major BitTorrent clients, DHT and PEX can handle the transfers and Magnet links can easily replace traditional torrent files.
There are still other services for users who dont want to go trackerless just yet, which include OpenBitTorrent and PublicBitTorrent.
Its really sad to see the end of this famous tracker, however times change and technology moves on, and all credit to The Pirate Bay team for trying to push the move even quicker.
Like you read it, you can download files using the BitTorrent network without actually using .torrent files with a new Firefox add-on.
“Well, yeah, I know that” you might say “those are called magnet links”. Yes, it is true, magnet links exists already; and they don’t use the .torrent file to download, they use DHT protocol. But unfortunately, magnet links are not so easy to find; even though there are some popular clients (like Vuze and uTorrent) that already support magnetized links.
But now, you can find those very easy with the Firefox Add-on Magnetiser. You can install it, look for the Torrent that you want to download, click on magnetise, select the torrent client, and your download will start.
One small consideration though, the Add-On it is not officially out just yet (officially meaning that you can download it directly from Mozilla site); but you can download this add-on from here (just drag-n-drop the .xpi file intro Firefox.
Well all know about the new lists feature that Twitter has released. Here at Crenk we thought we would add a few Twitter lists of our own and categories them so everyone can keep up to date with what is happening in the following areas:
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Over at TorrentFreak they were the first to report on a new bittorrent startup like no other, BitBlinder. Most regular bittorrent users are always looking for the best way to hide themselves online and this just may be the answer.
BitBlinder is a new and free cross platform (Mac coming soon) open source project which not only claims to make anonymous BitTorrent transfers a reality but also hides your IP address while browsing the web. Its functionality also extends to the bypassing of some web filters and in the future will be compatible with more applications, such as email, IRC and instant messaging clients.
As one of its creators explains: “We want to make online anonymity fast, usable and ubiquitous to the point that organisations give up on spying and filtering us”.
It’s apparently not as fast as regular BitTorrent use, but it’s fast enough – and the key thing is that it’s free. Previously, using BitTorrent anonymously has involved paying to use a virtual private network (VPN). Among new features promised are the ability to avoid university and corporate firewalls, too.
This morning I came across another great torrent search engine that allows users to simply and easily search for torrents on various leading torrent sites. The site I’m talking about is Torrents.to.
Torrents.to allows users to search for torrents on various leading torrent search engines, such as Mininova, The Pirate Bay, Isohunt, BTJunkie and over 150 others.
Additionally, Torrents.to also allows you to search specific torrent sites for specific mediums, such as Jamendo for Music, GamesTorrents for games and software.
Torrents.to runs as a search toolbar at the top of the page and when you are searching for a specific item you can then view the torrent page below and also click easily between torrent sites.
Torrents.to is a great search tool to help you find your torrents quicker and easier on various leading torrent search engines. For easy of use I think that Torrents.to is a much better product than competitors such as Sumotorrent.
LimeWire is clean, safe, virus and malware free p2p software.it has build in media player with optimized search result.supportes download from multiple hosts.
This was one of early p2p program when p2p was still new concept. It supports wide variety of networks like Gnutella, Gnutella2, EDonkey Network, BitTorrent, FTP and HTTP network protocols and which can handle magnet links, ed2k links, Piolet links, and the now deprecated Gnutella links.
Shareza has billions of users and uncountable numbers of files shared across shareaza network
Like Shareaza, Kaaza was one of best and most popular p2p during early days of p2p evolution. but in past few year due to many issues like virus infected files, lawsuite, spywares, Kazaa has lost its
popularity.
However kazaa has been continually trying to make Kazaa network virus and spyware free with many new features like built in virus scanner, infected file blocking made available in latest Kazaa Client to protect users.
Kazaa Lite is one of best client of Kazaa P2P network for file sharing. Supported Operating System:
spyware, adware free
p2p file sharing with application multi language support. iMesh claims to have over 15 million FREE songs & videos Over 2 million original high quality songs licensed from the record labels.
Personally I liked iMesh for downloading music and videos but haven’t found it good for downloading any freeware software or application.
eMule is one of the biggest and most reliable peer-to-peer file sharing clients around the world thanks to its open source support and based on edonkey2000 client.
eMule has Multilanguage support with ability to connect to multiple servers and intelligent file corruption detection system to help you in getting genuine files. eMule is free from
spyware, adware and its completely free.
eMule is also available in portable form to run from your USB derive
peer to peer file sharing protocol. This protocol improves the overall usability of peer to peer network, ability to downloads single file from multiple peers simultaneously. KCeasy supports multiple networks for file sharing. Supported Operating System:
Windows XP, Vista Download KCeasy
Ares is one of my favorite p2p program and I have been using it from last 4 years, ares network is not that much big as compared to other p2p but its completely free from viruses, spywares and adwares.
I haven’t got any infected files or corrupted installer. Ares List is used more then normal Ares client because of its low size, speed and performance.
Soluseek central server type of P2P file sharing application. Soluseek is good old
p2p file sharing program best of sharing music files. i haven’t tried soluseek ever but have heard that soluseek is best of music, audio, Mp3 file download. Supported Operating system:
Windows XP, Vista Download Souleseek Client
Have you ever struggled to find the torrents you are looking for? This means that you have to travel to 10 different sites until you find something that vaguely looks like the right torrent! TorrentZen aims to come to your rescue. TorrentZen is a live bittorrent search engine that brings the results of some of your favourite bittorrent search engines.
TorrentZen works in the same way as other torrent tracks but instead of actually hosting pages with the results, they provide a link to those pages on other search engines. Therefore TorrentZen functions in the same basic way as a meta search engine.
The big news this morning is that the Pirate Bay is closing down their torrent tracker for good. After launching the torrent tracker back in 2003 it quickly became one of the worlds largest Bittorrent trackers on the Internet, with some 25 million peers using the service. The Pirate Bay was launched by a few friends in Sweden and was never supposed to turn into a business, and never really did (probably the ultimate open source project).
This morning I came across another great torrent search engine that allows users to simply and easily search for torrents on various leading torrent sites. The site I’m talking about is 
This is one of best, fastest, safe and widely used p2p program. Performance of BitTorrent is way better then any other available P2P programs.
LimeWire is clean, safe, virus and malware free p2p software.it has build in media player with optimized search result.supportes download from multiple hosts.
This was one of early p2p program when p2p was still new concept. It supports wide variety of networks like Gnutella, Gnutella2, EDonkey Network, BitTorrent, FTP and HTTP network protocols and which can handle magnet links, ed2k links, Piolet links, and the now deprecated Gnutella links.
Like Shareaza, Kaaza was one of best and most popular p2p
Bearshare is pretty 
eMule is one of the biggest and most reliable peer-to-peer file sharing clients around the world thanks to its open source support and based on edonkey2000 client.
Ares is one of my favorite p2p program and I have been using it from last 4 years, ares network is not that much big as compared to other p2p but its completely free from viruses, spywares and adwares.
