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.
HHTimesheet is a new web based time and expense tracking software solution. HHTimesheet is aimed to increase your visibility over the health of your projects and facilitate the budget estimation and cost control.
Features of HHTimesheet include tracking time and log expenses, timesheet approval, iphone support, reporting and it all being web based.
HHTimesheet is very simple to use and has a great interface. Currently HHTimesheet is offering a free 30 day trial and then it is only $0.70 per weekly timesheet. Additionally they have an option of contacting them direct and actually purchase the tool as a piece of software and hosting it on your own dedicated server.
Torrent giant The Pirate Bay has launched an interactive map showing where people are seeding and leeching torrents around the world, with data for every country giving a percentage of users, and how many connections are going through that country.
It’s a Google Maps mash-up, which is already serving up some fascinating data. “In the near future more statistics will be added, such as the type of BitTorrent clients people use, and the average download and upload speeds per region,” claims TorrentFreak, which reported the news.
Stimator is a real-time website value estimator that aims to deliver the most accurate economical value that a website could worth by collecting important data from different sources as well as market places.
There are six major factors involved in the calculation:
- Top Level Domain – Stimator take in account the strength of a TLD.
- Financial - It uses Yahoo Finance to get all data needed to perform the variations of the financial market.
- Real Sells – The service was built to delivery real results (at least the most possible ones). The math used to determinate a website value was study using real website sells such as: Sedo, Sitepoint Marketplace etc.
- Web Factors – Stimator collects information from the website itself and from several major sources during the calculation stages before presenting the final estimated result.
- Estimation - The calculations are made to give what is called the “economic value”.
- Observations - The main mission is to avaliate domains and sub-domains. After each calculation, Stimator presents a report with the main relevant factors that it can extract from the examination. This factors will give the users an idea of how the site is performing.
Using Stimator Crenk is worth $17,351 which is kind of a realistic valuation. Anyone interested in offering me that much for the site?
Today it was repoted by Torrentfreak that according to a report in the Norwegian press today, some companies have reacted uncomfortably to the news that their Google Adwords text ads have been appearing on IsoHunt, the world’s third largest BitTorrent site.
Google has a policy of not displaying ads on sites that are involved in or linked to copyright infringement, with many torrent sites previously excluded from the scheme. Of course, some still carry Google ads, purely because Google is unaware of the nature of those sites, but with IsoHunt the situation is different. On IsoHunt the Google ads aren’t directly served by Google, but by Ask.com, a Google AdWords ‘reseller’.
Ask.com, formerly known as Ask Jeeves, works with several other BitTorrent sites. Only on IsoHunt have they displayed search based ads that came from Google AdWords campaigns. They have been doing so for several months, perhaps years, but up until now nobody complained, or knew.
In a statement, Jan-Henrik Ohme, head of digital marketing at Sony BMG said “We have stopped the section of the campaign that goes to the third party until Google cleans up the issues. We have contacted Google, and they took immediate action.”
For its part, Google Norway has apologized for the situation, and said that the advertisers should not be held responsible for the placement of the ads, since due to the 3rd party involvement, they had no way of knowing where they would appear. The campaigns are not limited to Norway though, and Ask.com certainly has something to explain to Google.
This situation was bound to happen but some of the companies dont really understand why it happened. Ask.com was only allowed to have their ads on Isohunt because the deal they started with Google was done after the Isohunt deal. Thus, Google allowed all historical deals to continue as normal. Therefore, it is impossible to now have Google ads on new bittorrent related sites.
Additionally, the ads are not done through Ask.com, they are from Ask.co.uk. This is because Ask.com sell their own adwords type program still and Ask.co.uk controls the Google Adwords reseller program.
I love people that come up with ideas like this and instead of trying to complicate it they just provide the basics. Feedjit provides real-time traffic data on your blog. It is so simple im sure my little sister could even use it. Just cut and paste in the code into your site and it is ready to go. There is no registration and it’s completely free. They also track popular links across blogs, so if your site is the first to link to a popular site, your blog may appear on their home page, which im sure is not going to boost your traffic, but it is just a nice touch.
