Here’s a few of the available web-based Torrent solutions for BT users who are just too lazy to download uTorrent. Or can’t. Or aren’t allowed. These services offer a client-less downloading approach to BitTorrent, which arguably may turn out to be safer than conventional methods.
Restrictions brought on by your ISP or network (workplace, school or global location) may result in the inability to surf certain torrent sites. Perhaps your IP address has been banned by a tracker (and the website) for inappropriate behavior. Or maybe you’d just feel much safer being anonymous while surfing torrent sites. Bypassing all this is simple enough - just visit an anonymous web proxy (or CGI proxy) such as anonymouse.org, type in the URL and start torrenting. But if you’re a heavy torrent user you may find this to be a major hassle.
Mass-Torrent.com solves this by incorporating a torrent site search paralleled with anonymous browsing. What makes this service unique is that all searching is conducted through the Mass Torrent Proxy, but the results are displayed through an anonymized webpage of the actual torrent site. And it’s fast, too! Unlike most public web proxy services, you probably won’t even notice a difference in pageload times.
Alright all you BitTorrent freaks out there. Think you know your BitTorrent?
We’ve come up with a quiz to test your knowledge. Here’s 55 mind-boggling BitTorrent questions that should make anyone’s head spin!
It works like this: 1 to 2 points are awarded for every correct answer, and you lose 1 point for each wrong one you get. Some questions have more than one correct answer (especially the ‘checkboxes’). TOP SCORE: 154 points.
Feel free to discuss it below, or post your scores! The answers can be viewed here.
Interested in the latest gadgetry for BitTorrent? Here’s a collection of hardware that supports the best filesharing protocol in the world. PC not required.
Price: $179
http://www.popcornhour.com/onlinestore/
What is it? — A media player / streamer / torrent downloader.
Pros — MKV file support; FLAC audio support; HD video playback (1080p); plays virtually everything right out of the box (all major codecs); Component video & HDMI outputs. Firmware / middleware updated often.
Cons — Not easy to obtain - you’ll need to get onto a waiting list in order to purchase this baby. Also note that PopcornHour can only be used ‘wired’ (non Wi-Fi).
Browsing through public BitTorrent sites in search of the latest releases can be a real exercise in futility. Sometimes we all need a pick-me-up - a cure-all solution to the madness. No, we’re not talking about private trackers. If personal vexation is your game, why not try TorrentStumble - here you’ll be able to ’stumble’ the top public trackers for a random ‘hit’ in any selected category. What could be more frustrating? Introducing TorrentStumble.com.
We held our tongue in check with our recent review on ThePirateBay - mostly out of respect. For mininova, we’ll be a little more candid and brash. It’s not so much as a personal disdain for mininova - heck, we all started out somewhere - it’s more about how detrimental the site is to its users and the BT community. How many countless people have received one of those RIAA pre-litigation letters and been forced to cough up thousands of dollars, all stemming from the use of mininova? That’s a statistic you won’t hear about. Mininova turns BitTorrent into a living joke, and is the quintessential example of how the best filesharing protocol in the world can be twisted and mangled beyond reproach.
Here at Filesharefreak we’ve conducted many reviews of private BitTorrent trackers - it’s part of what we do. However, there’s been some feedback lately why we don’t cover any public BitTorrent sites - how come we’re not digging deep into BT heavyweights such as mininova, Isohunt and ThePirateBay for your perusal. After some deep introspection, we decided it was time to do a public tracker review. So to those unfamiliar - here’s a look at ThePirateBay.
TPB has long been known as the bad-boy of BitTorrent with their pro-piracy stance and devil-may-care attitude. They remind me of that geek who’s hiding behind his Dad, taunting the neighborhood bully by sticking out his tongue. The "Dad" in this scenario is a faraway land called Sweden that so happens to have some pretty lax P2P laws. For now. Do you remember this past April Fool’s Day, TPB pulled a prank on all of its oh-so gullible (and intelligent) readership by staging a mock relocation to Egypt, citing an overnight change in Sweden’s copyright laws? Funnneeey. Life imitates art, as they say - this will one day be a reality. Brokep, can you pass the 40 SPF?
Die-hard Azureus users know what the rest of us don’t - the best features are in the plugins. But of all the plugins that are available for Azureus, not one supports internal torrent searching. That is, until now. Introducing Cubit - the Azureus plugin for decentralized searching.
So what makes this search plugin special, when there are dozens of torrent aggregators & metasearch sites, anyways? Cubit is a system that provides fully decentralized approximate keyword search capabilities to Azureus as a standard plugin. Approximate search means that you can use Cubit to find a movie, song or artist even if you don’t know which spelling variation is used in the title or in the name. It gives you what you mean instead of what you asked for exactly, and returns the best results in the network in only a few seconds.
Rarely does a piece of Torrent Search software make our headlines and qualify as newsworthy, let alone worth writing about. However, Bit Che is not your run-of-the-mill torrent search software.
So what separates Bit Che from the rest of the pack? For starters, it allows for private BitTorrent site searching (provided you have accounts to them). This is a monumental step forward in torrent searching development. Bit Che is also a great tool for:
Searching for hard-to-find torrents - In contrast to torrent meta search websites (that usually limit the querying to the top 10 public sites), Bit Che software implements many more sites in the search, with the ability to add others, and even add your own (for unlimited torrent searching).
Filtering of popular torrents - Torrent data is shown in the results, giving users the ability to quickly gauge what torrents are likely the best sources for a popular release.
We offer a behind-the-scenes glimpse into some of the best, most sought-after private BitTorrent trackers. If you’ve never seen the insides of some of these elite private sites, we recommend you take a look at what you’re missing.
TorrentLeech is quickly becoming one of the most coveted private BitTorrent accounts for any BT fan. With unrivaled speed and amazing pre-times, TL offers 0day/0sec torrents in all categories. While never open publicly to new signups, invites are handed out to qualifying members on a regular basis. TL is also one of the most used private trackers - there are a ton of seeders and leechers so uploading to other TL members isn’t all that difficult, either (a seedbox helps, but isn’t mandatory like some other trackers). New members have a 48-hour ‘wait time’ before the torrent becomes active - once a sharing ratio hits 0.4 this goes away.
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It goes without saying: Blackcats-Games is all about the games - be it console, Windows or Linux releases. Registered users hover in at around 50,000 (they stopped taking new signups back in November, 2007). With a 2,100% seed/leech ratio, downloads are assuredly zippy from their 6,000 offered torrents.
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Spring has just arrived in the Northern hemisphere; what better way to welcome it with a “Spring Cleanup” list of the Hottest 300 BitTorrent websites of 2008.
Hi-lighted listings denote websites with private trackers (require login/signup).
Sources - Torrentking.org, torrent-finder.com, and manual searches including P2P forums, meta-search websites & Google ‘operator’ queries.
The websites listed below only serve up .torrent files - related BitTorrent ’software’ sites are not included. Data source: Alexa.com - 2008.
| Rank # | Torrent Website | Alexa Rank(Mar.18/08) |
|---|---|---|
| 1. | mininova.org | 53 |
| 2. | ThePirateBay.org | 130 |
| 3. | isohunt.com | 147 |
| 4. | Torrentz.com | 192 |
| 5. | Zamunda.net (Russian) | 388 |
| 6. | BtJunkie.org | 469 |
| 7. | d-addicts.com (Asian/Eng) | 542 |
| 8. | 585 | |
| 9. | TorrentReactor.net | 616 |
| 10. | GamesTorrents.com | 641 |
Unless you were born last night, we probably don’t have to tell you that elite private BitTorrent websites occasionally offer new unannounced signups, usually to replace or “trim” inactive accounts or kicked users. Aside from a few lucky ones that happen to be there at the right time, there’s no sure way of knowing when new accounts are going to be announced. That is, until now.
Torrent Open Registrations Checker from TeamRoots is a brand-new tool to find private BitTorrent sites that are accepting new signups. It’s like Tracker Checker 2 on steroids and speed at the same time. Requires Microsoft .NET framework 2.0 or higher.
To confirm our belief that bonafide torrents would be faster than decentrally-hosted Azureus magnet links, we decided to put them head-to-head in a speed test.
To achieve this, we downloaded four different torrents and the four corresponding ‘magnet links’. Since we couldn’t open both the torrent and magnet link in the same BitTorrent client (Azureus v2.5), we opened the torrents in µtorrent (v1.6.1).
The results really aren’t all that surprising. Nor should they be - Azureus magnet links are not designed to be the Porsches of BitTorrent. Their purpose is to potentially squeeze out those last few packets that otherwise wouldn’t be available from a seedless or dead torrent.
Azureus is a BitTorrent client that exclusively supports special torrent magnet links that run through their own Distributed Hash Table (DHT) network. Instead of downloading the torrent from a web server (i.e. torrent site / tracker), you download it directly from the seeds / leechers. The biggest advantage is that you might be able to download the contents of the torrent even if the tracker is down or temporarily offline (or there are no seeds).
You’ll need a version of the Azureus client that is higher than 2.3. There are two settings within Azureus that must be enabled in order to use magnet links. By default, these are already set to ON, so no further modification is required. You can check if these two are already selected in the TOOLS > OPTIONS menu (see below). NOTE: We used Azureus v2.5 for these examples, and NOT the new Azureus Vuze client (v3.0.5). The older version can be found here on filehippo.com.
Every BitTorrent software developer claims that theirs is the fastest BitTorrent client, but which one really IS the fastest? There are so many variables to be considered: Seed/peer ratio of individual torrents, public or private trackers (and number of trackers in a torrent), DHT “trackerless” support and UPnP port forwarding, just to name a few. Even the default “factory” settings of each client can have an big impact on download speeds.
So how it is truly possible to really know? Conduct speed tests in a controlled experiment, natch! Let’s put ‘em to a test!
To create a semi-controlled environment in which the data could realistically be used, we needed to conduct the experiment in realtime - in a scenario where ALL BitTorrent clients were using the exact same torrent (loaded simultaneously in each) and thus were ideally downloading at the same time. Not only that, but we repeated the same text three times with 3 different .torrents (all 5 clients were loaded with the exact same torrent at the same time, on three separate occasions).
OK, no peeking - don’t scroll down to the bottom just yet. Out of the five tested clients (µtorrent, BitComet, Azureus, BitTorrent and BitLord), which one do YOU think won the races?
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— Brand-new Mobile Appz tracker
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