There’s a history between private trackers and Halloween that goes back a long way. It’s that one special holiday when sites come out with unique themes, contests and special events. For some trackers, Halloween also represents an occasion of substantial growth - especially so for horror movie trackers such as The Horror Charnel. For THC, it usually signifies the time of year when they open their doors for registration, such as right now.

From all the innovative ways in which BitTorrent can be efficiently employed to distribute files (legally & otherwise), you’d think that by now someone would have come up with an effective solution to stream video torrents in a browser. The concept of torrent streaming is as age-old as the BitTorrent protocol itself, although it’s never been successfully developed to include public torrents on a grand scale. Until now.

After nearly two solid months of downtime, BitTorrent’s favorite (and only) pack tracker is finally back in action, jack! This time around though, PackMe.In (yep, same URL as before - and now open for signups) is running on a smooth new server using Gazelle’s codebase. Also known as The Donkey, PiN’s purpose is to serve up their own breed of unique torrent “packs”. For those not in the know, packs are similarly-grouped torrents bundled together into one large torrent - this includes music discographies, movie box sets, TV series & seasons and everything else in between.

Thought we’d fill you in on a monumental newsflash - just in case you haven’t heard, SCC has just now granted free invites to all members (everyone should have received between 1 to 3 invites). The catch is this: they must be used up within 48 hours.

October, 22nd 20:11:54 - 7 hours ago. Due to unforeseen downtime, the 48 hours has now been extended until October 24th ~14:00 GMT.

After dozens of emails asking us, ”What happened to ThePirateSociety?” - we’ve just now received the official word from the proud new owner. Sorry folks, there’s not a lot of juicy gossip in this one, but what’s very clear is that TPS has indeed returned true to form - minus a few staff members. Since being offline for nearly two full weeks now, what exactly transpired between October 5th and October 16th? For starters - a new domain, new server, new (and old) staff. But what’s really important is the site, its contents, the user database - these have all been rescued from what would have been a total loss if it weren’t for quick action on the part of TPS’s new proprietor. FSF spoke with the new owner - bubbl3 - who shed some interesting light as to how & why these events unfolded. Plus we have the exclusive info regarding TPS’s official announcement.

In the competitive world of torrent forums to which the ‘net is grossly overburdened with these days, it almost seems foolish that any tracker discussion board would restrict the influx of new members. Many forums are indifferent to who signs up; others are wisely a touch more selective. Etiv.in is one such community that prides itself on quality over quantity, and they simply don’t offer much in the way of open registration. Never has, never will - simply put, Etiv has essentially remained a closed-community throughout the past ten months.

This story has a happy ending, though - it took yours truly a little bit of coaxing (and a 6-pack) to get Etiv to open the gates for the first time in more than a year. Rare it is that an opportunity should arise such as this, and just in time for Halloween - although it won’t last long. FSF managed to secure an exclusive offer: open registration to Etiv through a special signup link, available to the first 200 FSF readers:

We thought it be obligatory to pass along exclusive information: New BitTorrent is officially a ghost town. It’s painfully clear that private BitTorrent has hit its crescendo and is bottoming out - what’s scarier is new trackers can’t even find cool domain names to use these days. Despite the impending death of BitTorrent, a few new trackers still try to beat the odds. Here would be October’s answer to what’s new. Look if you dare.

Everything starts with an idea. While it’s clear that the original Mulve music downloading client isn’t coming back online anytime soon, that hasn’t stopped new developers from producing their own Mulve-based applications. Just a few days ago, Mulve’s own sourcecode was released to googlecode where it can still be found in subversion only - this got the ball rolling on what will probably be a long line of future Mulve clone successors. ThePirateApp and Mulve Phoenix are two new apps based similarly on Mulve’s code and principles.

The world of private BitTorrent trackers revolves around basic principles of trust, friendship, and sharing. To break into the world of private trackers, it all starts with one invite. One account made where you realize what it takes to seed a torrent to a 1:1 ratio, what a pre-time is, what an announce channel is, the works. What happens when you are ready for a new tracker, when you have sucked the current tracker bone dry? Well the answer is that now it is time to go scrounging for an invite. Hmm, how do I get an invite? Well a normal person would get their invite from a thread in their tracker’s forum, or they would ask a friend, or they would start working their way up in one of the million tracker invite forums, or they would try to jump into a recruitment irc and get in to a tracker that way.

Within the seedbox industry, the well-known drawback to 1Gbps lies within the limits of how much monthly bandwidth is allowable: you get great speeds but it’s generally not sustainable. Reading the fine print, capped throughput limits of 3TB to 5TB per month are considered the norm, and can be consumed rather quickly on this superior pipeline. As the overall cost of premium bandwidth continues to plummet - especially for those who purchase it in bulk - more and more providers are beginning to offer unmetered 1Gbit seedboxes.