Bittorrent News

A new version of µtorrent (v1.6.1 - build 490) is available to download. Changes and a download link are listed below:

• Feature: Select upload/download speed for a torrent through the rightclick menu
• Feature: Added encryption box to speed guide
• Change: Don’t check as many pieces at the same time.
• Change: Misc WebUI changes.
• Change: Switch to JSON for webinterface
• Fix: Problem with category list in the gui when updated from the webui
• Fix: WebUI not clearing state between requests.
• Fix: Redirect also index.html to guest.html
• Fix: Added On Now shows the time it’s added, not loaded.
• Fix: JSON uses ” instead of ‘
• Fix: (a) Upnp fix
• Fix: Show pause icon when checking is paused.
• Fix: Fixed problems with XML parser
• Fix: Don’t allow two message boxes to be shown in the RSS window
• Fix: Changed some window titles
• Fix: Fix malformed .torrent exploit
• Fix: Boss key field is now larger

http://download.utorrent.com/1.6.1/utorrent.exe

Torrent Inviting Palace is a forum where you can exchange invites to torrent sites.

XBT Client 0.7.3 has been released. Changes:

• Fixed crash after restoring window.
• Fixed chunk rejections due to out-of-order processing by remote clients, mainly uTorrent.
• Improved piece selection.
• Added Details - Last Chunk Downloaded at.
• Added Details - Last Chunk Uploaded at.
• Added Peers - Connected.

Torrent-Kingdom has a new public tracker available, just use the following announce url when creating a torrent:
Announce: http://public.torrent-kingdom.net/announce.php
Status Url: http://public.torrent-kingdom.net

Version 1.4 of µTorrent has been released. Major changes in this version are:

• Bitcomet style add dialog
• RSS Reader
• Speed wizard to select your proper settings based on upload speed.
• Add !ut to incomplete files
• Multi scrape
• Better download speeds from BitComet clients.

For a full list of changes, read the full version of this article or see the changelog.

Full list of changes in version 1.4:

— 2006-01-11: Version 1.4 (build 402)
- Feature: Added boss key
- Feature: Turn on/off multiscrape
- Feature: Statistics on help menu
- Feature: Option to enable/disable new tray behavior
- Feature: Double click in files list opens the file
- Feature: Use Shift when clicking on the main listview’s columns to setup a secondary sorting order.
- Feature: Ability to select label from the Bitcomet style add dialog
- Feature: Support sending a hostname to the tracker (it will be resolved)
- Feature: Bitcomet style Torrent Add dialog.
- Feature: Added-On column
- Feature: Delete thumbs.db when deleting torrents
- Feature: Append .!ut to incomplete files.
- Feature: Added some more values in the seeding time dropdown
- Feature: Run a program when a torrent finishes.
- Feature: Setting to enable/disable DHT when scheduler turns off.
- Feature: Added upload limit / download limit columns
- Feature: Lower the amount of active torrents if upload is set too low.
- Feature: Lower download speed if upload is set too low.
- Feature: Show a message if some incompatible firewalls are loaded in memory.
- Feature: Boss key now hides the settings window too.
- Feature: Argument /MINIMIZED and µTorrent starts up minimized (suitable for autostart)
- Feature: Check for updates every day.
- Feature: Don’t send HAVE pieces to seeds.
- Feature: Timeout requests that never arrive
- Feature: RSS Reader
- Feature: Support RSS cookies. Append :cookie:uid=12345;password=asdkjad at the end of the url, or equivalent.
- Feature: Wildcard matching in RSS window supports ?* and |. I.e. you can write Foo*|Bar* to match strings starting with Foo or Bar.
- Feature: Ability to not put computer in standby while torrents are active.
- Feature: Multi scrape.
- Feature: Speed Wizard
- Feature: Allow a single IP in ipfilter lines.
- Feature: net.outgoing_ip to specify which IP that’s used for outgoing connections.
- Change: Try to detect hacked bitcomet.
- Change: Scheduler limit doesn’t apply if in turn-off mode.
- Change: Show a more informative message if tracker is sending invalid data.
- Change: Changed queue algorithm for fast connections to work better when there’s disk overload.
- Change: Tweak some settings
- Change: Print additional info to the log in case there’s a “element not found” error
- Change: Add folder name when adding through RSS
- Change: Scrape. vs torrents in internal list are calculated a little bit differently in the main list
- Change: Swap the order of my requests / their requests in the Reqs column in the peers tab.
- Change: Connect a little bit more aggressively to peers.
- Change: Increased http timeout to 60 seconds
- Change: Built-in tracker didn’t support &ip=
- Change: Don’t reconnect to banned peers after 1 hour.
- Change: Reset last connect time when restarting torrent
- Change: Auto detect how much bandwidth to use for DHT
- Fix: More robust detection if µTorrent is already running.
- Fix: Prevent ? and * from being used in filenames.
- Fix: Not all gzipped http downloads in connection:close mode with a content-length specifier worked right.
- Fix: Connect to peers in a round-robin fashion when multiple torrents are active.
- Fix: Auto detect some more parameters if invalid values are given.
- Fix: Better detection if BitComet clients threw away my requests.
- Fix: Don’t preallocate diskspace if using compact mode
- Fix: Sorting files tab by starting piece should show them in the order they appear in the .torrent
- Fix: More robust crash handler.
- Fix: Use CSIDL_DESKTOPLOCATION instead of CSIDL_DESKTOP
- Fix: Hopefully fixed refresh issue for people with objectdock
- Fix: New algorithm to minimize the number of waste pieces.
- Fix: Added some clients to version decoder
- Fix: Don’t start multiple processes on Japanese windows.
- Fix: Fixed unpause bug.
- Fix: Disconnect peers if global slots reached even if local slots not reached.
- Fix: Tweaked performance on high speed connections
- Fix: Use less CPU when force rechecking skipped files.
- Fix: Disk Overloaded feature wasn’t working right.
- Fix: Refresh window immediately when adding a torrent through explorer.
- Fix: Speed graph would wrap for very large numbers.
- Fix: Save to a network share didn’t work.
- Fix: Some more strings are now translatable.
- Change: Rearranged settings dialog
- Fix: Lower DNS caching time.
- Fix: Better move up/down

Home Made Hunnies (NWS) is a new adult bittorrent tracker. It is by same people as Home Made Porn Torrents (NWS) but with the difference that Home Made Hunnies is intended to carry torrents containing videos and photos of women only, while the torrents on Home Made Porn Torrents may contain males too. Registration is currently open on both sites, and both sites contain adult material that is not safe for work - as you might expect.

A new tracker called Torrent Way has launched at the start of the week. This site deals with educational documentaries and nothing else. There are only a few torrents on the site at the moment but registration is open.

Build 380 of version 1.3.1-beta of µTorrent has been released. The biggest feature addition in this release is the support of RSS feeds (something which Azureus has been able to handle - through a plugin - for a while). You can download this version from the µTorrent download page.

Full list of changes in this new version:

RSS is the biggest addition, test it out!
Multi-scrape automatically detects if a tracker does not support it and will fall back to single scrape mode for that tracker, so there’s no need to turn it off.
You no longer have to manually set a diskio.write_queue_size, it will work perfectly in automatic mode (-1), even at 100mbit speeds.
Partfile bugs should be fixed now. Pre-allocate finally works with selective file downloading (with the partfile of course).

— 2005-12-26: Version 1.3.1-beta (build 380)
- Feature: Show a message if some incompatible firewalls are loaded in memory.
- Feature: Boss key now hides the settings window too.
- Feature: Argument /MINIMIZED and µTorrent starts up minimized (suitable for autostart)
- Change: Scrape. vs torrents in internal list are calculated a little bit differently in the main list
- Change: Swap the order of my requests / their requests in the Reqs column in the peers tab.
- Change: Connect a little bit more aggressively to peers.
- Fix: Better detection if BitComet clients threw away my requests.
- Fix: Bug with | characters in langfiles.
- Fix: Don’t preallocate diskspace if using compact mode
- Fix: !ut suffix was added if preallocating.

— 2005-12-25: Version 1.3.1-beta (build 377)
- Change: Boss key now hides the tray icon
- Change: Increased http timeout to 60 seconds
- Fix: Hopefully fixed refresh issue for people with objectdock
- Fix: Fixed some xmlparser crashes

— 2005-12-24: Version 1.3.1-beta (build 375)
- Feature: Label in RSS filters
- Feature: Added select/deselect items to add-torrent dialog
- Fix: RSS parser supports more feeds
- Fix: RSS window issues on win98/non-unicode

— 2005-12-23: Version 1.3.1-beta (build 374)
- Feature: Added boss key
- Feature: Turn on/off multiscrape
- Feature: Statistics on help menu
- Feature: Option to enable/disable new tray behavior
- Feature: Double click in files list opens the file
- Feature: Use Shift when clicking on the main listview’s columns to setup a secondary sorting order.
- Feature: Ability to select label from the Bitcomet style add dialog
- Feature: Support sending a hostname to the tracker (it will be resolved)
- Feature: Bitcomet style Torrent Add dialog.
- Feature: Added-On column
- Feature: Delete thumbs.db when deleting torrents
- Feature: Append .!ut to incomplete files.
- Feature: RSS Reader
- Feature: Ability to not put computer in standby while torrents are active.
- Feature: Multi scrape.
- Feature: Check for updates every day.
- Feature: Don’t send HAVE pieces to seeds.
- Feature: Timeout requests that never arrive
- Change: Tray icon activation behaves somewhat differently if window is in the background.
- Change: Rearranged settings dialog
- Fix: New algorithm to minimize the number of waste pieces.
- Fix: Added some clients to version decoder
- Fix: Don’t start multiple processes on Japanese windows.
- Fix: Fixed unpause bug.
- Fix: Disconnect peers if global slots reached even if local slots not reached.
- Fix: Tweaked performance on high speed connections
- Fix: Use less CPU when force rechecking skipped files.
- Fix: Disk Overloaded feature wasn’t working right.
- Fix: Refresh window immediately when adding a torrent through explorer.
- Fix: Speed graph would wrap for very large numbers.
- Fix: Save to a network share didn’t work.
- Fix: Some more strings are now translatable.
- Fix: Lower DNS caching time.
- Fix: Better move up/down
- Fix: Fix crash in files tab.

A couple of updates for trackers which deal primarily with punk music. Firstly, the Punk HC Tracker is back online after a period of downtime (it might’ve been back for a while now but I’ve only just noticed). Also, the site PunkTorrents, which had previously only been a forum, has started it’s own tracker (running the TB code like most sites). Registration is open now though email isn’t working so accounts have to be activated manually.

I’ve noticed that I’ve been getting a lot of hits for terms such as empornium site down over the last few days so let’s clear that up! Empornium, the adult bittorrent site is not offline at the time of writing this article. It seems that they are having problems with the name servers so visiting www.empornium.us may not be working for people.

To fix it, open the file c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts in notepad and add the following three lines to the bottom:

62.212.84.38 tracker.empornium.us62.212.84.38 download.empornium.us62.212.84.235 www.empornium.us forums.empornium.us empornium.us

I didn’t but you might have to restart your browser/computer for the changes to take effect. When you’ve saved the hosts file then visiting http://empornium.us in your browser should work!

This assumes that your windows directory is c:\windows, if it isn’t then just substitute that in above and it should still work. If you don’t use windows then i’m not sure how to edit the hosts file, though Google may be able to help you. 

From the Snarf-It mailing list:

After 2 months offline and extensive recoding we are pleased to announce that Snarf-It.org is back online with over 100,000 torrents available, a clean easy user interface and off course the little blue furball. If you do nothing else today have a look at what we have done with the place:

http://www.snarf-it.org

..and if you haven’t been to the forum lately then drop back in and catch up with old friends. Hope to see you soon!

The PunkHC Tracker has been taken offline by it’s owner, XstrapseX, although only temporarily. PunkHC has been running a tracker with the TorrentBits code for over a year and a half. A statement on the website gives reasons for the closure:

There are two reasons for the actual situation: on the one hand they shut off the server connection although I paid already because the administration has problems with the accounting right in time. On the other side I have to handle a lack of financial ressources, so I can’t afford the 40 to 50 percents of the whole costs (99 EURO) for the tracker (like I did in the last months) any longer.

The advertising doesn’t work well. GOOGLE-ADs transfers the money only in long intervals and the amounts decrease (on average 12000 site impressions and only 5 clicks). You could recognize that I tried additional advertisments to get some more income. At the same time banners from different providers have been installed on the tracker and for that reason one of the two providers has declined the payment.

Under these circumstances it is impossible to keep providing a sound basis for the tracker at all. A new arrangement (less expensive) wouldn’t allow such a high number of server-loads adopted to your needs and wishes as I made available in the past. Although the actual server works quite stabil in the last months he already reached the limit and a cheaper one will require higher restrictions concerning the up- and downloads as well as the number of users.

Read Full Statement: PunkHC Tracker.

The reasons given are common, and have claimed many bittorrent websites over the past two years.

This is a copy of a list of music related bittorrent sites that I posted on the vdhri.net tips and tricks blog. The original list will be updated over time while this one may not be, however I felt it was still relevant to post it here too:

I’ve been meaning to do this for a while, here are some of the best and most prominent bittorrent sites for obtaining music:

• Oink - all genres, lots of music, private tracker (invite only).
• FileMP3 - from the people behind FileList, this features new music scene releases only, private tracker but possible to register.
• indietorrents - indie music, private tracker (invite only).
• punktorrents - punk and ska music (offline at the moment)
• PunkHC - punk, ska and hardcore music tracker (offline?)
• KrayTracker - punk, ska, hardcore, emo, jazz music tracker. Invite only.
• Pedro’s BT Music Tracker - all sorts, private tracker (invite only).
• EzTorrent - lossless unofficial material (bootlegs, live recordings, etc)
• Kerrazy Torrents - metal music mostly - forum with open registration.
• Xwoman - dance music mostly, registration is open.
• BC Forums - dance music, forum with open registration and integrated tracker.
• Radiohub - live Radiohead music only.
• Hawklord’s BitTorrents - Pink Floyd, Syd Barret and Roky Erickson music only.
• Pearl Jam Bit Torrents - Pearl Jam live music only.
• Legaltorrents - music distributed under a creative commons license.

This list is by no means complete, and i’ll add to it as I find more. If anyone reading this knows of any more then please leave a comment or email me, thank you.

After putting up with attacks for a while, Mongo56 has finally ceased to exist as of December 1st 2006. In a post on the Mongo56 Admin Blog, they say that the attacks were not the only reason why they shut down but were a factor:

 As of December 1st 2005 Mongo56.org will no-longer exist. I am sorry about this, but after over a month of battling flood attacks and the like it’s time to kill the tracker.

The flood play a large part in my decision, but they are by far not the only reason.The number of donations are not covering the server costs, (€35 last month), and I really can’t afford to keep supporting the site, there are also many other reasons NONE of which have anything to do with legal threats etc.

During our time in the BitTorrent community, we have really made a differences and a huge impression. We have worked directly with admin and developers from all aspects of the community, for instance we became the first XBNBT based tracker to run with over 100,000 peers, we broke the XBTT record with over 763,000 peers.

Mongo56 will be missed by the BT community

Oink.me.uk, the popular music trading site recently posted a news update stating that the security of user’s passwords had been breached and that users should change passwords as soon as possible. The update on their page says:

We’re ashamed to admit that the security of the site was put into jeopardy recently. As a result, it is absolutely imperative that you change your password. You can do this at the bottom of the profile page.

We strongly recommend using a different password at each site you use. The person responsible for the security breach appears to be a collector of passwords and uses ones already attained to aid in retrieving more.

Version 2.3.0.6 of the bittorrent client, Azureus, has been released. You can get it from the Azureus website.

Changes in this new version:

New Features:

* Core | Built in tracker support for multiple listen ports
* Core | Tracker support for multi-hash scrapes
* Core | “Date added” field added for hosted torrents
* Core | Alternate max upload rate limit when only seeding option
* Core | Ability to move a download’s data files and torrent added
* Core | Added ability to turn off DHT originated IP Filter violation logs
* Core | When a peer is banned remove any data downloaded from it in partially complete pieces
* Core | Added “block banning” feature when multiple bad peers found with “close” IPs
* Core | Support for platform-specific plugin update components
* Core | Support for .torrent file download using just infohash hex string (via DHT magnet lookup mechanism)
* Core | Added some control over initial share ratio for “add for seeding” downloads
* Core | Added feature to allow disabling of multi-hash tracker scrapes
* Core | Tracker connections respect bind-ip settings (http only)
* Core | Banned ips persisted across restart
* Core | Ability to add an alternative max-torrent-limit when seeding
* Core | DHT NAT punching for firewalled peers
* Core | Ability to rename and redirect files within a torrent
* Core | Compact storage for “do not download” files
* Core | Magnet URI protocol registration under windows
* Plug | UPnP plugin will warn if it discovers a router that has known protocol problems
* Plug | Magnet URI accessor method added to Torrent
* Plug | Added “launchable plugins” that can be used to start Azureus
* Plug | Added single-instance management function
* Plug | Made some platform-specific functions available to plugins
* Plug | Ability to add Swing based interfaces as plugin views
* UI | Console UI support for viewing specific plugin logs
* UI | Beginner configuration user mode provides a simplified interface
* UI | Support for –closedown parameter to org.gudy.azureus2.ui.swt.Main to closedown an existing AZ instance
* UI | Added Average Peer Completion percentage column to MyTorrents view and Details view
* UI | Added NAT status icon to status area
* UI | Indicate potential DHT port problems in SWT status area
* UI | Added swarm average to activity view plus a legend
* UI | Console support for listing shares improved, deleting of shares added

Changes:

* Core | Countermeasures against swarm DOS/poisoning
* Core | Health status for swarms where all known peers are connected now reported as OK
* Core | Friendly hash-checking option now only applied during recheck operations and delay based on piece size
* Core | Don’t automatically remove directory contents shares if they (appear to) have been deleted
* Core | Improved algorithm for detecting DHT port reachability
* Core | DHT - removed cache-distance metrics and added value versions to handle value evolution correctly
* Core | Reduced thread count by aggregating async listener dispatchers
* Core | Major refactoring of Download and Disk managers
* Core | Download totals don’t include hash fails and discards and aren’t included in share-ratio calculation
* Core | “Max simultaneous outbound connection attempts” option no longer accepts zero as a disable value
* Core | Under OSX, new bundle launches using the Java Preferences application configured JVM, enabling JRE 5.0 support
* Core | Under Windows, now runs via a launcher built by exe4j - taskmanager process is now “Azureus.exe”
* Plug | Major refactoring of plugin interface to separate out UI-level and core-level stuff
* UI | Update to the latest release SWT library (3.1.1)

Corrected bugs:

* Core | Fix interested flag being set sometimes when seeding
* Core | Wrong file name returned for stopped simple torrents
* Core | Seeder/leecher counts missing for published torrents
* Core | Stats going negative for hosted torrent average up/down
* Core | Fix piece request ignore bug
* Core | Fixed DHT initialisation hang if port already in use
* Core | Don’t allow prohibited peer sources to be enabled (ui artifact only)
* Core | Fixed too many socket selectors created when in safe selector mode
* Core | Fixed re-announce interval when receiving “failure reason” error response from tracker
* Core | Fixed and improved restarts under OSX (and linux)
* Core | Fixed and improved one-to-one LAN transfer speeds
* Plug | UPnP fix for picking up changed network interfaces
* UI | Fixed 100% CPU problem with download bars
* UI | Fixed UI foregrounding itself on every unverified localhost:6880 socket connection attempt
* UI | Create-torrent wizard fix for multi-torrent checkbox enabling error

Demonorgy [NWS], a site from the people behind Demonoid, is a new torrent site dealing with adult content (ie porn). They’ve currently opened registration so that anyone may register without an invite, as is popular these days. As it is for adult content, registration is only open to over 18s, however there isn’t any verification system in place. They currently have over 20,000 users and over 400 torrents.

Adult torrent site list:

• Pure TnA [NWS]
• Empornium [NWS]
• Demonorgy [NWS]

Update (4th January 2006): Demonorgy is offline just now (and has been for a while) - the site states the message "There are a few parts of the site that need some work. We’ll be back when finished." The best way to be informed of a relaunch is to read the Demonoid news page where it’ll probably be announced as previously. Alternatively, keep checking this site and we’ll let you know when it comes back, too.

The Mongo 56 Tracker is having trouble with mysterious attacks and may be forced to shut down permanently, as the admin reveals in a post on the Mongo 56 Admin Blog:

Hi there. I don’t really now what to say, so I will start with the facts.

Mongo56.org has been under attack by unknown IP’s for a long time now using port 3434, a public tracker port, with the tracker listening on this port, it renders the tracker useless as the attack consumes all the available bandwidth.

Well, as of the 9th November 2005, an attack has started on another port, at present I don’t know which one, nor who is doing this.

So, we are now faced with a very hard decision, do we close down mongo56.org for good, and let the them win, or we just let the attacks happen, and allow maybe 1 in every 100,000 peers connect.

Well, we are going to go for option 2, I will leave the tracker running on all port EXCEPT 3434 until the end of November, if the attacks have stopped and the tracker is once again usable, then mongo56.org will continue, if the attacks have not stopped then we will be forced to close down the site on 1st December 2005.

My personal apologies to all, but my hands are tied, I hope you understand, we are only human after all.

So, if you are making a torrent for that tracker, use the announce url: http://mongo56.org:3535/announce.

Torrent Finder is a Bittorrent search site which allows you to search up to 31 different torrent search engines at once. Some of the sites it searches include the Pirate Bay, Mininova and IsoHunt. It shows the results from each site seperately, within tabs or frames on its site.

Grokster have settled with the RIAA in their lawsuit, following the US Supreme Court’s ruling that company could be held liable if they induce users into voilating copyright laws. Grokster have agreed to stop the actions that lead to copyright violation. A notice on Grokster’s website read: “There are legal services for downloading music and movies. This service is not one of them, Grokster hopes to have a safe and legal service available soon.”