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YouTorrent recently restricted the number of sites it indexes, but before that, it was one of the most widely used BitTorrent meta-search engines. Due to this popularity many have copied the concept -and as of today- everyone can have their own YouTorrent clone, thanks to the free and open source “YouTorrent3″. Update : The YouTorrent3 script used code and results from NowTorrents without permission. The links are removed. When we announced that YouTorrent was launching, we did not expected the site to grow in popularity as quickly as it did. Only a month after its launch the site was pulling in 2.5 million visitors and climbing – quickly. In fact, YouTorrent became so popular that the site made it into the top 25 most visited BitTorrent sites only 2 months after its launch. Unsurprisingly, other webmasters soon cloned the YouTorrent concept, and within a few weeks PizzaTorrent and NowTorrents saw the light, and even more clones followed. One of these clones is special th...

In a few months millions of BitTorrent users in the United States will be actively monitored as part of an agreement between the MPAA, RIAA and all the major ISPs. Those caught sharing copyright works will receive several warning messages and will be punished if they continue to infringe. Today the center responsible for administering the scheme announced its Executive Board, which surprisingly enough doesn’t include any neutral executives. Starting this summer, the Center for Copyright Information ( CCI ) will start to track down ‘pirates’ as part of an agreement with all major U.S. Internet providers. Last year the parties agreed on a system through which copyright infringers are warned that their behavior is unacceptable. After six warnings ISPs may then take a variety of repressive measures, which includes slowing down the offender’s connection and temporary disconnections. The new plan was announced under the name ‘Copyright Alerts‘ last year and will be implemented by ...

The Pirate Bay is not only the most visited BitTorrent site on the Internet, but arguably the most censored too. Many ISPs have been ordered to block their customers’ access to the website, and recently Microsoft joined in on the action by stopping people sharing its location with others. Microsoft’s Windows Live Messenger (MSN) now refuses to pass on links to The Pirate Bay website, claiming they are unsafe. Imagine that you found this great new band sharing their music on BitTorrent for free. You’re actually so excited about this find you want to share the experience with friends, so you paste them a link to the official torrent file via Windows Live Messenger. Although this might sound like a good idea to some, Microsoft appears to disagree. Those who try to paste a Pirate Bay link to their friends through Windows Live Messenger will notice that it never reaches its destination. Instead, Microsoft alerts the sender that The Pirate Bay is unsafe. Apparently, the compan...

If you follow some basic rules BitTorrent is without a doubt the best way to share large files online. Interestingly, BitTorrent’s inventor Bram Cohen recently noted that torrents with more peers are not always faster. We give some pointers on what torrents will guarantee the best download speeds. In the past we’ve written  many articles on how BitTorrent users can speed up their downloads. In most of these we focused on tweaking the client’s options such as the max upload speed and the maximum number of incoming and outgoing connections. Many BitTorrent users are looking for the holy grail that will boost their download speeds to the maximum, and tweaking your client can indeed help a bit. However, selecting the right torrents is far more important, and those are not necessarily the torrents with the most peers. Bram Cohen, the inventor of the BitTorrent protocol  addresses  this common misconception in a recent blog post. “Cohen designed BitTorrent to be able to downloa...

With anti-piracy outfits and dubious law-firms policing BitTorrent swarms at an increasing rate, many Bittorrent users are looking for ways to hide their identities from the outside world. To accommodate this demand we’ll give an overview of 5 widely used privacy services. With an increasing number of BitTorrent users seeking solutions to hide their identities from the outside world, privacy services have seen a spike in customers recently. Below we’ve listed some of the most-used services that allow BitTorrent users to hide their IP-addresses from the public. The services discussed in this post range from totally free to costing several dollars a month. The general rule is that free services are generally slower or have other restrictions, while paid ones can get you the same speeds as your regular connection would. VPN Hundreds and thousands of BitTorrent users have already discovered that a VPN is a good way to ensure privacy while using BitTorrent. For a few dollars a month VPNs r...

1. Hack the max half-open TCP connections If you’re on XP sp2, your TCP connections are limited to a maximum of 10. This might hurt your downloading speed because it wont let you connect to as much peers as you want. It is supposed to slow down viruses because their spreading strategy is to connect to a high amount of ip numbers, but it could cripple your torrent downloads. A nice way to fix this is to download this patch . Note: Some people report that their antivir reports the patch to be a Virus, This is not the case. Check out http://www.lvllord.de/ for more details on this The patch allows you to set the maximum allowed connections to any number you want. Any number between 50 and 100 is ok (more is NOT always better). Next you need to configure your torrent client to allow 50-100 max half-open TCP connections uTorrent: Options > Preferences > Advanced options > net.max_halfopen Bitcomet: Options > Preferences > Connection > max half-open TCP Now you’r...

Record labels and Hollywood have described The Pirate Bay as one of the biggest threats to their business, but thousands of artists clearly disagree with this view. In recent weeks more than 5000 independent artists have signed up to be promoted by the world’s largest torrent site. Those who were lucky enough to be featured are overwhelmed by the career boost and the positive responses from the public. For many independent artists obscurity is a bigger problem than piracy, but it’s a problem that The Pirate Bay is trying to solve. Earlier this year the site rolled out a new promotion platform for filmmakers, musicians, writers and all other artists alike. To help them reach an audience of tens of millions of people, The Pirate Bay started offering the artists a prime advertising spot on the site’s homepage, replacing the iconic logo. While The Pirate Bay team expected a decent response, they were positively surprised by the avalanche of submissions that have come in since....