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mininova posts

Filed under: P2P

It's not a good week to be a BitTorrent tracker

mininova
A few days ago Swedish authorities shut down popular BitTorent tracker The Pirate Bay. It wasn't long before the site was up and running again in true Pirate fashion. But it's not just The Pirate Bay that's in trouble these days.

A site called BTArena popped up recently, offering a complete copy of TPB's index. But it looks like Romanian authorities are threatening that site's operator.

And now a Dutch judge has ordered rival Bittorrent site Mininova to remove every last torrent that links to copyrighted materials. The site has 3 months to comply. If it doesn't meet the deadline, Mininova's operators will face a penalty of up to 5 million Euros, or about $7.1 million.

Mininova has reportedly begun removing some torrents. But it's ridiculously difficult to keep people from uploading copyrighted content to peer to peer networks. And if the site does succeed in ridding itself of illegally uploaded content, the question remains: will anyone use it anymore?

Filed under: Internet, P2P

Mininova tests copyright filtering service

Things in the P2P world continue to change in the wake of the Pirate Bay trial. Today, Mininova announced a new feature designed to make the removal of copyright-infringing works easier for users of their content distribution service.

Mininova's content checker utilizes a third-party recognition system, and the crew hopes that it will allow artists and producers to better control their own content.

Will it make a difference? Eventually, perhaps. The screenshot above illustrates pretty clearly that this 1) isn't going to impact all Mininova's torrents and 2) won't change things instantly.

As you would expect, user response to the announcement has been largely negative. Apart from the "way to make your site suck" comments, one user posted "Bad move. By being active in copyright control you're opening yourselves up for even more lawsuits, just like YouTube."

The bottom line? It's a tough gig running a torrent site today, and it's only going to get tougher.

[via TorrentFreak]

Filed under: Internet, Security, P2P

"Altruistic" Trojan blocks Piratebay and Mininova access

A new trojan once again underscores the importance of exercising caution when downloading. Disguised as a keygen, Troj/Qhost-AC is one of the strangest pieces of malware I've seen.

The trojan doesn't appear to be particularly malicious. Its mission: to prevent you from downloading torrents from PirateBay and Mininova, keep you from reading the forums at SuprBay, and the remind you that you shouldn't be downloading illegally.

A couple modifications to your hosts file are made that point the affected domains to your machine. Removal is fairly quick and painless - just get rid of the entries from your hosts file. If you need help, check out the helpful FAQ on MVPS.org.

Maybe this is the RIAA's new sinister plan: instead of suing everyone, they're just going to threaten, guilt trip, and annoy downloaders into submission. Whatever it is, there's more than a little irony in hiding something with "good intentions" inside a keygen inside a torrent.

Unsure about a torrent you were planning to download? Check out Vertor and see if they've indexed its contents first.

[ via TorrentFreak ]

Filed under: Internet, Video

Mininova testing BitTorrent video streaming

SwarmPlayer
There are pretty much two ways to distribute video on the internet. You can provide files that users can download and then play, or files that are streamed over the internet which can be watched pretty much immediately. Videos distributed over BitTorrent tend to be of the former variety. But popular BitTorrent tracker Mininova is rolling out a test of a technology that lets you watch streaming BitTorrent videos.

Mininova is using the open source Swarm Player developed by Tribler. Beta testers won't be able to watch every video, but Mininova will offer up featured torrents that are compatible with the Swarm Player technology. You can apply to be a beta tester at the Mininova forums.

[via TorrentFreak]

Filed under: Internet, Web services, Search

Search multiple BitTorrent trackers with NowTorrents

NowTorrents
Tired of searching a dozen different BitTorrent trackers every time you're looking for your 100% legal downloads of open source software? (We're going to assume that's all you look for on BitTorrent sites). NowTorrents is a BitTorrent search engine that lets you search a dozen sites including Mininova and The Pirate Bay.

While NowTorrents is hardly the only multi-site BitTorrent search tool, it does have one nifty feature - it offers a real time search to show you exactly how many seeders and peers are available for each file. The result is that NowTorrents looks a bit like the travel site SideStep, in that search results start popping up right away, but the page will continue to reload with fresh information until all NowTorrents is finished searching all 12 BitTorrent trackers.

[via MakeUseOf]

Filed under: Internet

Pirate Bay, mininova, and Torrentspy among top Alexa sites

mininova, Torrentspy, and The Pirate Bay on Alexa
TorrentFreak is reporting that three top BitTorrent tracker sites--The Pirate Bay, mininova, and Torrentspy--have accomplished the inevitable and entered the Alexa 200, the top 200 most-trafficked sites on the web acccording to Alexa. Torrentspy has the highest rank at 153, followed by mininova at 165, and The Pirate Bay barely squeezing in at 198. While nobody argues that Alexa's rankings are the picture of accuracy, it does give a pretty good indication of web trends, and this seems like a pretty big trend. TorrentFreak speculates that it was IsoHunt's recent (temporary) shutdown that bumped these sites into the top 200 (with its spillover traffic going to them), and the Alexa chart would seem to confirm that. Now that IsoHunt is back up, I wonder if it will gain back that traffic, knocking the other sites down a notch.

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