Friday, November 26, 2010

TorrentFreak Email Update

TorrentFreak Email Update


U.S. Government Seizes BitTorrent Search Engine Domain and More

Posted: 26 Nov 2010 01:20 AM PST

Following on the heels of this week's domain seizure of a large hiphop file-sharing links forum, it's clear today that the U.S. Government has been very busy. Without any need for COICA, ICE has just seized the domain of a BitTorrent meta-search engine along with those belonging to other music linking sites and several others which appear to be connected to physical counterfeit goods.

While complex, it’s still possible for U.S. authorities and copyright groups to point at a fully-fledged BitTorrent site with a tracker and say “that’s an infringing site.” When one looks at a site which hosts torrents but operates no tracker, the finger pointing becomes quite a bit more difficult.

When a site has no tracker, carries no torrents, lists no copyright works unless someone searches for them and responds just like Google, accusing it of infringement becomes somewhat of a minefield – unless you’re ICE Homeland Security Investigations that is.

This morning, visitors to the Torrent-Finder.com site are greeted with an ominous graphic which indicates that ICE have seized the site’s domain.

The message below is posted on the seized sites

Seized Servers

“My domain has been seized without any previous complaint or notice from any court!” the exasperated owner of Torrent-Finder told TorrentFreak this morning.

“I firstly had DNS downtime. While I was contacting GoDaddy I noticed the DNS had changed. Godaddy had no idea what was going on and until now they do not understand the situation and they say it was totally from ICANN,” he explained.

Aside from the fact that domains are being seized seemingly at will, there is a very serious problem with the action against Torrent-Finder. Not only does the site not host or even link to any torrents whatsoever, it actually only returns searches through embedded iframes which display other sites that are not under the control of the Torrent-Finder owner.

Torrent-Finder remains operational through another URL, Torrent-Finder.info, so feel free to check it out for yourself. The layouts of the sites it searches are clearly visible in the results shown.

Yesterday we reported that the domain of hiphop site RapGodFathers had been seized and today we can reveal that they are not on their own. Two other music sites in the same field – OnSmash.com and DaJaz1.com – have fallen to the same fate. But ICE activities don’t end there.

Several other domains also appear to have been seized including 2009jerseys.com, nfljerseysupply.com, throwbackguy.com, cartoon77.com, lifetimereplicas.com, handbag9.com, handbagcom.com and dvdprostore.com.

Domain seizures coming under the much debated ‘censorship bill’ COICA? Who needs it?

Article from: TorrentFreak.

BitSnoop Breaks 10 Million Indexed Torrents

Posted: 25 Nov 2010 01:36 PM PST

BitTorrent engine BitSnoop has the honor of being the fastest growing torrent site in 2010. After a terrible disaster in February the site lost its entire database and had to go offline for a couple of months. Skip a few months forward and BitSnoop is back on top as one of the leading indexers, with over 10 million indexed torrents covering a massive 12,049,125 GB of data.

bitsnoopBitSnoop was one of the most successful new torrent site launches of 2009. The site started out indexing a healthy 1,480,666 torrents and users particularly seemed to like the usability and its clean interface.

It went public in October last year and quickly gained a steady user base in the months that followed. Unfortunately, the site suddenly disappeared in February due to several crucial mistakes.

"Our host has screwed up hard drive replacement in RAID array," the BitSnoop team informed TorrentFreak. "They've replaced the wrong drive two times in a row, which caused all data to be destroyed. We did not have full backup at that moment, so it was partly our fault."

BitSnoop eventually returned in May this year and not without leaving an impression. The torrent indexer started from zero and is without a doubt the fastest growing torrent site of the year. Not only in traffic, but also in the library of indexed torrents that keeps on expanding.

This week the site reached a new milestone when the 10 millionth torrent was added to the index.

At the time of writing BitSnoop has 10,211,341 indexed torrents, of which 3,703,060 are currently active. These numbers make the site one of the largest torrent databases that we know of, nearing the range of established sites such as Torrentz and isoHunt, and beating KickassTorrents and The Pirate Bay by a a few million torrents.

Some additional mind-boggling statistics:

  • Trackers indexed: 10,277
  • Active trackers indexed: 2,413
  • Data indexed: 12,049,125 GB
  • Files indexed: 310.24 million
  • In terms of visitors the site has been doing well too. It’s currently on its way to entering the top 10 most visited torrent sites on the Internet with well over a million page views a day. Needless to say, servicing these numbers requires quite a lot of hardware. The BitSnoop team was kind enough to give us a sneak peak behind the scenes and find out what’s powering the BitTorrent indexer.

    BitSnoop’s data crunching box and indexer backend both run on Dual 4-core Xeons 2.33 GHz, with 32 GB RAM and SAS disks in RAID10. The search query server is a 4-core Xeon 2.6 GHz, with 16 GB RAM and SATA in RAID1. The web frontends are VPSes, and some small VPSes for utility and infrastructure purposes. All the current hardware is rented but BitSnoop’s plans to buy their own servers in the near future.

    The BitSnoop team further assured TorrentFreak that they will do all they can to keep the site running smoothly. The main focus for future improvements will be on usability. Currently they are working on several new features including a ‘TV show finder’, improved detection of fake files, some social features and tag based browsing and searches.

    And most importantly, more torrents will be indexed, with 15 million being the next big milestone.

    In relatively little time BitSnoop has become an established name in the public BitTorrent community. The site offers one of the best API’s that’s currently in use by several other torrent sites, and they also collaborate with academic researchers who wish to learn more about the BitTorrent ecosystem.

    It definitely looks like BitSnoop is here to stay, and despite a difficult start of the year with months of downtime, it deserves to be crowned the fastest growing BitTorrent site of 2010. They hereby follow in the footsteps of KickassTorrents, who ‘won’ this unofficial (but honorary) title last year.

    Article from: TorrentFreak.

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