This week we have three newcomers in our chart.

Mechanic: Resurrection is the most downloaded movie.

The data for our weekly download chart is estimated by TorrentFreak, and is for informational and educational reference only. All the movies in the list are Web-DL/Webrip/HDRip/BDrip/DVDrip unless stated otherwise.

RSS feed for the weekly movie download chart.

Ranking	(last week)	Movie	IMDb Rating / Trailer
torrentfreak.com
1	(…)	Suicide Squad	6.7 / trailer
2	(2)	Star Trek Beyond	7.4 / trailer
3	(1)	Mechanic: Resurrection	5.8 / trailer
4	(…)	Independence Day: Resurgence	5.4 / trailer
5	(5)	The Infiltrator	7.2 / trailer
6	(4)	Captain America: Civil War	8.1 / trailer
7	(3)	Ghostbusters	5.5 / trailer
8	(9)	The Magnificent Seven (HD-TS)	7.2 / trailer
9	(…)	Lights Out	6.6 / trailer
10	(7)	Ice Age: Collision Course	5.7 / trailer

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.

For most people, torrents are associated with downloading the latest Hollywood blockbusters or Linux distros, but it does much more than that.

WebTorrent in particular has opened the door to a variety of innovative uses, as it allows users to share data via torrents in a regular browser.

This still works well for video, but amateur astronomer and creative coder Charlie Hoey had bigger plans. Using new data released by the European Space Agency’s Gaia satellite, he created a 3D map of the galaxy with an accurate positioning of more than two million stars.

The starmap is presented on a single page where people can drag, zoom and pinch through the galaxy, exploring stars thousands of light-years away.

“To my knowledge, this is the first realtime 3D simulation of the data from the Gaia project, though other WebGL visualizers for astronomical data have come before,” Hoey tells TorrentFreak.

Every white pixel is a star

The map features 2,026,094 stars that are all located in their correct 3D position. This is much more than the 100k star visualizer Google made based on data from Gaia’s predecessor mission Hipparcos.

In addition, the new starmap is WebVR enabled which opens up a lot of new interactive possibilities. Making the galaxy less abstract is one of the powers of the visualisation, according to Hoey.

“For me, seeing the positions of stars in 3D makes them feel less like abstractions and more like real, tangible places in space. It also makes earth feel small and far away and insignificant, which in 2016 is a warm, calming sensation,” he says.

Gaia’s dataset is far from complete and many more gigabytes of data are likely to be released in the future. This is where the WebTorrent aspect comes in.

After a lot of work, Hoey was able to trim down the database to the bare essentials, which is still 24 megabytes. This wouldn’t be a problem to show to just one person, but when hundreds or thousands flock to the site all at once, it may be hard to handle.

“I didn’t want to be on the hook to pay for a CDN if it got popular, but I also didn’t want people to have a bad experience if there were bursts of visitors. WebTorrent was kind of a perfect fit,” Hoey tells us.

Downloading the stars, missing data still loading

With WebTorrent, traffic isn’t a problem as everyone who accesses the page automatically shares the data with other visitors. This even works in most popular mobile browsers.

“It’s been shockingly reliable, I’ll definitely be using it again for other projects,” Hoey notes.

“I could see a point where you don’t really have to worry about CDNs anymore in some situations. As long as you host a permanent seed or two, you can let the torrent autoscale and distribute your hosting for you. This was my first experiment with it, and amazingly it appears to actually just work.”

Talking about future projects. To make the starmap even more immersive, Hoey is developing a VR experience called Up There. This will allow people to explore a room-sized simulation of some of the data, and interact with and learn about any of the stars within it.

WebTorrent creator Feross Aboukhadijeh is really happy to see people using his tool in such diverse ways and hopes more and more developers will follow.

“This was the vision for WebTorrent from the very beginning, to make torrents really easy and lightweight to work with, so developers can use them in really interesting new ways in the browser. Really excited by these novel uses of WebTorrent,” Aboukhadijeh says.

“In my humble opinion, this is how we make P2P technology win. It’s gotta be just as easy to use as a centralized solution, but provide extra benefits, like bandwidth savings and speed improvements. And it has to work with today’s web browsers.”

The 3D simulation can be seen in its full glory here, and those who are interested in how it was created should read the extensive article Hoey published on Medium.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.

Last week, BitTorrent Inc. announced a new feature for its uTorrent and BitTorrent clients.

Altruistic Mode is an option buried away in the clients’ preferences that ensures that the downloader who enables it always maintains a share ratio of 2:1. In other words, if they download 1GB their upload will always be 2GB.

As subsequently highlighted, many enthusiastic file-sharers simply didn’t ‘get’ the point of the new feature.

By definition, keen file-sharers always try to seed more than they take, so often their ratios are higher than 2:1 already. Equally, those who don’t care about sharing wouldn’t bother enabling the new mode.

However, Altruistic Mode itself was developed and subsequently announced by Bram Cohen, the man who invented BitTorrent itself, so it must be useful – right? In discussions with TF, he certainly seems to think so.

“The reason for not just continuing to upload until the ratio hits 2:1 is that it won’t always get there. Sometimes a torrent is so overseeded that downloading a complete file guarantees you’ll get less upload than download, even if you keep seeding until the end of time,” Cohen explains.

“Almost all the people who are commenting on the public forums are torrent obsessives who already have put in the time and effort and gotten the permissions to get very high seeding ratios. Altruistic Mode is not for them.”

Great! So who is the mode designed for then?

“There are some sites with ratio enforcement which make it essentially impossible to get a positive ratio once you’re in arrears without Altruistic Mode,” Cohen explains.

In other words, the new mode is designed for people trying to maintain a decent ratio on private trackers, where site membership itself could hinge on being a good sharer.

Depending on site rules, any user can activate the mode and jump on any torrent, safe in the knowledge that their ratio will never get any worse and will only improve, which is perfect for building up a sharing buffer.

Cohen also took the time to address those who raised concerns over what would happen if too many people used Altruistic Mode. If everyone tries to upload twice as much as they download, the system breaks down, they argued.

“Of course it’s impossible for everybody to have a positive ratio. The people who run seedboxes, or who have super fast net connections, or special permissions to download early, can make it practically impossible for people who don’t have those things to upload more than they download,” he explains.

“Altruistic Mode is for those other people. Altruistic Mode is there so people who find themselves in an impossible ratio situation can simply start a whole bunch of things in Altruistic Mode and have a good chance of getting a favorable upload ratio.”

With that cleared up from Cohen himself, we’ll leave Altruistic Mode to do its magic. However, BitTorrent’s inventor may not be done with its development just yet.

“In the future I’m thinking of making a feature which downloads eventually but starts out in Altruistic Mode, so that people whose goal is to download the whole file eventually can help others stream it in real-time right from the beginning,” he concludes.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.

While most people still associate torrents with desktop clients, the browser-based WebTorrent equivalent is quickly gaining popularity.

Simply put, WebTorrent is a torrent client for the web. Instead of using standalone applications it allows people to share files directly from their browser, without having to configure or install anything.

This allows people to stream videos directly from regular browsers such as Chrome and Firefox, similar to what they would do on YouTube.

The technology, created by Stanford University graduate Feross Aboukhadijeh, already piqued the interest of Netflix and also resulted in various innovative implementations.

Most recently, Czech developer Michal Spicka created a the Web2Web project, which allows people to share entire websites using WebTorrent technology. This makes these sites virtually impossible to take down.

Michal tells TorrentFreak that he is fascinated by modern technology and wanted to develop a resilient, serverless and anonymous platform for people to share something online.

“In the past we’ve seen powerful interest groups shut down legitimate websites. I wondered if I could come up with something that can’t be taken down that easily and also protects the site operator’s identity,” Michal says.

For most websites the servers and domain names are the most vulnerable aspects. Both can be easily seized and are far from anonymous. With Web2Web, however, people can run a website without any of the above.

“To run a Web2Web website neither the server nor the domain is required. All you need is a bootstrap page that loads your website from the torrent network and displays it in the browser,” Michal tells us.

While there are similar alternatives available, such as Zeronet, the beauty of Web2Web is that it works in any modern browser. This means that there’s no need to install separate software.

The bootstrap page that serves all content is a simple HTML file that can be mirrored anywhere online or downloaded to a local computer. With help from Bitcoin the ‘operator’ can update the file, after which people will see the new version.

“If the website operator wants to publish new content on his previously created website, he creates a torrent of the new content first and then inserts the torrent infohash into a bitcoin transaction sent from his bitcoin address,” Michal says.

“The website is constantly watching that address for new transactions, extracts the infohash, downloads the new content from the torrent swarm, and updates itself accordingly,” he adds.

For Michal the project is mostly just an interesting experiment. The main goal was to show that it’s possible to make working websites without any central server involved, using WebTorrent and bitcoin.

He has no clear vision on how people will use it, but stresses and he’s not promoting or encouraging illegal uses in any way.

“I’m strongly against using it for anything illegal. On the other hand, I can’t prevent people from doing that. The moment will come when this project gets abused and only then we will see if it’s really that resilient,” he notes.

In the meantime, this perfectly legal demo gives people and idea of what’s possible. More info on how to create distributed pages is available here.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.

Well over a decade ago when peer-to-peer file-sharing was in its relative infancy, the RIAA thought it could stop piracy by punishing end users with ‘fines’ and lawsuits.

What followed was a punishing campaign that alienated consumers and ultimately failed to achieve its goals. Only subsequent widespread access to legitimate content proved to be effective in bringing piracy rates down.

But despite improved availability, piracy is alive and well, which means that groups all over the world continue to look for solutions to the problem. More innovation would be nice but Russian authorities appear to be looking into the past.

According to sources cited by Russian news publication RNS, the government is considering introducing a system of fines for Internet users who download copyrighted content without permission.

“It is expected that evidence of a download of an illegal movie, for example, will be shown by providing an IP address, then the offender will be sent the penalty fine,” a source familiar with the inter-agency consultations told the publication.

It’s understood that if ‘pirate’ site-blocking fails, authorities favor the kind of system that German Internet users are already subjected to, with fines up to 1000 euros per logged offense.

“If the initiative with blocking sites that publish illegal content does not work, will be discussing the German model,” the source said.

What isn’t known at this stage is who will be issuing the ‘fines’ or who will benefit from the revenue they create. What is clear, however, is that introducing this kind of system won’t be straightforward.

“There are two ways [to reduce piracy] – to block websites and penalize the user,” the source said. “The second option is effective, but we need to understand the social consequences.”

Reached for comment, Russia’s Ministry of Culture confirmed knowledge of the proposals but said that no formal consultations on how such a system might operate have yet been conducted.

The Ministry of Communications also admitted knowledge of the discussions but a spokesman urged caution.

“I’m not sure that it would be straightforward to implement [a system of fines] in Russia, but it is always the responsibility…of the person who posted the pirated content, and the one who deliberately consumes pirated content,” he said.

“The responsibility, in principle, should be [with these people]. How to implement a system in the Russian reality…that for sure requires a cautious and incremental process.”

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.