Ask any half-interested user to name the best public torrent sites and many will fall back on those inhabiting the top ten most popular online today.

While there’s much glory to be had, being one of the world’s most-visited torrent indexes has its downsides.

Two huge sites previously in the top ten of 2016 – KickassTorrents and Torrentz – have now disappeared, with at least one falling victim to enforcement action. It’s possible, if not likely, that more will fall in the months and years to come.

But what about sites outside the top ten? What about those in the top 50, top 100 or top 250? What happens to those on a day to day basis?

Well, each endures its own unique set of problems associated with running a torrent site but due to their size, most don’t have high-powered law enforcement agencies breathing down their necks. That often means they’re able to provide a steady service to users without too many headaches.

But while small is sometimes cool, obscurity is often the enemy of growth, both in terms of users and availability of content, with the former being the provider of the latter. That’s where meta and/or multi-site search engines step in.

A meta-search engine is a search engine that searches other search engines, in this case other torrent sites and indexes. Without doubt, the most famous meta-search engine was Torrentz, but that shut down last week.

Torrentz be sorely missed. While it was always possible to visit The Pirate Bay or KickassTorrents to get a popular torrent, if that content was a little more rare, time-consuming visits to multiple sites might be necessary. Torrentz alleviated that problem by searching multiple sites at once and displaying the results in one location.

As the image above shows, most sites that were listed by Torrentz are very successful in their own right but the concept of meta-search doesn’t have to stop at the biggest players.

There’s no insurmountable reason why meta and multi-site search engines of the future won’t index hundreds of diverse torrent sites, sites that might usually fly under the radar due to their small size and low public profile.

Of course, once these sites become more visible (and searchable) they will naturally grow in size, with the higher quality platforms securing a larger share of the traffic. For some, this could mean the loss of their quiet life status and for others, it might mean breaking into the top 10.

Whether these changes in status will turn out to be a help or hindrance is a matter for each site operator, but for the user it will mean greater access to a broader range of sites that are less likely to be taken down.

The authorities are reasonably happy to play whac-a-mole at the top, but doing so with hundreds of targets lower down the food chain becomes an expensive, chaotic, and ultimately unwinnable game.

Giants might be doomed to fall but the era of the thousand little men might be just around the corner – if people can find them.

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

Hollywood hoped that it would never happen, but this week The Pirate Bay quietly turned thirteen years old.

The site was founded in 2003 by Swedish pro-culture organization Piratbyrån (Piracy Bureau). The idea was to create the first public file-sharing network in Sweden, but the site soon turned into the global file-sharing icon it is today.

Over the years there have been numerous attempts to shut the site down. Following pressure from the United States, Swedish authorities raided the site in 2006, only to see it come back stronger.

The criminal convictions of the site’s founders didn’t kill the site either, nor did any of the subsequent attempts to take it offline.

The Pirate Bay is still very much ‘alive’ today.

That’s quite an achievement by itself, looking at all the other sites that have fallen over the years. Just last month KickassTorrents shut down, followed by Torrentz a few days ago.

Many KickassTorrents and Torrentz users are now turning to TPB to get their daily dose of torrents. As a result, The Pirate Bay is now the most visited torrent site, once again.

TorrentFreak spoke to several members of the TPB-crew. While they are not happy with the circumstances, they do say that the site has an important role to fulfil in the torrent community.

“TPB is as important today as it was yesterday, and its role in being the galaxy’s most resilient torrent site will continue for the foreseeable future,” Spud17 says.

“Sure, TPB has its flaws and glitches but it’s still the go-to site for all our media needs, and I can see TPB still being around in 20 or 30 years time, even if the technology changes,” she adds.

Veteran TPB-crew member Xe agrees that TPB isn’t perfect but points to the site’s resilience as a crucial factor that’s particularly important today.

“TPB ain’t perfect. There are plenty of things wrong with it, but it is simple, steadfast and true,” Xe tells TorrentFreak.

“So it’s no real surprise that it is once more the destination of choice or that it has survived for so long in spite of the inevitable turnover of crew.”

And resilient it is. Thirteen years after the site came online, The Pirate Bay is the “King of Torrents” once again.

Finally, we close with a yearly overview of the top five torrent sites of the last decade. Notably, the Pirate Bay is the only site that appears in the list every year, which is perhaps the best illustration of the impact it had, and still has today.

2007

1. TorrentSpy
2. Mininova
3. The Pirate Bay
4. isoHunt
5. Demonoid

2008

1. Mininova
2. isoHunt
3. The Pirate Bay
4. Torrentz
5. BTJunkie

2009

1. The Pirate Bay
2. Mininova
3. isoHunt
4. Torrentz
5. Torrentreactor

2010

1. The Pirate Bay
2. Torrentz
3. isoHunt
4. Mininova
5. BTJunkie

2011

1. The Pirate Bay
2. Torrentz
3. isoHunt
4. KickassTorrents
5. BTJunkie

2012

1. The Pirate Bay
2. Torrentz.com
3. KickassTorrents
4. isoHunt
5. BTJunkie

2013

1. The Pirate Bay
2. KickassTorrents
3. Torrentz
4. ExtraTorrent
5. 1337X

2014

1. The Pirate Bay
2. KickassTorrents
3. Torrentz
4. ExtraTorrent
5. YIFY-Torrents

2015

1. KickassTorrents
2. Torrentz.com
3. ExtraTorrent
4. The Pirate Bay
5. YTS

2016

1. KickassTorrents
2. The Pirate Bay
3. ExtraTorrent
4. Torrentz
4. RARBG

Today

1. The Pirate Bay
2. ExtraTorrent
3. RARBG
4. YTS.AG
5. 1337X

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

Regardless of differing opinions on what kind of content should be shifted around using the protocol, few will contest the beauty of BitTorrent.

Thanks to the undoubted genius of creator Bram Cohen, it is still extremely robust some 15 years after its debut.

But while some may assume that BitTorrent is no longer under development, the opposite is true. Behind the scenes, groups of developers are working to further develop the protocol via BitTorrent Enhancement Proposals (BEPs).

Early BEPs, such as those covering DHT, PEX and private torrents, have long since been implemented but the process continues today.

Just one of the P2P developers involved is Luca Matteis. He lives in Rome, Italy, where he studies Computer Science at the Sapienza University and works part-time on various projects.

Passionate about P2P and decentralized systems, Luca informs TorrentFreak that his goal is to enable people to share and communicate in a censorship resistant manner. His fresh proposal, Updating Torrents Via DHT Mutable Items, was submitted last month and aims to live up to that billing.

We asked Luca to explain what his group’s proposal (it’s a team effort) is all about and he kindly obliged. It begins with the Distributed Hash Table (DHT) and a previous enhancement proposal.

“So currently the DHT in BitTorrent is used as a peer discovery mechanism for torrents, and it has really nice decentralized properties. It works just like a tracker, with the difference being that trackers are on central servers with a domain name, and therefore can be easily shut down,” Luca begins.

“[An earlier enhancement proposal] BEP44 added some interesting properties to the DHT network, namely the feature of being able to store arbitrary data. So instead of just storing IP addresses of people downloading specific torrents, we can now store any kind of data (max 1000 bytes per item).”

Luca says that so far this functionality hasn’t been used by torrent clients. uTorrent apparently has it under the hood, with some developers believing it’s there for reasons connected to BitTorrent Inc’s Bleep software. At this point, however, it only exists at the network level.

Importantly, however, Luca says that BEP44 allows one to store changing values under a key.

“We call these mutable items. So what you could do is generate a public key, which can be thought of as your address, and share this with the world. Then you use this public key to store stuff in BitTorrent’s DHT network. And, because it’s your public key, you (and only you) can change the value pointed by your public key.”

As mentioned earlier, only a 1000 bytes can be stored (less than 1kB), but Luca points out that it’s possible to store the info hash of a torrent, 79816060EA56D56F2A2148CD45705511079F9BCA, for example. Now things get interesting.

“At this point, your public key has very similar properties to an HTTP URL [a website address], with the difference that (just like trackers before) the value does not exist on a single computer/server, but is constantly shared across the DHT network,” he explains.

“Our BEP46 extension is an actual standardization of what the value, pointed by your public key, should look like. Our standard says it should be an info hash of a torrent. This allows for a multitude of use cases, but more practically it allows for torrents to automatically change what they’re downloading based on the public key value inside the DHT.”

While the technically minded out there might already know where this is going, Luca is kind enough to spell it out.

“Torrent sites (such as The Pirate Bay) could share a magnet link they control, which contains their public key. What they would store at this ‘address’ is the infohash of a torrent which contains a database of all their torrents,” he says.

“Users who trust them would bookmark the magnet link, and when they click on it, a torrent will start downloading. Specifically, they’d start downloading the database dump of the torrent site.”

While that might not yet sound like magic, the ability to change the value held in the DHT proves extremely useful.

“The cool thing is that when the torrent site decides to share more torrents (new releases, better quality stuff, more quality reviews), all they need to do is update the value in the DHT with a new torrent containing a new .rss file.

“At this point, all the users downloading from their magnet link will automatically be downloading the new torrent and will always have an up-to-date .RSS dump of torrents,” he says.

But while this would be useful to users, Luca says that sites like The Pirate Bay could also benefit.

“For torrent sites, this would be an attractive solution because they wouldn’t need to maintain a central HTTP server which implies costs and can be easily shut down. On the other hand, their mutable torrent magnet link cannot be easily shut down, does not imply maintenance costs, and cannot be easily tracked down,” he concludes.

For those interested in the progress of this enhancement proposal and others like it, all BEPs can be found here.

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

Mere hours after Torrentz.eu announced its farewell last week, various clones and mirrors juggled into position to take over.

As one of the oldest and largest torrent sites around, Torrentz had an active following of millions of users. This is something a lot of site owners envy, and these people see the demise of Torrentz as an opportunity.

Taking over an established brand is something the torrent community has seen before in recent years.

When isoHunt was shut down by the MPAA, Isohunt.to quickly took its place, and remains one of the most popular torrent sites today. Similarly, YTS.ag and others took over when YIFY was forced to stop, with success.

This week we have seen a flurry of Torrentz clones appear online. These sites hope to pick up where the original site left off, all offering similar meta-search engine functionality while copying the Torrentz look and feel.

As with previous cases, the success of these takeovers relies on getting a healthy number of eyeballs. Promotion on social media helps, as does a viral Reddit thread and news coverage.

Some clone operators are even willing to pay hard cash to get covered, as we’ve experienced first hand. A few days ago TorrentFreak received an offer to do a “paid” news article. This is something we would never do of course, but it shows that this is a serious business.

So who are these clones? Without endorsing any site, or falsely claiming that “Torrentz is back” as other news outlets have done, here are some of the alternatives we’ve encountered.

—

Torrentz2.eu has been widely reported as a Torrentz alternative and the site itself bills itself as an upgrade. With a massive 63 sites in their index, with a total of 59,658,880 torrents, it certainly has a wide coverage.

For now the site doesn’t have any extra features such as bookmarks, voting or commenting options.

Torrentz.ec is another clone that popped up this week. The site has a more modest index than Torrentz2.eu but still covers 25 sites, good for a total 27,508,811 active torrents.

The voting functionality appears to work too, but users are not able to log in, at least when we checked. Interestingly, the site claims to index more torrents and sites on its help page, but perhaps the frontpage still has some catching up to do.

Torrentzeu.to is another clone but unlike the other sites it doesn’t advertise itself as such. Instead, the number of indexed sites and torrents mentioned on the frontpage are just copied from the original site.

—

The above are just a few examples. It’s not our goal to give a complete overview, but it’s clear that several sites are in the race to become the next ‘Torrentz.’

In a way, it is sad to see others taking over the ‘goodwill’ that a site like Torrentz took years to establish. However, judging from public responses, many people don’t care about these sentiments as long as they can get their torrents.

The question that remains, however, is how resilient and trustworthy these new sites are.

Some site owners may have good intentions, but there are also plenty of scammers, phishing for credit card details, or serving malicious content. As is often the case with torrent sites, money is a big motivator for those people.

Time will tell if and to what degree this applies to the clones that have emerged over the past days.

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

This week was one to forget for United States service provider Cox Communications after a federal court in Virginia found it liable for copyright infringements carried out by its customers.

The ISP was found guilty of willful contributory copyright infringement and ordered to pay music publisher BMG Rights Management $25 million in damages.

The case was filed in 2014 after it was alleged that Cox failed to pass on cash settlement demands to customers that were sent by anti-piracy outfit Rightscorp on behalf of BMG. The ISP also failed to take firm action against repeat infringers.

Now, with a BMG victory on the record, Rightscorp has come out swinging. Welcoming the decision of Judge Liam O’Grady, the anti-piracy outfit says that its long-held position, that ISPs must comply with its wishes, has been proven accurate.

“For nearly five years, Rightscorp has warned US internet service providers (ISPs) that they risk incurring huge liabilities if they fail to implement and enforce policies under which they terminate the accounts of their subscribers who repeatedly infringe copyrights,” the company said in a statement.

“Over that time, many ISPs have taken the position that it was simply impossible for an ISP to be held liable for its subscribers’ actions — even when the ISP had been put on notice of massive infringements and supplied with detailed evidence. There had never been a judicial decision holding an ISP liable.”

Of course, that changed this week with Judge O’Grady’s decision, and Rightscorp CEO Christopher Sabec couldn’t be happier.

“Although Rightscorp was not a party in this case, we are delighted with the outcome. The Federal District Court declared the liability of ISPs to be precisely what Rightscorp has been saying it is for years,” Sabec says.

“With this final Federal Court ruling, not only has our position on ISP liability been confirmed, but our Company’s technology and processes for collecting and documenting evidence of peer-to-peer copyright infringement on ISP networks has been validated as well.”

While Rightscorp was expected to make the most of BMG’s victory in its future dealings with ISPs, the level of aggression in its announcement still comes as a surprise. Essentially putting every provider in the country on notice, Rightscorp warns that ISPs will now have to cooperate or face the wrath of litigious rightsholders.

“As we have consistently told ISPs, we stand ready to assist those ISPs that desire to work in a constructive way with the copyright community in order to reduce the massive infringements that occur every day on their networks,” Sabec says.

“But our company has also amassed a vast amount of data documenting infringements that have occurred over the past five years on the network of essentially every ISP in the country. That data will be made available to copyright holders that wish to enforce their rights against ISPs that are not inclined toward a cooperative solution.”

Whether this week’s developments will help to pull Rightscorp out of the financial doldrums will remain to be seen. The company has been teetering on the edge of bankruptcy for a couple of years now, and its shares on Wednesday were worth just $0.038 each. Following the BMG news, they peaked at $0.044.

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