Large scale web-services need tens of thousands of servers to keep things running smoothly for their millions of users.

Keeping all of these servers updated with the latest code can be time and resource intensive and it was no different at Facebook during its early years.

However, most problems disappeared when the social networking company discovered BitTorrent. With BitTorrent all servers in the network could help to distribute code updates and as a result deployment took minutes rather than hours or days.

After discovering these benefits Facebook changed its BitTorrent implementation quite a bit. Among other tools, the company is now using the open source tracker software Chihaya, named after a school girl starring in the manga series Chihayafuru.

While this might seem like a peculiar name for a piece of BitTorrent tracking code, all becomes clear when you look at the history of the software and its links to a private anime torrent tracker.

In 2012 a developer named Kotoko started working on a new tracker backend written in the then-new programming language Go. Named Chihaya, the project (originally developed for a private anime community) aimed to become a replacement for the Ocelot tracker used by many Gazelle-based torrent sites.

Around the same time the people behind the Waffles community were working on a full replacement for Gazelle named Batter, and the Chihaya developer eventually jumped on this bandwagon. The project also drew the attention of other programmers, including Jimmy Zelinskie and Justin Li, both college students at the time.

“I was interested in helping out with Chihaya back then because I wanted to work on a project to cement my skills in the Go programming language,” Zelinskie tells TF.

After a while priorities changed. Chihaya was never connected to a tracker frontend, but Zelinskie and Li kept improving it bit by bit.

“The Batter project fizzled out, but Chihaya development continued,” Zelinskie says. “We restructured Chihaya a few times, trying to decide how to make it scalable and ultimately landed on what we have today.”

Chihaya

Over the past several years Chihaya has evolved into one of the most advanced pieces of tracker software around, with support for multi-cored processors and peers announcing on IPv4, IPv6 or both.

“The architecture of the project is entirely modular and in doing so, we’ve made the tracker so it could potentially support any transport protocol like HTTP or UDP and any backend BitTorrent indexing software like Gazelle,” Zelinskie tells TF.

This didn’t go unnoticed by others, including the engineering team at Facebook who also started to use the code for their server deployment.

“Facebook started using the project because of our proper IPv6 support,” Zelinskie says, adding that they optimized the tracker even more for a local setup.

“We soon after added the ability to prefer peers based on a subnet of their IP address; for example, if your IP address is 192.168.1.1, you can configure the tracker to deliver you all the ‘closest’ peers in the 192.168.1.X range before any others,” he notes.

Zelinskie currently works at CoreOS, a company that specializes in the deployment of software. He believes that BitTorrent-supported distribution is the future for companies, large and small. Chihaya certainly fits into this picture.

This leads to the remarkable conclusion that an open source private tracker, originally programmed to serve anime torrents, is now powering one of the largest technology companies in the world.

For Zelinskie, this transition not only shows the true power of open source, but also of BitTorrent.

“This is the reason why I write open source software and my company releases so much of what we do open source. Having as many people as possible working towards a common goal, in this case a solid BitTorrent tracker implementation, is beneficial to all of society, not just one set of individuals,” he says.

“BitTorrent is far too often associated with copyright infringement. When in reality, BitTorrent is simply the best file transfer protocol. Whether it’s being used by you, me, or even Facebook.”

—

Facebook didn’t respond to our request for comment but their use of Chihaya was confirmed by an insider.

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

This week we have three newcomers in our chart.

Big Hero 6 is the most downloaded movie for the second week in a row.

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 BD/DVDrips unless stated otherwise.

RSS feed for the weekly movie download chart.

Ranking	(last week)	Movie	IMDb Rating / Trailer
torrentfreak.com
1	(1)	Big Hero 6	8.0 / trailer
2	(2)	Birdman	8.2 / trailer
3	(…)	Horrible Bosses 2	6.5 / trailer
4	(7)	Wild Card	6.0 / trailer
5	(…)	John Doe: Vigilante	6.5 / trailer
6	(3)	American Sniper (DVDscr)	7.6 / trailer
7	(…)	Fifty Shades of Grey (CAM)	3.9 / trailer
8	(8)	Nightcrawler	8.0 / trailer
9	(6)	Dumb And Dumber To	6.1 / trailer
10	(5)	Taken 3	6.3 / trailer

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

We know little of spycraft before ancient times, but we do know that covert messaging was common in the Roman Empire. One well-documented method was to shave a slave’s head, tattoo a message into the scalp, let the hair grow back, and send the slave on foot to the recipient, presumably carrying a decoy message.

(And you were complaining that PGP messaging takes too long.)

It’s possible to assume that the concept of “information advantage” arose as soon as civilizations broke beyond tribal stage. We can observe groups spying on each other in all parts of recorded history, and even though the winners write the (surviving) history books, we can see that those who knew more were also the ones who came out on top.

There are many reasons for this. One is the straightforward concept of military intel: if you’re at war with somebody and know about their weaknesses, you can exploit them and get the upper hand. Most of the net generation are perfectly familiar with the concept of the Fog of War, and the value of sending scout drones early in a StarCraft game.

But it’s more subtle than that. If you establish yourself as knowing more than others, for whatever reason, other people will start asking you for information. Information – perceived truth – will flow from you to others. This is one of the most powerful positions somebody can be in; it establishes the power of narrative, and it lets a group essentially dictate truth, enlighten people, or poison the news-well according to what fits their interest on any particular day, as long as they are perceived to still hold the information advantage.

It’s easy to observe that governments have had this role. “Our satellite imagery shows X, Y, and Z on the ground in Farawaystan.” You can’t really dispute it, you have to take that government at their word, simply because you don’t have any expensive satellite network of your own. It’s quite outside of your budget range. Or rather, you had to take them at their word: you don’t anymore. All of a sudden, you have distant acquaintances on the ground in Farawaystan who are confirming or disproving the statement, and usually doing so within minutes.

It’s not hard to see what a power shift this creates – how the many are taking the power away from the few. It used to take an enormous nation-state-level machine to provide information detail at the satellite-level degree; today, better information can be obtained by the informal network that is the internet.

Putting it another way: the net generation, the global net generation, has taken the information advantage from the world’s governments, using nothing but their everyday presence and practically no resources at all. And those dethroned governments are absolutely furious about it, and are turning to poisoning the news-well and destroying the net’s utility value by introducing mass surveillance and forcing the network operators’ dirty collaboration in a last-ditch attempt to regain that information advantage – knowing what everybody’s saying, thinking, planning, discussing.

It’s not going to help. That cat is out of the bag. But it’s going to be a fight.

The copyright industry is only a small part of this. It’s a really annoying small part of this, but the picture is still much bigger. There’s a reason the copyright industry gets so much governmental support (from the United States) when it tries to assert its continued power of narrative, despite YouTube and similar sites long having disproven the notion that you need a governmentally-awarded private monopoly – “copyright” – for culture to be created.

(YouTube alone now has 300 hours of video uploaded every minute. In other words, it’s providing 18,000 24/7 television channel equivalents. Granted, those “channels” are of widely varying quality, so they’re quite exactly like yesterday’s TV concept.)

We still need to fight for our basic civil liberties. But the power shift happening right now is immense – far beyond the question of where some entertainment studio is going to find its future revenue.

About The Author

Rick Falkvinge is a regular columnist on TorrentFreak, sharing his thoughts every other week. He is the founder of the Swedish and first Pirate Party, a whisky aficionado, and a low-altitude motorcycle pilot. His blog at falkvinge.net focuses on information policy.

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

Today Calendar Pro is a popular replacement calendar for Android. Several thousand voters on Google Play agree on its quality, most voting near to the fabled five stars.

However, at the start of February developer Jack Underwood announced that rather than pay for his software, a huge majority are preferring to pirate it instead. The figures were substantial. According to the UK-based dev, 85% of ‘pro’ users were using his software without paying for it.

While that fact might’ve caused some creators to go nuclear, Underwood remained pragmatic. He engaged his public and decided to make light of the situation by introducing some novel anti-piracy measures in his software. Rather than make it unusable, Underwood added some pirate-themed events as detailed in our earlier article.

It turned out to be a great move on the PR front. News of Underwood’s approach spread quickly and dozens of news outlets covered the story giving the developer and his software plenty of exposure. Interested in the effects of this new-found fame, TF caught up with the dev to assess his mood.

As it turns out Underwood was in fine form. News of massive piracy of his app published February 2nd/3rd onwards had certainly turned into a positive. Sales of his software enjoyed a significant boost, as the graph below illustrates.

While reluctant to talk about money generated, Underwood did reveal the size of the increase over regular sales. Today Calender Pro sold around three times more than it usually does after the news broke, leveling to twice as many sales shortly after.

However, it was the effect on Google Play’s rankings that appears to have done Underwood the biggest favor. Following news of the high piracy rates there was a five-fold increase in Play user ratings, averaging a score of 4.8. This means that Today Calendar Pro is now the highest rated calendar on the Play store.

The ratings boost means that sales are now running at a steady 50% uplift, a great result all considered.

Interestingly, however, the free version of the app hasn’t done quite so well. On the first day sales increased two-fold, dropping to 1.5x the day after. Unlike the ‘Pro’ version, there was no change in Play ratings and ‘sales’ are now back to the level they were before.

But perhaps of most interest is how these new figures have affected piracy rates overall, which previously sat at 85%.

“Over the last week pirated installs have made up 56% of the downloads,” Underwood informs TF. “Much better, but I guess we’ll see how long it lasts!”

Finally, Underwood says that interest in the pirate-themed events he added to his software has resulted in lots of requests from users wanting to see them. He’s come up with the following solution.

“Users can now trigger the pirate events themselves. Any event title with ‘walk the plank’ or ‘swashbuckling’ or ‘pirate’ (providing there’s no other trigger words) will cause the pirate images to be displayed,” he concludes.

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

When BitTorrent Inc. announced its plan to add advertising to its flagship uTorrent client a small user revolt broke out.

The people complaining were mostly annoyed that there would be no option to disable the ads. Luckily, BitTorrent listened to the feedback and decided that users would indeed get a chance to opt-out from the ads.

Despite the initial complaints, nowadays most users probably aren’t aware of the opt-out settings. uTorrent previously reported that it’s serving billions of ads per month, quite a significant number.

Even for those users who do know, uTorrent doesn’t make it very easy for them to remove the ads. They will have to mess with the advanced settings, search for the relevant variables, and change them one by one.

The developer of the torrent optimized TV-calendar DuckieTV was confronted with this issue a few days ago when he introduced a friend to BitTorrent. After first installing uTorrent, he noticed that the client was littered with ads he disabled himself a long time ago.

After manually changing several settings to strip the ads, he came up with the idea to automate the process.

“I turned them off for my friend, and decided to try and see if I could automate the process the next day,” Schizoduckie tells TF.

For DuckieTV, the developer previously reverse-engineered BitTorrent’s Torque and BtApp.js tools, which are able to talk to uTorrent via the browser. He therefore decided to see if the same code could also be used to change uTorrent’s settings.

“I remembered that BitTorrent previously ran an experiment with btApp.js that fiddled with settings, so all I needed to do was hook up the settings functionality in my library and set up a page so users can disable ads in one click,” Schizoduckie says.

Fast forward a few hours and “Pimp my uTorrent” was born.

Pimp my uTorrent literally requires just one click to disable the ads on Windows clients. There is nothing to install as the page uses JavaScript to communicate with uTorrent.

After the “pimping” is done, uTorrent might need to be restarted before the changes are visible. People who are not happy with the result have an option to reverse them with another click.

It can’t get much simpler than that.

Those who are interested in what the tool does can inspect the relevant variables here. A more detailed overview of all ad related settings and how these can be changed is available in the uTorrent forums. A more detailed how-to with many more tips and tricks is available here.

Happy pimping!

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