Hack a Day » bittorrent

Pirate bay verdict: Guilty

Caleb Kraft — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 19:23:06 +0000

As you’ve undoubtedly seen on every other website in the universe, the verdict is in. The four defendants from the Pirate Bay have been found guilty of copyright infringement and sentenced to 1 year in prison and some pretty large fines. This could be a pretty important case since it deals with the blurry area between supplying material and supplying a means to get material. Though the verdict is obviously bad for the individuals, the site seems to be thriving from the media exposure. They’ve stated that the site will stay up. We’ve been watching this since it began, and now we’re curious what this means for the rest of the file sharing world.

Posted in news

Using Bittorrent on Amazon EC2

Eliot — Sun, 18 Jan 2009 04:30:48 +0000

Bittorrent is a great distribution method for large files, but its heavy bandwidth usage can be disruptive to both work and home networks. [Brett O'Connor] has decided to push all of his torrenting activity into the cloud. Amazon’s EC2 service lets you run any number of Amazon Machine Images (AMI, virtual machines) on top of their hardware. You pay for processing time and data transferred. [Brett] put together a guide for building your own seedbox on the service. First, you set up the Security Group, the firewall for the machine. Next, you specify what AMI you want to use. In this example, it’s a community build of Ubuntu. Once you have your SSH keypair, you can start the instance and install Apache, PHP, and MySQL. TorrentFlux is the web frontend for bittorrent in this case. It manages all the torrents and you just need to click download when you want to grab the completed file.

Even if you don’t plan on setting up a seedbox, the post is a straightforward example of how-to get started with EC2. He’s not sure what the cost will be; the current estimate is ~$30/mo.

[via Waxy]

[photo: nrkbeta]

Posted in home entertainment hacks, video hacks

uTorrent for Mac leaked via Pirate Bay

Caleb Kraft — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 20:38:45 +0000

In a somewhat ironic chain of events, uTorrent alpha for Mac has been leaked on Pirate Bay. Initial reviews are positive, with some saying that it runs better than its windows counterpart. The search function seems to be broken though.

[via BoinBoing Gadgets]

Posted in news

Should you get a seedbox for your bittorrent needs?

Kimberly Lau — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 22:40:00 +0000

Torrentfreak offers up a few reasons why you should get a seedbox if you’re a bittorrent user who likes to share a lot of files. A seedbox is a dedicated private server used exclusively for torrent transfers. [sharky] discusses a few pros and makes a few claims that we think might be a little overblown. Although the seedbox will speed up your downloads and allow you to bypass ISP limits on your bandwith, we’re a little leery of the claims that the seedbox is completely safe and secure, or that it’ll protect you from getting sued by the RIAA or MPAA. As pointed out in the comments, paying for a dedicated hosting service and paying for cable is no different. Of course, the seedbox also costs money, so you’ll have to weigh whether you’d rather have speed or risk getting throttled by your ISP. Torrentfreak does list a few hosting solutions that may be reasonably priced.

[photo: nrkbeta]

Bittorrent admin convicted by federal jury

Eliot — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 10:20:00 +0000

[Daniel Dove], administrator of the site EliteTorrents.org, has been convicted of conspiracy and felony copyright infringement. Running a bittorrent tracker isn’t in itself illegal, but [Dove] apparently recruited seeders and distributed the initial illegal copies to them from his own server. From the press release, it seems the Justice Department is quite tickled with finally getting a conviction in a P2P case after a jury trial.

[photo: nrkbeta]

Detecting ISP throttling

Eliot — Sun, 15 Jun 2008 01:50:00 +0000

ISPs have recently become very aggressive towards their customers. They’ve been blocking or altering traffic to prevent you from using specific programs or protocols. Google’s Senior Policy Director recently stated that they’re developing tools to allow people to detect ISP interference. A couple other groups have been building tools as well: The Network Neutrality Squad just released the second beta of their Network Measurement Agent. The tool currently detects spoofed packets by monitoring the round trip time of the connection; early reset packets will have lower than average RTT. If you want to go more in depth, the EFF has published a guide for using Wireshark to do the detection. We’ve even heard rumors of people building tools to tunnel a session inside of one that looks completely different.

[photo: nrkbeta]

Web based bittorrent support

Juan Aguilar — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 03:00:00 +0000

We recently came across a new bittorrent service called Torrent Relay that features an innovative yet simple function: it allows you to download torrents to web-enabled devices like the PlayStation 3 and iPhone. Torrent Relay works by having the user surf to their site using the web-enabled device and upload a local copy or enter the url of a torrent file. The file is downloaded as normal, only all the work happens on Torrent Relay servers. It works especially well with Mininova, using torrent IDs from the site instead of the torrent’s URL. Once Torrent Relay has the completed file it sends it to the web-enabled device. It is not without a few kinks, however, as it only seems to be able to download a single file from a torrent whether or not it contains more than one, and it has a size cap of 400MB for that file. That limit means you’re probably just going to be watching television and not grabbing ISOs, albums, or movies. Far from perfect, but how else are you supposed to watch Battlestar Gallactica on your iPhone?

Recent news followup

Sean Percival — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 03:00:00 +0000

Last week we talked about a single rumored arrest over the OiNK torrent tracker. Since then, there’s been a confirmed report of 6 arrests. The arrests appear to be the result of users uploading pre-release music to the now defunct site. For some time, police have had access to the OiNK user records minus the passwords which are thought to be stored as a salted MD5 hash. It seems British authorities can force these individuals to reveal passwords under something called the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act.

The Phoenix Mars Lander (pictured above) has found what might be a large piece of ice directly underneath it. This week the lander will scoop up a sample, melt its contents and test the various gases it releases. Twitter users can watch the mission’s progress in semi real time by following the MarsPhonix account. Lastly it looks like the official website for this mission was defaced through a SQL injection attack.

We already reported the world’s largest GPS drawing as a hoax. It has however inspired a few to look closer at the concept of position based art and others have already created authentic works. Our friends over at BoingBoing even made a little flash application to create your own “Unimpressive GPS Art“. Upon hearing of the hoax we were quick to draw up a brand new proposal for DHL using Google maps.

OiNK Arrests

Juan Aguilar — Sat, 31 May 2008 01:00:00 +0000

British authorities have reportedly begun arresting users of OiNK. Last week at least one person was arrested for seeding a single album on the now-defunct torrent index. The user was questioned by police and then released on bail.

Though it is not new for record companies to engage in civil action against users of filesharing networks, legal experts who have commented on the case are puzzled by what – if any – criminal charges can be filed against filesharing defendants. It is unknown if any further arrests have been made.

Media streamers: buy or build?

Juan Aguilar — Thu, 22 May 2008 03:00:00 +0000

The market is flooded with new media streamers, but which one is for you? One of the cheapest and easiest options is the unambiguously titled Netflix Player. With an active account, the Netflix Player streams movies and television shows from their online library (currently around 10,000 videos). It connects to the internet via 802.11b/g WiFi or ethernet, but delivers low-quality video if your connection speed is less than 1Mbps. It costs $99 plus at least $8.95/mo for a Netflix subscription. It runs Linux so hopefully we’ll see some hacks for it soon like we did with previous Roku products. A fine device, if you want to stream movies and nothing else, but if you want to stream data from other sources, like a network, usb hard drive, or (gasp) bittorrent, you’ll have to look elsewhere.

A friend of ours recently purchased the Popcorn Hour. This set-top box can stream video from a network or usb hard drive using practically any codec or container format, can be configured to download torrents with an internal hard drive, and supports a number of web services including YouTube and Flickr. The Popcorn Hour is at least a fair value at $180. The downside? It doesn’t come with a hard drive or WiFi.

The lack of internal storage might be deal-breaker for you; if so, the Myka could be a better fit. In addition to coming in 80, 160, and 500GB flavors, this device opts out of all proprietary content delivery services in favor of open ones. It has strong synergy with BitTorrent.com built in, downloading directly from it or a number of other torrent services like ISOHunt. Prices range from $299 to $459.

If you’re like us, you’d rather build your own Linux media streamer. All you need is a spare computer. Cheap graphics cards with component out are fairly easy to acquire. For a frontend, you could use DVR software like MythTV, but that might be overkill. Check out the Linux port of XBMC which is what the Mac version of XBMC we covered previously is based on.