Month: January 2016

The endlessly entertaining /r/trackers and /r/torrents subs of Reddit are inhabited by a broad range of BitTorrent users, from the just starting out to the seriously experienced. As a result discussions range from the very basic to the fairly complex which makes them great environments for those of all skill levels.

The million dollar question

Pretty regularly the topic lands on the differences between public and private torrent sites and the inevitable million dollar question: Which is the best?

As someone who has seen this conversation play out dozens of times before it’s no surprise what happens next. Users of each type of site regularly batten down the hatches and go head to head with their perceived rivals in a battle to be won at all costs.

But the truth is this: public and private sites and their users might sometimes pretend to hate or have disrespect for each other, but the existence of both amounts to a match made in heaven. They squabble and bicker in public, but quietly they crave each other’s attention. In fact, these secret lovers can barely stand to be apart.

‘Elite’ torrent users didn’t appear by magic

Many (not all) private trackers work on the assumption that their users are among the elite. These individuals have perfectly honed systems, underpinned by the finest torrent client setups ever seen. Their sharing manners are impeccable and their access to content unprecedented.

Surprise!! These users didn’t simply appear out of thin air.

The majority of today’s “elite” users will have started out on the public torrent scene where they picked up knowledge and developed their skills over time, possibly several years. Like many they will have heard of the private tracker streets paved with gold and aspired to tread them one day.

Eventually, when luck, judgment and an existing member with invites all collided, Joe Public will have entered the Promised Land. The chances are he will have been impressed by what he found. Many private trackers display exceptional attention to detail, are meticulous in their presentation, and have great communities to boot.

But make no mistake, without his training on the public scene Mr Public would not have lasted long on a private tracker. Thankfully he already knew many if not all of the basics and while private site staff might not like the public scene too much, they are grateful to it for educating their new recruit. Rarely will they admit it, however.

Join us – if you can (but it won’t be easy)

Perhaps one of the most interesting things about the private / public rivalry is how the former absolutely needs the latter to boost its ranks. Many private tracker users/staffers hang out on /r/trackers and /r/torrents and many are happy to answer questions. Need movies faster? Better quality music? Cure for arthritis? Join a private tracker!

However, as many advice recipients discover, that’s often easier said than done. Most private sites have strict limits on the number of members allowed in and the majority require users to be invited. Several demand that prospective members sit an entrance exam or interview to get in. It can be a real hassle.

No room at the inn :(

That said, limited availability of member slots exists for a number of reasons, not least technical limitations and other practicalities of running a relatively small site.

While this is a nuisance for those looking to get in, this is a real plus for private trackers. Not only do they have the luxury of picking and choosing new entrants, they also maintain the exclusivity that makes them so desirable to join in the first place. But just as new members trickle in, other things flood right out.

Thanks for the content, private trackers

For many years the so-called warez scene was the source of much of the content available online today. Things are changing in a very big way though and P2P distribution is now the uncrowned king.

Recently a flood of DVD screeners began to hit the Internet yet none of them came from a traditional ‘Scene’ source. In fact (and as far as the masses are concerned) most of them first appeared for the early enjoyment of the lucky individuals inhabiting private trackers. Eventually nearly all of them spread to public sites though. And users of those sites are grateful, even if they don’t mention it.

They should just get along

The ubiquitous nature of public sites has created a wealth of interest in file-sharing that private sites could never have managed on their own. Both have benefited as a result and it’s hard to escape that.

Also, most private torrent site users were doing their thing in public at one stage and when it comes to swelling their ranks, footfall to private sites is provided by the public. ‘Elite’ users don’t just appear out of thin air.

And, when Joe Public finds he can’t or refuses to keep up with the often stringent rules and requirements of private trackers, there needs to be a safety net or he could disappear from the P2P sharing scene entirely. Where does he go? Back to public torrent sites, of course.

Finally, for those who like to measure the quality of public and private sites by comparing YIFY rips with those more exclusively available – two words:

Gateway. Drug.

Excited new recruits coming up……and the secret love affair continues.

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

From something new from pirates to something new on disc, read the news roundup for the week ending 3 January 2016

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Most file-sharers are creatures of habit, but when their favorite site disappears they gladly hop over to the next one.

This is also reflected in our annual top 10 which sees the usual names on top but also features some dubious newcomers.

One of the major changes came with the hostile takeover of the popular TV-torrent site EZTV. This prompted the popular TV-torrent distribution group to shut down last May. Another group took over the popular brand and continued with their own ‘unofficial’ EZTV releases. We therefore marked the site as a newcomer.

Something similar happened to YIFY’s YTS website, when the Australian admin ran into legal trouble. The official YTS website shut down but it was quickly replaced by the “unofficial” YTS.ag, which gathered a large user-base over the past two months.

Apparently, most torrent users are happy as long as they can get their fix, no matter what the source is.

KickassTorrents (KAT) remains the most visited torrent site and continues to grow. The Pirate Bay is listed in second place and made a strong comeback after nearly two months of downtime spanning the turn of the year. Since the site has been operating from several domain names until a few days ago, we chose not to list an Alexa rank.

Finally, it’s worth noting that Rutracker would have made it into the top five based on the number of visitors. However, we choose to only include English language content sites.

Below is the full list of the top 10 most-visited torrent sites at the start of the new year. The list is based on various traffic reports and we display the Alexa rank for each. In addition, we include last year’s ranking for each of the 10 sites.

1. KickassTorrents

KickassTorrents was founded in 2009 and surpassed The Pirate Bay in traffic last year. Battling various censorship efforts the site has burned through a few different domain names over the years. Most recently it switched to a Costa Rican .cr domain after it lost its Somalian .so address.

2. The Pirate Bay

The Pirate Bay is one of the main piracy icons. The torrent site wasn’t online at the beginning of 2015 and had to deal with a staff revolt. However, it quickly regained millions of users after a successful comeback operating from a hydra of domain names until last week.

3. ExtraTorrent

ExtraTorrent continues to gain more traffic and has become one of the most active torrent communities. The site is also the home of the popular ETTV and ETRG release groups.

4. Torrentz

Torrentz has been the leading BitTorrent meta-search engine for many years. Unlike the other sites featured in the list Torrentz does not host any torrent files or magnet links, but redirects visitors to other places on the web. The site uses several domain names with .eu being the most popular.

5. RARBG

RARBG, which started out as a Bulgarian tracker, was last year’s newcomer and continues to rake in more visitors. The site was blocked by UK ISPs last year, which put it on par with most other sites in the top 10.

6. 1337x

1337x has traditionally been a community driven torrent site but several weeks ago most of the admins and moderators abandoned ship over security concerns. The coming year it will become clear whether 1337x can keep its popular status.

7. EZTV.ag

TV-torrent distribution group EZTV shut down earlier this year after a hostile takeover. The site continued to operate under new ownership and releases its own torrents now. In solidarity with the original owners several large torrent sites have banned these ‘new’ releases from their sites.

8. TorrentHound

TorrentHound has been around since the last decade but is a newcomer in the top 10. It has also been on the radar of copyright holders this year. The torrent site is blocked in several countries and was reported as a piracy haven to the U.S. government, alongside many other sites in this list.

5. YTS.ag

YTS.ag has nothing to do with the original YTS or YIFY group, but aims to take its place. As with the new EZTV, several large torrent sites are not allowing the group to use the YIFY or YTS brands on their sites.

10. TorrentDownloads

TorrentDownloads has been around for several years. The torrent site regained a spot in the top 10 this year after it was featured for the last time in 2011. It’s a no-nonsense index that provides torrents to millions of users each month.

Disclaimer: Yes, we know that Alexa isn’t perfect and that Compete has plenty of flaws, but when combined both do a pretty good job at comparing sites that operate in a similar niche.

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

Not all that long ago, Ars was the rare outlet where your 5,000-word-plus treatise on some scientific techniques or operating system would be scant (or completely devoid) on images. In fact, it was only 2013 when a redesign required a new focus on visuals for all staff. In the years since, we like to think the pictures have slowly but surely caught up to the rest of the work done around the Orbital HQ. And while we can't all be Aurich Lawsons (or Jennifer Hahns, to say nothing of our growing video cache), 2015 gave staff plenty of opportunity to flex their artistic muscles.

So to celebrate "the year that was" one final time, we've compiled a collection of our favorite pictures and images from 2015. You'll find links to the relevant stories embedded in the image captions (and hopefully the sizes will be acceptable for all your Pinterest/Instagram/wallpaper/etc. needs). Let us know if we overlooked a particular looker in the comments, otherwise enjoy some of what stands out to the staff below.

Ars Visits...

John Timmer

Ever wondered what happens to your recycling once you dump it in that blue bin? Jay went to find out.

14 more images in gallery

If it wasn't already evident, 2015 was a busy year here at Ars. We visited movie sets and fallout bunkers, poured molten lava, and toured a recycling plant among our many excursions. (No rest for the weary, however, as staff are set to attend CES this month.)

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(credit: Alex Wild)

Carpenter ants live in a caste system, where some members of the colony grow into large, strong worker guards known as majors and others grow into small, inquisitive food scouts known as minors. Scientists have long been fascinated by how majors and minors come to be. Though the two castes share the exact same genomes (and parents), they look and behave in dramatically different ways. Clearly, these differences must be epigenetic, or triggered by environmental factors that take hold after the ants are born. Now a group of researchers have shown that just one dose of a specific enzyme, injected into a recently-hatched major's brain, can mess with the ant's epigenome for months.

Many studies have shown that social insects like bees create their biological castes with food. Queen bees, for example, are made by feeding royal jelly to a larva. Speculating that a similar mechanism might be at work in carpenter ants, University of Pennsylvania developmental biologist Daniel Simola and his colleagues attempted to isolate a substance they could feed to ants that might cause one caste to transform into another. Specifically, they wanted to see whether they could induce a major worker to act like a minor worker, abandoning her job as guard to become a forager. They focused specifically on enzymes that affect 160 genes whose activity diverged the most between minors and majors. Those genes included ones associated with learning, memory, and the way neurons communicate with each other in the brain.

In this video, the researchers explain how the ant caste system works.

Eventually, Simola and his colleagues found just a few enzymes that regulated the behavior of those genes. After several experiments with feeding the substance to their insect subjects, the researchers figured out how to inject the enzymes into the brains of major workers shortly after hatching. The treatment made the ants take on new social roles immediately. Those major workers looked big and powerful like their unmodified major sisters, but they acted like minors, exploring and foraging for food. In a paper published today in Science, Simola and his co-authors explain that they observed the modified majors acting like minors for up to 50 days after hatching. Carpenter ant workers can live up to 7 years, so it's not clear whether this alteration in the insects' behavior would last their whole lives.

The modification ultimately depended on changing the behavior of one particular gene, Rpd3, which set off a cascade effect that changed the behavior of other genes too.

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Finnish mobile company Jolla had a rough year in 2015, and the company decided to stop producing its own hardware in order to focus on its Sailfish OS software. But what about folks who’ve already given the company money to buy hardware that hasn’t been delivered? After launching a smartphone in 2013, Jolla launched a […]

Jolla to crowdfunding backers: Not everyone will get a tablet is a post from: Liliputing

(credit: orangebrompton)

Welcome to Ars Cardboard, our weekend look at tabletop games! Check out our complete board gaming coverage right here—and let us know what you think.

What do we do on the Ars Orbiting HQ to while away the lonely holiday hours? Play board games, of course. And the last 18 months were high-water marks for the hobby, throwing out innovative, beautiful titles on a near-monthly basis.

Here, we've rounded up a few of our favorites from 2015 (with a few late 2014 titles sneaking in for good measure). These are the new games that we most enjoyed this year—and we hope you'll find something new to try, too.

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