Month: October 2016

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.

Googles Pixel-Smartphones gibt es bekanntlich auch bei der Deutschen Telekom. Wer dort sein Smartphone kauft, muss sich aber auf ein paar Unterschiede einstellen. Ob diese als Einschränkungen empfunden werden, hängt vom Einsatzzweck ab. (Google Pixel, Smartphone)

Das Galaxy Note 7 wird für Samsung immer mehr zum Desaster. Zwei weitere Smartphones sind in Brand geraten, die eigentlich nicht mehr von dem Selbstentzündungsproblem betroffen sein sollten. Einen der beiden Fälle hat Samsung geheim halten wollen. (Galaxy Note 7, Smartphone)

From useless IP addresses to useless link removals, read the news roundup for the week ending October 9, 2016

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Google now removes more than 24 million URLs every week as part of their piracy takedown program.

The company now processes more than 10 million takedown notices every 3 days. This compares to five years ago when it took an entire years for Google to receive the same amount of notices.

Since 2011, Google has already removed more than 1.83 billion links, but at the current rate, Google is set to process more than a billion links just this year alone, which would represent a hundred fold increase in just five years.

And despite the frequent report of mistaken requests for removals, recent data shows only two percent of submitted links are rejected for removal, with 7 percent rejected due to duplication or incomplete links - the rest, 91 percent, are all removed from Google's search results.

But despite the herculean effort on Google's behalf, rights-holders are still unhappy that they're constantly playing a game of "whack-a-mole", that removed URLs are re-added back to Google as new URLs. Rights-holders have called for Google to implement a "take down, stay down" regime.

[via TorrentFreak]

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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.

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Amazon have a cool name for this toy: “Flying Screaming Slingshot Cow!” Pretty funny to read and kinda cruel. Although this piece of toy cost you $6.60 only, it’s indeed a great joy playing it. Especially for surprising people around your office just like this movie: Basically, this toy really “Flying and Screaming” when you […]