The popular cross-platform BitTorrent client, Transmission, just released a new version. Along with other enhancements it now comes bundled with Clutch, enabling users to remotely control their torrents from any web browser.

The free, multi-platform Transmission BitTorrent client continues to increase in popularity and is considered by many to be a fast and lightweight piece of software.

The open source client runs on various operating systems with the notable exception of Windows, and according to the developers was designed to offer functionality without bloat. It is now the default BitTorrent client on Ubuntu.

Windows users who favor uTorrent as their BitTorrent client have had the ability to control their torrents from a webUI (web user interface) for some time now. The webUI for Transmission is known as ‘Clutch‘. This additional software makes it easy to monitor and control torrent transfers remotely, from any web browser connected to the Internet, anywhere in the world.

Previously, Transmission and Clutch had to be obtained separately but with the arrival of new Transmission releases (v1.30 and v1.31), that has changed.

‘Gimp’, a Clutch developer explains: “We are pleased to announce the Clutch project has now merged with Transmission. There will be no more releases of Clutch on its own, from 1.30 onwards it is bundled inside Transmission. You can still download Clutch 0.4 from the clutchbt.com website if you need clutch for an older version of Transmission, however that release is no longer supported.”

Other additions and improvements to the latest Transmission versions include:

- Ability to add and remove tracker addresses
- Ability to create .torrent files with multiple tracker URLs
- Support for HTTP/FTP seeding

Clutch can be enabled by finding the ‘Remote’ tab in the ‘Preferences’ section.

Finally, here is ‘Gimp’ again with a call out to the community: “Although it has merged [with Transmission], Clutch is still a very new project, and thus there are still a few bugs and a lot of features missing. This message is also an open call for people to test Clutch all they can, and please, please submit patches and improvements! Right now clutch does not have a developer with enough time to push it forward to the place we all want it at, so anyone with the experience, and time, is welcome to help out.”

Gimp can be contacted on the Clutch forums.

This is an article from: TorrentFreak

Transmission BitTorrent Client Now Bundled With Clutch

BitTorrent Inc., founded by Bram Cohen, the inventor of the BitTorrent protocol, is firing 12 of its 55 employees. The company, which also develops the popular BitTorrent client uTorrent, had been struggling to make money from their download store, which is one of the causes of the layoffs.

One of the main plans of BitTorrent Inc. was to be the next iTunes, by selling movies and music via their “BitTorrent powered” online store. For several reasons, DRM being one of them, the store never became the success they hoped it to be.

Valleywag reports that the company has now decided to lay off its sales and marketing department, due to failing attempts to sell the entertainment store to Best Buy. This means that the development of uTorrent, specifically the long awaited Mac version, is not in danger.

The BitTorrent entertainment network was launched February 2007 and offers movie rentals starting at starting at $2.99. Before the store launched, BitTorrent Inc’s co-founder Ashwin Navin said that the store was going to compete with BitTorrent sites like The Pirate Bay and mininova, as he said, “If we’re not competing effectively with piracy, we’re not going to win.”

There never was any real competition however, mainly because the movies are infected with Windows DRM. The company never wanted to use DRM. In fact, Bram Cohen told TorrentFreak in an interview that the DRM issue is causing an awful lot of headaches, but that most of their content partners are insisting on it.

BitTorrent’s Ashwin Navin was a bit more outspoken about it. He said that DRM is “a time bomb waiting to happen,” and that it will inspire people to pirate content. One thing we can be sure of, it didn’t help to convert illegal downloaders to go legal.

If online video stores want to compete with their pirate counterparts, the pricing should be reasonable, the catalogue extensive, and all without DRM. The BitTorrent store failed to meet these standards, and unfortunately, 12 people lost their job because of it.

BitTorrent Inc. has not replied to a request for comment at the time of publication.

This is an article from: TorrentFreak

BitTorrent Fires 20% of Its Employees

After it was ruled that a hacker who obtained unauthorized emails from TorrentSpy on behalf of the MPAA did not technically intercept them under the WireTap Act, the EFF has filed a friend-of-the-court brief. EFF describes the recent decision as a “dangerous attempt to circumvent privacy laws,” and wants to see it overturned.

The case, Bunnell v. Motion Picture Association of America, was brought against the MPAA by Justin Bunnell, the owner of TorrentSpy, who found out that the MPAA had intercepted his email communication.

In 2005, an associate of TorrentSpy, Robert Anderson, ‘changed sides’ after an internal dispute and decided to work with the MPAA instead, gathering evidence against the BitTorrent site.

The man configured the TorrentSpy mail server to copy and forward all of the site’s email to his own Gmail account. He later sold the 34 pages of information to the MPAA for around $15,000 but later relented and went back to work with the torrent site, telling them what he knew. The same man also spied on The Pirate Bay.

The EFF had filed a brief with the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals, arguing that federal wiretap laws protect emails from interception while they are stored on the mail servers that work to transmit them. However, the federal district court ruled that because the emails were momentarily stored on the server during the delivery process, under the Wiretap Act they were not technically intercepted. The ruling itself only applies to the 9th District, but could have relevance at other courts in the US.

In its friend-of-the-court brief, the EFF states this ruling is incorrect and must be reviewed, since it could allow the government to spy on other people’s emails in the future, without the need for a court order.

“The district court’s decision, if upheld, would have dangerous repercussions far beyond this single case,” Senior Staff Attorney Kevin Bankston at the EFF said. “That court opinion — holding that the secret and unauthorized copying and forwarding of emails while they pass through an email server is not an illegal interception of those emails — threatens to wholly eviscerate federal privacy protections against Internet wiretapping and to authorize the government to conduct similar email surveillance without getting a wiretapping order from a judge.”

It appears that, as long as emails aren’t actually intercepted en-route, it could be legal for the government to request that an ISP copies an individual’s emails after they arrive on the mail server. This would not be classed as a breach of wiretap laws, which up a worryingly easy circumvention of vital privacy laws according to the EFF.

The EFF asks the Court to vacate the district court decision, and and rule that the MPAA hacker did “intercept” email communication from TorrentSpy owner Justin Bunnell. The full amicus brief can be viewed here.

This is an article from: TorrentFreak

EFF Supports TorrentSpy in Electronic Privacy Case

After a month of downtime, TextBookTorrents.com makes its return, right on time, as the first semester starts in just a few weeks. The BitTorrent tracker, dedicated to sharing knowledge in the form of textbooks, was pulled offline by Dreamhost early July because the hosting company received a takedown request.

The Textbook Torrents tracker is considered to be the largest library of textbooks on BitTorrent. The site had been flying under the radar for quite some time but this changed a month ago. On July 1st, The Chronicle of Higher Education ran a story on the site, which was picked up by Slashdot and later the LA Times blog.

All this attention led to thousands of new visitors to the tracker, but the publicity also had a downside. Geekman, the administrator of Textbook Torrents told TorrentFreak that their host, xlHost, and their domain registrar, Dreamhost, both received a takedown request a few days after all the press coverage. “We received a DMCA notice from Pearson Education a week or so prior, which we complied with, but it was a group of publishers that contacted our host,” he told us.

Although the tracker was pretty popular, with around 20,000 peers trading files at any given point in time, Geekman said he had never received takedown notices from big publishers before. “We had a couple of emails from individuals before, but nothing from organizations. One was an editor complaining about being cheated out of his 10¢ per copy commission.”

On July 5th Dreamhost suspended Geekman’s account, and despite his many efforts to contact them, they simply didn’t respond to his inquiries. It took more than a week before he was allowed to transfer the domain. Now, more than a month after the site went down, TextbookTorrents returns, and it’s not planning to go away anytime soon.

Geekman plans to focus on making the site’s resources redundant, to reduce vulnerability and to make sure the site remains online. In addition he will work on the legal issues and improve the privacy of the site’s users. One of the most drastic changes is the decision to stop the logging of IP-addresses, which means that the site will stop ratio tracking. Making the tracker public will ensure the privacy of the users, in case the server is compromised.

“I want to see the textbook industry change such that we are no longer needed,” Geekman says when we ask him about his main motivation to bring the site back, while mentioning cheap books and responsible business practices as examples of positive change.

He doesn’t think publishers should give away their books –even though some authors profit from doing so– but he does think most books are too expensive. “The companies may be corrupt, but they have a right to make money. They can’t be expected to give their material away for free. After all, there is a significant amount of work involved in the production of a textbook. We need a middle ground,” he says.

“I’m not naive enough to say that if something can be distributed in a digital form it should be free but there needs to be some adaptation here,” Geekman added. For now, however, all the publishers see is a threat to their revenue stream, as Allan Ryan of Harvard Business Publishing put it: “We have been fairly vigorous in monitoring these sites and in requesting that they take down our copyrighted content.”

They sure have something to monitor now, as TextbookTorrents has made its return…because you still can’t torrent beer. Currently, the site can only be accessed directly via the IP-address, however, the domain should be working again shortly.

This is an article from: TorrentFreak

Textbook Torrents Makes Long Awaited Comeback

Configuring your BitTorrent client is essential if you want to enjoy optimal download speeds. In our quest to help users get the most out of BitTorrent, we asked one of the uTorrent developers how we can speed up our downloads.

At TorrentFreak we have written quite a few speed guides, but we are not as knowledgeable as the people who work with BitTorrent clients daily. A few weeks ago we asked Olivier Chalouhi, developer and CTO of Vuze (formerly known as Azureus) to share some of his BitTorrent speed tips with us.

Today we continue our mission to help people get the most out of BitTorrent, by asking uTorrent developer Greg Hazel to give us his recommendations on how to optimize BitTorrent download speeds. Here are his three suggestions.

Cap the upload speed

Limiting your upload speed is by far the most important suggestion, and was also mention by Olivier Chalouhi in our previous BitTorrent speed guides. The rationale behind it is simple. Your connection is a tube (sort of), if you max out the upload capacity, the tube gets clogged.

Choose the correct maximum number of connections

Too much connections can actually slow down your torrents, instead of increasing the download speed. The uTorrent speed guide (Options > Speed Guide in uTorrent) automatically recommends the ideal settings. For users with a maximum upload speed of 256 kbit/sec, uTorrent suggests a maximum of 35 connections per torrent, and 60 in total.

Run as few torrents as possible

Less is more, sometimes at least. Running fewer torrents will guarantee that your connection can handle all the connections and requests properly. Since BitTorrent rewards people for uploading, the less torrents you run, the faster they will download. Again, the uTorrent speed guide will suggest the optimal settings, which is a maximum of 2 torrents for users with a maximum upload speed of 256 kbit/sec.

These three settings are the most important according to Greg, and configuring them correctly in your BitTorrent client, is the key to faster downloads.

This is an article from: TorrentFreak

uTorrent Developer Shares BitTorrent Speed Tips

TV shows are by far the most wanted files via BitTorrent, and according to some, it’s fast becoming the modern day TiVo. But what are all those people downloading?

The data is collected by TorrentFreak from a representative sample of BitTorrent sites and is for informational and educational reference only.

At the end of the year we will publish a list of most downloaded TV-shows for the entire year, like we did last December.

TV-shows such as “Lost” and “Heroes” can get up to 10 million downloads per episode, in only a week.

Top Downloads July 27 - August 03

This is an article from: TorrentFreak

Top 10 Most Pirated TV Shows on BitTorrent (wk31)

Mac users missing the community spirit they enjoyed at BrokenStones are on an urgent mission to save an endangered manatee-like sea mammal which lives almost entirely on sea cabbage. But that will have to wait. There’s a brand new Gazelle-based Mac tracker in town - and it promises to be fun. We take a look.

For a commnunity more used to a certain calm, things have been quite turbulent in the Mac torrent scene recently. After hosting issues took down the BrokenStones tracker the mood was low. So, when another site, Vortex Network, offered much as a potential replacement but ultimately proved too controversial, the mood fell lower still.

What the community needs right now is less drama, a place to call home and some well-deserved fun. We spoke to a senior staffer at the brand new mac tracker, SaveTheCoratee.org, to get some answers on the important stuff - like what the hell a coratee is?

“A coratee is an animal that is similar to a manatee, its primary diet is sea cabbage” he told us. “It was hunted and killed by tuna companies and sold to you because they are easier to fish. They are slow and stupid animals that are loving and soft and on the brink of extinction, meaning they are in desperate need of saving.”

The BrokenStones community parallels are obvious - minus the “slow and stupid bit” perhaps. But, an equal (if not greater) amount of love, of course. And cabbage.

“We picked Save the Coratee because of two real reasons. One, I try to live my life and everything I do with a healthy sense of the ridiculous. Two, the mac community is a creative and innovative community. Hand them a fake animal with no description rather than ‘It’s kinda like a manatee’ and people love it. It builds community and creates a family feeling that is ‘fun’.”

So bizarre mammal protection aside, what inspired the staff to start the site? Our source told us: “When BrokenStones went down we started talking with people about getting a site up but Vortex beat us to it.” As we know, things didn’t go to plan at Vortex but in the background, slowly but surely, SaveTheCoratee was still in development. “We started talking and we were kinda moving slow, brain-storming etc. Then stuff started to go down hill at Vortex so we kicked it into gear,” the staff member said.

So, apart from all the regular categories and well-seeded torrents and cabbage-eating sea mammals one would expect at a site like this, what else is there to this site? Well, for a start, the site is based on the Project Gazelle codebase, but it’s been put together ‘in-house’. The team at What.cd weren’t involved beyond the initial development, although they did save the first coratee (a female), and managed to effect some sort of virgin birth and a successful breeding program. I didn’t pry any deeper.

Nevertheless, I was told that a big achievement during the development was that the coders managed to convert the music-based source of Gazelle into a multi-app, multi-purpose site in just 4 days, which certainly sounds like an achievement.

The staff member further told us that SaveTheCoratee hopes to develop into a small, dedicated group (5,000 members, maybe more) of users who love both Apple Computers and BitTorrent sites: “I never want the site to be big or to loose personality” he told us. The site currently has around 1000 members but it’s growing fast.

So what might convince potential users of the site to head over to their IRC channel with a big bucket of sea-cabbage bribes to smooth the entrance interview?

Our source told us: “We included a lot of…. how would I put this… win in the site……or love…….”

According to a message on the site, once you have loved a coratee, you cannot go back to a plain old manatee, because it will seem rough and stupid by comparison.

Sounds like a good time to stock up on sea-cabbage.

This is an article from: TorrentFreak

BitTorrent Mac Fans Try To Save the Coratee

The top 10 most downloaded DVDrips on BitTorrent, “Hancock” tops the chart this week.

We do not link to actual torrent files because linking to files that link to files that may be copyrighted is something that might get us in trouble.

The data is collected by TorrentFreak, and is for informational and educational reference only.

RSS feed for the weekly DVDrip chart.

As of August 4, 2008…

This is an article from: TorrentFreak

Most Downloaded DVDrips on BitTorrent (wk31)

The deals between ISPs and anti-piracy organizations are a worrying trend. In just a few months entertainment industry representatives managed to convince ISPs and governments that they should have the right to accuse and warn Internet subscribers, without solid proof. The question that remains unanswered is whether these warnings will have any effect.

The power of the entertainment industry and anti-piracy lobbyists is growing rapidly. In the UK, six major ISPs have teamed up with the music industry to start mass warning filesharers. France has gone even further, recently adopting a law that will enable the entertainment industry to disconnect alleged pirates on their third warning. Similar methods are proposed throughout the rest of the world.

It’s quite scary if you think about it. In France the right to access the Internet now rests on the shoddy evidence of anti-piracy units, evidence that is known to be inaccurate. Christine Albanel, the French Minister for Culture recently quoted research that allegedly found that 97% of all file-sharers will stop downloading copyrighted content when they receive a warning, but this seems to be very unlikely.

Unfortunately, the minister failed to name the resource for the study, but it does raise some interesting questions. All these new agreements and policies have strong faith in the deterrent function of these so called warnings, but thus far there is no evidence that these actually have any effect. That’s right, millions of people are now receiving warnings (sometimes even threats), and they may very well lead to nothing.

You would think that the government would at least get some solid proof of the deterrent effect of these letters but, perhaps even more importantly, check the validity of the anti-piracy evidence before they allow the entertainment industry to start contacting millions of citizens with intimidating letters. It might turn out that thousands of users receive a letter for something they didn’t do, and that wouldn’t be the first time that had happened. On the other hand, even those who are correctly accused might not change their behavior so easily.

Warning letters will most likely make most pirates more cautious, and they will find ways to get what they want more anonymously. Whatever happens, it wont stop the most of them from getting what they want. As Justin Milne of Telstra BigPond, Australia’s largest Internet provider put it: “There’s no one thing that you can do that is going to fix the problem (but) when people think about this area, they often look to ISPs to provide the silver bullet.”

So how can “pirates” be stopped then? This is not an easy question to answer. Right now, 50% of all BitTorrent traffic is generated by people who download TV-episodes, something that’s available for free in most countries, but not available on demand. It might be a good start for the entertainment industry to rethink their outdated business models, experiment and use peer-to-peer technology to fulfill the ever growing demand for media online.

This is an article from: TorrentFreak

Anti-Piracy Lobby Gains Power Over Internet Subscribers

One of the big breakthrough acts of the last year has joined the increasing ranks of artists who don’t mind if people share their music. Duffy, the million-selling 24 year-old vocalist and winner of this year’s MOJO Song of the Year Award has been downloading for a couple of years. “It’s amazing,” she said.

If the media is to be believed, some artists spend most of their time going to big parties in hugely expensive designer clothes, drinking expensive champagne, driving around in prestige cars, smashing up hotel rooms - and the rest of the time complaining about piracy. It’s very difficult for the average Joe in the street to feel sorry for them, such is the lifestyle gap, but it doesn’t have to be that way.

In recent times we’ve written about the positive attitudes towards file-sharing shown by some big names in the music business. The Nine Inch Nails are probably the most outspoken but there are others, including 50 Cent and more recently Joss Stone, who called file-sharing “brilliant”. Others, like ‘Travis’ are happy for their fans to share.

Now, in an interview with Shortlist magazine, the million-selling 2008 MOJO Song of the Year Award winner, Duffy, says that she got into downloading a couple of years ago, calling it “amazing”.

One of twins, 24 year-old Duffy has sold over a million copies of her debut album Rockferry, making it the biggest selling album of the year in the UK, netting 180,000 sales in the first week alone. In America, the album sold sold 72,000 in its first week, entering the Billboard 200 at Number 4. Her track ‘Mercy’ has been viewed over 17.6 million times on YouTube (although I quite like the just-for-fun remix from ‘The Game’)

But if you don’t have the cash for the album, don’t worry - Duffy is pretty forward thinking when it comes to ‘legal’ versus ‘illegal’ downloads: “Somebody asked me the other day what I thought of illegal downloading, and I thought, ‘You know what? I don’t care,’ because I think the majority are kids and as they get old and get more income they’ll probably buy records. It’s just making music a part of everyone’s lives.”

Duffy notes that access to music is all-important but due to where she lived in her childhood, she had no easy access herself, having to take a two-hour bus trip to get to a good record store.

She’s pragmatic when looking at the big picture: “Well, I mean, it can go two ways – there are pros and cons to everything. Some people think it creates illegal access, but I think the big wheel is round, y’know?” I think it’s got more positives because it basically gives people access, what’s the harm in that?”

“It’s just making music a part of everyone’s lives”

This is an article from: TorrentFreak

‘Song of the Year’ Winner Says Downloading is “Amazing”