As you may of heard, The Pirate Bay’s ship hasn’t sank but it has been overtaken(bought) by the Global Gaming Factory, they plan to make the site a bit more legal.  The Pirate Bay staff assured us not much would change(link); however if it does this will not stop piracy.  Trackers are like a hydra; kill one head several will grow in its place there are literally hundreds of trackers out there:

Note: Keep in mind most likely piracy is illegal where you live; although chance at prosecution is slim-none, there is a chance.

MiniNova, many trackers appeared after the falling of SuprNova, in our opinion this is the best one that came from that group.  It indexes from other trackers giving it thousands of torrents, the downside? Well every now and then you get a torrent from a private site which will either not download for you or go extremely slow.

Demonoid, is hard to classify it is a “private” tracker meaning only members can use it and the sign ups are closed.  However it isn’t hard to get in they often will open registration up for a day, it is probably the easiest private tracker to get in and can be a doorway into more private ones.

1337x.org, currently a very small tracker letting Pirate Bay Users know they are safe here.  Best of all this place has a 24/7 chat and several DJ’s giving it a nice place not only to pirate but hang out.

Vuze Subscriptions and ShowRSS are a match made in heaven for those of you who download TV Shows.  Why? Well Vuze has the ability to automatically download files from an  RSS Feed while ShowRSS lets you create an RSS Feed that will only show the shows you want!

What You Need:

1. Vuze (Torrent Client)
2. ShowRSS Account (Tutorial Here)

Steps:

1. Open Vuze
2. Click on the (+) next to subscriptions, located on the left of the Vuze Window.
3. A screen may pop up asking if you want to enable this feature, click yes.
4. A window titled “Available Subscriptions” should now be displayed.  Click Create New Subscription.
5. Click on “RSS” near the top of the “Create New Subscription” window.
6. Place your personal ShowRSS feed address here and click Save.
7. Now you will be back in Vuze, give your Subscription a name and click next.
8. Change the “Check:” to 1 hour and check  ”Auto-Download”
9. Click Save.
10. Vuze will now check your ShowRSS feed for any new shows(as long as Vuze is open)  and download the new shows when available.

If you have download large files, or pirated content before chances are you have ran into a torrent file.  Basically a torrent is a file which will tell a torrent client where the file actually is.  I personally recommend using Vuze (formerly Azureus) as it will work on any operating system, which lets me answer any question.  Also it has many many features, if you want a torrent client to do something it can do it!

There are many torrent sites, the most popular being ThePirateBay.org.  There are a few items you should know before you begin your quest to download torrents.

• Seeders: Normally has a arrow pointing up as an icon.  This is the most important thing about a torrent, this is the number of people sharing the full file.  If no one is sharing it, your download won’t go fast: trust me.
• Leechers: Normally has an arrow pointing down as an icon.  This is the number of people downloading the file at this time, to ensure good download speeds you want to make sure this number isn’t incredibly higher then the seeders(like 10x).  Unless you are on a private tracker there is a good chance you will not get a good speed.
• Peer: Person you are connected to, it can be either a leecher or seeder!
• Tracker: The server that keep track of who has what.  None of the actual files are stored here, it simply tells your client where to go to get a file.
• Seeding: After downloading you will share the file with everyone.  You may stop seeding at any time, however it is common courtesy to seed atleast half of what you downloaded.  If you are on a private tracker you will be banned for not seeding.

If at any point you run into a snag you can ask us here, we generally have a very fast response time.

1. Download & Install Vuze.
2. Open Vuze
3. If you have a firewall it will probably ask if you want to add an exception… Allow it
4. Once Vuze is opened we should ensure we are not using ports 6881-6999 , those are the default torrent ports ans ISP’s have a tendency to slow down traffic there.
   

   1. Open Vuze Prefernces. On Mac click on “Vuze” in the title bar and “Windows/Linux” click on File, then Preferences.
   2. You should already be on the connection section, if not click connections on the left.
   3. Change the “Incoming TCP Listen Port”, I changed mine to 1100

5. Once we verified we are on a different port, ensure Vuze is able to listen.  (your local ip may change from time to time; if you notice torrents going slow in the future, run this test again)
   

   1. Go to Help > NAT / Firewall Test
   2. Click Test, if it says OK you are good to go. If you have issues scroll down to Network Issues.

6. Download and open a torrent file, Vuze should open and begin downloading it.

Network Issues

The problem most people have with torrents is they claim they go “slow”; which can be the case sometimes, however most of the time it is going slow due to the network not being configured properly.  You will need to log into your router and set up port forwarding to get optimal speeds, there is a guide here.  If you have problems you can always ask a question here, I do my best to answer all questions within a day.  You will still be able to download without the port forwarding set up, however it will be slower.

Compiling from sources can be a pain in the neck. It also can be a joy, and in the end you get the great feeling of accomplishment when you are done. I can finally say “I did it!” without having to worry about my next problem (or so I hope not). Anyways, I will take you through the basics and setting things up, so bear with me if you do not understand anything. By anything I mean, anything at all. If you get stuck on a step, keep on reading. If you are still stumbled, do not hesitate to post a comment with your misunderstanding!

What?

rTorrent, a terminal based bit-torrent client for Linux. It can do anything, it has the optimization to run in the background with (basically) no notice at all. Lost? This is just a simple explanation of the program. The benefit of rTorrent to Azureus or some other 3rd party clients is that rTorrent is extremely efficent. Said enough? No! Without rTorrent you do not realize how much easier and enjoyable it is to download things off of the bittorrent network. I may be stumbling over words, so if you really want an explantion and dont mind reading more about the “What” of rTorrent, here are some links.

rTorrent @ wikipedia.org
libtorrent @ wikipedia.org

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Cable companies report that 55% of traffic in the US is due to torrents. What is a torrent? Well it is a peer to peer network which can deliver insanely fast download speeds at no cost for the hoster! It also puts a nice cloak on whoever put the file out there, which means you can get almost any song or software. Including the new Windows Vista for free!

To get started you will need to get a torrent client here are my recomendations per OS, if you want one client to handle any OS you can get Azureus but it can be a memory hog and slow down your machine.

• Windows: utorrent, it is free small and very memory efficient meaning it won’t slow your computer down.
• Linux: rtorrent, like utorrent but for linux.
• Mac OS X: you can get rtorrent if your brave, or Transmission if you like a gui.

Now after you installed it you can go to a torrent tracker and search for you want such as Torrentz.com or ThePirateBay.org.

How to improve your speeds!

• Set up port forwarding or DMZ for the computer running the torrent, you should look in your torrents preferences for the port range. Their are no ports dedicated for torrents anymore due to ISP’s putting restrictions on those ports.
• Put a cap on your upload speed, I suggest capping it to 20kbps but you can always look at what the max seems to be and dividing it by 2.
• If you are on windows xp sp2, chances are it is only going to allow 10 connections which will kill your download speed, use this program(mirror) to change that number, any number between 50 and 100 should be fine.