Awesome Techs

The site Hid.im, allows users to convert torrent files into PNG images, as a way to allow the uncensored, hidden upload of torrent files to image hosting services such as photobucket, imageshack etc, also almost all discussion boards allow uploads of image files.

According to Michael Nutt, founder of the site, via TorrentFreak the site is

“an attempt to make torrents more resilient. The difference is that you no longer need an indexing site to host your torrent file. Many forums will allow uploading images but not other types of files.”

For this to work we have to simply select the torrent file and submit it to the site and the site will do all the background work. the only restriction is on the file size. The file size should be less than 250 KB.

Those trying to decode the message will need either a Firefox extension or through the site’s bookmarklet.

From TorrentFreak,

In his article ‘Playing Whack-A-Mole With Data: The Pirate Bay Lives On‘, Jamie King cut through much of the doom and gloom of the last week and took a refreshingly optimistic view of how the sale of The Old Pirate Bay might not necessarily be the death-touch many people in the BitTorrent community think it is.

Jamie mused: “What if someone was to simply scrape and copy all The Pirate Bay’s torrents over to a new tracker and Mininova and all the other indexes currently using the TPB tracker were to change their listings to point to that? OpenBitTorrent.com for example, an independent open tracker which started recently.”

So today we ask this question – was Jamie’s article incredibly prophetic? Or did it provide the spark, the catalyst, the inspiration needed to bring the BitTorrent community out of its premature misery this week, instead prompting it into positive action rather than self-destruction?

Whatever the truth, whatever the route, today the BitTorrent community has reason for cautious optimism – or possibly a full-scale celebration.

Try this for yourself, don’t take my word for it. First of all find a torrent on The Pirate Bay – I chose Montt Mardie’s “We Are All The Pirate Bay” for symbolic demo purposes here. Now paste the URL of the torrent into the editor on TorrentEditor.com and click ‘edit it’. TorrentEditor will return the seeds and peers – in this case 182 seeds and no peers.

For the next step, remove the Pirate Bay’s trackers from the torrent and replace them with the announce URL for OpenBitTorrent’s tracker, which is http://tracker.openbittorrent.com:80/announce and click ‘update’ at the bottom of the page. Result: 182 seeds, no peers.

I haven’t got time to check all 1,720,650 torrents on Pirate Bay right now but after trying a few, I reached the same result each time. Also, the scrape file of the OpenBitTorrent tracker is exactly the same size of that of The Pirate Bay tracker.

GGF would like you to think that they will control The New Pirate Bay but I believe that accolade is for the community to bestow. So is OBT (c’mon, what’s a tracker without an acronym these days?) the New TPB?

It is if you say it is.

Now look at these too:

nslookup tracker.thepiratebay.org

Non-authoritative answer:
Name: tracker.thepiratebay.org
Addresses: 2a01:298:3:1::2
192.121.86.4
192.121.86.2
192.121.86.6
192.121.86.3
192.121.86.8
192.121.86.7
192.121.86.5

nslookup tracker.openbittorrent.com

Non-authoritative answer:
Name: tracker.openbittorrent.com
Addresses: 192.121.86.5
192.121.86.8
192.121.86.7
192.121.86.4
192.121.86.2
192.121.86.3
192.121.86.6

and This

http://whois.domaintools.com/openbittorrent.com

http://whois.domaintools.com/212.63.222.20

person: Fredrik Neij

Man i can tell you this is huge.I hope, you got what this means. Pity Global Gaming Factory X.

The site which is one of the top 100 websites that are being visited, “thepiratebay.org” is being sold out to to another Swedish company Global Gaming Factory X (GGF) for 7.8 million USD.

The acquisition is set to be completed in August and this will have an effect on the business model of the TPB.

GGF CEO Hans Pandeya added,

“The Pirate Bay is a site that is among the top 100 most visited Internet sites in the world. However, in order to live on, The Pirate Bay requires a new business model, which satisfies the requirements and needs of all parties, content providers, broadband operators, end users, and the judiciary. Content creators and providers need to control their content and get paid for it. File sharers need faster downloads and better quality,”

Anyway the official blog of TPB says

“The profits from the sale will go into a foundation that is going to help with projects about freedom of speech, freedom of information and the openess of the nets.”

Peter Sunde, co-founder of TPB, has told TorrentFreak that The Pirate Bay will be shutting down their tracker and remove torrent files from their servers. After closing the tracker The Pirate Bay will use the torrents of an upcoming third party service which will introduce an API accessible by other torrent sites as well.

Update:Peter Sunde, co-founder of TPB, has told TorrentFreak that The Pirate Bay will be shutting down their tracker and remove torrent files from their servers. After closing the tracker The Pirate Bay will use the torrents of an upcoming third party service which will introduce an API accessible by other torrent sites as well.

Update:

ThePirateBay adds Userdeletion.

According to the tpb blog :

“We are going to build a user deletion interface later today. Many people have asked about having their account removed and we will not force anyone to stay on of course.

However, we also want to point out that we have no logs of anything, no personal data will be transferred in the eventual sale (since no personal data is kept). So no need to be worried for safety. We always care for that.

It also feels a bit sad to see the comments on the previous blog entry. We understand that you’re upset. But we have reasons to do this that we cannot ignore. We need to keep the site going and this is the only working alternative. We cannot finance the growth of the site anymore and we cannot back down. The only way is up and this is the only route to that place.

The support we had, is support we still need. We’ve been fighting for years for you; and yes; you have supported us in that endeavor. We still need you, even if you abandon the site. The important thing is that you keep sharing and keep on saving the internets. We will try to do that, but right now, we need and deserve a break. Some things needs to be reborn and rebooted. Let’s make this into something good!”

According to a new study performed by Futuresource Consulting, 8 percent of consumers from the UK, France, Germany, and the US admitted to downloading video content such as movies by unauthorized means, usually from file sharing sites and networks.

The study, entitled ‘Living With Digital: Consumer Insights into Entertainment Consumption’, “used a representative sample in each country and provided respondents with a list of legal and illegitimate download sites from which to select.”

France topped the list, with 25 percent of survey takers admitting they pirated video content. The survey took about 625 consumers from each nation.