I was very surprised to read on Slashdot about Comcast apparently sending DMCA notices to torrent users who have downloaded fansubs of certain unlicensed anime (source). People who claim that no company can send out DMCA notices for unlicensed anime are, of course, mistaken. Just because no US company is licensed to distribute a series in the US does not mean that the copyright owners (in Japan) have no legal rights in the US.
Nevertheless, I am very surprised at the tactics employed by whomever is asking Comcast to send out these notices. First, well-established anime fansub groups have thus far been very respectful of the wishes of Japanese copyright-holders of shows the groups are fansubbing. A polite letter from the anime creators to the fansubbers generally halts the fansubbing (at least by “mainstream” groups) of that particular series, or even all series from that company.
Second, unlike Hollywood movies, software, and American TV shows, the spreading of anime fansubs via BitTorrent rely almost exclusively on a small number of and easy to track down trackers and indexers. Many groups use the a.scarywater.net tracker. Others use their own trackers. Most anime torrent downloaders also get their anime from a small number of indexers, such as AnimeSuki and Baka-Updates. These sites and trackers will generally respect any takedown notice from anime copyright-holders.
It seems that a few messages to these fansub groups, anime trackers and indexers will do a LOT more to curb copyright infringement of an anime series than sending out thousands of DMCA notices to downloaders.
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Why do I link to torrents on isoHunt whenever possible? Because isoHunt is the only torrent site with this cool but seldom talked about feature: tracker cross-referencing. The feature was implemented back in 2005 and is still invaluable.
Identical torrents across the web are often tracked by different trackers. Users might submit identical torrents to different sites using different trackers. Some tracker sites inject their own tracker into torrents. isoHunt caches one copy of these identical torrents (with the same hash), and edits the torrent to include every available tracker tracking the torrent. Therefore, when you download a torrent from isoHunt, you get maximum reliability and performance due to the redundant trackers that can pick up the slack even when the primary or original tracker is down or slow.
Remember to use redundant trackers when you create your own torrents too.
And for those who aren’t aware, isoHunt is an awesome meta search engine. It indexes practically every public torrent site on the web, and there’s generally no benefit to using other meta search engines instead of isoHunt. Check out the list of sites indexed by isoHunt. Be sure to shoot Gary an email if you know of sites that are not indexed.
Ever want to surf the web anonymously? Forget unreliable and sometimes illegal open proxies that are usually compromised or misconfigured servers. Forget web proxies that spam you with ad frames and pop-ups. Try Tor, an open-source anonymous peer-to-peer network. Using Tor and Firefox is extremely easy. More about Tor in this Wikipedia entry.
I tried the following steps in Arch Linux, but they should apply to any modern operating system. (By the way, Arch Linux is my favorite Linux distribution. I’ll likely write about it at some point.)
To verify if your browser connections are anonymized by Tor, visit TorCheck. You can also visit any of the many sites which show you your IP address. If Tor is working, the IP address shown should be different from yours.
Windows users who need an even simpler method of using Tor should check out the XeroBank (xB) Browser. Read more about it at Wikipedia.
Be warned, don’t use Tor to do anything illegal. Tor has known weaknesses and does not guarantee your anonymity if someone wants to catch you badly enough.
If you’re interested in helping the Tor network grow, consider running a Tor relay.
Ever wanted to edit the trackers in a torrent, share the modified torrent without breaking compatibility with the unmodified torrent? Maybe the torrent is using a dead or dying tracker. Maybe you just want to add more backup trackers to a torrent with only one tracker. You’ll be glad to know that you can do just that.
Editing the trackers in a torrent file does not change the info hash of the torrent. Trackers rely on this info hash to figure out when users are requesting files from the same torrent. If the info hash changes, then trackers and clients will treat the torrent as different from the unmodified torrent, and the tracker will no longer share the seeds and peers using the unmodified torrent, even if the files being shared are identical.
The easiest way I’ve found to edit a torrent file is actually a slick online tool, Torrent Editor. It is, of course, labeled “beta” as all web applications nowadays are (when did the meaning of “beta” change from incomplete, unpolished, buggy, to hot and cool?), but I haven’t encountered any bugs. You simply upload the torrent you want to edit, add/remove the trackers using the online forms, then save and download the modified torrent. It’s all quite self-explanatory.
Note: I originally began researching convenient ways of editing torrents to see if I could edit the “private” aka “DHT” flag of torrents to convert torrents uploaded on private trackers into public ones. It turns out I cannot. 
Changing the private flag changes the info hash.
Here is a list of BitTorrent trackers I know of that track any torrents, whether you upload the torrent to their site or not, and track for any users whether they are registered on their sites or not. Basically, if you need trackers for a torrent that’s open to the public, use these trackers. In fact, use all of them so that you have super-duper redundancy in case your primary tracker goes down. One of the weaknesses of the BitTorrent protocol is its reliance on centralized trackers. The use of redundant trackers (along with the DHT feature) all but eliminates this weakness. Read on for the list.
Continue reading ‘20+ open and public BitTorrent trackers’
