One of the downsides of the bittorrent protocol over previous P2P applications was the fact you couldn’t search the network for content, this is what cubit a plugin for azureus aims to change.

Below Is What The Plugin Authors have to say.

What is it?

Cubit is a system that provides fully decentralized approximate keyword search capabilities to Azureus as a standard plugin. Approximate search means that you can use Cubit to find a movie, song or artist even if you don’t know which spelling variation is used in the title or in her name. It gives you what you mean instead of what you asked for exactly, and returns the best results in the network in only a few seconds.

How does it work?

Cubit creates alongside BitTorrent a lightweight peer-to-peer network designed from the ground up to enable rapid and accurate approximate searches. It performs the searches without relying on any centralized components, and therefore is immune to legal and technical attacks targeting torrent aggregators. Additional technical details can be found in the approach section.

Screenshot

After playing around with cubit for a while it became clear that the holy grail of bittorrent searches is still a long way off, the system does work but the content returned seems limited at the moment compared to other p2p search functions in clients like emule. Maybe future development’s of the plugin will bring true full search capabilities to the bittorrent protocol like we are used to in other clients, for now though i would stick with you favorite indexing site as Cubit simply doesn’t cut it.

Visit and Download: Cubit Azureus Bittorrent Plugin

The OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) Project had originally released over 8.5GB of free sound samples on their Wiki - Sound Samples, probably not fully anticipating the popularity of these samples they made the error to host them as direct downloads on their server. In a two day period this week the sample pack downloads consumed up to 5TB of data per day from their server, you can read a quote below from the OLPC site.

Dear site visitors, thanks to tremendous interest in these files, we are currently moving them to more dedicated servers. We transmitted 5TB of sound sample a day for two days last week… In the meantime, v.1 of the 44kHz samples (with 80% of the files) can be downloaded via this BitTorrent tracker. You can also download the collections from their creator’s pages on the Internet Archive

This BitTorrent tracker refers to MiniNova.org which OLPC have decided to use as way of saving bandwidth, utilizing the bit torrent protocol to distribute a pack containing around half the samples is a smart move by OLPC and the direct downloads will also remain active on the wiki. Bit Torrent has proved itself time and again as the most effective method of distributing large media files over the Internet, good to see it’s now finally being accepted for that use although the copyright war will still bound to rage on in the background.

If you would like to download the samples in torrent form you can grab them from Mininova - olpc-sound-samples

On Monday, officials from the GVU seized ten webservers first a tracker server and a Webseedserver were seized, An immediate partial evaluation of extensive traffic data found on the server by the police resulted in the discovery to eight further bittorrent Webseed servers hosted with the same Provider.

The operation began in the United States like so many do. The world-wide federation of the filmwirtschaft was originally notified by the Motion Pictures Association OF America (MPAA) that a pirate copy of a current film available on a German portal, It turns out that the film in question could be traced by means of an individualized water-mark located on a Award Screener.

What makes this case different to the usual bittorrent bust’s is the fact the US individual who rented the servers was charging for downloads, basically he was commercially trading pirated copies of content just like an online store would. Found on the servers were latest current works in high quality, including films, like “John Rambo”, “Rush Hour 3″ and “The Attic”. Games lovers could choose between titles, such as “Crisis” and “Assassin’s Creed”. The offer predominantly addressed itself to prospective customers from the English-language area.

The tenth computer which functioned as tracker server as mentioned above, made the file exchanges possible. 60 Terabyte the monthly data traffic amounted to the total that has been quoted. This corresponds to the traffic data of almost 14,000 commercial DVDs, which were distributed to 13.000 users world-wide for order - in Australia and the USA and other countries.

What.cd a private bittorrent site dedicated to the world of music has moved from Leaseweb in Holland to Sweden-based PRQ hosting, PRQ Hosting is operated by the owners of the pirate bay.

In October this year Cleveland Police arrested the owner of OiNK.cd and the web site was closed down, Two alternatice sites quickly sprung up to take over the OiNK legacy What.cd and Waffles.fm, both achieved 1000’s of users in a short period of time and both wer also hosted at Leaseweb in Holland. Leaseweb was one of the most popular hosting companies in the world for bittorrent trackers and had also hosted OiNK before it was taken offline.

In mid November Leasweb droped another bombshell on Bittorrent Owners that were hosting tracker servers with them, notifying the bittorrent tracker owners that they had a deadline of the 1st December to find an alternative hosting home. The source behind the leasweb exodus is the ever resourceful dutch anti-piracy group BREIN.

Leaseweb Forced To Shut Down More BitTorrent Sites

Quote from What.CD

Yes, you’re reading that correctly. A few hours ago, we relocated the entire site to a single server hosted in the prq.se datacenter - with 12 hours left on our leaseweb deadline. The move went quite smoothly (a lot more smoothly than we anticipated), although some users are still experiencing DNS problems.

If you’re having problems accessing the site or the tracker, do this:

1. Check your hosts file. If you edited it when we changed servers before, it’ll still be forwarding the what.cd domain name to the old server. Just remove the what.cd lines, and all should be well.

2. If that doesn’t work, flush dns. In windows, you do this by going start -> run, typing in cmd, then typing in ipconfig /flushdns.

3. If the above two methods have no effect, then your problems are most likely caused by caching in your DNS servers. They’ll be sorted out automatically in the next 12 hours.

Waffles.fm is expected to follow suit and move to sweden in the coming days.

Moviex.info is a private members only bittorrent community and tracker that has been setup and configured to leech file sources from public bittorrent users, their tracker configuration allows only seeding for external users with downloading being blocked for non members of moviex.info.

The large amount of private bittorrent tracker web sites are exactly that, private and for registered members only. When a member signs up to a private bittorrent tracker community they are normally provided with a uniqe ID often called a PassKey. This uniqe passkey then allows users to download torrents from the the site and gives the sites tracker a mean’s to monitor that individuals download and upload ratios/amount.

A user that downloads a torrent from a private tracker and that is not a member of that tracker will usually get a tracker connection failure in their bittorrent client. They will not be able to download or upload any data from that torrent, more often than not rendering the torrent useless to them.

This is the basis that most private bittorrent sites work upon, most that is apart from www.moviex.info.

Over that past few months bittorrent users have noticed a sudden rise in torrent files being uploaded to public indexing sites like newtorrents.info, mininova.org, and thepiratebay.org that contains a tracker url belonging to moviex.info, newtorrents.info is indicated as being the most polutted site containing these torrent file uploads.

The two tracker urls that are present in these uploaded torrents are the pirate bay along with the moviex.info url that always has the same passkey present, presumably the passkey for an anonymous user.

http://www.moviex.info:2710/r12xjr0azivx42cjuyzn3c73mdqxj31q/announce
http://vip.tracker.thepiratebay.org/announce

To see a pirate bay tracker URL present in a torrent file is nothing out of the ordinary so what’s special about the Moviex.info URL being present in public torrents we may hear you ask, well the message you get when trying to connect to the moviex.info tracker if you are not a member below should just about say it all.

You can clearly see from the tracker message that moviex.info allows non members of their site who have downloaded the torrent file to seed parts but never actually download any from their members, this is a huge bonus for moviex.info tracker and it’s members. Currently NewTorrents.info provides 1000’s of downloads per day to torrent users and reportedly 50% of the available torrents on that site have the moviex.info tracker URL present, the percentage may be higher.

These deliberatley and consistently uploaded torrent files allow members of Moviex.info to leech data from the external users that have downloaded the torrent file from newtorrents.info, the bonus for moviex.info members is that they never have to and cannot upload a kb of that torrent to the non moviex member.

It’s a pretty nice system if you want your private tracker to gain external seeds along with faster download speeds for your members, It’s however also a very damaging method for any user who is not a member of MovieX.info as they will continually upload pieces of the torrent to users who will give nothing back.

How can you stop uploading to the leech tracker of moviex.info, well if you download a torrent file from a public tracker check the tracker URL’s and remove the one below if it is present. This will stop you seeding the file on that tracker and in turn not allow members of moviex.info to leech data from you.

http://www.moviex.info:2710/r12xjr0azivx42cjuyzn3c73mdqxj31q/announce

You could also try blocking the moviex tracker by the IP Address below in your IP filter if your not a member.

206.53.62.206

Moviex have taken the time to code this feature into their tracker and at the moment as far as P2PViNE can tell are the only private site exploiting this type of dirty hack to leech from external bittorrent users.

What moviex.info should do is not allow external users with no passkey to connect to their tracker in any way, instead they deliberatley setup to leech as much from the bittorrent community as possible.

UPDATE: PeerGuardian 2 now blocks moviex.info from connectig to your torrent client, you can download the PeerGuardian 2 installer from HERE.