Torrentfreak: “BitCannon: Download Torrent Sites to Use Offline” plus 1 more

BitCannon: Download Torrent Sites to Use Offline

Posted: 18 Jan 2015 02:12 AM PST

Attacks on torrent sites are a regular occurrence. That’s been the case for well over a decade and isn’t likely to end anytime soon. As a result people are increasingly looking at ways to make them more resilient.

Proxies and mirrors, for example, helped keep The Pirate Bay accessible in the face of countless web blockades. And today, projects like Open Bay and other sundry clones keep the spirit of the site alive even during its prolonged downtime.

While these projects are of interest, they all rely on other people taking the initiative. A new open source tool, however, brings torrent site preservation into the hands of everyone with a PC.

The idea behind BitCannon is straightforward. The software allows users to download and import torrent site contents into a database hosted on a local machine. From there users are able to browse and search torrents using a web browser in much they same way as they can on the site itself. Torrents can then be downloaded using magnet links and any compatible torrent client.

After getting a local copy of KickassTorrents up and running, TorrentFreak caught up with BitCannon creator Stephen Smith for the lowdown.

“I’m a self taught web developer currently in college studying computer science. I’ve always been fascinated by BitTorrent and its decentralized nature,” Stephen told TF.

“With BitCannon, I am hoping to reduce the incentive of taking down torrent sites by encouraging users to utilize the site archives, and I hope this will also encourage more torrent sites to offer full site archives.”

Currently only a handful of sites offer these archives (notably KickassTorrents and Demonoid) but they are offered openly and are easy to download and use once BitCannon has been installed.

Downloaded site databases, which be viewed in any web browser, are presented in a straightforward and clean format. The image below shows BitCannon running a KickassTorrents dump of all torrents uploaded in the past 24 hours.

BitCannon is certainly fast. While tests with a 24 hour dump of KickassTorrents were impressive, Stephen says searches on a database of 6 million torrents can be completed in about 10ms, plenty quick enough for most users.

Unsurprisingly BitCannon is open source and currently available on Github. Stephen says the decision to go this route was an obvious one.

“I want BitCannon to be useful to people, and I want it to be clear that I don’t intend to profit off of it, although I decided to have a donate button because the domain did cost money and I’m a college student,” he says.

“I also want to allow people to use BitCannon as they please without any restrictions, in hopes that even if someone wanted to rebrand it and use it to host their own public torrent site, they may do so with minimal trouble.”

And that’s the other trick up BitCannon’s sleeve. Stephen says in addition to personal use he hopes that BitCannon will prove flexible enough to provide public facing versions of cloned websites to lower the barrier of entry for those brave enough to host their own torrent sites.

BitCannon works well but is still in development, so there are some issues to be ironed out. The installation process could be more automated and the browse page can take a while to load when databases contain more than one million torrents. Seeder/leecher counts are also on the to-do list as is a fully embedded database rather than MongoDB.

“What would be ideal, I think, is if more torrent sites allowed users to download archives AND if more users downloaded these archives. Taking down torrent sites would then have less and less of an impact,” Stephen says.

BitCannon’s creator is grateful for the invaluable help he’s received from friend Casey Nordcliff and is now is calling on the community to help the project along.

“BitCannon isn’t 100% production ready, but I’d like to invite BitTorrent enthusiasts to try it out and provide feedback on how I can make it more useful and easier to use,” Stephen concludes.

BitCannon can be downloaded for Windows, Linux and Mac here with instructions found here. For initial testing we advise use of a daily dump rather than full site databases.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and anonymous VPN services.

MPAA Wants to Censor OpenCulture’s Public Domain Movies

Posted: 17 Jan 2015 10:25 AM PST

Despite the growing availability of legal services in many countries, movie studios face a constant stream of pirated films.

In an attempt to deter these infringements, the MPAA and individual movie studios send thousands of takedown notices to Internet services every month. Most of these requests are directed at Google.

When it comes to takedown notices the MPAA has a dubious track record. The movie industry group has got into the habit of asking Google to remove the homepages of allegedly infringing sites instead of individual pages where the infringing movies are listed.

A few days ago, for example, the MPAA asked Google to remove the homepage of the most popular torrent site Kickass.so, alongside several other torrent and streaming sites. As with previous requests Google declined to do so as the request was too broad.

The same takedown notice includes another unusual and perhaps more worrying request. Between all the “pirate sites” the MPAA also targeted Open Culture’s list of public domain movies.

For those unfamiliar with the project, Open Culture offers an archive of high-quality cultural & educational media. With Stanford University’s Dan Colman as founder and lead editor, the content listed on the site is selected with great care.

The MPAA, however, appears to have spotted a problem with the list and has asked Google to remove the entire page (containing 700 movies) from its search results, as shown in the image below.

So why would MPAA target content that’s seemingly in the public domain?

The full details of the takedown notice have yet to be published, but there is a good chance that the request was sent in error.

In any case, the notice doesn’t look good for the MPAA. Over the past several months the MPAA has lobbied Google to block entire domains from its search results, but mistakes like these are a reminder for Google to remain cautious.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and anonymous VPN services.