The Pirate Guy

B-oh-noes: filesharing = child abuse?

admin — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 13:20:25 +0000

Our favorite save the world rockstar Bono has compared filesharing to child abuse. Read!

Look wot I found: Dan Bull – Dear Mandy [an open letter to Lord Mandelson]

admin — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 23:16:10 +0000

An open letter from Dan Bull to Lord Mandelson who is apparently enough trying to ban filesharing in the UK. Bonus: Same style music-videoish open letter to Lilly Allen who made herself many friends with her utterances. Sad lolz after the break.

Btw: I know it´s a bit old but I just refound it and thought many of you guys havent seen this yet.

Packme.in open signups

admin — Sat, 02 Jan 2010 00:06:28 +0000

Packeme.in has opened its doors for about 2000 new users. The trackers concept is rather interesting as it content consists only of Torrent packs which are collections of related Torrents. Another point worth mentioning is that the site has no ratio restrictions. All in all you can say the site is rather newb friendly.
Here is the sign-up url.

ThePirateGuy

Private tracker guide part 1: What is a private tracker an why would you want to join one?

admin — Sun, 20 Dec 2009 06:32:55 +0000

Since we all know how lazy pirates are I didn’t want to confront you with a huge wall of text. So I split my ultimate guide to private tracking in three parts. The first one – this part – will cover the advantages of being a member of a private tracker. As well as showing you guys what private trackers are and how they work. The second part is going to be about how to join some of those treasure islands of the internet. The third and final part deals with the issue of staying on the sites and maintaining a good ratio.

Private trackers are basically like public trackers with restricted access. You have to register to get in. Sadly its not as easy as it sounds as registration is usually only possible if you get invited by folks who are already on the tracker. Gladly there are exceptions to that rule and I will cover them in part two of this series.
So dont worry if you don’t know anyone on a private tracker you still might get into one.

Another difference to public trackers is that you have to keep a good ratio on most of the private trackers or you will get warned and eventually banned. This is a good thing, that way your torrent download will be much faster as more users try to seed to get / keep their good ratio.

This brings us right to my list of reasons why to prefer private torrent sites over public trackers:

1. E-Penis enlargement

While you might say this doesn’t concearn me, this might be the greatest motivation for almost everything on the internet. From collecting huge numbers of friends / followers on Facebook or twitter most of which people you barely know to getting those useless achievements on your Xbox. All those things are done in pursuit of one thing: Having achieved more than others. All the above said applies as well to private trackers. If you get in one of the leet trackers out there you have something new to brag about.

2. Speed

There are two aspects to this point. First being the download speed. As I wrote above people are trying to keep a good ratio on their tracker. This means they have to seed which leads to them providing more bandwidth for their upload. Also many people use seedboxes with huge upload capacities to further boost their ratio. So on private tracker content is much faster to download and older torrents are seeded much longer.

The second aspect is how fast new content arrives on the tracker. To make the tracker more attractive to their users the operators often buy into topsites and upload the stuff directly onto their seedboxes. There are even races between private trackers going on. For you, should you manage to get into a private tracker, this means that you are able to access the latest TV series / movies / games / music within minutes after a scene group released it. For example TV shows are on a good tracker within an hour or so after they aired for the first time.

3. Good content

The rules for uploads are usually quite high on private trackers so you wont find any fakes, viruses, passworded archives or any other kind of crap there. Instead there are tons of torrents with a good description, samples and comments. Finding exactly what you want is just so much easier.

This is even more true on one of the many special purpose trackers. There are trackers out there for almost anything you can imagine, old games, new games, porn, vinyl rips, e-books, audio books, shitty movies, HD movies, old TV series and so on. Most of the stuff you can get there you wont find anywhere else on the net.

4. Community

Many trackers have a nice community. There are forums and IRC chatrooms for pirates to help each other out, discuss the latest stuff, or just kill some time. This is especially true on special purpose trackers, since people seem to be more committed to their cause here.

This concludes the first part of my guide to private trackers in the next part I will tell you folks how to go private. If you liked or disliked what you have seen so far, feel free to leave a comment.

ARRRARRR
ThePirateGuy

I’ve put.io to the test… oh, and we got a few invites to share

admin — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 17:57:12 +0000

First of all I have to thank the put.io guys for providing those precious invites so fast.
I´m glad to say that put.io keept their promises and everything works as advertised. The interface is sleek and easy to understand. The download speed for torrents was about 50-60 Mbit/s per transfer wich is pretty nice. After the download it extracted the files within a few seconds and I was able to stream them without any problems what so ever.

I have experienced no buffering or stuttering while streaming 480p or 720p content. Due to the 4GB file size limit you won´t be able to download or stream full-hd videos but for most people with normal dsl-lines that wouldn´t work anyways. MP3´s can be played directly in the browser or downloaded from put.io as can various video formats if you have installed the right plugins but there is also a link provided to start the stream in your local player.

Screenshots of put.io interface

The download from put.io to my pc maxed out my 16mbit DSL line consistently. Another nice feature is the zip and download thingy where you can zip all the files you want to download on the server so that you don´t have to download every file on it´s own. This also only takes a few seconds depending on the amount of files and the file size.

The only thing I couldn´t get to work as promised was streaming on the Playstation 3. The Playstation browser wasn´t able to display the whole site so I was unable to access my files. The workaround I came up with was to enter a direct link to the media but I coudn´t be bothered.

Except for that little flaw everything worked and I have a new favorite toy.

We got very few invites so act quickly and check it out: th3p1rat3guy

ARRRARRR
ThePirateGuy

Put.io: The most newest thing of the past few days, ever!

admin — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 05:12:58 +0000

Imagine a giant vacuum cleaner for files from all kinds of sources which lets you stream the previously sucked-in files to any PC or for that matter any device connected to the Internet. Sounds to amazing to be true? Well the folks at Put.io claim to have created just that.

According to their website the service can swallow anything from torrents to ftps to rapidshare links. It doesn’t even choke on those cloggy rss-feeds. And the awesomeness continues: Not only is it fast to download the stuff you want to have, but it also seeds your torrents for you up to a ratio of 1:1. Once accumulated files can then be shared with your friends.

This all looks very promising, but the success of the service depends highly on the yet to be announced price tag it comes with. Another concern might be how a service like that can guarantee anonymity of its users to protect them from those nasty pirate hunters.
Don’t forget to tell me what you think in the comment.

ARRRARR
ThePirateGuy

Last Pirates Standing

admin — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 23:02:06 +0000

The last couple of days have been anything but good for us pirates. There are two events which might represent the biggest turning point in the history of public torrent trackers.

Mininova Failed

First of all Mininova has turned off its public tracker and is from now on “only” a delivery system for legal content. According to their blog Mininova failed to implement filtering systems for their tracker an had to take these drastic measures to comply with a verdict from the Court of Utrecht. As a result more than 1,5 million torrents were taken offline and most of Mininovas community is looking for an alternative.

Pirate Bay Tracker Shuts Down

The second important news is that thepiratebay.org´s tracker has been taken offline and was replaced by an indexing service for magnet URLs. For the normal user this doesn´t change anything. Instead of downloading .torrent files the user now clicks on magnet links. The link contains a hash value which lets the torrent client identify the content.
The folks at piratebay claim that progress in technology made centralized trackers obsolete. That may be the case but it might also have something to do with the ongoing struggle the piratebay crew has in Swedish courts. It sure helps them to dodge a few bullets is the future.

In the upcoming posts I will try to guide you through the rough seas of the interweb. I will help you find your stuff and maybe even a new torrent home for those of you which have lost theirs in the recent events.

ARRRARRRR
ThePirateGuy