Common Paradox Tech Blog

It’s been a busy week for BitTorrents! I’ve showed you how to download them, how to tweak the heck out of a great program you can use to download them, and how to remotely access your BitTorrent downloads through Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox. You, young padawan, are now fully grounded in the ways of the torrent. But you are no Jedi yet…

The final task that awaits you isn’t so much related to the act of downloading information via BitTorrent as it is contributing to the cloud of data that you’re usually pulling from. Yes, that’s right. You’re going to learn how to make your own .torrent file for distribution via your tracker of choice. While I realize there’s a handy feature in uTorrent that allows you do this rather effortlessly, you’re limited to working on one torrent at a time via this method. What if you want to make a whole bunch of .torrent files corresponding to a larger number of files you want to make available for download?

In that case, you’re going to need the Download of the Week: MakeTorrent. This freeware app hasn’t been updated since 2004–it’s an oldie, but a goodie. It works fine all the way up to a 64-bit installation of Windows 7, so don’t worry that MakeTorrent isn’t going to be compatible with your OS of choice.

It couldn’t be any easier to make your own .torrent using this quick little app. Start the program, then navigate to wherever it is you’ve stored the files that you want to share. Select them all, and then enter the URL of the corresponding tracker that will help coordinate the communications between your computer and the other peers jumping into your download stream. You can find some useful links to get you started right here. You can also append a comment to your .torrent file if you’d like. Click on the "Create .torrent now" button when you’re done and voila! Create first BitTorrent file achievement unlocked! And if you’re feeling adventurous, you can also use MakeTorrent to edit existing .torrent files.

Each week, Maximum PC picks a new free or shareware download as its favorite of… the week. Have a nifty application that you can’t live without? Twitter David Murphy @acererak with your latest suggestions.

Unlike its companion addon for Firefox, the Chrome Extension uTorrent for Google Chrome doesn’t actually give you any way to remotely add a torrent to a uTorrent client that’s running on a different, Web-connected system. That’s kind of funny, considering that the uTorrent Firefox addon doesn’t give you a way to control what’s actually being downloaded by the remote system–Google Chrome’s extension does.

It’s a weird mish-mash of features, but it doesn’t mean that uTorrent for Google Chrome is any less valuable of an addon for your daily browsing. If you’re a BitTorrent junkie, you’ll find this addon to be a considerable upgrade from the experience of having to load the default uTorrent Web UI every time you want to check on (or edit) your downloads.

Web UI… remote BitTorrent… this might be a bit over your head. Let’s back out for a second and take a more general look at what this extension actually does. The uTorrent app comes with a nifty little feature–a Web UI–that allows you to remotely "log in" to your BitTorrent client. It’s a great tool for when you want to capitalize on the fast speeds of your home (or office) Internet connection, yet do much of your actual browsing in the various coffee shops, libraries, or other WiFi hotspots around your community. You can fire up this Web interface to do everything you could normally do if you were sitting right in front of your running uTorrent app: start downloads, stop downloads, pause downloads, label downloads, et cetera.

The aforementioned Chrome Extension takes all of this functionality–and the painful process of typing in a large URL to access said Web UI–and slaps it into a tiny button near the address bar in your browser. You can’t add new files, but you can check and see the status of your downloads using a pretty visual bar that indicates the percentage done. You can also get a quick look at your client’s upload and download speeds, the estimated time remaining for your download, and the exact number of seeds and peers that are also grabbing the files in question. Of course, you can also perform all the basic uTorrent commands: starting files, stopping files, deleting files, et cetera.

It’s small, it’s pretty, and it’s quite useful–save for that whole "adding new files" bit. For a great Google Chrome uTorrent manager, this appropriately titled extension is just what you need.

Maximum PC picks one new Chrome extension as its favorite of the week each… week. Have a nifty extension that you can’t live without? Twitter David Murphy @acererak with your latest suggestions.

Keeping with my uTorrent/BitTorrent theme this week, it only makes sense to show you how you can go about pulling .torrent files through the Firefox browser. But wait, you say! What am I talking about? Clicking on a .torrent link allows you to open it right up in your client of choice (I’ll assume uTorrent for the sake of this post), and that, in turn, slots said file (or magnet link) into the application and begins the download.

Why would you need a fancy addon to do that?

Good point. In fact, you don’t need an add-on in Firefox to load torrent files. Where an addon becomes handy is when you’re using Firefox from a different computer and would like to somehow get a .torrent file you’ve found onto the download queue of a different machine. Think it’s a strange setup? It’s not that uncommon: perhaps you’ve left your PC on at home to make best use of its super-speedy landline connection, yet you’re browsing around various BitTorrent sites at work, in a coffee shop, or in your car.

I guess you could email the .torrent file to yourself and queue it up later. That’s lame, especially when a little addon called BitTorrent WebUI is ready to do all the work for you!

Here’s how it works. Go into your uTorrent preferences menu and turn on the program’s WebUI feature. You can change the default login and password if you want (I recommend it). Install the BitTorrent WebUI addon and restart Firefox. When your browser loads back up, it’ll want you to put in your system’s IP address as well as the port that uTorrent uses for its connections. Select uTorrent as the client, then hit OK.

Assuming that uTorrent is running on your main computer–and that’s a critical factor–then you’ll now be able to click on any .torrent link in your browser and load it into your main system’s uTorrent client. Simple as that. You can now start BitTorrent downloads (or access the Web UI to do much, much more!) via any computer with the configured addon installed!

Maximum PC picks one new Firefox add-on as its favorite of the week each… week. Have a nifty extension that you can’t live without? Twitter David Murphy @acererak with your latest suggestions.

Yesterday, we wrote that Twitter asked some users to reset their password as a security measure. We suspected that the reason was a phishing attack on Twitter, and now Twitter has officially confirmed it, with a bit of background.

Recently, Twitter admins discovered a surge of followers to some suspicious accounts, decided to investigate, and discovered that a number of accounts were compromised through an intricate attack involving torrent-related sites and forums. Here’s Twitter’s explanation of what went down:

“It appears that for a number of years, a person has been creating torrent sites that require a login and password as well as creating forums set up for torrent site usage and then selling these purportedly well-crafted sites and forums to other people innocently looking to start a download site of their very own. However, these sites came with a little extra — security exploits and backdoors throughout the system. This person then waited for the forums and sites to get popular and then used those exploits to get access to the username, email address, and password of every person who had signed up. Additional exploits to gain admin root on forums that weren’t created by this person also appear to have been utilized; in some instances, the exploit involved redirecting attempts to access the forums to another site that would request log-in information. This information was then used to attempt to gain access to third party sites like Twitter. We haven’t identified all of the forums involved (nor is it likely that we’ll be able to, since we don’t have any connection with them), but as a general rule, if you’ve signed up for a torrent forum or torrent site built by a third party, you should probably change your password there.”

Well, folks, I guess it all boils down to the same old advice: never use the same email/password combination on multiple sites.

Reviews: Twitter

Tags: hack, security, torrent, twitter

With the rise of popular streaming services such as Hulu, many would probably speculate that BitTorrent usage would be on the decline, but according to the folks over at TorrentFreak, nothing could be further from the truth. Nearly doubling its 28 million a year user base to 52 million, uTorrent usage is continuing to rise with no end in sight. “In addition to this, at the start of this year we saw almost 5 million monthly users of BitTorrent Mainline,” said Simon Morris, BitTorrents VP of Product Management. “In November 2009 we saw over 10 million”. “We see no evidence whatever that BitTorrent clients are any less popular”.

It seems pretty obvious that the legal woes of The Pirate Bay, Mininova, and others have done little to stem the tide of torrent adoption, and unless things change drastically, its hard to figure out what will. The uTorrent development team has several major improvements planned over the next 12 months, and hope to add options to increase file security, and even the ability for torrent site owners to promote their own content from within the client.

I’m sure all 52 million users are downloading the latest Linux build right? I had no idea it was becoming that popular! If you would like to join me in leaping to conclusions, feel free to leave your comments below.

You can get them in Torrent and pirated VHS tapes, but Hulu is playing Mystery Science Theater 3000 online now. Only five full episodes—from seasons 4, 5, and 6—are available, however:

They got The Starfighters, Secret Agent Super Dragon, Monster A-Go-Go, The Rebel Set, and The Giant Gila Monster (which is great). None of those are my favorites, but I’d watch them again. In case you don’t know what Mystery Science Theater is, watch this:

They do the same with cheesy movies—the worst they can find, la-la-lah—mostly science fiction. If you have never seen them, go check it out. If you are a fan, you are welcome. [Hulu—Thanks Bonnie]

In Denmark it’s legal to make backup copies of your DVDs, but illegal to break the DRM that prevents copying them. This annoyed a guy so much that he decided to turn himself in for ripping his own DVD collection

At first thought, Henrik Anderson seems crazy for doing something like this, but he’s actually attempting to force clarification of the contradicting laws by bringing them in front of a court. He’s doing this after his attempts to contact the Danish anti-piracy Antipiratgruppen, their lawyers, and the Association of Danish Video Distributors and discuss the issue were blown off, so he’s definitely not just randomly deciding on an extreme approach.

So far no actual arrest has been made, so we’ll have to wait to see how the whole thing plays out. Either way, Anderson’s protesting an entirely paradoxical set of laws in a pretty ballsy way. [Torrent Freak via Boing Boing]

The world of BitTorrent has turned all kinds of topsy turvy as of late. First the uber popular PirateBay sinks its tracker and urgers others to do the same, and in an equally surprising move, Mininova says its going completely legit. Can you believe it?

"Today is an important day in the history of Mininova," the site admins wrote in a blog. "From now on, we are limiting Mininova.org to our Content Distribution service. By doing so, we comply with the ruling of the Court of Utrecht of last August."

Mininova’s Content Distribution service was actually launched back in 2007, but the commitment to go legit came only after a judge last summer ordered the site to remove all copyright infringing links within the next three month. If it didn’t comply, Mininova would have faced up to $7.5 million in fines.

Interestingly, Mininova’s commitment could be short lived. The site’s admins said they’re "still considering an appeal at this moment."

Image Credit: blogs.jwatch.org

Pabugs writes with news that popular torrent site Mininova has abandoned their attempts at filtering and simply deleted all torrents other than the legal ones they facilitate through their Content Distribution service. According to their blog post, they were left “no other option than to take [their] platform offline” after a court ruling from August. “The judge ruled that Mininova is not directly responsible for any copyright infringements, but ordered it to remove all torrents linking to copyrighted material within three months, or face a penalty of up to 5 million euros.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

itwbennett writes “Some very generous Alpha OS geeks have snagged the Chrome OS source code and compiled a version to share with the rest of us, writes blogger Peter Smith. ‘The build comes in the form of a virtual machine, which means you’ll need VMWare or VirtualBox running, and of course the image of Chrome OS itself. The folks at gdgt are distributing the latter, and they’ve set up a page with all the links you’ll need. You’ll need to create a gdgt account if you don’t have one yet. The Chrome OS image is only a bit over 300 megs, so it’s a fast download. If you need a little more handholding, TechCrunch has a step-by-step guide to getting Chrome OS installed and running using VirtualBox, and a Chrome OS torrent they link to.’”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.