Pirate Bay is the swedish heaven for torrent users seeking access to millions of copyrighted material online. Recent lawsuits and allegations have put the torrent community at a tight position which could result in permanent shutdown of services in the near future.

For the most part, the owners of Pirate Bay have been able to avoid troubles due to their decision to switch between Netherlands and Sweden. Its much harder to seek justice dealing with intellectual property outside of United States.

Their latest announcement to buy the island of Sealand has been meet with outrage among those wishing an end to piracy. Sealand is a small island off the coast of United Kingdom which was first claimed as an independent nation in the late 1960’s by a radio broadcaster named Paddy Roy Bates.

Pirate Bay has reported that the cost would probably be about $2.000.000.000.  In fact to help raise funds for such a large purchase, they have lauched buysealand.com. They know such a price would be hard for any company to raise but if things dont go well, they would buy a less expensive island.

In my humble opinion, a decision to purchase a whole nation just for the sole purpose of avoiding government control does sound a little farfetched.

Torrents Guide for Dummies is a guide to help beginners to the whole bittorent protocol get started.So you have been hearing everyone talking about “how they download tv shows they have missed using torrents” but you never really got the hang of it.I will give you some insights into what Bittorents can do and what it really is.I will try my best to keep it simple.

Bittorrent is a P2P(peer to peer) file sharing protocol orginally designed and created by Bram Cohen.Currently Bittorent protocal is maintained by BitTorrent inc.It was designed as means to cut down on costly server and bandwidth resources.

Cachelogic,a internet traffic company claims 35% of all traffic on the web is from torrents.CableLabs, the research organization of the North American cable industry, believes that BitTorrent represents 55% of the upstream traffic on the cable companies’ access network.

»How does it work?

Basically bittorent protocol functions by a tracker coordinating transfer of bits and pieces of data to you from other clients who have finished downloading or are currently downloading the same file.Traditional filesharing protocols were designed to connect you directly to a single source.

In practice,bittorent model is much faster because of its ability to tap into a wide variety of sources for download.A key point to note is that Bittorrent protocol is designed to reward those who share files upward with higher download speeds.Those who are not willing to upload are punished with slow download speeds.

»What do I need to start downloading with Torrents?

There are a few things you need to start downloading with torrents:

Here I will provide the most popular bittorent tools out there.

1.Bittorrent Client such as:

Utorrent-One of the best Bittorent clients available for download at the moment.It combines both fuctionality and performance into a small package.It only requires 1MB of harddrive space and memory,which is why its no suprise most expert downloaders refer to uttorent as “micro torrent”.

Although utorrent only requires a small amount of system resources,it offers full fuctionality to both seeders and downloaders.This is one piece of software I would recommend most to anyone begining to use bittorrents.

Azureus-Once regarded as one of the best bittorent clients has only now been replaced by utorrent.Azureus still enjoys a strong fan base that is constantly working on improving it’s capabilities.In terms of functionality,Azureus is still one of the most recommended programs by the torrent community.

ABC-This client is capable of some advanced features and it’s very popular among the community.

Bitcomet-Yet another popular bittorrent client with some fancy capabilities.This is definitely a good client but not in the standards of Utorrent or Azureus.

BitTorrent client-Authored by Bram Cohen the creator of bittorrent protocol itself.It’s very useful client that is very fast but not very friendly to beginners.

2.You will need a Torrent search engine to find files that you are looking for:

Isohunt-A torrent site that has incredible amount of files in its database.

Torrentspy-Torrent search engine with a very friendly design and great amount of users.

The Pirate Bay-It’s a swedish torrent website that has faced many legal issues but still remains.This is definitely one of the most popular torrent sites available.Their database is massive compared to its competitors.

Torrentreactor-This is a site well known to many torrent users.

3.If you are using a internet connection with a router/firewall then you will need to open some ports:

In order to achieve this you can use this site.The author gives us a comprehensive guide into hows it done.If you are using a software firewall,then make exceptions for your bittorrent client of choice.You can also make exceptions for ports ranging from 6881-6889 in your firewall to accomplish this task.

»Torrent Terms You Should Know:

“Swarming” is about splitting large files into hundreds of smaller “bits”, and then sharing those bits across a “swarm” of dozens of linked users.

“Swarm” swarm is when all peers are sharing a torrent 

“Tracking” is when specific servers help swarm users find each other. Download speeds are controlled by these tracking servers.

“Availability” The number of full copies of the file available to the client.

“Choked” Describes a peer to whom the client refuses to send file pieces

“Interested” Describes a downloader who wishes to obtain pieces of a file the client has

“Leech” A leech is usually a peer who has a negative effect on the swarm by having a very poor share ratio - in other words, downloading much more than they upload

“Peer” A peer is one instance of a BitTorrent client running on a computer on the Internet to which other clients connect and transfer data

“Tracker” A tracker is a server thats keeps track of which seeds and peers are part of the swarm.

»If you need a step by step guide to download,then use this link.

Many people out there suffer from slow downloads through the torrent network.Often times they do not realize that there are ways to improve those slow speeds.Simple tweaks can be done to optimize your current speeds.

If you are on a dialup line wishing to download using Bittorrents,then you’re simply out of luck.Here I will provide some of the many tricks out there to optimize your download speed.

»Cap your Upload Speed

Although Bittorrent protocal is designed to perform efficiently when all users upload to their maxium output,while they are downloading.The truth is that you should not upload to your maxiumum bandwidth because it effects your download speed significantly.You should set your upload to be somewhat of 75-80 percent of your actual maximum upload speed.

Inorder to do that, you should find out your upload speed by using one of the million speed test sites out there.Personally I prefer using Speakeasy Speed Test because I live in the U.S.

»Remove the TCP connection Limit 

You might have realized that your Torrent speeds have diminished marginally after you upgraded to windows xp service pack 2.What you fail to realize is that with the update to SP2,microsoft has limited the amount of tcp connections required by torrent programs.Currently the connection limit is capped at a maximum of 10 in service pack 2.

This was implemented by microsoft inorder to limit the spread of worms,trojans and other security threats.The whole idea behind service pack 2 was to secure your computer by all means possible.The most effective way to override the limit on you tcp connections is by using the Event ID4226 patch.Basically what the patch does is override the connection limit imposed by SP2 to any number.I do not recommend setting the connection limit too high,due to security reasons mentioned.An effective number would be anywhere between 50-100 connections.

[More info on the Author of the patch] [Direct link to download EvID4226Patch]

»Unblock Ports in your Router

Most of the time,slow torrent speeds are due to this problem.Usually beginners to torrents do not realize the effect routers have on Bittorent applications.It is important to realize that torrents commonly use ports ranging from 6881~6889 for high speed downloading.

If you do not know how to port forward those ports I mentioned above then visiting this site would be best.The author gives a detailed look into how its done. 

If you want to specific on which ports to forward for the your exact application.You should begin by finding out the manufacturer of your router and the specific model.Then you should head over to Portforward.com and begin by choosing the the model of your router.The rest should be very simple.

»Disable Windows Firewall

Windows Firewall was designed to limit traffic in and out of your computer for security purposes.However that is not beneficial for torrent users who need all the extra bandwidth they can get.The best thing to do is simply disable windows firewall and get a more torrent friendly one such as zone alarm.

If you insist on keeping windows firewall on but want to use your internet connection to its maximum,then follow this:

note:Opening ports within windows xp’s built in firewall can be time consuming, because you can not add port ranges. Only single ports, so you will need to do this about 16 or so times, for each port between 6881 ~ 6889…

1. Click Start, click Control Panel, click Network and Internet Connections and then click Network Connections.
2. If you have a cable modem or digital subscriber line (DSL) connection, under LAN or High-Speed Internet, click the connection you use for the Internet.
3. Under Network Tasks, click Change settings of this connection.
4. On the Advanced tab, make sure that the check box Protect my computer and network by limiting or preventing access to this computer from the Internet is selected.
5. Click Settings.
6. On the Services tab, click Add.
7. In Description of service, type a name so that you can identify the port you want to open. For example: Torrent. Type a name that will help you remember the service and the port. You can use any name that you want. The name does not have any effect on the functionality but is only to help you remember.
8. In Name or IP address of the computer hosting this service on your network, type your ip address
9. In External Port number for this service and Internal Port number for this service, type the port number (the same number in both boxes).
10. Click either TCP or UDP, and then click OK.
11. Repeat this process for each port that needs to be opened. That means you need to repeat every step, adding both TCP and UDP ports for each number from 6881 ~ 6889. When your done, you should have 16 services added in there.It is best to name them something like Torrent1_tcp, Torrent1_udp, Torrent2_tcp, Torrent2_udp and so on.

»Choose your Torrents Wisely

Choose torrents that have a good seed to peer ratio.Most of the time,torrent users fail to realize the demand for certain files are very high and those serving it are low.You want to download torrent files that have seeds more than or almost equal to the peers.For example a file having 100 seeds and 100 peers is much better than having 100 seeds and 200 peers.
 

[credits:TorrenFreak]

Google’s search Engine Technology is infact the most powerful to ever exsist. However big names such as google would not want to associate itself with illegal downloading and protection of intellectual property.

The search capability of a Torrent site using google technology would be very useful to those who favor it.

A Bittorrent search engine named googletorrents claims to use the same technology found in google search engine to search for Torrents. After using the site, it becomes clear that the site is of no real use. You can perform the same functionality of the site by simply placing “Filetype:torrent” before a torrent search topic.

For example, using this neat trick you can find torrent files relating to podcast by entering the query ”filetype:torrent podcast” without the quotes.