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The top 10 most downloaded movies on BitTorrent, ‘Green Zone’ tops the chart this week followed by ‘She’s Out of My League’. ‘Hot Tub Time Machine’ completes the top three.

This week there are three newcomers in the top 10. Green Zone is the most downloaded movie on BitTorrent this week.

The data for our weekly download chart is collected by TorrentFreak, and is for informational and educational reference only. All the movies in the list are DVDrips unless stated otherwise.

RSS feed for the weekly movie download chart.

In the fall of last year The Pirate Bay took its tracker offline. Luckily, for the stability of the BitTorrent ecosystem several new trackers emerged to take its place. Time for us to provide an overview of the largest public BitTorrent trackers currently around.

The BitTorrent landscape has changed dramatically in the past 12 months. The two largest BitTorrent trackers today didn’t exist a year ago, and the top tracker of last year has shut down. The upside is that all these changes went by relatively unnoticed to the millions of downloaders.

Despite claims that millions of BitTorrent downloads would cease to work if a major BitTorrent tracker closed down, most downloaders today don’t even notice when a tracker stops working. Thanks to technologies such as DHT and PEX central trackers have become a luxury good to some degree.

Indeed, larger torrents with thousands of peers will work just fine without a central tracker. But the majority of torrents out there only have a handful of peers and for these files a central tracker is still an essential part of the downloading process.

It’s therefore good to know that several new players took the place of The Pirate Bay’s tracker when it shut down last year. Below we show a list of the five largest public BitTorrent trackers based on the number of torrents and peers (downloaders+uploaders) they track.

The first thing that stands out in the top five above is that the first three spots are taken by standalone trackers that do not have a torrent index or search engine attached to them. These three trackers are responsible for the coordination of millions of public downloads on BitTorrent but do not provide any torrents on their sites like The Pirate Bay used to do.

PublicBitTorrent and OpenBitTorrent, number one and two in the list, are both relatively new trackers that emerged after The Pirate Bay announced that it would sell the site last year. This sale eventually failed to go through, but The Pirate Bay did close its tracker so both trackers became a very welcome addition to the BitTorrent ecosystem.

Another observation is that there is a lot of weight on the shoulders of the top three trackers. Although there are close to 50,000 known BitTorrent trackers, only a fraction of these are active, and of these only a few dozen track more than 1,000 torrent files. Without the five trackers in the list above most of the smaller public torrents could quickly become unavailable.

Although trackers in the top five are all public ones, there are a few private ones that should be in this list if it was only based on the number of torrents tracked. The music tracker What.cd, for example, currently tracks more than 800,000 torrents alone. A dazzling number that puts the site in fourth place based on the number of torrents, not peers.

For BitTorrent’s long tail content reliable public trackers are still invaluable. The good news is that the ecosystem is better off than a year ago when The Pirate Bay was carrying this burden alone, but it’s far from bulletproof yet.

Source TorrentFreak.com

The top 10 most downloaded movies on BitTorrent, ‘She’s Out of My League’ tops the chart this week followed by ‘Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time’. ‘The Wolfman’ completes the top three.

This week there are five newcomers in the top 10. She’s Out of My League is the most downloaded movie on BitTorrent this week.

The data for our weekly download chart is collected by TorrentFreak, and is for informational and educational reference only. All the movies in the list are DVDrips unless stated otherwise.

RSS feed for the weekly movie download chart.

The top 10 most downloaded movies on BitTorrent, ‘Kick-Ass’ tops the chart this week again followed by ‘Iron Man 2?. ‘Clash Of The Titans’ completes the top three.

This week there are five newcomers in the top 10. Kick-Ass is the most downloaded movie on BitTorrent this week. Iron Man 1 and 2 are both listed in the top 10, which is quite unique.

The data for our weekly download chart is collected by TorrentFreak, and is for informational and educational reference only. All the movies in the list are DVDrips unless stated otherwise.

RSS feed for the weekly movie download chart.

The top 10 most downloaded movies on BitTorrent, ‘Clash Of The Titans’ tops the chart this week again followed by ‘Shutter Island’. ‘Avatar’ completes the top three.

This week there are two newcomers in the top 10. Clash Of The Titans is the most downloaded movie on BitTorrent this week, again.

The data for our weekly download chart is collected by TorrentFreak, and is for informational and educational reference only. All the movies in the list are DVDrips unless stated otherwise.

RSS feed for the weekly movie download chart.

The top 10 most downloaded movies on BitTorrent, ‘The Bounty Hunter’ tops the chart this week followed by ‘Shutter Island’. ‘Cop Out’ completes the top three.

This week there are three newcomers in the top 10 including Avatar which returned after the release of the DVD rip. The Bounty Hunter is the most downloaded movie on BitTorrent this week.

The data for our weekly download chart is collected by TorrentFreak, and is for informational and educational reference only. All the movies in the list are DVDrips unless stated otherwise.

RSS feed for the weekly movie download chart.

A new type of malware is riding the wave of file-sharing pre-settlement letters by infecting BitTorrent users’ machines and then demanding payments in order to make imaginary lawsuits go away. ICPP Foundation try to give the impression they are RIAA and MPAA affiliated but the whole thing is a scam to extort cash and obtain credit card details.

ICCP Foundation claims to be an international company operating out of Switzerland. They say they are “committed to promoting the cultural and economic benefits of copyright” while assisting their partners to fight “copyright theft around the world”.

In fact what they really do is operate a scam to extort money from BitTorrent users.

Right at this moment we are unsure of the exact route of infection, but somehow malware (probably in either fake file or attached virus form) is displaying a “copyright violation alert” on the victim’s screen, locking it, and redirecting users to the ICPP site where they are told they have been caught infringing copyright.

There they are warned their offenses could result in 5 years in prison and a $250,000 fine and are given the option to take the (fake) case to court. They are also offered a chance to make the whole thing go away for the payment of a ‘fine’ of around $400. Victims are also prompted to give their name, address and full credit card details – it is unclear how this information is further abused but it doesn’t look good.

If they select the court option, they are scared with this screen:

So that that this evil software (believed to be located at C:\Documents and Settings\Administrator\Application Data\IQManager\iqmanager.exe) more accurately targets BitTorrent users rather than just random users, it appears to scan the user’s hard drive for .torrent files and displays these as ‘evidence’ of an earlier infringement.

In order to boost their credibility, icpp-online.com claim to be affiliated with influential partners – the RIAA, MPAA, and The Copyright Alliance. Of course, this is a complete fabrication.

This whole approach seems very similar to that employed by so-called ‘rogue software‘ or ’scareware’ which attempt to frighten users into parting with cash for often useless software. And it seems the links to malware don’t stop there.

A WHOIS on the ICPP-Online domain reveals some contact data which shows up elsewhere in connection to other questionable activities.

Details on this new threat are scarce at the moment, so if any readers can discover more about this malware or the operation behind it, please collate the information and send it over to tips@torrentfreak.com.

The top 10 most downloaded movies on BitTorrent, ‘From Paris With Love’ tops the chart this week followed by ‘Ninja Assassin’. ‘Legion’ completes the top three.

This week there are four newcomers in the top 10. From Paris With Love is the most downloaded movie on BitTorrent.

The data for our weekly download chart is collected by TorrentFreak, and is for informational and educational reference only. All the movies in the list are DVDrips unless stated otherwise.

RSS feed for the weekly movie download chart.

The data for our weekly download chart is collected by TorrentFreak, and is for informational and educational reference only. All the movies in the list are DVDrips unless stated otherwise.

RSS feed for the weekly movie download chart.