Over the past couple of years, the BitTorrent market has been dominated by the likes of uTorrent, Azureus and BitComet, with the three of them taking up as much as 90% marketshare. With such sort of dominance these apps we’ve not seen many alternative solutions in the past few years.

Common sense says that it might be next to impossible for a new app in this field to play catch up with the major three, but the newcomer on field Halite (named after a mineral) might just stand a chance.

Halite has been in development since 2006, and over the years it has become a fast, full fledged lightweight BitTorrent client. One of the greatest strengths of Halite is that it uses minimal system resources. If you thought uTorrent was already lightweight, then correct yourself because Halite consistently uses up half the resources that uTorrent uses on my PC.

Halite supports all the basic features the average downloader would need including encryption, selective downloading, a torrent creator and more. At the moment there is no support for disk caching, seeding preferences and torrent queuing, but these and others are on the to do list, which means they will be implemented in the future.

In my tests I found Halite to be slightly faster than uTorrent in download speeds, but they don’t much of a difference.. On the other hand a few users have seen improvements in speed over uTorrent and other clients.

The real benefit obviously is the minimal system resources that Halite uses. Here are a few screenshots of Halite in action…

Overall if you are looking for a fast, lightweight BitTorrent client then I suggest you give Halite a try. I’m sure you won’t be disappointed.

Halite Homepage

The Website of Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences seems to have had what you call major security breach. The whole of the website complete with Server backups, Databases of Students, Site Databases, and the Complete directory structure have been leaked onto BitTorrent.

At the time of writing this, a 125MB Zip File is being tracked by Pirate Bay.

According to Torrentfreak, the Harvard University website has become a victim of a major security breach. A Torrent that is currently available on Piratebay claims to be a complete backup of the Website of Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.

The Torrent basically contains a 125MB Zip file that contains the entire directory structure of the site, and the major database backups. Details of the databases are below :

1. joomla.sql – claims to be the database for the Harvard site
2. contacts.sql – claims to be a database of contacts
3. hgs.sql – stated as ‘other minor thing’

Here’s what the release notes from the Torrent reads as in Broken English : ” Maybe you don’t like it but this is to demonstrate that persons like tgatton(admin of the server) in they don’t know how to secure a website.”

The guy basically refers to Thomas Gatton, Systems Administrator and User Support Specialist at Harvard. Not much is known about the reason behind the security breach. And also at the moment the site that was hacked seems to be down.

I am waiting for Harvard to come out with a clear explanation as to what is happening. At the moment the files contained in the Zip seem to be the real deal.

Via TorrentFreak.

The last quarter of 2007 hasn’t been particularly good for the BitTorrent community. We have seen the shutdown of some popular BitTorrent Trackers like OiNK and Demonoid and a lot more countries worldwide have been blocking Torrent Search Engines. In the US Internet companies are prevent access to the BitTorrent protocol itself, thereby preventing users from sharing files.

Yes 2007 has been the year when Torrent Related sites where shutdown faster than they were born, but finally we have a good news from Mininova that has just reached a milestone i.e. it’s millionth torrent was uploaded yesterday by an anonymous user.

Torrent number 1,000,000 was uploaded yesterday by an anonymous user. Unfortunately, the memorable torrent has no seeds, which makes it likely that it wont be around much longer.

One million uploaded torrents is a great accomplishment, especially if you consider that Mininova only allows user uploads. Contrary to what most people assume, Mininova doesn’t scrape any torrents from other websites, all the torrents hosted on the website are uploaded by its users.

My hearty congratulations to Mininova on reaching this commendable milestone. However with growing pressure from Anti Piracy Organizations on ISP’s and Governments supporting the hosting of Torrent Files or Trackers, do you think Mininova will be able to survive in this world of BitTorrent where survival is becoming more and more difficult.

My best wishes are with Mininova..  I want it to remain around for many more years to come..

Via TorrentFreak

This is shocking isn’t it. The Biggest loss to the Bit Torrent world is here. Demonoid is dead and is no longer available for anyone in the world. The CRIA managed to put pressure on the company renting servers to Demonoid and its been pulled down.

Here is what the message on the site reads :

The CRIA threatened the company renting the servers to us, and because of this it is not possible to keep the site online. Sorry for the inconvenience and thanks for your understanding.

This is one of the biggest losses that we have seen to Torrent Network after OiNK was shutdown. The Pirate Bay seems to be the only tracker that has been able to withstand all kinds of legal pressure.

I just hope that Demonoid is backup and running soon on some alternate servers in some country like Sweden..

I wonder if Demonoid will be able to get itself back and running.. Lets all pray, so that we have our favorite Tracker Demonoid back online.

Thanks Sindhu

BOiNK is an attempt to bring the hundreds of thousands of music albums back online that disappeared during the raid. The replacement will be released within a week and should be available on the BOiNK.cd domain.

Things are moving pretty fast on Torrent Space and I believe that the Pirate Bay are doing a good job at keeping the MPAA, RIAA, IFPI, BPI at bay. Things are gonna be a little different at BOiNK, the most important thing will be that it will be a public tracker rather than the private tracker that OiNK really was. Well that means we’re going to see a lot of people leeching the torrents and polluting the Torrent Sphere.

A lot depends on the OiNK community, they have to come over to BOiNK and start uploading everything that they had shared on BOiNK. This also sends out a very strong message to the Anti Piracy organizations, that if you kill one tracker a thousand others will pop up. Call it a Slap on the face if you want.

Well here is a screenshot of The Pirate Bay Admin working on BOiNK. You can expect BOiNK to go live within a week from now.

My best wishes are with the Pirate Bay and I really hope that BOiNK does well and becomes one of the biggest public trackers out there, and never shuts down!

Well this is the 3rd major leak for Microsoft, this month, first it was Windows Vista SP1, then Home Server and now its Windows XP SP3′s latest build that was released to Connect testers just a few days back. The latest build of Windows XP Service Pack 3 has been leaked on BitTorrent and is available on almost all popular torrent trackers.

Windows XP SP3 isn’t ready to be called as beta as yet, as it seems to be a preview of what we can expect from the 3rd Service pack. While the download was made available to Microsoft Connect testers its leak means that more than 12000 people that Microsoft originally planned will test SP3 are going to be able to get their hands on the preview.

Finding the torrent shouldn’t be hard if you are already a pro when it comes to filesharing, but here are some details that I managed to extract,

• Filename : windowsxp-kb936929-sp3-x86-enu.exe
• Size : 334.92 MB

If you can’t find the torrent link, drop me a email and I will try to help you. If you are planning to download and test this latest build, then drop in your comments as to what you feel is new and changed from the last build.

The basic principle of DNA is the same as what Bittorrent already does, the only big difference is how you download and consume the content. All you need to do is just get the Bittorrent Client (About 330KB). Once installed when you visit a DNA enabled site, you can download all the content from the DNA enabled site and by using the P2P technology you are reducing costs for the Big Media Companies.

Well the main selling point of DNA is that it should reduce bandwidth costs for the Content Providers. Online Video Portal Brightcove will be one of the launch partners. Brightcove will be using DNA in its upcoming Brightcove Show, which will be highly bandwidth intensive.

Now you can select files that you want to share through the Java Applet, create the torrent, do the Initial seeding all from the Bitlet Upload interface. Once you are done, you have the option of adding the torrent to torrent search engines like Mininova to gain exposure.

I feel that Bitlet has taken an important step forward by adding support for torrent creation. This would make sure that ordinary users can share some of the rare stuff that they have. I would like support for more trackers being added and submission to a lot more torrent search engines in the future. This feature reaffirms the fact that if you can’t stop the P2P technology evolution then you better join or face extinction.

Try Out Bitlet Uploader today!

On a related note it seems that Demonoid trackers are back up and running while the site is still non functional.

Well you might be wondering that there is no such thing as a web based torrent downloader. But, there is, and that is Bitlet. Bitlet is very simple web based java app and it has a very clean interface.

Downloading torrents is also a breeze, just enter the torrent url and the download begins. Here are some screenshots for you guys..

Also Bitlet allows you to create special download links which you can email to your friends and family and help them download torrents.