Saturday, September 22, 2007
Which BitTorrent Tracker/Website Should You Trust?
More and more secrets of the anti-file sharing company, MediaDefender, are being uncovered due to a massive email leak last week. Almost 700MB of confidential memos were released onto BitTorrent (in an ironic twist), and people have been scouring them for interesting bits of information since.
The latest piece tells us that some BitTorrent sites/trackers are more secure than others. Have you ever downloaded a fake BitTorrent file and only discovered it after you finished downloading? That's due to the efforts of MediaDefender to seed trackers with fake files.
According to the emails, MediaDefender judges its effectiveness on websites by the number of decoy files that make it to the top 10 search results. So, if 4 out of the 10 top results for "The Bourne Ultimatum" are fake on The Pirate Bay, then their effectiveness is 40%.
As it turns out, The Pirate Bay is one of the most resistant to decoy files with highly aggressive moderators who weed out fakes. Joining it among the trustworthy are Mininova and TorrentSpy. On the other hand, the worst sites are BiteNova, BushTorrent, TorrentPortal, IsoHunt, and Meganova.
Here's the complete list based on the results for "Fantastic 4: Rise of the Silver Surfer", courtesy of TorrentFreak (higher percentages are worse):

Labels: Technology