Find private torrent sites accepting users with Trackerchecker

Private torrent trackers are great. If you’re after hard-to-find files that don’t make it to major sites like Piratebay or Mininova, you’ve likely tried to locate them on a private site only to learn that they’re not accepting signups. I still remember what a pain in the butt it was to keep checking in on Demonoid years ago to see when a few more spots would open up.

Trackerchecker does its best to keep you informed about which sites are accepting new user registrations and which ones aren’t. Over 500 trackers are currently supported, and they cover an incredibly wide range of specialties. As you can tell from the screenshot, they’re not all SFW, but then again, you probably shouldn’t be downloading from a private tracker at work anyway.

The code is easy to understand: green means you’re good to go, red means you’re out of luck for now. Sites that don’t respond to Trackerchecker’s queries in a timely manner are given a blue mark. If your desired site is taking signups, click its name to be taken directly to the registration page.

The listings also tell you when the last check was run on each site. Registering at Trackerchecker lets you build a list of favorites, making it easier to monitor only the sites you’re actually interested in joining.

It’s a great tool to add to your P2P bookmarks.

Google helps found M-Lab to identify ISPs who throttle torrents

Google has joined with the Open Technology Institute to help identify which ISPs are restricting peer-to-peer traffic, launching M-Lab to help users discover whether or not they’re being affected.

One of the tools M-Lab will use is Glasnost, a java applet that initiates a torrent transfer between a user’s pc and the remote testing server. It compares the results to the speed of a normal transfer to see whether or not the peer-to-peer traffic is being throttled.

If you’re curious about your own ISP, run the Glasnost test and see what it reports. You’ll have to be patient, though – the recent news about Google coming onboard has increased traffic on the site greatly and it’s having a hard time keeping up.

It’s good to know that once M-Lab is online they’ll have 36 Google servers in 12 locations to help run the tests.

USniff Offers Fast, Multi-Site Torrent Searches

If you’re after torrent downloads, chances are you’re searching Piratebay, IsoHunt, Mininova, and possibly a few others. Why not save yourself time and effort and search them all in one place?

USniff provides a nicely styled web 2.0 interface for multi-site torrent searches and allows you to query up to eight sites simultaneously. Results load extremely quickly, and I was pleased to see that they sort by number of seeds by default.

It’s ajax, so filtering and re-sorting your results is almost instant. The design is totally clean so far, there’s not even a single banner ad in sight. You’ll still have to click through to the actual tracker, of course, to grab the actual torrents. USniff doesn’t host anything…blah blah blah…insert usual torrent search engine disclaimer here.

For anyone looking for multiple options to download that new Ubuntu release (since you’re all using torrents for purely legal downloads, of course!), take a gander at USniff.