Endless Paradigm

Original Source TorrentFreak

Quote:Many experienced file-sharers can’t understand why relative novices manage
to download so much junk from BitTorrent. Fake downloads that never finish, video files which refuse to play, movies that require special players and unwatchable video are easily avoided by those in the know. But how do they do it?

Although it’s quite a small problem, BitTorrent is sadly being used by a minority to generate money for scammers through trickery and deception. Wee’ve reported before how people download movies only to learn that they require a special media player to play it, or others which come with a payload of malware to infect their PC when they install it.

Other people get other problems such as torrents never finishing or when they watch a downloaded video it turns out to be completely the wrong thing - i.e the file was deliberately mislabeled. Sometimes the video download is of such poor quality it’s simply unwatchable and of course all this adds up to a lot of frustration and wasted time.

There are many techniques employed by experienced file-sharers to ensure that the torrent is what it says it is and of a good enough quality to even bother with. Wee’ll look at just a few of them here.

Remember that sharing certain types of media via BitTorrent may not be legal in your country.

1. Always read the comments

Before downloading any torrent, it’s always prudent to read the comments on the site. It only takes a few seconds but it’s time well spent. Very often there are requests from previous downloaders for a password to access the file or some might be asking where to download a special video player to view it. Movies should never come as .zip or an .exe file, if they do there is every chance the file comes with some sort of catch. If the movie won’t play with VLC Media Player there’s every chance it’s a fake. Any files needing 3WPlayer, DomPlayer or any that direct to other sites and ask you to fill in forms or install stuff, are also fake.

2. Can the source be trusted?

A good way to find out if a .torrent is real or not is to find out who uploaded the file. There are several well known users that always release new torrents on the same account, aXXo and EZTV are some good examples of such users. If the user is anonymous, you could look at the tracker, and see if it’s widely used. There is no guarantee that files on a well known trackers are safe, but you can almost be certain that files tracked by trackers such as bittorrent.isthebe.st are fake.

3. Is the file actually released already?

Many people use sites such as VCDQuality, Nforce.nl and RLSLOG.net (sites that rates the quality of media releases on the internet) to not only ensure that the video is of a good quality, but also to weed out malfunctioning releases and identify real ones. Recently a movie producer was grateful to the BitTorrent community for spreading his movie ‘The Man From Earth‘, so wee can use this movie as an example:

The VCDQ page shows a lot of information but let’s look at the box marked ‘folder’. Here you can see the release name. By copying and pasting this exact filename into Google, a list of almost guaranteed non-fake torrents appear.

4. TorrentSpam?

Another place to check is TorrentSpam. If you already have a torrent file in your possession, you can either paste the full name (or hash value, obtainable from the ‘general’ tab in uTorrent) into their search engine and if someone has reported this as a bad torrent, the results will be shown. Equally, if despite all the measures you still end up downloading a bad torrent, its possible to report this fact for the benefit of other TorrentSpam users in the future.

Do you have any tips or tricks not mentioned here that you would like to share? Feel free to leave a comment!

4. Other suggestions

Wee asked Matthijs from Mininova for some good tips on how to avoid downloading fake or scammy torrents and he came up with the following suggestions in addition to what wee already posted.
# Check the contents of the torrent, a single rar files is often an indication for a passworded file, especially if it is accompanied by a readme.txt/.url
# Nowadays you even have to watch out for releases with a single avi file and a readme file/url where the user is required to rename the avi file to rar and fetch a password somewhere.
# Tracker names which look very similar to well known trackers are often fake, e.g.: http://vip-the-piratebay.homelinux.com:6969/scrape and http://tracker-btc-net.dnsdojo.org:6969/scrape
# Unknown/new trackers (that can’t be found on google anywhere) with large amounts of seeds/leechers
# If an application torrent isn’t really appropriate for BitTorrent (very small) it’s better to avoid them.
# Check the size and see if it fits the description
# Most important: install a good (up-to-date) virus/spyware scanner and scan before opening!

In the end it’s experience alone that helps identify the fakes. Most people who have been file-sharing for a little while can easily spot these bad torrents but it’s clearly not so easy for the novice, judging by the number of emails wee get at TorrentFreak each week. Let’s hope that number reduces soon.

Some useful hints/tips there for people who don't know how to get at the good stuff.

From experience. I have NEVER encountered a fake.

mainly because I always followed rules like this one from day 1 of using torrents.

and cool! the coputer confab tutorial section.

Yeah, I'm also surprised at how many people download fakes.

A few other techniques I use:

• Compare filesizes - if 90% of the torrents are 300MB, and 2 other torrents are 100MB, it should be obvious that the 100MB ones aren't correct (or heavily stripped).
  
• If you're paranoid - increase the priority of the first few chunks.  If it's a movie, you should be able to get a glimpse of what the video looks like.  You can often also determine if the file extension is valid by checking the file signature (eg, if the file is .avi, but the first four bytes in the file is "RAR!" - well...)
  
• Filenames - I typically find that "released by <name>" are generally more reliable, though this is somewhat a small factor
  

can I know what is seedlings and leechers ? because everytime I download a torrent i will see the leechers and seedlings first before download

seeders are how many people there are that have FINISHED the download and are uploading it do people who are downloading,

LEECHERS are people who are downloading the file of seeders and also slowly seed aswell so leechers are downloading and sorata mini-uploading.

i did get a srewed torrent once actually it was a game that was not working properly in game after sometime

I have never really downloaded fake files either.

Most fakes are easy to spot, and can be easily avoided.

Generally, if something looks real, has a correct size, correct extention, and there's a decent amount of people seeding and leeching (A realistic number. if it says there are 252383 people seeding and leeching, it's definately fake
) and a realistic filename, then it's generally real. Files like "Warcraft 3.rar" that is 50MB in size, or "Clannad - Episode 1.exe" is obviously fake.


As Zinga mentioned, checking size is very effective in weeding out the fakes, and so is checking extentions and file names.

i once had one of them one's which needed a "special player" when i first started using torrents, but it doesn't take a genius to check the name of the program in google and find out its spyware really

I have downloaded a couple videos that were labeled as one thing, and turned out to be hershey kisses.  Most memorable was when I was downloading every episode of DBZ and deleting them after watching (because wee didn't have enough space back then), and coming across 2 different hershey kisses on 2 separate episodes.  Probably weirdos that are sharing an apartment with a friend and have to change the name of the file to throw them off.  That was on Kazaa, though.   I have never had trouble with torrents.  Thanks for the info, though, UG!

I've had a few problems. i got a virus. i killed it though.

Where do u guys go to get .torrents?