200px TorrentFreak frontpage on November 12th, 2007 | |
Type of site | Weblog |
---|---|
Owner | Ernesto |
Created by | Ernesto (Modified WordPress) |
Revenue | Advertisements |
URL | http://torrentfreak.com |
Launched | November 12, 2005 |
TorrentFreak.com (commonly referred to as TorrentFreak) is a weblog dedicated to reporting the latest news on the BitTorrent protocol and anything closely related to it. TorrentFreak was started in November of 2005 by a Dutch man named Ernesto.[1] He added Smaran to his staff in September of 2006, and he added Enigmax to his staff in February of 2007.[2]
Comcast BitTorrent Throttling
editOn August 17th, 2007 TorrentFreak reported that Comcast had begun throttling it's upload bandwidth, specifically against BitTorrent users. This made seeding, which is an essential part of the BitTorrent protocol, effectively impossible.[3] It was later determined that Comcast was using Sandvine products which implement network traffic shaping and policing, and include support for both blocking new and forcefully terminating established network connections. Comcast has denied this claims whenever they have been asked to comment. A guide, for customer service representatives when asked about Comcast's BitTorrent throttling, was leaked to the Consumerist on October 26th, 2007.[4]
Controversy
editIn October of 2007, TorrentFreak was accused of attributing the temporary shutdown of the Demonoid.com BitTorrent Tracker to the CRIA, when nobody had knowledge of the true reason for the downtime. It was later revealed that TorrentFreak was, in fact, correct in it's assertion that Demonoid was shutdown by the CRIA.[citation needed]
In November of 2007, TorrentFreak reported that the owners of the SeedPeer BitTorrent Tracker had created a BitTorrent client that was entirely copied and pasted from the source code of the open source MonoTorrent. The creators of the new client then admitted to recoding only about 15% of the entire source code. They soon, however, banned the creator of MonoTorrent from their website.[5][6] The SeedPeer website was temporarily down due to a DMCA takedown request filed by an unknown party. SeedPeer administrators alleged that TorrentFreak was responsible for the request, but Ernesto denied these allegations.
External Links
editReferences
edit- ^ http://uscpwned.blogspot.com/2007/05/final-project-interview-2-ernesto-of.html
- ^ http://torrentfreak.com/about/
- ^ http://www.lightreading.com/document.asp?doc_id=132115
- ^ http://consumerist.com/consumer/leaks/comcasts-we-dont-throttle-bittorrent-internal-talking-points-memo-315791.php
- ^ http://torrentfreak.com/seedpeer-prides-itself-on-borrowed-bittorrent-client-071110/
- ^ http://monotorrent.blogspot.com/2007/11/i-heard-some-great-news-earlier-in-week.html