Files Network: Mayıs 2010

ShareTheRemote (STR) – Tracker Changes, IRC Invites & More

Whenever there was a discussion about TV trackers in the last couple of weeks, the spotlight has been on BTN. While BTN definitely is a feature filled private tracker, it is not the only TV torrent site that’s been improving. This post is about ShareTheRemote (better known as STR), another gazelle based tracker that’s grown a fair bit since it’s launch several months ago. STR recently introduced a number of changes to its ratio system – this includes new free leech modes (half leech, double upload), changes to what users placed under ‘ratio watch’ can download, changes to their TV show database (TheTVDB) and other minor tweaks. ShareTheRemote is currently closed for signup but they do have an official invites IRC channel where potential new members can get invited.

Quoted below are some of the recent changes made to STR, as posted on news items on site homepage:

We have modified our tracker to support two new freeleech types. These are 'half-leech' and 'double upload'. Their functions are just as their names imply; when downloading half-leech torrents, only half of the data you download will be counted, and double upload torrents will award double the upload credit that you seed.
Effective Immediately: Torrents over 25GB are no longer freeleech, they are now half-leech.
Although this change may be met with some disparity, it is for the better of the site's health. Allowing so many large torrents to be freeleech was having detrimental effects on their seeder retention and the site's economy. We will be evaluating ways to counterbalance the loss of this freeleech for new users, so feel free to make suggestions!
We plan to use double upload as an incentive for people to download and seed underseeded torrents. We haven't came up with exact numbers for this yet, but we hope to have it implemented within the next few days.
Finally, due to TheTVDB's frequent downtime and decision to block embedding images from another torrent site, banners hosted on TheTVDB may no longer be used. It is still encouraged to use banners from that site, however you should first upload them to an image hosting site such as imgur.

Since we felt that the ratio brackets were not adequate for the size of torrents on this site, we've increased them by a factor of 1.5. This effectively increases the grace period for new users to 15GB. A full list of ratio requirements is available at rules.php?p=ratio.

We've rolled out another set of tracker changes that we hope you guys will enjoy.
The most notable of these changes is that users on ratio watch can now download full freeleech torrents. We hope that this will help users who find themselves on ratio watch without torrents that receive frequent traffic work their ways off of it.
To fix an oversight on my part, torrents may now be any logical combination of the three freeleech types. The main reasoning behind this change is to allow underseeded half-leech torrents to be double upload as well.
Additionally, the tracker now supports 'single user freeleech'. This feature treats every torrent as freeleech for any user who has this flag set. Although we do not know how or if this feature will be used, we decided to add it to prevent a later recompile if we decide to implement it.

Although somewhat overshadowed by the success of BTN, ShareTheRemote too boats an impressive set of site features. They too have a TV Shows Database, detailed series pages, staff picks and even a TV news section. Series pages are similar to that of BTN – individual episodes and season packs for a particular show are accessible from a single location. The collector add-on found on these pages makes downloading all available full season packs for a particular show a breeze. In addition to the widgets you can see in the screenshot to the right, there is a recommendations add-on which suggests other similar shows to the user.

Currently, there are over 7200 users and nearly 5000 torrents indexed on this tracker. Some of these torrents are full season packs and some, as said earlier, are individual episodes. While STR already has a healthy flow of new daily torrents, they would need to improve this aspect if they are to compete against the likes of BTN, BMTV, etc who definitely add more content every day.

STR has been open for registration several times in the past but the site is currently invite only. However, there’s still hope for those who missed the open registrations (or for those hearing about this tracker for the first time right now). Although many are unaware, STR has an official invites channel hosted on their IRC server. You may get an invite by following the procedure mentioned on the channel topic.

Site Name: ShareTheRemote (http://sharetheremote.org/)

IRC Channel Details:

Server: irc.sharetheremote.org
Channel: #invite
Direct Link: irc://irc.sharetheremote.org/invite

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nTorrents To Shut Down, Plans To Launch PWN - A Multi Platform Games Tracker

During the past couple of years, nTorrents has been a premier destination for those seeking to download Nintendo video games. Being one of the first private trackers to migrate to the now famed Gazelle codebase, nTorrents gained huge popularity even though it catered to a smaller niche in the gaming community. Despite its popularity, NT administration is planning to shut down the site pretty soon. Plans for the the site’s XBOX360 torrents section which was to be morphed into a separate private tracker called xTorrents, have also been scrapped. However, it’s not as bad as its sounds - NT crew will be launching PWNNetwork, a brand new games tracker that will not limit itself to a single gaming platform but cater to a wider user base comprising of both PC and console gamers. In short, PWN will be the future of NT.

As of right now, PWN seems to be in a closed, private beta testing phase. Although the site is live, registrations are not open and there is no recruitment going on in any of the BitTorrent forums or on IRC. Existing NT members who purchased a ticket in their last raffle will be invited in by staff as beta testers.

The full announcement regarding the change (quoted from NT homepage) is posted below:

Ladies and gentlemen, the big news. NTorrents is closing, our xbox sister-site XTorrents is not going to be released. We're simply combining resources into a powerful gaming tracker instead. All your favorite staffers, a few new ones, and a fresher (less buggy) gazelle code. Combine this with a new look, including a few modifications, along with our reputation of an outstanding community. We welcome you to PWNnetwork.net.

Why is this happening you ask? Easy, we want to advance beyond the constraints of offering one company's games, and we don't want to split our userbase among two sites to do it. This will be a gradual process instead of an instantaneous action though, NTorrents will stay open as an archive until we get our most dedicated users to switch over to PWNnetwork. Sign up with PWN will be separate from NT, so yes, you will lose all of your stats. Don't worry too much though, for an undetermined amount of time after the site goes live, we will support an integration processes where we will transfer your upload and download stats from NT to PWN. Everything else will be lost.

Now that we've gotten that out of the way, I have more news. After our raffle is closed, and we've gotten the prizes to the winners sent out, we will also be issuing beta access to PWN to every person who purchased a ticket in the raffle. This will be a beta period, in order for a decent amount of users to test the site, pitch ideas, and help work out issues before PWN officially goes live. So, if you don't want to wait until we launch the site to check out what PWN has to offer, go buy that ticket! Not only will you get into PWN early, but you will have a chance to win one of those great prizes.

We appreciate everyone in our community, and we hope, even though the NT journey will be ending, that we will continue being awesome through PWN.
//Staff

A public launch date for the new tracker is yet to be confirmed. However, one thing is certain – PWN will have a head start with the backing of large user base, experienced staff, uploaders and Nintendo/XBOX360 torrents that NT already has. At the time this post is being written, nTorrents has over 17500 active users and nearly 4000 torrents. Either way we wish this new tracker the best of luck and will post updates when/if it opens registrations or any form of recruitment anytime soon.

PWN Details:

Site Name: PWNnetwork (http://pwnnetwork.net)
Signup URL: N/A
Other: The favicon on the page suggests they are using resources for XTorrents (XT) for the new site.

nTorrents Details:

Site Name: NTorrents (http://ntorrents.net)
IRC Invites Channel: irc://irc.ntorrents.net:6667/nt-invites

Related Articles

nTorrents Nintendo Games Tracker - Now With Autouploader & New DDL Forum Section

Manage Multiple Remote Desktop Connections With Microsoft RDCMan

If you work with multiple remote desktop connections simultaneously, here’s a software that’ll make your life easier. RDCMan (Remote Desktop Connection Manager) is a tool from Microsoft that will let you easily connect and manage several remote desktop sessions at once. This can be a useful tool for network administrators as well as for software developers who need to deploy and test applications on multiple machines. RDCMan is a small download which is sized around ~750KB and the app is distributed as freeware. I haven’t had a lot of time to test drive this app but it looked like a solid piece of software with no showstopper bugs during the short period of time I used it.

First thing you’ll want to do after installing RDCMan would be to create and save a new group. You can do this through the File menu. Then, you can start adding servers to the group, create sub groups, etc. The interface is not the most user friendly but since the app is not targeted at novice users, this wouldn’t be too much of a problem.

Download

You can download this software free from Microsoft Download Center. If you use a relatively older operating system such as Windows XP or Windows 2003, you’ll need to obtain version 6 or newerof the Remote Desktop Connection client software.

[Click Here] to download RDCMan 2.2 from official download page.

GazelleGames – Games Torrent Tracker Running on Gazelle RC2 (Open Signups)

Here on FILEnetworks Blog, we talk about video games a lot. In fact, our PC Games section is equally popular as our private trackers section and brings in a lot of traffic to the site every day. Hence, we have reason to believe that an article about another specialized games torrent tracker would generate positive responses from our readers. GazelleGames is a private tracker that indexes games for DOS/Windows PC, XBOX, XBOX360, Playstation 1,2,3, PSP, Nintendo 64, Wii, iPhone and lots of other gaming platforms available today. Running on the shiny new Gazelle RC2 codebase, GGn has so far shown great results in design, content and community aspects of the site and seems to be one of those few trackers that have a positive outlook for the future.

Ever since we heard news of GGn (back when it was in beta), we’ve been in touch with it’s SysOP/Recruiters who kept us up to date on the progress of the site. One thing we could clearly see was that site staff were really passionate about what they were doing - they were not is a rush to start yet another games tracker and be done with it, they wanted GGn to stand out from the rest. It would be unfair to compare GazelleGames to leading games trackers such as bitGAMER and BCG since it’s only been a few days since the site has gone public. However, they already do boast an impressive set of site features that can even rival well established BitTorrent trackers –listed below are some of them (parts quoted from official GGn review on their forums):

Game Reviews (GamePedia) - We are not only a Games tracker but we also supplement the content with comprehensive reviews of games that you might like to check out. Supplied by members, each review is analyzed by the staff to make sure it is of top-notch quality. Also, on that note, submitting a review to the site has its incentives...(think freeleech on ALL platforms for said game as well as a few GB's of upload for yourself).
GGn Wiki- Have a thirst for more knowledge? Check out our Wiki articles and quench that thirst. You can read up on about everything from how to build your ratio, to information on the scene. Have information to share? Create your own wiki article and share it with our users!
Games - We aim to please when it comes to content you are looking for. Yes we are new, and somewhat lacking in content...but don't let that fool you. Our uploaders have a priority upload list which includes the Top 1000 Games list, including old and rare gems, as well as new releases. We are also getting an auto-upload script working so that we can get those great pre-times that so many of you have learned to love!
IRC - We have active irc channels if you would like to join in and share info with other IRC members, and you can also get some "behind the scene" info on current site news.
Community - The biggest aspect of the site we pride ourselves on is the community. From friendly, helpful and knowledgeable staff, we are also chock-full of members who are as passionate about games as you are. We love to talk gaming, and by checking out the forums and IRC channels, it really shows. We have a very welcoming community that absolutely love gaming, so join in on the fun!

Add to these the great navigation, organization and search features provided by Gazelle RC2 and you have a great looking specialized private tracker on your hands. The screenshot below shows part of GGn’s torrent index:

GGn publicly launched just two days ago after an extended beta phase. Although it was invite only during the beta, signups have now been opened to facilitate further expansion. The site has so far done really well with around 1000 new members signing up and ~200 torrents uploaded during the short period of time it’s been online. Open signups will continue until GGn reaches its current user limit of 5000 – if you are someone used to downloading games over BitTorrent, don’t forget to check this site out. You get 1.5GB free upload credit upon signup and all new torrents have free leech for the first 6 hours they are alive.

Site Name: GazelleGames (http://gazellegames.net)

Signup URL: http://gazellegames.net/register.php

Special thanks to Daedy, t4nk and rest of GGn staff for the heads up.

VoiceThe.Net (VTN) – New Open Registration BitTorrent Forum From Etiv Crew

If you’ve been reading us for some time, you may have come across the name Etiv. It’s a well established BitTorrent invites and discussion forum that is generally closed to the public (to read our previous post about this site, click here). This post however is not about Etiv opening it’s doors– it’s rather about the launch of their sister site VoiceThe.Net (VTN), an open registration BitTorrent news, invites and discussion forum. One of the main characteristics of VTN is that it does not have any entry restrictions – the site will cater to even absolute beginners to the BitTorrent scene. While a fully fledged BitTorrent community in its own right, active members from VTN will even gain entry to Etiv based on their performance.

A very informative piece about VTN with plenty of background information about the site, who runs it and the events that lead to its birth was sent to us by Frylock, a SysOP of Etiv. Some parts of it are quoted below:

BEGIN QUOTE
Some time ago Etiv noticed space in the market for an always open regs torrent forum. There are some but far fewer than the countless elite sites that you have to jump through hoops to get into. The Admins at Etiv all have their roots at the legendary P2P-Talk and we remember the daily influx of new users open regs and a well SEOed site brings. Etiv serves its niche well and we weren't prepared to take it in that direction. The idea of opening a secondary site has been on the drawing board for 6 months but we simply didn't have the man power to competently run 2 sites. We've come a long way since then and a lot of good people have joined our ranks. This is were Rabbot come into the picture. He came into Etiv during our December membership drive and quickly rose in ranks to our Supervisor position. He revived the idea and had a domain and vB Lic. ready to go. Just like that VTN was born.

VTN is part of the "Etiv Network" and staffed by Etiv members/staff but is owned and operated by Rabbot. It's purpose is double edged; We all enjoy working BT sites and spreading the pirate fun and building new sites is just what we do. It also is going to be the gate way to Etiv. Closed and Open sites both have their own advantages and disadvantages, we feel we can have the best of both worlds by operating in this manner. There are no set standards for VTN members to gain entry to Etiv. There is an application available to VIP's but we will also be hand picking people to give the golden ticket to.

We decided late in the game to add level 3 and below invite GAs and requests. We don't want to step on Etiv's toes with the invite game but also realize that you can't catch fish with out bait on your hook. Basic rules apply, we do't tolerate cheater, sellers, traders, ect.
END QUOTE

Like we said before, VTN will have all the functionalities of a regular BitTorrent forum including invite giveaways, tutorials, invite requests, tracker reviews, tracker discussions, internal contests and so on. Qualifying members will also be given access to Etiv, VTN’s older brother. Below is a screenshot showcasing VoiceThe.Net’s torrent discussion and invite forum sections in the main index:

These are still very early days for VTN and this is probably the first time the world hears of its existence. Almost all of the technical work has finished and the site is now live on the interwebz. Registration is currently only available to FILEnetworks readers through the special link below but doors will be opened to everyone after some time (after all, it’s one of their goals) .

Site Name: VoiceThe.Net (http://www.voicethe.net)

Signup URL: http://www.voicethe.net/FileNetworksOpenRegistrations.php

VTN Blog: http://voicethe.net/blog/

Twitter Feed: http://twitter.com/voicethenet

Special thanks to Frylock and Rabbot for the continuous support.

Alpha Protocol - How To Change Language, Fix Crashes & Moaning Sounds In Menu

The title is weird & we know it – if you read on, you’ll understand why its there. This post is related to the recently released PC game Alpha Protocol. I have had the chance to play licensed version of this game for a few hours and it has so far played like a mediocre 3rd person RPG. I ran into an annoying bug where the game won’t save the state properly and there’d be slight changes (for example to player position) when a save is loaded. On the plus side, the story and game play concepts look pretty good. Although the game is not broken, it did not look anything special either. Anyways here’s answers to a few questions asked by our readers so far; How to change language in Alpha Protocol & more importantly, what’s with the weird moaning sounds you get in the main menu.

How to change language in Alpha Protocol

If your version of Alpha protocol runs in any other language than English (and if you want the game to switch to English), try the fix below.

Go to X:\Users\USERNAME\Documents\Alpha Protocol\APGame\Config\APEngine (where X: is your system drive, usually C:) and open the APEngine.ini file with a text editor.
Scroll to the [Engine.Engine] section and set Language=EN. Save and close the file.
Go to X:\Program Files\SEGA Corporation\Alpha Protocol\Engine\Config\BaseEngine and Open BaseEngine.ini file with a text editor.
Scroll to the [Engine.Engine] section and set Language=EN. Save and close the file. Now start the game.

If you want to change the language to any other language than English, you may try a different language string. For example to switch it to Russian set Language=RUS. For this to work your copy of the game must be a MULTILANGUAGE version.

How to Fix Crashes, weird menu sounds, game exiting to main menu after the first cutscene, etc

We’ve received several E-mails from our readers who all seem to have run into a very weird issue. Whenever a menu item is selected/hovered on, the game would emit a strange moaning sound :D Apart from that it would crash to desktop or go back to the main menu after the first cut scene. From what I have found so far, this happens when you try different versions of the game in your machine. For example if you installed a leaked copy of the game earlier and then tried installing the legit version (or a different exe) later, these problems may materialize. To try and resolve these issues, follow the instructions below.

Note: Be careful when making changes to the system registry. Deleting/modifying wrong values may cripple your system.

Open the Windows Registry Editor – this is usually done by typing RegEdit.exe in the run/search box and pressing enter.
Expand the key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE and then expand SOFTWARE
Right click the ‘SEGA Corporation’ Key (under SOFTWARE) and hit delete. Press yes to the confirmation message. Close the Registry Editor.
Navigate to X:\ProgramData directory, where X is your system drive (usually C:\). Delete the SEGA Corporation folder located inside it. Now run the game.

If the above does not work, try uninstalling the game, repeating steps 1-4 and then reinstalling a fresh copy.

How to improve mouse controls and mouse movement in Alpha Protocol

If you are annoyed by the way your mouse behaves in Alpha Protocol (sudden mouse speed variations when FPS drops), you can try the following fix to improve mouse handling. Full credit for this fix goes to user MirkoOdora on NFoHump Forums.

Go to X:\Users\USERNAME\Documents\Alpha Protocol\APGame\Config & open DefaultInput.ini file with a text editor. Set bEnableMouseSmoothing=False in this file, save and close it.
Go to X:\Users\USERNAME\Documents\Alpha Protocol\APGame\Config & open APInput.ini file. Set all occurrences of bEnableMouseSmoothing variable in this file (there should be 2) to bEnableMouseSmoothing=False
Go to X:\Users\USERNAME\Documents\Alpha Protocol\APGame\Config & open APEngine.ini file. Set the following values in appropriate sections
[Engine.GameEngine]
bSmoothFrameRate=FALSE
MinSmoothedFrameRate=1024
MaxSmoothedFrameRate=4096
[SystemSettings]
UseVsync=False
Open X:\Users\USERNAME\Documents\Alpha Protocol\APGame\Config and make all ini files in this folder read only (note – after making these files read only, your changes from the in game menu options may not get saved. If you need to change any settings from the in game menu, it’s suggest that you do it before this step)

Note: This article is a work in progress. Check back here frequently for updates as we will be adding new content when more fixes are discovered.

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iTune, HDPre Trackers Open Signups After Downtime

Updates from two relatively popular trackers in the BitTorrent scene – HDPre and iTune. Both these sites currently have open signups but they have also suffered minor setbacks due to database failure. HDPre, a Hungary based high definition private tracker was forced to revert to a several months old DB backup, resulting in the loss of some user accounts and torrents in the process. Site wide free leech has been activated and signups have been opened as a form of compensation. In similar fashion, the gazelle based music tracker iTune has sprung back after being offline for 12 long days. They have however lost 4500 torrents, a significant amount when it comes to a specialized torrent site. On the plus side, the intermittent downtime issues with iTune now seem to be resolved. This tracker too will have sidewide free leech in the coming 12 days.

iTune

Site Name: iTune (http://itunez.net)
Signup URL: http://itunez.net/register.php
Description: iTune is a music torrent tracker indexing English music from all genres. The site is based on the Gazelle codebase and has a great user interface that is pleasing to the eye. iTune recently switched domains from itune.ro to itune.net.
Stats: 6400 users and 660 torrents (Updated after downtime)
Full Review: [Click Here]

HDPre
HDpre
Site Name: HDpre (http://hdpre.com)
Signup URL: http://hdpre.com/signup.php
Description: HDpre is a Hungary based veteran HD tracker that’s more than two years old. It was previously accessible via hdpre.ath.cx however the site has now moved to more secure domain and is hosted at hdpre.com.
Stats: 20100+ users and ~400 torrents (used to index around 4.5k torrents before downtime)
Full Review: [Click Here]

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The Game Scene Charts Issue 41 & 42 – March/April 2010 Editions

The past two months have been pretty hectic for the gaming scene, especially for the folks involved in cracking game copy protection mechanisms. During this time we saw the public launch of UBISoft’s new hyped up DRM system (bundled with games such as Assassin’s Creed 2 and Splinter Cell : Conviction), creating frenzy among release groups who simply hacked away at it, trying to break this supposedly unbreakable protection. We saw leading names such as Razor1911, RELOADED and SKIDROW each claiming to have cracked the protection and there was quite a bit of E-drama and flame wars between these groups. Either way, the cracking scene was more alive in the past two months than it was in the first few weeks of 2010. If you want to see how scene groups fared and competed against each other during this time, check out the latest two editions of The Game Scene Charts (TGSC), a pirate magazine that rates and ranks groups of crackers based on their ‘performance’.

March 2010 rankings saw SKIDROW top the charts with their recent flurry of new games releases. SKIDROW, founded in 1990 as a release group for AMIGA console games, returned to the scene in 2007 as a PC cracking group. Initially releasing mostly budget games, SKIDROW have now proven themselves to be a team of top crackers and reverse engineers capable of cracking complex DRM. Legendary RELOADED and GENESiS follows SKID in TGSC’s March rankings.

April 2010 rankings are very much similar. SKIDROW grabs the first spot, RELOADED second and the only difference is TiNYISO moving a few spots up the ladder to claim the 3rd place. Unlike SKID and RLD, TiNYISO deals with budget PC games that are relatively unknown to the public.

Download

You can download TGSC issue 41 and 42 from Defacto, a site we featured on a previous article.

[Click Here] to download Game Scene Charts Issue 41 (March 2010) from Defacto.

[Click Here] to download Game Scene Charts Issue 42 (April 2010) from Defacto.

If you are looking for older editions, Defacto has the complete collection of TGSC magazines since Issue #1 (September 2006) on this page

TvFreeload Forum Back After Downtime – Direct Download Links For TV Shows, Movies

Here’s another great news for you TV & movie fans out there. TvFreeload, simply one of the best direct download link (DDL) forums on the planet for television shows, seems to have recovered from their downtime issues. I’m not sure when exactly the site came back online but it sure as hell was down more often than not in the last couple of months. This site falls under the same category as previously mentioned ev0.in, TV-Dump and Dedicated TV but TVFL is a true forum whereas other sites are more like release blogs/logs (and there aren’t many DDL forums that specialize in TV shows online these days). TvFreeload maintains a huge database of direct download links & online streaming links for TV shows, movies, documentaries, sports, anime and even some lossless music - this is a highly recommended forum if you intend to download any of these content for free.

Some of you may be hearing about this site for the first time but it’s actually a quite popular forum. Despite the downtime issues that have plagued TVFL for weeks, it has managed to recruit over 30000 members, making it one of the largest DDL forums online for TV/Movie downloads. The activity is also pretty good with nearly 50000 posts in 10000+ threads – note that these stats are only for the year 2010.

Anyways most folks who sign up for a DDL forum wouldn’t care about how big or active the community is – they’d simply want to download the stuff they need. TVFL will kick your ass in this department – there are tons of movies and TV shows up for grabs here. You will be able to find these in TVFL’s ‘Downloads’ section. TV shows are categorized by type, name and movies are categorized by type, year of release and then name. Both new and old series/films are available. Be sure to have a look at the ‘A-Z Index’ threads under each category as well – these are sorted lists of all the content in TVFL’s downloads section.

Content on TVFreeLoad comes in many forms; Below is a list of video formats you may stumble across on this forum:

Regular HDTV Format Files, XViD etc.
.mp4 format for iPhones, PSPs, iPods etc.
High Definition Download (720p,1080p etc.)
m-HD, m-720p, m-1080p Encoded Files
Streaming Online Media, No Need To Download/Extract.
DVDR Format Movies

Note that these video files are not hosted by TVFL itself. They are hosted on external hosts and only the verified, live DDL links are posted in the forums. One click hosters used by this forum includes:

RapidShare
Megaupload
Netload
FileFactory
DepositFiles
Hotfile
Storage.to
Mediafire
Multiupload
Megavideo
x7.to
Uploading.com
Enterupload

If you still aren’t a member of this awesome forum, registrations are currently open. Registration and log in is mandatory for viewing download links, etc so if you intend to download or watch movies/tv shows/cartoons online, go ahead and sign up using the link below.

Site Name: TVFreeload (http://forum.tvfreeload.com)

Signup URL: http://forum.tvfreeload.com/ucp.php?mode=register

If you liked this site you may also like:

Blackcats Games Invite Giveaway – 500 Free BCG Referrals

BCG is considered by many as the holy grail among games torrent trackers. This veteran private torrent site (which by the way is over 7 years old) has a lot of PC, console and mobile video games along with a large, dedicated user base who keep these torrents alive. However, BCG is not the easiest tracker to get into, especially if you are a newcomer to the BitTorrent scene. Open signups almost never happen on this tracker and you can only become a member either through a referral from an existing member (referrals are BCG’s alternative to the invites system commonly found on private trackers) or via an official recruitment thread on select BitTorrent forums. If you still aren’t a member of this tracker, good news is that thanks to stoi (BCG SysOP) we now have at our disposal 500 referral codes to be given away to FILEnetworks Blog readers.
UPDATE: We have received well over 500 requests. As we commented earlier, please do not send any more emails – this giveaway has now concluded. Referrals will be sent to selected emails in the coming days.

BCG crew seem to be in a mode of expansion right now and they’ve just given 10 referrals each to most of their existing members. According to stoi there are now 187,225 free referrals ‘out there’ in the system. If you are an existing BCG user, now would be a good time to check your account – you may have received them as well. Although BCG isn’t really short of members, new blood is always welcome in a private tracker. Their user base currently hovers somewhere around the 27000 - 30000 mark and the plan is to recruit several thousand new members within the next month.

When it comes to content, BCG has games for almost every platform there is on the planet. From the popular DOS/Windows PC section to PS3, XBOX360, Wii console games sections, BCG tracks over 12000 active torrents which include latest titles (scene and non scene releases), retro games and exclusive BCG member creations. Recently they have expanded to cover mobile platforms and now games for Android, iPhone etc are also available on this tracker. In addition to individual releases, lots of games packs & collections have been uploaded – some of these can be seen in the screenshot below:

One thing you should know about BCG is that it’s functionality in some areas is drastically different from the average private tracker. For example on BCG there are no invites – these have been replaced by referrals. Same goes for the Seed Points mod – it’s an advanced system that essentially replaces the seed bonus system on most private trackers. We strongly recommend everyone to check the site’s Rules and FAQ pages first thing you login – without reading these your stay on BCG will be short lived. You can also find many helpful tutorials on this forum section of the site. Anyways it’s time to get back to the invite giveaway :)

How to send the referral request

Referrals can be requested / sent back via E-mail. Before you send in the request, please do some background reading and get a basic understanding of how the Seed Points system and Hit and Run warning system functions on BCG. To prove that you at least tried, please answer the two questions below and send the answers with your referral request email. Answers to both questions are available in this forum post stoi made on FileSharingTalk (FST) forums.

To receive Seed Points for a particular torrent, what is the minimum active time requirement you need to have on that torrent?
What is the minimum individual ratio a torrent needs to have for you to safely stop seeding it (without getting it counted as a hit and run)?

Here’s how you need to send the referral request E-mail

Address the E-mail to invites[dot]filenetworks[at]gmail[dot]com
Set the subject to BCG 01 . Please don’t get this wrong as we use the subject to filter invite requests.
In the message body, specify clearly your answers to both the questions mentioned above.
In message body, insert the link to your profile page of any private tracker you are currently a member of – for example http://sitename.com/user.php?id=12345 . You do not need to have a massive buffer or an unbelievable ratio – not being a Hit and Runner and not being a collector would be suffice.
Send the mail. If you are successful, a response with a referral code will be sent back.

Use your referral before it expires

In the next few days, we will be sending out referrals in batches of 125. Please allow us one week to send out all the referral codes. This is not an automated process and we will have to manually verify the request, generate the referral and then send it to the requester via email. Needless to say it’s a time consuming process.

Note that a referral code expires after 6 hours. That means, you have to use the code within 6 hours since we generate it or the code would become invalid. Make sure to use an email you check frequently when sending the request. Since there can be various obstacles such as time zone differences, etc, we have taken the following steps to make this process more convenient for our readers :

After each batch of codes is sent, we will immediately notify you via E-mail, Twitter and Facebook. You can use any one or all of these mediums to stay up to date.

E-mail – An email with the code will be sent back to the E-mail account you used to send the referral request.
Twitter – Follow us on Twitter and we will Tweet whenever we send out a new batch of referral codes. http://twitter.com/filenetworks
Facebook page - ‘Like’ our Facebook page to become a fan of it. Then you will get an update on your FaceBook wall immediately after we send out referrals: http://www.facebook.com/filenetworks

If you didn’t receive a code after a certain batch of codes were sent out, don’t lose hope as you might get it in the next round. However do keep in mind that we only have 500 codes (at this point) at our disposal and these will be served on a first come, first served basis. We may be able to do additional giveaways in future but this is not confirmed as of yet.

What to do after you receive the referral code

Like many other areas of the site, BCG’s referral/signup/login system is very unique. Follow the steps below to use your referral code to create a new account:

Visit http://www.blackcats-games.net
TYPE the word referal into the search box (don’t change the spelling), without hitting submit or enter. Once you do, Email and referral code (aka referral link) text boxes will appear at the foot of the page
Enter a valid email address (NO HOTMAIL) and code in the boxes given. Then submit.
Check mail for link and proceed to signup page
Fill in your details and submit. this will then send you a completion email and more importantly, the keyword.
Back at http://www.blackcats-games.net you must type in the keyword in the search box. Username pass fields will appear at the foot of the page.
Enter your credentials at the username, password fields and hit submit. Enjoy BCG

Special thanks to stoi for hooking us up with referrals.

To get advance notifications on giveaways like this, follow us on Twitter or Facebook.

SyncTheBits (StB) Now On Gazelle – Signups Open

A long awaited change has finally happened over at SyncTheBits (StB), a leading private torrent tracker for mobile, smartphone content. StB has gone through a complete site overhaul and staff have now launched the next major revision of the tracker. This new milestone (dubbed StB v2) introduces many new features, add-ons and enhancements including advanced search, a new bonus system, streamlined user interface, a more organized torrent index, faster navigation and many other smaller tweaks. StB now runs on a customized version of Gazelle source making it the first specialized mobile tracker to utilize this popular codebase. In celebration of StB v2 public launch, signups have been opened on this otherwise invite-only private community.

Good news about the Gazelle migration is that StB staff have managed to do it without any data loss. All the torrents are in tact and the tracker is functioning as it should. User accounts however seem to require manual input for them to be migrated – this is a one time process and can easily be done through the automatic migration tool available at http://www.syncthebits.com/stb_migration.php (this applies to existing members only – new users who signup today are not required to do this).

At the time of writing StB had 2400+ active users and ~4000 torrents in its index, making it probably the largest specialized mobile tracker in existence. As we highlighted in a previous post, you can find on this site applications, games, themes, mobile optimized movies, ebooks, etc for a number of different mobile platforms including iPhone, Android, Symbian, Windows Mobile, Palm, PSP, Java, BlackBerry and more. Thanks to the user friendly search and organization features provided by Gazelle, discovering goodies for your mobile should now be easier.

Another new feature introduced with the launch of StB v2 is the ‘Store’. Through the store you are able to purchase invites & upload credit in exchange for bonus points (earned by seeding torrents), gift your points to friends and convert excess invites back to bonus points. You can even gamble away your credits by playing Blackjack solo or against other players.

Simultaneous to the launch of StB v2, public signups have been opened. The site’s current user limit is set to 5000 which leaves around 2500 free slots remaining. If you are looking for a mobile tracker with a great interface and a decent amount of content, check this out.

Site Name: SyncTheBits (http://www.syncthebits.com)

Signup URL: http://www.syncthebits.com/register.php

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FreeTheScene (FTS) Now A Ratio Free Private Tracker – Invites On IRC

Looking for a general/0day private torrent tracker without ratio? Try FreeTheScene (FTS). FTS, a BitTorrent tracker based on Gazelle codebase, has removed its ratio system and has switched into a no-ratio model. FTS was a ratio based torrent site ever since its inception more than a year ago and this sudden move comes as a bit of a surprise. Anyways it’s a pretty well established medium sized tracker with a decent amount of content and going ratio free might just increase their user base by luring all those ‘no ratio’ fans in. Signups are not directly open but interested readers can ask for an invite on their official IRC invites channel.

As of 23/5/2010, FTS tracks around 3300 active torrents (4600 total) and has a registered user base of 3600+ members. When this site started it did not use the Gazelle codebase at first – the migration happened sometime later back in early 2009. FTS was in fact among the first few private trackers to switch to this now famous codebase that has won the hearts of many torrenters.

As you can guess from the name, Free The Scene is a General/0Day private tracker. This means you can find all sorts of content ranging from movies to games here. FTS however is not a scene only tracker – non scene releases including exclusive packs are also indexed. At time of this posting, they had around 100 unique packs indexed. Anyways FTS seems to be ‘celebrating’ switching to ratio free mode pretty hard. Have a look at the graphic below:

As the poster above states, you now only need to seed all downloaded torrents for a minimum of 72 hours. The actual amount of data you upload during this time does not matter. Downloaded and uploaded data is still calculated but there is now no such thing as a global ratio.

FTS used to open signups at random times in the past but such open registrations have been scarce in the past few months. However, if you are interested in joining, an invite can be obtained from their official invites IRC channel.

Server: irc.freethescene.net
Channel: #fts-invite
Direct Link: irc://irc.freethescene.net/fts-invite
New to IRC?: [Click Here] for a brief mIRC tutorial

Once logged into the channel, do as the channel topic says.

Special thanks to Jhonson for the heads up and ckpro for opening the invites channel for our readers.

ComicBT – A New Comic Book Torrent Tracker

We have lots of good news lined up in the BitTorrent front and here’s the first of those stories. As we have previously highlighted, the BT community has a serious lack of specialized trackers when it comes to comic books. Leading comics trackers such as ZCultFM, CTT, AnimaTooniC, etc have shut down and comics fans nowadays don’t have many options apart from H33T, Demonoid, Bibliotik & ComicPirates (Of course, there are plenty of DDL forums for this purpose but we’re talking about BitTorrent sites here). Anyways the good news is that we’ve seen the birth of a brand new comics tracker; ComicBT. For those interested, this site is currently open for registrations and new signups are now being accepted.

ComicBT is a very young site in the BitTorrent scene. There aren’t many folks who even know of its existence yet. This is not because CBT is a super secret, l33t tracker but because it’s not a crazily hyped up site (and it has received zero publicity so far). CBT currently has only 30 registered users and 42 indexed torrents but we believe small, niche trackers such as this should be promoted despite their size or popularity - there is great potential for growth here.

First thing you’ll notice after logging into CBT will be the site’s theme. The default theme which has a lot of green color has a very comic-book like feel to it (the site still seems to be in final stages of development so there may be bugs present). They have an impressive list of categories including categories sorted by major comic book publishers and if they can fill out those ‘Packs’ sections it would add real value to this site.

ComicBT has a bonus system in place and comes with all other standard features TBDEV 2009 source has to offer. Note that there are wait times for this tracker. However this should not affect you maintaining a good ratio as all torrents on site are free leech till 27th of May.

Signups for ComicBT are currently open. While it’s too early to predict the future of this tracker, signup may be worth it if you are a serious comic book fan.

Site Name: ComicBT (http://comicbt.com)

Signup URL: http://comicbt.com/signup.php

Special thanks to Squills (ComicBT SysOP) who invited us in and let us know about this tracker.

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Newzbin Two – World’s Largest Usenet Indexer May Return

Few years ago, there was this unofficial rule on the internet regarding UseNet; you don’t talk about UseNet. However, this has recently changed with some indexers publicly advertising on file sharing blogs, forums, etc. The increased publicity has not only resulted in many pirates adopting to UseNet technology but it has also diverted the attention of copyright lawyers who seemingly have only one intention; bringing UseNet down. Recently, there has been several court cases filed in various countries against Usenet indexers and this series of events has eventually lead to the closure of Newzbin - as reported by TorrentFreak, Newzbin shut down its operations after a court ruled it’s operations were against the law. But have we truly seen the end of world’s largest Usenet indexer? We think not.

Quoted below is part of a mass email sent to previous NewsBin account holders:

Good news: we are Newzbin Two, and we have glad tidings:

NEWZBIN IS BACK! and we are the new management. The crew got most of the original Newzbin source code and the main databases. We loved it too much to let it die.

According to Newzbin’s Ex- owner Caesium’ Chris Elsworth, their source code is indeed leaked and is in the wild:

The Newzbin source code *is* in the wild. Someone has it. I don’t know who, and I don’t know what they’re going to do with it, and I don’t really much care. Best of luck to them, it won’t be competing with anything I choose to do in future.

Don’t ask me to share the Newzbin source with you, it is not mine to share. Control of Newzbin Ltd was transferred away from me (because I sold it. not by force) in January 2010 and with it, all my rights to the source code and servers etc etc. Whoever obtained it didn’t get it through me – how did they get it? I don’t know.

You can read more of his comments (and more Newbin gossip) on this blog.

As of right now Newsbin Two has not gone live yet. Whether it will be named differently or what it’s new URL will be is currently not known. It’s likely that these information will also be made public through another mass E-mail directed at all Ex-NewsBin users. Either way, this just sends another message to the copyright industry – whenever a large file sharing site gets taken down, several others spawn to take it’s place - The hydra effect is not only limited to BitTorrent trackers.

Fix Split Second : Velocity Crash, Resolution & Controller Issues, Black Screen & More

The PC platform has seen a racing game after some time. Split Second : Velocity (aka Split/Second) has now been released to the public. From the brief experience I had with the title, this looked like a fun game to play with more arcade style gaming elements. However, Split/Second is a console port and like most console ports, it does not appear to be the most optimized game to run on PC hardware. In other words, some of you with even high end systems might run into performance woes. Anyways here is our routine troubleshooting article which tries to address some of the crashing issues, controller problems, stuttering performance, etc with the game. Hopefully this should help you resolve the nagging issues you run into while playing Split/Second.

Can’t change resolution, black screen, game minimized to tray or crashes when changing resolution

This is a very common issue with Split/Second and dual monitor systems. If you run into any of the above problems, try disabling the second monitor prior to starting the game (if you have more than two monitors connected, disconnect everything apart from your primary monitor). You can connect the second monitor once the game is started up and you have changed the resolution. Perhaps and upcoming patch may address this issue.

Playing Split/Second with an XBOX 3670 controller

Although you may not be aware, you can play Split Second with an XBOX360 controller. However, since the game does not have native support for them, you may run into a few snags such as not knowing which button on the controller does what. If it helps, here’s the default button mapping for X360 controller:

Accelerate = RT
Brake = LT
Tab = Y
Instant replay = LB
Level 1 power play = A, X
Level 2 power play = B
Enter = Start, A
Escape = B

If you run into any issues with controller setup, I suggest you give XPadder a go. It’s a simply utility that allows you simulate keyboard and mouse movement in a game using a XBXO controller.

Tips to improve performance and reduce stuttering

Like I said earlier, this game is not the most optimized port so you may run into performance issues. Here are some things you can try to improve performance.

Disable Anti Aliasing – this has a major impact on performance and turning this off should give you more than a few FPS boost. Additionally, make sure you have not forced AA from your video card’s control panel.
Try playing in Windowed mode – some people (mostly on ATI hardware) have reported better FPS on windowed mode
Disable VSync – you can try this as well but it’s doubtful if it will yield positive results. On a side note, this game has a built in framerate lock at 30FPS so don’t waste time trying to get it above 30FPS.
Update your DirectX to the latest monthly runtime. Windows XP users may grab the latest runtime from here.
Update your video card’s drivers – if latest drivers do not work, try downloading and installing latest beta drivers (do this at your own risk).
ATI Drivers: Download the latest ATI Catalyst drivers from this link: http://game.amd.com/us-en/drivers_catalyst.aspx
NVIDIA Drivers: Download latest official NVIDIA drivers from this link: http://www.nvidia.com/Download/index.aspx?lang=en-us
Beta Drivers: Check here http://downloads.guru3d.com/

What Are the minimum system requirements to run this game?

Since many have asked, here are the minimum and recommended system requirements to run Split/Second. IMHO 4GB system memory in recommended settings is a bit of an overkill.

Minimum

OS: Windows XP/Vista/7
Processor: Intel Pentium 4 @ 3.0 GHz / AMD Athlon 64 4000
Memory: 2 Gb
Hard Drive: 6.5 Gb free
Video Memory: 256 Mb
Video Card: nVidia GeForce 7800 / ATI Radeon X1800
Sound Card: DirectX Compatible
DirectX: 9.0c

Recommended

OS: Windows XP/Vista/7
Processor: Intel Core 2 DUO @ 3.0 GHz / AMD Athlon 64 X2 4800
Memory: 4 Gb
Hard Drive: 6.5 Gb free
Video Memory: 512 Mb
Video Card: nVidia GeForce 9600 / ATI Radeon HD 3870
Sound Card: DirectX Compatible
DirectX: 9.0c

Note: This article is a work in progress. More issues/fixes will be added as they are discovered. If you have any specific problem or a solution, feel free to comment to this post.

The Pirate Bay’s Hidden Message To The RIAA

The Pirate Bay crew aren’t kidding when they call TPB ‘the world’s most resilient BitTorrent tracker’. After several court cases, injunctions against ISPs, blockades of bandwidth suppliers and various other obstacles, The Pirate Bay still stands tall. Every one of you is now probably familiar with the story of TPB temporary shutting down to switch servers after their host CB3ROB was dragged to courts. Just like many expected, TPB did not stay down for long – the site came back online fully operational again within a matter of hours. That’s not all, TPB crew has had the time to send RIAA a hidden message embedded inside one of their blog posts about the downtime.

I’m sure by now everyone has seen the above LOLCATS image on TPB homepage. If you actually clicked on the image, you will be taken to their new blog post about the downtime. It reads something like this:

PLZ LEARN: TPB CANT BE SHUT DOWN

LOL!

AS U MITE HAS READ OR NOTICD, PEEPS ONCE AGAIN R TRYIN 2 SHUT US DOWN. DIS WILL NOT SUCCED, LOL. OURS RLY NICE WEBHOST WUZ THREATEND WIF RLY HUGE FINE, SO WE DECIDD 2 MOOV TEH SIET SO DAT THEY DIDNT GOT INTO TROUBLE, LOL. TEH DECISHUN 2 MOOV WUZ TAKEN BY US, TEH PIRATE BAY, LOL.

TEH PIRATE BAY IZ AN UNSINKABLE SHIP. IT WILL SAIL TEH INTERWEBS 4 AS LONG AS WE WANTS IT 2. REMEMBR DAT, K THX.

TPB, ONLY IN IT 4 TEH LULZ SINCE 2003

The message is written in the strange internet language associated with LOLCATS (aka LOLSpeak) and is pretty straightforward. But did you notice that certain letters in the text are in bold? If you take only the bold letters and put them together, you get an entirely different message:

ASSCLOWNS OV TEH RIAA

Now that’s pretty awesome, isn't it?

Google Wave Now Open For Everyone – No Invite Needed

There was quite a lot of hype built around Google Wave, the new communications and collaboration platform from Google, when it first hit the web. During the product’s early beta testing phase, registration was closed and the product was available to a select number of users. Needless to say, initially there was a heavy demand for invites (some folks even sold them and some traded private tracker invites for these) but this soon died down as the hype around Wave decreased. Anyways, if you still have not received a Google Wave invite and is waiting to try out the service, good news is that Google has opened Wave registrations for all users. You can now sign up for the service with your free Google Account.

Earlier on we conducted several Google Wave Invite giveaways and were able to give invites to a considerable number of people. However, we were faced with a huge number of requests and our supply of invites was never enough to meet the demand. If you missed out on earlier giveaways, now’s the perfect chance to create a new account.

Quoting from the Google Wave Blog:

Starting today, we are making Google Wave openly available to everyone as part of Google Labs. You no longer need an invitation to wave -- simply visit wave.google.com and sign right in.

Signup URL: http://wave.google.com/ and sign in with your Google account

If I remember correctly, new users should receive 25 invites upon joining. In the meantime if you are one of those early adopters who tried out Wave, thought it sucked and gave up, now would be a good time for a re-visit. Wave has several new enhancements and many improvements up its sleeve and it’s actually a lot better than what it was a couple of months ago.

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Google Wave Invite Giveaway 02 – Now With 50 Invitations

Diwana – Australian and New Zealand TV Torrent Tracker Now Open

Nowadays there’s a TV tracker for almost everything. You have BMTV, BTN, TVT.com etc for US & Canadian TV shows, UKNova, The Box and TVChaos for UK TV, DesiTorrents and a lot more others for Indian/Pakistani shows and so on. Here’s another private tracker that specializes in somewhat rare TV content – Diwana is a BitTorrent site that tracks television shows from Australia and New Zealand. Apart from drama, documentaries, comedies, lifestyles shows, kids shows, etc, Diwana tracks a whole lot of sports content including cricket and rugby torrents. We did an article on this tracker way back in 2008 – the site is still going string with more content and more activity so it’s time to do an updated post. Speaking of updated articles, there’s no better time to write them than when signups are open.

Last time we featured Diwana, it tracked 17000 torrents and had 20000 members. These stats have further improved during the past few months and the site now tracks in excess of 25000 torrents and registered user base has surpassed 32000. Needless to say this is a tracker with very good activity. The number of torrents could have been a lot higher had they not moved new sports releases to http://acrossthetasman.com (AcrossTheTasman is Diwana’s sister tracker and is currently closed for signup – however, existing Diwana.org members can request a free invite from staff).

Speaking of content, majority of Diwana’s torrent index consists of Television shows from Australia and New Zealand. This includes both full season packs and individual episodes of primetime TV, comedies, drama, soaps, game shows, science/medical series, telemovies and so on. Note that Diwana no longer indexes new sports content – sports torrents are still available but all of them are releases made in 2009 or before. Screenshot below shows part from this tracker’s torrent index:

Built on TS Special Edition codebase, Diwana comes with all basic features of a private tracker. This includes a seed bonus system, requests, re-seeds, forums, advanced search, separate subtitles section, etc.

As stated above, signups for Diwana are currently open. They are known to open and close regularly so get in while you can. Note that accounts will be deleted after 60 days of inactivity.

Site Name: Diwana (http://diwana.org)

Signup URL: http://diwana.org/signup.php

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The X Tracker Goes Down, Resurfaces, Opens Signups Again

A lot has been happening around The X tracker recently. First up, their recent open signup was a massive success with several thousand new users joining, bringing much needed activity into the site. However, it’s hasn't all been smooth sailing for this tracker so far - they suffered a setback when their database got corrupted due to a server issue, ultimately resulting in the site being offline for more than just a few hours. Good news is that both the web interface and the tracker are now back up, almost fully functional with all 21000+ torrents in tact. The bad news – user accounts created after the 29th of April have all been deleted along with ratio statistics, forum posts, etc. This means that if you were one of the several thousand members who signed up during The recent X open signups, you need to re-create your account (signups have been re-opened).

So what really happened? A detailed account of the events that transpired is posted on the site homepage. Quoted below are some parts of the news article:

Attention Members
Due to some unforeseen reasons, our server had a mini meltdown of sorts and our database had gotten corrupted to the point that we could not recover it. As a result of this, we are forced to roll back and use a slightly older backup than we would have liked to use and ALL accounts that were opened since 4/29 are lost. There is slightly silverish lining to this story, it appears that pretty much most of the site code was untouched. We know this comes at an awkward time as we were in the middle of open signups and moving forward from the "Beta" process. However, this is a minor set back and we will continue to move forward, we do apologize for the inconvenience. As an extra note: any torrents that you have downloaded during this time are also lost.

User Passkeys:
Although the site was down, we did take the opportunity to move forward and implement our PLANNED updated passkey system. What this means is that we've updated the code and optimized it greatly. However, due to some of the changes in the code, all passkeys had to be reset as they no longer will be valid. We have done this already on our end and ask that you update the information in your clients to reflect the new information, or they will no longer work properly.

Once again; We are really sorry for this. We know just a simple "sorry" is far from good enough, so there will be "gifts" and lots of other fun stuff coming up soon. Also this problem will most likely never happen again in the future.

When it comes to any website (and not just torrent trackers), downtime is expected. However, downtime and data loss makes life a lot harder for sites such as The X which are still in the growing phase. As the news post quoted above says, let’s hope this will never happen in the future.

In the meantime, signups have been re-opened. If you are joining the site as a brand new user or if you are re-creating your user account which got lost in the ordeal, now’s a good time to do it. A full review of this tracker can be found in our previous article located here.

Site Name: The X

Signup URL: http://scenexpress.net/opensignup.php

Note: IP ranges from Romania and Israel are banned from signing up. Only existing users from these countries are allowed to use the tracker.

Official Trailer: Embedded on this page

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Windows Live Messenger Build 14.0.8117.416 Standalone Offline Installer

While we all wait for Windows Live Wave 4 series products to be released to the public, here’s a new build of an existing Wave 3 product. Windows Live Messenger (WLM – formerly MSN Messenger), the popular IM client for the Windows platform, has received a new minor update in build 14.0.8117.416. As usual a changelog which should include a complete list of changes in the new build is missing and we are left guessing what’s new – according to an article on Softpedia this update is only bugfixes. Note that we have linked to the full standalone, offline setup of the program as opposed to the over the web installer that Microsoft provides by default.

The offline installer will be useful for people who have multiple computers, limited bandwidth internet connections, unstable internet connections etc. The idea is to download the entire setup file to hard disk and then re-use the setup to install on any number of computers whenever, wherever you like.

That being said, the installer contains full installations for ALL (not just WLM) Windows Live apps including Mail, Writer, Movie Maker and so on. The file size is 135mb. If you find the file size to be too large – you can download the regular, online version of WLM setup to get the newest build as well.

Download

[Click Here] to download Windows Live Messenger 2009 Final build 14.0.8117.416 Standalone/Offline/Redistributable installer directly from Microsoft

[Click Here] to download Windows Live Messenger 14.0.8117.416 web installer

PDA4x – DDL Forum For Android, BlackBerry, iPhone, PocketPC, Palm & Symbian Apps

Excellent news for all of you folks who own a Smartphone or a new generation mobile device – PDA4x is open for registration. There are so many direct download link forums online nowadays which provide downloads targeted at mobile platforms. PDA4x is definitely among the top 10 of those sites and it provides applications, games, themes, ringtones, hacks, patching tools and all sorts of content for a wide range of platforms including Symbian OS, Android, iPhone, BlackBerry, Pocket PC, Palm, PSP, etc. This is a China based underground community and needless to say most of the applications linked to in the forums are cracked (and in some cases signed) so it’s essentially all pirated material. If you want to get in, now would be a good time to do so as registrations have been opened for a limited time.

This may be the first time you are hearing about PDA4x but believe me, this is not an obscure forum located in an isolated corner on the internet. One of the most notable differences between this site and other similar forums such as DOtSiS, IPMart, etc is theformer’s closed nature. Registrations are usually closed at PDA4x and they don’t open regularly even with lots of potential new members constantly knocking on the door. Despite their tight policy on new signups, there are already several thousand users registered on PDA4x and the activity is in fact very good.

Content is where PDA4x shows it’s true colors. It has a lot of mobile optimized stuff ranging from apps, games to even movies and TV shows. And the collection is not limited to popular Nokia/Symbian software you can find on almost every other forum on the planet. There’s a great amount of apps here for platforms such as BlackBerry, iPhone, Android, etc and this is one factor that sets PDA4x apart from similar mobile forums that are around. Part of the site’s main index can be seen in the screenshot below – note that only some of the platform categories are visible in the screen:

Like most direct download link forums, the site does not host any material on its own servers. Cracked apps, etc are uploaded into one click hosting sites such as Rapidshare and verified, non fake download links are organized and indexed in the appropriate category in the forums.

As we mentioned earlier, PDA4x’s roots lie in China – but that doesn’t mean the content it has is Chinese. In fact, almost everything on this site should be usable by English speaking users – if you get Chinese language interface selected by default after registration, you can change it using the link at top right hand corner of a site page.

As mentioned earlier, registrations for PDA4x have now been opened. This is acknowledged in a forum post but a closing date for open signups has not been mentioned. Either way this definitely won’t last forever so get in while you can.

Site Name: PDA4x (http://www.pda4x.com/)

Registration URL: http://www.pda4x.com/register.php

Other good sites to download mobile optimized content: