Monthly Archive for September, 2007

Updates for Mininova and Snotr

Published
by
Jos
on September 21, 2007
in Mininova technical
. 79 Comments

It’s been a while since the last technical update. So today, we added some new functionality for Mininova and Snotr to make your life easier :)

Updates for Mininova:

  • Number of comments in the tables. If a torrent has one or more comments, the Comment icon icon and the number of comments is shown. Clicking on the number or icon will take you to the comment page of the torrent.
  • Subcategory information in the tables. When you move the mouse cursor over a torrent, its subcategory shows up next to its name.

Updates for Snotr:

  • The video cloud. An interesting way to browse the videos.
  • The video wall. A quick way to find a specific video if you remember its thumbnail image.
  • Quick submit link. Explained on the submit page. This link makes it easier to submit videos to Snotr.
  • Animated thumbnails. When you move the mouse cursor over a thumbnail, an animated version of the thumbnail is shown.
  • Better video encoding method. Already in use since a few weeks, and results in smaller file sizes.
  • Some bug fixes.

As always, we would like to hear your suggestions and ideas. Please comment on this blog post to share your thoughts.

Edit (24 September):

Two more small improvements for Mininova:

  • Comments posted by the uploader of the torrent are shown in green. Example here.
  • The “number of comments” icon (see above) is now always at the right side of the column, so it’s easier to compare torrents in a table.

About the MediaDefender leaked emails

Published
by
Niek
on September 15, 2007
in Mininova-related news and Personal rants
. 37 Comments

Most people probably already read the news on TorrentFreak or another website: yesterday, someone published a torrent consisting of roughly 6.6 thousand leaked internal emails from MediaDefender.

For those who don’t know MediaDefender, it’s part of the company ARTISTdirect (OTC: ARTD) and their sole purpose is to disrupt P2P traffic. They try to achieve this ‘noble’ goal by creating fake (decoy) torrent files and spreading these on BitTorrent websites. Their server farm consists of thousands of servers they use to seed and track these fake files. These guys like to refer to their work as “content protection”.

Now that these internal MediaDefender mails are leaked, I want to share my thoughts on the whole thing. What’s interesting to see is that Mininova is more than once referred to as a difficult site to post fake files. Let’s see some quotes:

NEGATIVES: Attempted to upload to Mininova using 15 different IPs across various ranges. Was banned on every single attempt.

– Benny Mao, on uploading fakes to Mininova

These are very disappointing results given that people were here over the weekend. I understand that Mininova is moderating heavily, …

– Ben Ebert, on attempts to upload fake “Fantastic 4″ torrents

And I know Mininova is our toughest site to get onto.but we gotta think of something.

– Ben Ebert, on failing attempts to upload fakes

Somewhere in between collecting real torrents and posting decoys, post comments for these files on Piratebay, Mininova and Torrentspy.

– Pedro Cortez, in meeting notes

REMINDER: Next Fox High Priority project - Release July 27th: “The Simpson’s Movie”
Try to post to Mininova and Torrentspy by any means possible.

– Pedro Cortez, in other meeting notes

We can only be grateful for the many nice words from our friends at MediaDefender :) All thanks go to our great moderating team, who did (and do) great work.

Oh, and one last quote:

It’s slow. I would say on average 15-20 seconds to load a page.

– Benny Mao, on Mininova load time. We took this remark very serious and decided to take immediate action and added a new slave database server. Graphs of the new setup can be seen at our statistics page.

Stay tuned for updates!