Written by Ernesto on December 28, 2008
Link To Article here
With
millions of potential targets, BitTorrent sites are a great arena for
scammers and spammers. Vertor is a new BitTorrent site that aims to
eliminate these threats. Every torrent on the site is checked for
viruses, DRM and password protected archives by Vertor’s software, and
users are able to preview the contents of torrents before they download
them.
It
is no secret that badly moderated sites are often filled with spam,
spyware and worse. The true power behind the best torrent sites are the
moderators, since they are the ones who monitor all uploads and remove
the bad apples by hand. Vertor.com,
short for ‘verified torrents’, takes moderation a step further - the
site actually downloads every file, to check for viruses, DRM and other
inconveniences.
The site goes even further though. For every video file, Vertor takes several screenshots so users can verify that it is actually the film the title says it is. Similarly, for music torrents users can preview 20 seconds of the tracks, to avoid downloading the wrong files, wasting precious bandwidth.
Alex, the founder of Vertor explained to TorrentFreak: “If there is
a video we extract screenshots, if there is a text file we save it on
our server, if there is music we extract 20 second samples and if there
is archive we open it and extract the list of files. Then we manually
remove video files protected with DRM.” On an average day, 6000
torrents are downloaded, and between 2000 and 2500 torrents are
verified and get published.
There is a downside to verifying all the torrents though. Since it
takes some time to process, it can take one or two days before a fresh
torrent appears on the site, which might be a problem for those who
want to catch up with a TV-episode that aired yesterday. On the server
side, the drawback is that these processes require some additional
hardware. Alex told us that they use 6 Dual Xeons with 4 GB ram and
500GB of hard disk space.
It is therefore no surprise that it took a few weeks of verifying
torrents before the Vertor project could go live. Currently there are
138439 torrents verified, and more than 5000 were removed because they
contained a virus or a passworded archive. In addition, the site’s
moderators blocked another 14445 torrents. Alex told us that they
started to use new anti-virus software this week, which should be
resulted in higher percentage of virus recognition.
Aside from the verification part, Vertor has another user friendly
feature, as it allows users to download torrents in their browser with Bitlet,
by clicking the “download from the web” button on the torrent detail
page. For now, the site is completely ad-free, and Alex told us that he
will try to keep it like that for as long as possible.
In summary, we think that Vertor has a lot of potential, especially
for those people who are not familiar enough with BitTorrent to spot the bad stuff themselves.
