BitTorrent is a peer-to-peer file sharing protocol used to distribute large amounts of data. The initial distributor of the complete file or collection acts as the first seed. Each peer who downloads the data also uploads them to other peers. Relative to standard internet hosting, this provides a significant reduction in the original distributor’s hardware and bandwidth resource costs.

Today, we are going to see of the very popular torrent service that called Mininova. This service is one of the most popular torrents indexing service. It’s one of the services that I use frequently to download stuff. Alright, so let’s see what this service does and how it is useful for a common user like you and me. Just to get an idea of what you can do with torrents, you might wanna read this post on Downloading Torrents: Checklist for Movie buffs using Free Torrent Sites. Users of mininova can anonymously upload torrents to this site which is tracked by any bit torrent tracker.

The great part about this service is that they don’t log your IP information making your activity on the site completely anonymous. However, this service doesn’t allow for pornographic content to be uploaded or tracked by their traker. According to mininova, more than 5 billion downloads are there at mininova. This site was started in the year 2005.

Following are some interesting stats related to Mininova as of June this year:

• Total torrent downloads: 5,360,573,100
• Total seeds: 5,923,574
• Total torrents in database: 791,045
• Total number of trackers: 15,599
• Total leechers: 5,286,306

Mininova also has a great reputation of being the 9th Googled word in the year 2006. Mininova also has a toolbar which makes your torrent related activity just a click away.

The search interface of mininova is as easy as it can get with features like advanced search, categories and tag cloud. Following is a video which is a mininova guide.

A great service. We hope that it doesn’t go down because of legal issues.

Immediately after Italian government ordered the ban on PirateBay, PirateBay did what it does best, Changed the domain IP making it accessible on few ISP’s, It also suggested its Italian users to use OpenDNS which not only allows them to by pass ban and visit PirateBay but also bypasses other restrictions. It also suggested its Italian users to visit pirate bay at http://labaia.org. which in Italian means "The Bay".

The only thing these attempts to ban PirateBay is doing is making people more curious about the site and its services thus adding to its traffic and popularity.

Read what PirateBay had to say about it here