Furk: Direct Download BitTorrent Proxy On Steroids

[p2p rules]

In the regular BitTorrent downloading scenario we would go to a torrent site such as The Pirate Bay or Mininova, select a torrent and download it. Once that torrent starts running in our client, connections are made to other people using the same technique and the content is downloaded and shared with and via those ‘peers’.

This type of file-sharing is very effective - indeed, it’s what BitTorrent is all about. However, there are those who would prefer to stop or hinder such P2P traffic - certain ISPs take measures to identify BitTorrent protocol traffic and slow it down with a process known as ‘throttling’.

While Furk.net (update: the site had some XSS vulnerabilities but these are fixed now according to the admin) can simply be used as a torrent meta-search engine to trawl other sites for .torrent files, to combat throttling (and privacy concerns) Furk bills part of its service as a ‘BitTorrent Proxy’. This means that instead of searching for a torrent file and downloading in the usual manner via the BitTorrent protocol, instead Furk itself joins the swarm in question and downloads the material directly to their own servers.

Once completed, users can simply download that material directly from Furk’s super-fast network using the HTTP protocol in their regular web browser. Identical to standard web traffic, HTTP generally isn’t throttled by ISPs, allowing the user to download more quickly than with throttled BitTorrent. In the less likely event that an ISP tries to slow down HTTP, downloads can be made from Furk using HTTPs.

torrentfreak