2600 Magazine
The Hacker Quarterly
Astalavista
Don't waste your time with conventional search engines looking for the "toolz" of the trade. This site is a huge search engine for computer security related material, and is updated daily. You can run a search on Astalavista directly from this site by using the search bar below.
Attrition.org
A great no-nonsense underground page. Their disclaimer: "ATTRITION may use language or ideas that are unsuitable to you. ATTRITION staff, system, and respective pets are NOT upbeat people. Deal."
Cult of the Dead Cow
One of the more famous Hacker Groups. These guys are brilliant and put a lot of pride into their work. Under-estimate them at your own risk.
EliteHackers.com
One of the best sites on the web. Great File Archive with Tools and Utilities. And it's updated frequently.
Nomad Mobile Research Centre
"Simple Nomad" as he calls himself, runs a first-rate site that is well organized and easy to use. This is easily one of the best Hacker/Security Pages on the web, and is a little "friendlier" than most.
Phrack
The original Underground No Holds Barred Hacker Journal. Some of the material in the archives is dated, but every serious security specialist has read them.
Top Torrent Sites of 2006
Warning for new users: while P2P file sharing technology is completely legal, many of the files traded through P2P are copyrighted. Unless you live in Canada where users are shielded from P2P lawsuits, then downloading P2P files may put you at risk for a civil lawsuit in any other country. These lawsuits are usually class-action suits, filed against groups of users who blatantly copy and distribute copyrighted materials.
Your Internet Service Provider may, at their discretion, release their logs of your downloading activity to potential copyright plaintiffs. The more megabytes you download, the more you risk being sued by copyright protection groups. Please know this risk before you use any of the following Torrent search engines below:
Torrent Terminology
(also distributed copies) The number of full copies of the file available to the client. Each seed adds 1.0 to this number, as they have one complete copy of the file. A connected peer with a fraction of the file available adds that fraction to the availability, if no other peer has this part of the file. (ie. a peer with 65.3% of the file downloaded increases the availability by 0.653, when two peers who both have the same 50% of the file downloaded and there is one seeder the availability is 1.5).
choked
Describes an uploader to whom the client does not wish to upload. An uploading client 'chokes' another client in several situations:
The second client is a seed, in which case it does not want any pieces (ie. it is completely uninterested)
The uploading client is already uploading at its full capacity (ie. the value for max_uploads has been reached)
interested
Describes a downloader who wishes to obtain pieces of a file the client has. For example, the uploading client would flag a downloading client as 'interested' if that client did not possess a piece that it did, and wished to obtain it.
leech
A leech is usually a peer who has a negative effect on the swarm by having a very poor share ratio - in other words, downloading much more than they upload. Most leeches are users on asymmetric internet connections who do not leave their BitTorrent client open to seed the file after their download has completed. However, some leeches intentionally avoid uploading by using modified clients or excessively limiting their upload speed. The term leech, however, can be used simply to describe a peer.
peer
A peer is one instance of a BitTorrent client running on a computer on the Internet that you connect to and transfer data. Usually a peer does not have the complete file, but only parts of it, however, 'peer' can be used to refer to any participant in the swarm (in this case, also known as a 'client').
This is when a client sends a request to the tracking server for information about the statistics of the torrent, like who to share the file with and how well those other users are sharing.
seed
A seed is a peer that has a complete copy of the torrent and still offers it for upload. The more seeds there are, the better the chances are for completion of the file.
snubbed
An uploading client is flagged as snubbed if the downloading client has not received any data from it in over 60 seconds.
superseed
When a file is new, much time can be wasted because the seeding client might send the same file piece to many different peers, while other pieces have not yet been downloaded at all. Some clients, like ABC, Azureus, BitTornado, or µTorrent have a "superseed" mode, where they try to only send out pieces that have never been sent out before, making the initial propagation of the file much faster. This is generally used only for a new torrent, or one which must be re-seeded because no other seeds are available.
Together, all peers (including seeds) sharing a torrent are called a swarm. Six ordinary peers and two seeds make a swarm of eight.
torrent
A torrent can mean either a .torrent metadata file or all files described by it, depending on context. The torrent file contains metadata about all the files it makes downloadable, including their names and sizes and checksums of all pieces in the torrent. It also contains the address of a tracker that coordinates communication between the peers in the swarm.
tracker
A tracker is a server that keeps track of which seeds and peers are in the swarm. Clients report information to the tracker periodically and in exchange receive information about other clients that they can connect to. The tracker is not directly involved in the data transfer and does not have a copy of the file.
