BitCannon – A new open source tool that lets you download torrent websites
Torrent websites face daily attacks and takedowns either from authorities for copyright violations or from cyber criminals for their own purpose. Torrent file seekers are more often than not exasperated to find their favourite torrent website down due one of the above reasons. With users awaiting the refurbished Pirate Bay website to come online from 1st Feb 2015 as per the count down timer aboard the page, torrent fans would love to have an alternative arrangement.
BitCannon developers hope to fill this void with their open source tool. BitCannon aspires toย bring torrent site preservation into the hands of everyone with a PC.
The behind BitCannon say that the idea is pretty easy. ย BitCannon software allows user and torrent fans to download and importย torrent site contents into a database hosted on a local machine. Once the torrent websites details are saved onto the PC, the users can browse and surf for the torrents pretty much the same way they do with online torrents sites. ย Once they like a particular torrent, it can be download using magnet links and compatible torrent client.
The problem is that only a handful of Torrent websites offer these archives to users. ย But luckily for the torrent fans, the major ones do offer them openly. ย You can download and use them once you have BitCannon installed.
Downloaded site databases, which be viewed in any web browser, are presented in a straightforward and clean format.
Torrent Freak says that they have tested BitCannon and found it to be very fast.ย BitCannon developers say that it is still a work in development and users could face some issues. ย Bigger databases can take much more time to install and work on this version of BitCannon.
BitCannon developers have made it open source and you can view the source code on GitHub hereย if you want to help the developers with your own inputs.
Other users can download BitCannon for Windows, Linux and Mac here with instructions found here. TorrentFreak has advised that users should use daily dump rather than full site database till they get hang of the tool.