Skytorrents is a new ad-free and privacy-focused Torrent website
One of the few things that irk any torrent user are the advertisements on various torrent websites like The Pirate Bay, ExtraTorrent, KickassTorrents. As soon as you click in the search bar, the website opens up a new ad page in the background often frustrating users. Likewise, many other smaller proxies and torrent websites go on to launch survey ads which often contain adware.
If ads are worrisome, another big worry for any torrent user is privacy. With the Trump administration allowing ISPs to sell user’s browser data to the highest bidder, it is expected that the torrent websites make most of this decision and sell their users data to ISPs who in turn will sell it to advertisers.
Skytorrents looks to break free from both these issues. It is perhaps the world’s first ad-free torrent website. Skytorrents also guarantees that they will safeguard user privacy. The admin tells Torrent Freak that they will guard privacy and keep the website ad-free by approaching users for donations. “We will NEVER place any ads. The site will remain ad-free or it will shut down. When our funds dry up, we will go for donations. We can also handover to someone with similar intent, interests, and the goal of a private and ad-free world,” Skytorrents’ operator informed us. The main motivation is to showcase an ad-free experience to users. We are giving something good back to society.”
To maintain the privacy of the users, Skytorrents users don’t have to create any account. Also, the website doesn’t use JavaScript at all. Skytorrents also doesn’t use any CDN which often stores the end-users data. “For example, using a CDN breaches user privacy. As far as complete privacy is concerned, either there is complete privacy or zero privacy. For maintaining complete privacy, we do not use cookies, java scripts or user logins. We also do not have any moderators,” says Skytorrents team member.
The Skytorrents website is a refreshing change over the ad-laden torrent websites that we are accustomed to. The UI is simple yet interactive with a powerful search engine that throws up best torrent download results in a matter of seconds. The website runs on a CentOS operated server and has been created without PHP or MySQL.
Another great fear of torrent users is spam and malware-laden torrents. It is good to know that Skytorrents team is taking action even on that front. Skytorrents fetches the torrents from BitTorrent’s DHT network. But before they are approved for Skytorrents users, all torrents have to pass through two spam detection algorithms. Skytorrents also has an automated tool that “confirms” torrents to be genuine. While 99% of the torrents are spam-free already, for “genuine” torrents this goes up to nearly 100%.
“We also have another algorithm which validates and marks genuine torrents. However, note that 99% of listed torrents are spam free. A genuine marked torrent can be assured 99.99 % of the time,” Skytorrents’ says.
Skytorrents has already indexed about 13,00,000 torrents. It has also found popularity with torrent users quickly rising from zero to 10,000 on Alexa. It is already getting 300,000 users a day and with their clean ad-free and privacy-focusses outlook soon the website will be breaking bread with the likes of The Pirate Bay and Extratorrents.
The Skytorrents team has taken an Indian domain to avoid copyright issues but with media companies baying for torrent websites blood, it is to be seen how Skytorrents stands up to them.
