If you use µTorrent, please make sure to upgrade to the latest version, 1.7.6. All previous versions have a bug where a remote user could crash your copy of µTorrent and in some cases, possibly even get into your PC.

So again, if you use µTorrent, please make sure you’re running the latest version!

UPDATE: I almost forgot — this exploit applies to the BitTorrent branded client too as it’s just µTorrent with a different name.

UPDATE #2: If you’d like to read more on this, TorrentFreak has a good article.

UPDATE #3 (1/21): µTorrent v1.6.1 is immune and safe to use. All other versions besides 1.7.6 and the latest 1.8.x alpha are unsafe (that includes 1.6.0).

If you’ve been trying to download a torrent today, chances are you’ve been getting an error message over on Mininova. Seems they are having server troubles.

Not much I can do about that, but I can link you to the torrent for the latest Top Gear episode on isoHunt.com.

UPDATE 11/21: Mininova seems to be back up and running as usual.

Yeah, this isn’t Top Gear or Fifth Gear related, but I’m sure many of you were Colin McRae fans, so I’m posting anyway.

The former rally driving champion Colin McRae was killed and his five year-old son feared dead in a helicopter crash yesterday (it’s Sunday now in the UK. -Viper) afternoon. The aircraft came down in Jerviswood, Lanarkshire, half a mile from the family’s home and burst into flames just after 4pm.

Jean-Eric Freudiger, McRae’s agent, said the 39-year-old driver had been piloting the helicopter himself. Also on board were believed to be his son Johnny, another adult - said by locals to be a school friend of McRae - and another child. McRae’s wife Alison and their daughter Hollie, 9, were not on board, friends said.

More details at the Times Online and discussion on our forums.

Rest in peace, mate.

UPDATE: The Telegraph has a good article / obit. Worth checking out.

If you’re a uTorrent user, go upgrade. Version 1.6 is now out! :)

As many of you have noticed, both of the trackers that we use are currently having issues.

Our primary tracker is hosted on a home connection and due to the sheer number of users downloading Top Gear and such, it’s maxxed out the connection’s upload. Before a week or two ago, this had never been a problem. We will keep using this tracker, but we may end up switching to using a different tracker as our primary.

Our backup tracker appears to be down and has been like this for a day or two. Modern BitTorrent clients would normally switch to using this tracker if the main one was down/unavailable, but this one is down as well, so…

Update 6/3 1:30AM: The backup tracker is now back online. It just required a reboot. :)

Until one or both are up/available again, please use a modern BitTorrent client like uTorrent or Azureus. Both have a feature called DHT that will allow you to use torrents even when it’s tracker(s) are unavailable.

Apologies for these issues and hopefully they will be resolved soon. :)

I just thought I’d point out that if you’re at a university or whatever that has traffic shaping (i.e. makes torrents go at about 1 KB/sec), you can get around it and download at pretty much normal speed. Just use uTorrent or Azureus and enable packet encryption. For more details, see this entry in the Azureus wiki.

And if you require any help, please use this thread in our forum.

Just thought I’d let everyone know that the recent tracker downtimes are due to bigfoot1942 (the tracker’s owner) changing ISPs, DNS switch-over times, and then his new ISP having issues. At the time of this post, all issues seem to have been resolved, but just a head’s up to as what’s going if it goes down on again. No, you are not banned from the tracker or anything like that. Just hang tight and use a client that’ll switch over to the backup tracker meanwhile. ;)

For the official word on the tracker, check out this thread in the forums.

For those who hadn’t heard, µTorrent v1.5 was released back on March 7th. If you are a µTorrent user, it’s strongly suggested that you upgrade. There are new features that will be helpful to both you (especially if you’re behind a packet shaping firewall) and to others. So, please upgrade by downloading the latest version. Thanks! :)

For all of those using µTorrent, the current beta version has torrent RSS feed support. If you aren’t already using it, you can get it here and then add our torrent feed to it to automatically download all newly released torrents:

http://www.finalgear.com/feed/torrents/rss2/

Have you been looking for hosting? If so, cubanseeder, the guy that graciously hosts us for free, has a special offer for FinalGear.com visitors running for the rest of the month on webhosting. For just $10 a month, you get 10 GB of storage, 10 GB of web transfer, 10 domains with unlimited subdomains, etc.

Interested? More details can be found here.