According to Slyck News, a news site covering the file sharing community, “bit torrent spam” has recently been popping up on “Suprnova.org”:http://www.suprnova.org/, the ‘net’s largest bit torrent listing site.

When you download a compressed file from some users, you have to visit the site of the person that originally uploaded the torrent in order to get the password to unlock the archive. Many times the password is encoded in the filename itself, but it’s still a silly and unnecessary step. I always find it funny that these cracking and encoding groups go through steps like this to “protect” their stolen software or media. It’s almost like how the companies they are ripping off try to protect their own software from the crackers.

Anyway I hope this trend doesn’t spread too much, or it will quickly ruin bit torrent. I’m already getting flashbacks to the days of Hotline, where you had to go to 3 different sites, click here, here and there, and then type in the 47th word in the 5th paragraph of the page, so the owner of the server knew that you had clicked on enough ads.

The owner of Suprnova was interviewed in the article and said that if the problem continues to spread, they will start blocking people that are locking archives. I already couldn’t open a file from Suprnova this morning because apparently Stuffit Expander doesn’t know what to do with a password protected RAR file.