Largest Torrent Site Mininova Shuts Down

Mininova was previously known as the largest BitTorrent website, but now it decided to cease its operations for good. Its forum will shut down next week, and the rest of the site will close its doors a month later. The site operators are proud of the role they played in the file-sharing history, but their legal distribution platform appeared unsustainable.
A dozen years ago, the mighty Suprnova went offline, damaging the BitTorrent landscape of that time. The vacant space was soon filled by new sites trying to fulfill the public’s increasing demands for torrents, of which Mininova became the most successful. 5 Dutch students set up this BitTorrent site a month after Suprnova went offline. Started as a hobby project, the platform managed to turn into a successful business that generated millions of dollars in revenue. Of course, legal pressure also came along, even despite the site operators complying with takedown requests.

Eventually, BREIN filed a case against Mininova in 2009 and won it, forcing the tracker to remove all infringing torrents, which effectively ended its popularity. Although Mininova remained online, it now permitted only pre-approved publishers to upload files. Finally, it decided to shut down for good on April 4, 2017. Despite more than 950 million legal torrents having been downloaded from the site in recent years, its income couldn’t make up for the costs. Mininova founders have moved on over these years – they are no longer students and have parted ways, engaging in different projects and ventures.

Mininova’s users have been very grateful, as well as several artists who also thanked the platform for providing them with a great promotional tool.

New Privacy-Oriented advanced Browser with Built-in Torrenting

Welcome Brave – a brand new security-oriented web browser, which also has built-in support for torrent downloading and streaming.

It is not a secret that old-fashioned BitTorrent clients have lost most of their appeal, as they become outdated with the rise of video streaming websites and services. This is why the solution is to enjoy both torrent downloading and streaming without having to install any separate apps.


Brave was first launched in early 2016, intended for privacy conscious people willing to browse the web securely. The web browser also supports torrent downloads out of the box, along with instant torrent streaming. Its developers explain that their new, open source browser was designed for both speed and security, featuring a built-in adblocker, which ensures an ad-free and seamless browsing experience. As such, the browser claims to significantly improve browsing speeds while shielding you from malicious ads and offering lots of other privacy features like HTTPS Everywhere, script blocking, and third-party cookie blocking.

The most interesting part is the recently introduced built-in support for BitTorrent transfers, powered by WebTorrent technology. Brave is able to download torrents via magnet links directly from the browser. This feature is not exclusive (Opera also supports it, for instance), but Brave also supports torrent streaming, which allows you to view videos instantly as you would do on streaming websites.

The browser received support from WebTorrent founder, who continues to lend a hand. Right now Brave is compatible with all traditional torrent clients, and support for web peers is also expected. WebTorrent uses TCP connections and is going to add WebRTC support to allow Brave users to connect to web peers.

However, Brave has its shortcomings – its user interface is quite limited, and basic features such as canceling or pausing a torrent are not available yet, so you need to close the tab to cancel a download.

However, you should understand that even despite Brave’s focus on privacy, torrent transfers are not anonymous – if you don’t use VPN or other anonymizer, tracking outfits will be able to track your downloads or streams

Touchscreen stop working while mobile plugged into a charging point in the train. Why ?

Mobile plugged into a charging point provided in the train, the battery started to charge up but the touchscreen stop working, if unplug it touchscreen will start working again. Why ?

Mobile adapters are almost always 'universal AC input', that is, they can work with input voltages anywhere from 85V-265V (RMS). So it likely has nothing to do with the fact that the train gives a lower supply of 110V. The issue has to do with conducted EMI because of the switching in the adapter. 

How capacitive touchscreen works: Basically, you have a transmitter and receiver electrode separated by a junction. A mutual capacitance links the electrodes, and the charge movement into Rx electrode is monitored to calculate this capacitance. When a finger is placed on the screen, it affects the fringing fields and hence causes a change in the mutual capacitance, hence causing a change in charge movement across junction. These changes in capacitance are measured across the matrix of Tx-Rx electrodes, to form a touch map.

How the adapter (charger) for phones is built: There is no earth connection in these chargers. It is isolated for safety, using a transformer. While the transformers physically isolates the secondary from the primary, there is a capacitance formed across the isolation between the windings. The topology of the charger is called as the flyback converter. Apart from the switching waveform, there is a great deal of high frequency resonant LC ringing in this topology. This switching EMI is coupled across the isolation because of the coupling capacitance (a capacitor couples high frequency very well). Since this appears as a common mode noise on the secondary side (i.e. it exists on both the DC power line and DC ground), there is no complete circuit path for this conducted EMI, so normally it causes no issues.

Now when you touch with your finger, there is a coupling capacitance formed from the display, through your body to 'earth'. The conducted EMI now has a complete circuit. Charge flow occurs from the Tx-Rx junction to the finger, and so the finger changes the measured capacitance. Not only this, the finger also has mutual capacitances linking to other Rx electrodes, which can cause charge flow changes at points where the finger isn't actually touching. The entire touch map gets screwed up, and the touchscreen behaves erratically.