World’s Oldest Torrent Is Still Being Shared After 4,419 Days | Hacker News Reader

World’s Oldest Torrent Is Still Being Shared After 4,419 Days

torrentfreak.com

244 pointsyabatopia107 comments

Speaking of fan-made and Matrix, a long time ago there was a fan-made film in the Matrix universe called The Fanimatrix (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fanimatrix). Around a decade ago, I downloaded it through BitTorrent. Then a few years ago, I found it in my old files, still next to its original torrent file. Ever since then, I seed it on and off, in the vain hope that anyone knows it exists, has its torrent file (or magnet link), and wants to get a copy of the full file.

If somehow this torrent becomes live again, it's even older than the Matrix ASCII mentioned in this article, by a few months.

  Name: The-Fanimatrix-(DivX-5.1-HQ).avi
  Hash: 72c83366e95dd44cc85f26198ecc55f0f4576ad4
  Created by: 
  Created on: Sat Sep 27 23:08:42 2003
  Piece Count: 516
  Piece Size: 256.0 KiB
  Total Size: 135.0 MB
  Privacy: Public torrent

What trackers are you using for this file? I'd mirror that file for sure.

TRACKERS

  Tier #1
  http://kaos.gen.nz:6969/announce

As I said, it's the original torrent file. The tracker it used is long defunct. Only DHT can be used for it now.

I'm not sure, think you can construct a DHT-only magnet link from that hash/filename like so: magnet:?xt=urn:btih:(hash)&dn=(filename)

I used to work with a couple of people that helped with that movie. I think it came out between the first two movies when the whole Matrix thing was huge :)

kaos.gen.nz was the personal domain of one of the guys I worked with. He's the "Juggling Goth" at 4:30 and did some other stuff.

It's back up now. ;) If someone wants to seed the original files back to the tracker I'll get back to seeding them forever. ;)

Booya, the once again functional original tracker and original 2003 torrent file in all it's glory. Working and happy.

http://www.kaos.gen.nz/The-Fanimatrix-(DivX-5.1-HQ).avi.torr...

It's on Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/754262

Hi there, I'm actually the original creator of this torrent. I'm really quite keen on getting it up online again for posterity now. :P I've re-registered the original domain, and have it all set up. But I don't have the original torrent file anymore. If you'd be able to get it to me somehow. I'd be ecstatic to host it again in all it's original glory.

I really like the idea of torrents being used to distribute anonymous derivative works of copyrighted media.

I recently created a fan edit of "Star Wars: Episode II - The Phantom Menace" for my dad for Christmas. I removed Jar Jar Binks and the entire Gungan subplot. I tried to keep the edits as subtle as possible, and I learned a lot about the editing techniques and transitions used in the film. I wanted to release it, but I decided that the risk outweighed my confidence in my anonymity skills.

You can send to him "The Phatom Edit" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Phantom_Edit. It is already widespread all over the internet (even in youtube) and has the same objetive of your edition (Jar Jar binks is gone as well).

How did I not know that existed?

I named mine "The Gungan Minus". We watched it together on Christmas Eve.

There's a bunch of Phantom Edits; the name's been reused several times. The one I watched was this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y9LEhOZZbuk

All three prequel movies edited down into a single 2-hour film. And you know what? It's actually... still not what you'd call good. But it's embarrassingly better than the originals.

But there are others, like the Phantom Re-edit, which tries to improve on characters like Jar-Jar and the Trade Federation by scrambling their speech into traditional Star Wars Alien, and subtitling them. With different dialogue. It's supposed to be pretty good, but I've never tracked down a copy.

I do wonder if the lasting legacy of the terrible prequels will turn out to be teaching an entire generation about film editing!

Could someone do this for Transformers? Not for the Bots, for the Humans. Dub Japanese or German in there and subtitle it. 1000% better movie.

One of the most surreal experiences of my life was watching one of the old Godzilla films, dubbed into fluent Australian.

Umm where can I find this?

How come this is still on YouTube? Isn't this copyright infringement?

  "All trademarked and copyrighted liscences are property
   of their repsective owners."

Obviously some magic YouTube incantation to protect against take-downs :-/

With 1m+ views, it's nice to see it's made it so long. Don't feel good about its prospects for much longer though!

The 'magic' is called Content-ID and it looks for video and audio matches with content uploaded to a private (and unviewable) system by copyright holders and it takes automated action if a match is detected.

Theoretically any matches are reviewed by a human, but they make it quiet easy to automate the 'review' process. Automated actions are typically Claim-Remove (claim content for copyright holder, remove from YouTube) for some content types (Movies, TV shows, some music) or Claim-Monetize (claim content, ad advertisements if there were not already on, and if they were already on all revenue is redirected to claimant).

This automated system is actually what causes the majority of 'this content is not available in your country' messages, as if it gets claimed by a studio / copyright holder who only has the rights distribute in USA and UK for example, everyone else would see that error message after it has been claimed-monetized.

In case anyone was curious.

Edit: realized I had a contextual homonym typo... and it has been too long so I can't edit. (Why does HN do that... gah)

> or Claim-Monetize (claim content, ad advertisements

ad --> adds

Which is an interesting distinction because this means content that had no in video ads (pop over text ads, pre-roll ads, trueview ads) can get ads added to it when it is claimed, if that is what the claimer chooses to do.

How does a group get upload access to ContentID? Can a small independent record label or filmmaker use ContentID to protect their works, or does one have to be a member of a AA?

You can apply. Manual approval and doesn't seem to be the most consistent.

https://www.youtube.com/content_id_signup

There are so many fan edits for the prequel movies that I don't' know which one to pick. Some of them go quite far, like adding alien dialects to certain characters.

Another movie I'd love to see something like this for is Fast Times at Ridgemont High. There exists a TV-friendly cut that removes all nudity, and inserts a couple of extra scenes (like Spicoli in the boys' room bragging to his stoner buds about what he's going to do to Mr. Hand). I'd love an edit that starts with the R-rated release, and adds in the extra TV-friendly footage.

I'd like Breakfast at Tiffany's without the racism.

You should probably also know about the "Despecialized" editions of the original trilogy which removes the CGI crap and restores the original movies (more or less) as they were, with some color correction and other odds and ends.

> with some color correction and other odds and ends.

So they removed Luca's artistic touches and replaced them with their own?

No, the goal is to remove Lucas' artistic touches and get as close as possible to the original theatrical releases. Color correction means reversing all the color changes that Lucas made to the movies. Where higher quality film of a scene exists, they splice it in. Etc. If you google a bit you can find a detailed explanation of the changes.

Ok, the way it was worded it sounded like the color corrections were embellishment and not restoration.

For the record, the proper way to make a possessive out of a name that ends in s is just to use 's. It should be Lucas's. s' is only for when something is owned by more than one object. Think animals' house where there are several animals.

http://www.ccc.commnet.edu/grammar/possessives.htm

Some writers will say that the -s after Charles' is not necessary and that adding only the apostrophe (Charles' car) will suffice to show possession. Consistency is the key here: if you choose not to add the -s after a noun that already ends in s, do so consistently throughout your text. William Strunk's Elements of Style recommends adding the 's. (In fact, oddly enough, it's Rule Number One in Strunk's "Elementary Rules of Usage.") You will find that some nouns, especially proper nouns, especially when there are other -s and -z sounds involved, turn into clumsy beasts when you add another s: "That's old Mrs. Chambers's estate." In that case, you're better off with "Mrs. Chambers' estate."

There's a great YouTube video that explains the changes that later releases of Star Wars have, as well as the methods used by fans to make restorations in the Despecialized edition. You can find that video here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QXifjbxZDAM

And Han Solo shoots first!

Even better, Team Negative1 just released their 35mm transfer of ANH!

I was shocked when I discovered that if you just removed every scene with Jar Jar + pod race, the movie REALLY tightened up. Not because Jar Jar is offensive/stupid, but because a lot of of the pacing and tension are thrown off. It's like he was added into an existing decent script, with minimal effort made to integrate the new parts. (No idea if that's true, but that's how it feels)

I watched Ep 1 again recently and IMHO Anikin is the worst part, not Jar Jar. Most of Jar Jar's scenes are blissfully short and at least the kids enjoy slapstick. Anikin entertains nobody, and he's critical to the plot.

And he destroyed the enemy force by accident.

I can't argue about any of that - I just found that Jar Jar was STRUCTURALLY problematic, not plot problematic.

Jar Jar's also unusually annoying.

"I really like the idea of torrents being used to distribute anonymous derivative works of copyrighted media."

This reminds me of fan-provided (third party) commentary tracks.

Are those still a thing ? When I first heard of this, many years ago, I was very excited about the idea of seeing interesting films with interesting background/commentary/metadata provided by well-informed commentators.

Did that ever go anywhere ? Do people still do that ? Any golden examples of this kind of work that I should look into ?

There is RiffTrax: http://www.rifftrax.com/

Wasn't that originally MST3K?

Yes

Giant Bomb have been dabbling with this in their "Film & 40s" podcasts (more for entertainments sake than being well-informed though).

For anyone with a GB Premium account, links are:

Rocky IV - http://www.giantbomb.com/podcasts/film-40s-rocky-iv/1600-115...

Hunt for Red October - http://www.giantbomb.com/podcasts/film-and-40s-the-hunt-for-...

I mostly just know of the usual comedy sync-tracks like MST3K and its successors in Rifftrax and Cinematic Titanic.

Also, if you're at all a fan (or not) of the Harry Potter movies, there's a great alt audio track called "Wizard People, Dear Reader". For that one, you either turn off the audio in the movie (or at least turn it way down so you can still sorta hear the music) and play the alternate narration. The premise is kind of the story as told by someone who's never heard the actual narrative, but I think the humor shows that he was at least a bit familiar with it.

if by "Warner Bros. is not known to go after this type of fan-art" you mean "Warner Bros went after someone extremely aggressively for this type of fan-art" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wizard_People,_Dear_Reader#Pre....

I just sat through a torrent of this movie, thanks to this post.

Dear lord, that was painfully long, but I belly-laughed at least five times during the film unexpectedly.

Yeah, when I watch it, I usually stop around the time of the quiddich game. It's easy to forget how long that movie is, but it's REALLY funny.

Ah, crap, I just posted this as a reply farther up before seeing your post. Wizard People is indeed hilarious. Oddly, one friend who is a huge Potter fan tried to watch it and said he hated it whereas in my opinion, a good portion of the humor comes from familiarity with the "real" story.

Actually I may watch this again tonight as it's been a while. When I wanted to get this friend to check it out, I made a DVD of the movie with the Wizard People audio synced up and the original audio track turned low enough that you can hear the music but the spoken lines don't interfere with the alternate audio.

I guess if I was more ambitious I could've gone through and tweaked levels during dialogue and added a filter in those parts to cut out more of the speech frequencies while leaving the music and other ambient sound. Seemed like it would take a lot of time though.

Slightly off topic, but I find the fascination with ASCII-arting things interesting.

I grew up in the days of 2400 baud modems and even ran a BBS briefly. At the time, ASCII art was the only thing you could do to differentiate yourself.

Nowadays I suppose it's a combination of nostalgia and ease of transferring since pretty much every system ever has a way of reading ASCII.

But I wonder how long the trend will last -- the majority of internet users don't have "nostalgia" for ASCII anymore [0] and there are at least a few image and video formats that are becoming almost as ubiquitous as ASCII readers.

[0] I was recently on a discussion with some folks I used to work with at university about how our old workplace was no longer offering shell accounts to the students because they weren't being used. This made us all sad since most of us learned all of our command line foo at that workplace.

Not EXACTLY the same thing, but there's a really neat Jason Scott talk from Defcon 18 that goes into some of the history of crack screens from early software. [0]

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a5AceLYWE1Q

I think some of this stuff will retain its coolness with future generations even though they didn't experience it first hand. Kind of like the way I distributed copies of the Hacker Manifesto when I was in high school even though I was an infant when Mentor wrote it.

It's a form of art. Imagine Matrix done by arranging small pictures of flowers, by constructing scenes using parabolic approximating curves or fractals. Just an interesting form of art giving you another perspective. And for many text-oriented people ASCII art is like opening up a new visual perspective they were lacking.

I think ASCII art is still somewhat popular on 2ch.

http://aa.en.utf8art.com/new

I grew up in what was almost certainly a post-ASCII world (my first OS was Windows 98; I was 5). Despite this I still have a weird fascination with ASCII and terminal-based stuff. I played a lot of MUDs/MUSHs when I was younger, and recently made a game engine for the terminal (https://github.com/JoelOtter/termloop).

I think people will always find relative primitiveness a novelty. Look how popular 'retro' gaming is amongst those far too young to have played the titles in their original form.

(Off to see if my Avalon character still exists...)

There's still a semi-active community: https://artpacks.org

When I read Twitter was going to allow longer tweets, my first thought was "ASCII art". Unfortunately, I don't think you can force a fixed-width font in Twitter clients.

(Unicode has a full-worth alphabet, but that is a bit limiting. On the other hand, that may be in the spirit of ASCII art)

It still has a use. I occasionally put figlet text into project headers that are likely to end up copied around to other codebases. That makes it more obvious that the file in question comes from an outside source.

ASCII will subsist a long time. Just like the roman alphabet. It's minimal and easy to support. People rely on it to express through words or art or diagrams. It just sticks around because it's the easiest form of computerized lettering you get.

Unicode is too heavy and complex AFAIK.

I recently had a solo art show consisting entirely of ASCII Art works based on Taylor Swift, and it was quite successful. Probably 300 people came and I'm a veritable nobody.

A bunch of young Swift fans came with their parents and it was a good introduction for some kids as to what you can do with programming

Some images: https://www.facebook.com/dmitricherniak/media_set?set=a.5502...

A video rendering I made: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_hyfGkkFoOw

That's awesome, thanks a lot for sharing! I've passed these pics and video on to our hackerspace community here. :)

The Facebook link you provided is not publicly viewable - I get a "Sorry, this content isn't available right now" error.

Believe this one works https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.550287341792003.10...

I'd be interested to learn about the software that created the ASCII version of the movie.

Is there a simple way to do this, or would they have made something custom?

ffmpeg can output ascii videos

Whilst this statement is true, the torrent predates the earliest versions of ffmpeg, so it wouldn't have been what was used (which was what the OP was asking).

Whilst this statement is true, the torrent predates the earliest versions of ffmpeg

How so? The torrent is 12 years old, while ffmpeg was first released 15 years ago.

I remember using this program in 2001:

http://linux.die.net/man/1/ttv

aalib + video4linux = TV tuner outputting as ASCII.

[Shockingly I actually used this for a useful purpose - I had a messed up graphics card that couldn't run X stably due to machine lockups, but Linux console worked fine - so I used this to watch TV. I was a teenager at the time so it was a while before I replaced it.]

aalib + mplayer would be my guess.

I remember reading about it back in the day, it was aalib and mplayer, but the conversion was done frame by frame with a patched version of aaview. Here's the write-up of how it was done: https://web.archive.org/web/20150311033450/http://onyx.chatt...

The algorithm dosent need to be too complex. You basically look at each still frame as grayscale, generate a hashtable of brightness values mapping to monospaced characters, and convert each grayscale pixel to a character.

You can do better than that by taking advantage of character shapes, though. Minimal example:

()

and:

)(

have the same brightness values, but we see them pretty differently.

Ideally you would use edge detection, maybe some object detection, and then be willing to compromise a little on brightness in order to make important edges nice. I don't know if there's software out there that does this, though.

A better example would be ( vs ), checking neighboring pixels to weight that pixel correctly.

How complex is an edge detection algorithm?

Depends on how complex you want. Something like a Prewitt filter is super simple.

I know the person who made this and will probably see him at Chattacon this weekend. He told me how he did it but I forget now. I'll try to remember to ask him. I think he used something like VLC to split the movie into frames, then used another package to generate the ASCII art.

I pointed out this article to him, and he decided to (finally) take some credit for it. http://nooga.com/172237

I sincerely hope it doesn't lead to any legal troubles.

I don't know if you still can but you used to be able to do this to your whole screen on Windows using the NVidia control panel. Playing first-person shooters as ascii art looks pretty cool!

Actually torrents are pretty bad for storing "rare" files. Maybe someone should offer a fix.

The problem is not really torrents. The problem is that seeds are ephemeral. But an equally ephemeral source for any protocol will always make the availability of the resource low. The solution is not to change the protocol; the solution is to have less ephemeral sources.

It would be interesting to see how a Usenet/Torrent adapter may work to at least supplement loss

The Internet Archive might be a good host for rare (and not copyright infringing) torrents.

It actually is, because it already provide torrent access to its content. See, for example, the Matrix ASCII (only the sample though):

https://archive.org/details/TheMatrix-InAscii

(1 more point for how terrific the Internet Archive is)

EDIT: it turns out the complete Matrix ASCII is hosted on the IA, making its availability a non-problem for years to come, even though it's not the original torrent anymore

I think this is mostly a consequence of how the clients work. When I download something with BitTorrent, it goes into a Downloads folder. Then I want to move and rename the files to fit into an organized collection, but then the client won't be able to find it anymore. If my client were able to track files across moves and renames, I'd be much more willing to seed things permanently.

(It would also need to have good upstream-bandwidth management, use a number of TCP connections that's less than O(n) in the number of torrents, and offer a few bulk operations like "stop seeding torrents with more than N seeds" and "resume seeding torrents with fewer than N seeds".)

I've "solved" this by having torrents go to a "Torrents" folder, then symlinking those files into my organized collection.

I do the same thing but into multiple folders with a unionfs in read-only mode so I don't accidentally modify the files and cause them to be re-downloaded

I hardlink them instead. Then I can prune them from the torrents folder without affecting the organized file.

Even if I stop seeding, I like to keep them in the torrents folder because it gives me essentially free integrity checking.

You can deal with the renaming issue with a bunch of symlinks. It's pretty easy to script that up.

To make it work i think the client should have some hard drive space allocated for the purpose of "preservation" , which he can automatically use according to some reasonable policy(maybe only files i downloaded can be put in the folder) and it should allocate some share of my bandwidth for that purpose. Than the client automatically manages everything with coordination from the network.

That's the only way this can scale for regular users, i think. And of course it may use social mechanisms like feedback "you're the reason why this rare work of art if available for everyone".

As for scalability of TCP connections , you're probably right, not my area of expertise , but once this will be declared as an important BT problem with great practical value, i'm sure some researchers would be happy to contribute and might solve this.

There are distributed data stores that work just like this. IPFS (https://ipfs.io/) is a recent effort, while Freenet (https://freenetproject.org/) has been around for a while.

Whether this can be retrofitted into Bittorrent not clear. Conceivably one could write a bridge between IPFS and Bittorrent such that an IPFS url could serve as an "IPFS seed" much like a HTTP url can serve as a BEP 19 webseed.

It could work, but wouldn't it be simpler , as a first step, to add this feature in a basic form to a python based BT client like tribler and see where it goes from there ? I.e.

1. At torrent delete , set a flag on torrent to hide

2. At torrent display , don't display hidden torrents

3. Periodically or on storage_full event - fully delete hidden torrents , based on some simple strategy like "remove those with most seeds" ?

And after building it and testing a bit , creating some nice web page , a bit of marketing , and gather developers/users ? Who knows, might become popular .

Might have tried to do so myself , but i'm not really a developer.

Anyway, is it realistic?

You'd want to write a server that could retrieve and serve the file over bittorrent, but would store it canonically in IPFS.

In the good old days of using (Napster|Audiogalaxy|Gnutella) I could point the file-sharing application to my collection and presto - it was all shared and available to whoever was interested. Nowadays, I just share whatever torrent I have participated in lately, plus a few that seem popular but rare (those most uploaded from my client) - but I have a whole lot of rather rare music that I fail to share for lack of a way to do it. Is there a contemporary way to share a whole collection or is that really missing from the toolset ?

Well - maybe I'll finally get around to setting up a heeadless gtk-gnutella node again.

eMule and derivated have the .emulecollection format, which is just a binary file grouping together multiple ed2k links to files.

As for the network eMule/KAD seems do be doing ok with 200K+ peers while Gnutella nowadays seems to be populated mostly by slightly-compatible chinese clients, which bootstrap from traditional gnutella but are incompatible.

Soulseek is still up and kicking.

I thought about it and found it a bit too social and too insular - having "rooms" as a central feature feels odd to me who would rather use a global search of the whole file-sharing network.

Also, having to run a desktop client was putting me off. But then I just found http://www.museek-plus.org so I might try that... But it is disappearing from Debian: https://packages.qa.debian.org/m/museek+.html - not a good sign...

But there is a global search of the whole network, chat rooms are separate thing.

Well, it does not match wcd at all anyway.

This reminds me of that ASCII Star Wars telnet thing. How long has that been around for?

I believe you're referring to http://www.blinkenlights.nl/services.html (or 'telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl', as it's more popularly known).

On the authors bio page it says he started creating it in 1997.

Oh this is masterful trolling. If you connect over IPv4:

       The IPv6 version has extra scenes and extra color support.        
       So if you want to experience ascii starwars to it's fullest       
       you really should get IPv6.                                       
                                                                         
       www.sixxs.net or another IPv6 tunnel broker may                   
       help getting IPv6 to your computer.                               
                                                                         
       Good Luck,                                                        
                                                                         
       Snore ( Has no life for Hardware )

But if you actually connect over IPv6:

       Well, the IPv6 version is exactly the same as the IPv4 one.       
                                                                         
       The difference is in the visitors...                              
                                                                         
                                                                         
       Je bent een Stoere Bikkel, aka You Rock.

The telnet version seems to be from 2001, but the ASCII work has been since 1999 at least.

The creator emerges: http://nooga.com/172237/chattanooga-man-responsible-for-worl...

For those of us who feel uncomfortable going to torrentfreak on a work computer, what is the torrent?

> A fan-created ASCII version of the 1999 sci-fi classic The Matrix is the oldest known torrent that's still active. Created more than 12 years ago, the file has outlived many blockbuster movies and is still downloaded a few times a week, even though the site from where it originated has disappeared.

Whoa.

I'll leave this on Deluge for a while to share :)

That's a strange title. The article is about "the oldest known torrent that's still active." Assuming "active" means "being shared" then it's a bit of a tautology, isn't it?

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