The Pirate Bay's 20th Anniversary
torrentfreak.com
torrentfreak.com
Oooh, what a fancy, high-falutin word for... writing bingo tickets to your SSD. Could more accurately be called "proof of bingo card", and then it doesn't infringe on actually interesting concepts, like relativistic physics.
I remember when the new of Chia caused SSD prices to spike around the time I was buying, in the speculative fever for free money. At least it crashed, causing the Chia miners to become irrelevant in the market. Too late for me, sadly, I was stuck paying 400% of current market prices.
Fuck Chia, fuck crypto nonsense.
And some technologies do too!
So it's natural and probably good to have thoughts and perspectives and positions on politics and technologies that impact me and my family and the world we live in (rather than be apathetic).
Should we avoid polarization, and arguing by memes, absolutely!
But like perpetual motion machine and eugenics and racism and trickle down economy, there are things in life that a) We've discussed and read about sufficiently and b) We believe they impact us negatively enough that we have a fairly established position on; something would have to change quite radically to shift it.
For cryptocurrency, I find it either naive or disingenuous to call it "just a technology" or "an algorithm". Tables and B-trees and markov's chains and blockchain may be technologies. Cryptocurrencies are an implementation and usage and ideology, not an "algorithm". It's closer to a cult religion, from where I'm sitting, and I'm terrified that zealots will push it far enough that its current (flawed! Awful! Insane!) implementations become the norm and "too big to fail".
(Snarky add-on: And even for technologies... since when did any of us not have guttural reactions and strong opinions and religious wars on technologies? JavaScript, Oracle, Microsoft, Perl, Intel vs AMD, Linux vs Windows for Apple, Kubernettes, etc etc etc... guttural reactions and strong opinions are the norm, and those are not policy-changing, environment-draining, scam-filled financial schemes :)
FWIW :)
The list was heterogeneous analogies to illustrate a point, not equivalences. And that point was: there are concepts which are not obscure and no longer new and people have had some experience with, and its ok to have a negative reaction about them until and unless some pretty darn novel new evidence or argument comes up (yet there exists a set of people who still buy into it and don't understand the negativity). Like, I have a friend who's into crypto currency and I know a guy who's into racism and I have an uncle who's working on perpetual working machine... and they'll all get a "negative gutural reaction" from me.
Just as it's frustrating to have the tech dismissed as universally evil, it's also frustrating to see the technologists continue to create systems that fail to address the criminality and ecological concerns.
Because the resource waste and scalping had real, measurable impact to a lot of completely unrelated people's life.
Cryptocurrency has been used for a huge number of scams, and generally to allow criminals launder their money and do more easily their job. All of this, and more, at a huge environmental expense. Technically the concept is great, but the implementation and use has been mostly harmful so far.
If you still find utility in the dollar bill after such reflection, then the argument doesn't hold up to cryptocurrency.
cryptocurrency is hated because it turns every action into a transaction.
a system with mistrust as its core principle. where the enablement of scamming masquerades as freedom.
basically thousands of incompatible pay-to-play messaging protocols all imbued with some pretty dark zero-sum incentives and fancy jargon
So it's a market. Like double entry bookkeeping. Are you similarly triggered by NASDAQ or Quickbooks or point of sale systems that use Postgres instead of a blockchain?
> its basically a pay-to-play messaging protocol with fancy jargon.
It's a fee based messaging protocol with a demand based pricing mechanic for limited block space. All messaging protocols are pay-to-play. Someone is paying for it and whatever infrastructure it runs on, even if it's free for you (via ads, spyware, etc). Only difference with a blockchain is that the infrastructure costs and fees are transparent, and it avoids dependency on a central actor.
just pointing out why I think people hate it and i think there are some valid reasons.
Hell the damage it's done to the planet alone should give most people pause
I don't think poor uneducated unmployed people in developing countries have money to worry about.
> are the ones profiting from Crypto?
Profit is the wrong word.
In my country people are not looking for profit when they buy dollars. When even the official inflation numbers are above 120%, they are escaping state sponsored pillage.
Naturally it's illegal to buy dollars here, so the only way to do this is cash. Everyone who can save a penny will try to buy dollars, so by the strict definition, the country is pretty much filled with criminals.
Since having basic banking is something everyone wants, crypto becomes an attractive alternative for those who can sort out the technical barriers of entry.
Don't kill the messenger, people. It doesn't help the discussion.
On one end, I do see the point of cryptocurrency as an anonymous payment method but on the other end, they have done nothing but cause me inconvenience, skyrocketing GPU and SSD prices just so they can use thousands of gigawatts of power to make $20 that will probably be down to $12 a couple hours later and pioneering the latest generation of bullshit technology that's taking grifters and AI bros by storm.
We stayed connected; he is currently doing a Blockchain + Climate company.
A few months ago I downloaded it from TPB; somewhat to my surprise it was the same torrent I had uploaded 16 years ago.
I thought that was kinda neat. It's probably also the only way to watch this TV show, legal or otherwise. "Distributed cloud backup" I suppose :-)
(I do regret the childish and embarrassing comments in the README, which are also still alive after 16 years :-/ That's also why I'm not mentioning which TV show this is.)
Relatedly, when Docker started charging open source projects for Dockerhub storage, a friend and I started brainstorming a torrent registry driver (although we didn't find a way around the project still needing to provide a signature for verification at least, even if it didn't need to maintain hosting for the image itself)
Nothing to show for it just yet, but point being I think this "distributed cloud backup" idea has a lot of interesting applications still.
For a versioned registry, all the info can be stored in any cloud key-value store - eg. The bittorrent DHT
Say the Redis team seeds a redis:1.0 image. So far, so good.
But what if a nefarious hacker seeds a redis:2.0 image? In a traditional registry, the auth system for the registry ensures that only those who are authorized can write to a particular registry. But in (at least our understanding of) a swarm, there is no auth and therefore no way to know if a particular tag of the redis image in the swarm is legitimate or not.
if I understand you, this is where you're saying the info can be stored in the DHT, which I don't really understand at the moment but if so that sounds like something we should look into.
There is a BEP (Bittorrent Extension Protocol) for storing mutable data: like all good things in computing, it's just an indirection. Create a pair of asymetrical cryptographic keys for a specific (mutable) content and store the hash of the public key. People will search for that hash, get to some content that is any bytes you want but signed with the private key.
What you want is not exactly that, but more of a naming system. The easiest would be to let each image owner be their own source of truth: the redis team puts up an HTTPS server with a well known path, say "/.well-known/docker?identity=redis:2.0" and the reply includes the magnet link. My node would cache the association under the assumption that it never changes (it shouldn't; a change in the image implies a change in the name).
As you yourselves discovered, the swarm doesn't solve the naming issue (ie Zooko's triangle), there needs to be a third-party here
But the registry implementation in the "distribution" project takes storage drivers, so an IPFS storage driver is certainly a possibility. In part for me going with Bittorrent was also just an excuse to get more familiar with the technical details of Bittorrent.
To be honest I can't be bothered to look at it further, but here's the torrent if you want to look at it yourself: https://thepiratebay.org/description.php?id=3848177 (with the disclaimer that some comments in the README do NOT represent my current attitude or views, and haven't for well over 10 years)
Oh come on, it can't be that bad...
> and no, stupid "Sci-Fi" like Stargate or Enterprise is not good science fiction
Wow. Thank you for atoning for your sins.
"An episode of the Swedish comedy show “High Chaparral” has the honor of being the oldest torrent. The file was originally uploaded on March 25, 2004, and although it lists zero seeders in search results, there are still several people actively sharing the torrent." https://torrentfreak.com/pirate-bays-oldest-torrents-survive...
hxxps://thepiratebay.org/description.php?id=3211594
https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/92/
Great episode, he interviewed one of the founders. Goes through the whole history of the piratebay and all the times they tried to take it down. Guy seems... interesting. Basically exactly who you might expect would be running that website.
Even seven years ago he was saying that torrent sites had stagnated and there was necessity for innovation to protect against the vulnerabilities inherent in having only few large, popular torrent sites.
So, this 20th anniversary is somewhat of a bitter pill to swallow for at least one of the founders.
https://torrentfreak.com/pirate-bay-founder-piracy-scene-nee...
Back then it was a combo of Napster going away, filesharing apps typically sucking, and the invention of BitTorrent making access to content really easy. Digital music and movies were new too and ahead of their physical media counterparts.
There are many great brains trying, and it will just take one of their ideas to takeoff and become another household name.
I don't see how that would be the case, as nothing what he said is wrong. Torrenting in general is getting less popular for a while now, many private tracker sites are alive but not as active as 10 years ago, especially if it's something which was replaced by legal streaming like music trackers.
In my group of "regular people" friends none of them pirates any more and they all just use Netflix and Spotify. It went back to being a nerd thing after being mainstream for a while with Limewire/TPB/Popcorntime etc.
But for the tech progress available now, we should have the MPAA, RIAA and all other copyright cartels shivering on their knees, with 100% anonymous, distributed data transfers
In my youngster time (80s and 90s), there were a lot of ideas and projects: kazaa , ed2k, kad, mute, i2p, freenet, bittorrent among plenty of others.
But it seems young kids today are busier o other things (tiktok influencers?) Or they had become highly profit driven.
It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.
Theodore Roosevelt
Excerpt from the specch "Citizenship In A Republic" delivered at The Sorbonne Paris, France April 23, 1910
Yeah, he was also a rich guy born with a silver spoon, who never faced any actual adversity in life, and so spent his time fetishizing those who do, while LARPing as one of them in controlled environments.
Read into his whole trip through South America; it's an absolute disgrace. The attitude you illustrated above led to the death of his guide (and almost his son) and him having to be hauled out of the jungle by natives on a stretcher for weeks.
Even the charge up San Juan hill is pure mythology. The enemy position had already been cleared by the 10th cavalry, and they were waiting for Roosevelt at the top. The guy is a complete work of fiction as he is taught to school children these days.
Point being, these romantic notions of life have very little bearing on reality. Criticism is valid. And doing dumb things is indeed many times just dumb.
https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/theodore-rooseve...
I guess your definition and mine are incompatible. The forensic evidence is quite clear: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Political_ad...
I also agree that it's crucial to critically examine historical figures and not idealize them blindly, it's also essential to avoid oversimplifying or misrepresenting their lives.
Theodore Roosevelt certainly had privileges, but it would be unfair to dismiss his contributions and experiences entirely. The challenges he faced and his contributions to American history, both domestically and internationally, are more complex than a single perspective or narrative. Dismissing an entire life based on a few events can be as misleading as uncritical adulation.
I am all for being critical of class-based inequalities but having resources does not exempt one from adversity. Very few people would consider someone who spent their whole childhood in debilitating sickness, someone who lost their wife and mother 2 days apart, rode western with cowboys through a winter in North Dakota as someone LARPing in controlled environments. Not all of this is romantic ideology. One can be born with a silver spoon and still experience the realities of life, the trauma of losing loved ones, prolonged sickness, etc. Saying that he "never faced any actual adversity" is black and white while being arguably wrong.
The Edmund Morris trilogy gives a good overview of his life for those interested.
WP says the battle was over a ridge with a couple major peaks, and that the highest was indeed cleared and occupied by other soldiers the day before, but the following day Roosevelt’s troops (among others) did face real resistance taking the other major peak. It reads like the first day was rather more intense, but the second wasn’t exactly a cake-walk, and it definitely doesn’t read like they just walked up to an already-taken position.
https://web.archive.org/web/20110902004820/http://thepirateb...
There are websites that crawl DHT and you can search using them https://btdig.com but of course it would be better to have something decentralised.
Also Me: Distributed hash table.
Me: Thanks.
Also Me: You're welcome, but don't be too impressed. I googled it.
Kademlia is similar for eMule, only that it also allows search.
How are hash collisions resolved? I'd hate to think I'm downloading my favorite TV show & find that I've downloaded something that makes ma attract the attention of law enforcement.
Saved me a few times on shady-looking sites that demanded an account or something before showing a download link, but still listed the infohash on the page. Useful too when pasting it into a search engine actually gave results.
- IPs of peers can be obtained from any source, not necessarily a centralized one. you could argue that this is centralized if you use only one, but there is no central authority and you can move to any other one or use a sizeable list of completely independent sources.
- torrent clients can persist previously contacted peers to contact them when starting up again from scratch, attempting connection in hopes that they are still around (which at least some usually are given that clients are usually long-running processes)
By removing search from the protocol it meant that they actually had to join the swarm. Also, this led to the creation of private trackers.
You also want to know which torrent looks legit, so you may want to query trackers ... Here you go: https://sr.ht/~rakoo/magneticos/
Less technical people I know have heard or used TPB and are likely never to have heard of this as well.
I am curious (although I'll be googling as well) on what makes it better. As a personal preference though, if given the option, I would rather make a project that used by many reliably than to have one that is really really fine tuned but not used at all.
However, if I do see that gnutella is better for my purposes, then I will gladly make the switch and will say thanks in advance.
Though my understanding was that Gnutella worked better than torrents because it was an incredible fast local network, i.e. our campus was connected with the fastest network I’ve ever experienced personally. I don’t think Gnutella works as well over the public internet.
Also, Gnutella having search built in to it was a huge mistake. BitTorrent was a success because it allowed anyone to host their own distinct index of torrents. I'm sure that something similar could have been done with Gnutella, but its search was compromised so badly even in its heyday. It was pretty obvious that there were bad nodes that would take your search terms and dynamically return listings of fake files named after what you typed in.