BitTorrent usage increases in Europe, following the blockade of The Pirate Bay | Hacker News Reader

BitTorrent usage increases in Europe, following the blockade of The Pirate Bay

extremetech.com

97 pointsmrsebastian16 comments

When you spend millions advertising a service, its usage increases. What a surprise.

Just from looking at the graph, it seems like there is almost no change and the increase is purely incidental.

In other words, users, who torrent, will torrent even without pirate bay; users, who don't torrent, won't really start to.

will torrent even without pirate bay

Or they'll just use any free proxy/VPN. TPB nowadays just serves magnet hashes, even the slowest, more restricted link is enough. The rest goes through DHT.

In my experience, most of the people who are serious about torrenting don't use The Pirate Bay anyway and have long since moved to members only trackers (like Demonoid etc).

Is demonoid really members only?

As far as I can say, I can browse the torrents - http://www.demonoid.me/top_torrents.php - search the torrents - http://www.demonoid.me/files/ - and download them - http://www.demonoid.me/files/download/2916572/ - without being registered or logged in.

Also, I really like the phrase "serious about torrenting". :)

The way demonoid "members only" works is you have to log in to their website with your web browser before the tracker will permit your IP to connect.

Oh, OK, that is possible, I actually have no seeds from the demonoid tracker. However, DHT gets me other peers fairly quickly, so I don't really care.

I personally have had really bad luck with private, members only tracker sites. If I don't get on the torrent within minutes of posting, I can't reach the desired 100% seeding goal. On the other hand, this is ridiculously easy to do with public tracker sites (such as TPB).

There is huge variability in private trackers, some are awful (Demono's adds have become unbearable), some are pretty good, like karagarga, which has lots of films I simply could not find anywhere else, legally or otherwise, and others are awesome, like what.cd.

This is the case with the best and most serious private trackers. If you're serious about keeping a good ratio, just get a seedbox and set up a script to download the torrents you want as soon as they're posted (most trackers have an IRC bot that announces new torrents).

It's all mirrored on isohunt, along with most of the other public torrents on the net.

Indeed, but TPB is vast, sometimes you don't find what you need on private trackers.

I'm quite convinced that the raise in BitTorrent usage here is due to the shut down of Megavideo and nothing to do with the Pirate Bay.

What's the purpose of torrent again? Is that the thing people use to steal copyrighted works or are millions of people using it to exchange wedding videos? Torrents are the reason movies and music is so expensive relative to their actual production and distribution costs.

The purpose of BitTorrent is peer-to-peer file sharing. Period. While it is all too often used for distributing works illegally, its primary purpose is not that. Consider reading the Wikipedia page[1] for some examples of effective and legitimate uses of the protocol.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitTorrent#Adoption

What's the purposed of a troll again ? :)

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