End of an Era: Pirate Bay Tracker Shuts Down
mashable.com
mashable.com
... upon looking, they still seem to publish .torrents for now, but the huge magnet icon on their home page pretty much tells it all :)
That doesn't mean the MPAA won't try, they've argued that file hashs are equivalent to the file before, and they may win in the US, however, I'm not sure that arguement would hold up in the EU due to the possibility of hash collisions, and the fact that you can't make the file from the hash.
Currently sites like torrentz.com give multiple trackers for torrents so that you can get the best set of peers/seeds for a torrent. These sites are going to become moot.
Also the legal issues associated with running TPB is going to literally go away for all future business. TPB can't be held responsible for holding an MD5 hash of a file, since they don't host trackers anymore they won't be responsible for even facilitating anything. Basically the record industries have to go after the customers yet again.
The only thing left is an IP masker mechanism which is super easy to use in torrents and torrents will become completely untraceable :P ok fine someone will find a way.
A tracker serves 2 purposes:
1) Hosting the .torrent file (which is basically just a list of checksums for each piece)
2) Initial matchmaking of peers, and keeping track of "who has what"
#1 isn't a huge problem, as the .torrent files are tiny and pretty simple to find. #2 is where most of the value of the tracker comes in, because it lets each peer in a swarm find out about the others, so they can connect directly. However, once peers have found each other they'll connect and communicate directly.
In the traditional torrent model, with a tracker, your client pings the tracker every 20 minutes or so for a list of new peers who have joined the swarm. From that list, you'll attempt to connect directly to new peers.
A DHT (distributed hash table) is a nice hack that is meant to take load off the central tracker. In essence, instead of always asking the tracker for a list of new peers or who has a specific piece, you can ask the peers you are already connected to. Its kind of like an office, where you ask questions of your coworkers before bothering your boss.
This is why you can download torrents even when the tracker is unreachable, or in this case, taken offline completely. This is also why you can download torrents from demonoid without a demonoid account - the account just gives you access to the demonoid tracker, which you don't necessarily need.
I'm a little hazy on how a swarm would start without a tracker, as it seems like a decently sized swarm is needed to get the ball rolling, so to speak. Perhaps someone else can jump in?
This is also why private trackers don't like DHT and discourage its use.
What would really be news is - completely anonymous torrenting.
It's a much easier target than TPB - they receive money directly from users and host the files themselves. They officially run a business based on illegal sharing. Yet I haven't heard of them having any large legal problems. Sites that get sued are usually torrent trackers can always argue they don't earn money on this and don't know the contents themselves. Why are they going after the hard to get targets, while the obvious main distribution sites are still running?
Also - querying (for example) Giganews location I get "Data Foundry, Inc., Austin, TX, US". This really shouldn't be a problem for US lawyers...
Even if bittorrent were to disappear, it seems more likely that sites like Rapidshare would be the next 'mainstream' distribution method.
Besides that, when it comes to bittorrent the end-users have to do some uploading while on the torrent, so the media companies can nail them for distribution. If someone is just downloading content, it's harder to punish them -- from a legal standpoint -- then if you can get them for distributing content.
As for Giganews, I believe they are protected by safe harbor provisions. For usenet you'd have to go after all of the individual posters, which is something the RIAA/MPAA/BSA doesn't seem to have any interest in currently.
And all p2p transfer of torrents is not illegal copyrighted material.
How do you do that? I heard about something like this some time ago, but that's all I know.
Of course you have a reason you don't want to run a tracker.
Running services is overhead and keeping them up constantly is a pain. (One of the announcements pointed out that torrents from one site and the corresponding content remained available for months after that site went down because of the use of DHT.)
I will conclude with a thought experiment: Do you know how to host a small file over HTTP? Do you know how to setup and maintain a Bittorrent tracker?
If you answered yes to the first question but no to the second question, decentralized tracking is for you.
HTTP hosting is decentralized and not decentralized. If I run an Apache server hosting my website, it's centralized. Everyone that wants to access my website has to go through my server. They don't have to go through my server to access the whole internet net though. The internet -- for the most part -- is globally decentralized, but locally centralized.
It's the same with Bittorrent and trackers. If a tracker goes down, someone else can start up a new tracker that is serving the same torrent. It's not centralized the way something like Scour.net or Napster were (all peer-finding goes through the same servers).
> Decentralization greatly increases the reliability of the system.
Not necessarily. If you have two groups of 20 peers that are only connected to each other by a single peer, what happens when that one peer goes down? It's now impossible for those two groups to find each other. And consider that it's a lot more likely for a single peer in a torrent swarm to go down (someone's computer crashes, close the torrent, residential internet goes down) than it is for a centrally hosted tracker that is probably on a dedicated server in a colo somewhere.
PEX from Wikipedia:
While it may improve (local) performance and robustness—e.g. if a tracker is
slow or even down—heavy reliance on PEX can lead to the formation of groups of
peers who tend to only share information with each other, which may yield slow
propagation of data through the network, due to few peers sending information
to those outside the group they are in.It's needless linkbaiting... creating a headline out of an event that really isn't one.
Why's that? It's not like it's impossible for a PI to infiltrate one of these private trackers. Once the tracker is sued/confiscated, they usually have all kinds of information about you.
I joined what.cd just to see what these private trackers were like and they asked my a ton of questions. From 'where do you live' and 'what type of 'net connection do you have' to 'do you know the difference between encoding X and encoding Y' and 'look at these spectral analysis of a music file, which one was converted from mp3->flac instead of source->flac'.
Of course, I don't know how much of that they actually keep on file vs. just running you through the 'gauntlet' to filter out flakey people.
The real question is that will humanity morally accept or reject the concept we call 'copyright'.
When it comes to the ethics of copyright law, it boils down to economics. The consumer will always seek to purchase at the lowest price possible, and the corporation will always seek to sell at the highest price possible. Each side is driven by the ethics of what they determine to be "fair" and getting each other to agree on this will be impossible.
Netflix really "gets" the consumer argument for movies. I absolutely think the $10/month fee that I pay (probably a bit less than that) is a bargain and would gladly pay twice as much, but in all likelihood this price is going to go down over time. If the RIAA/MPAA were to take that example and provide us with such a service, then it would make economics-driven ethical sense.
The RIAA/MPAA really live in another reality where there can be no compromise.
In my experience, people generally believe that private consumption of copyrighted material should be unrestricted. That is, the part of copyright that gives the copyright holder an exclusive license to control distribution is overreaching, and should only apply to major commercial operations.
This is great. Basically the authorities are fighting a superior technology with nothing but the greatest of benefits: everyone contributes when downloading, so the load is not 100% on the server to serve the content. And the authorities are not giving good alternatives. ISPs are not working together with bt developers to make a protocol friendly for everyone, instead they are fighting to keep the protocol down.
O well I like the part about the servers being given to a museum.
It may be. The discrepancy between 99 cents and 1 cent is considered to be much smaller than the discrepancy between 99 cents and nothing.
and still get pirated in large numbers
Citation needed.
I don't really care for TPB, I don't think it provided anything useful for me. Bittorrent is a useful tool for sharing things like isos, but I don't need TPB for that.