

If Pirate Bay Shut Down, Could Take BitTorrent With It - ojbyrne
http://i.gizmodo.com/5153109/if-pirate-bay-is-shut-down-it-could-take-all-of-bittorrent-with-it

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wheels
This is a bit like saying if Google went away that web search would go with
it. Google's far and away the dominant service, but if it disappeared it'd
take the universe about 4 seconds to recover and switch to another service.

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jlouis
If PB shut down, then it could take bittorrent with it. But in the sense that
a new protocol emerges, not in the sense that bittorrent stops working.

Also note that there is a multitracker extension on the bittorrent protocol.
And PB seems to use it.

~~~
cabalamat
> _But in the sense that a new protocol emerges, not in the sense that
> bittorrent stops working._

I've often wondered how practical it would be to have a P2P protocol that only
connects with people in one's social graph. For example, it could use
someone's email, IM and facebook contacts, minus anyone they deem as
untrustworthy.

If such a system existed, it would be very hard for law enforcement to break
into, as they would have to infiltrate people's social networks. Of course, if
law enforcement could force people to turn traitor on their freinds and entrap
them, that would make it easier to roll up such networks; but it's unlikely in
democratic societies that people would let the government do that.

The range of files available to be shared from one's immediate friends is
going to be a lot less than what's out there on the whole internet, but if the
protocol allowed requests to flow over multiple nodes, potentially a much
larger set of files would be available. (Consider that everyone is no more
than six handshakes from everyone else).

~~~
cabalamat
I've just found this is called Friend-to-friend filesharing:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friend-to-friend>

An extract:

"""A friend-to-friend (or F2F) computer network is a type of peer-to-peer
network in which users only make direct connections with people they know.
Passwords or digital signatures can be used for authentication.

Many F2F networks support indirect anonymous or pseudonymous communication
between users who do not know or trust one another. For example, a node in a
friend-to-friend overlay can automatically forward a file (or a request for a
file) anonymously between two friends, without telling either of them the
other's name or IP address. These friends can in turn forward the same file
(or request) to their own friends, and so on."""

------
bd
_"In June 2005, BitTorrent, Inc. released version 4.2.0 of the Mainline
BitTorrent client. This release supported "trackerless" torrents, featuring a
DHT implementation which allowed the client to use torrents that do not have a
working BitTorrent tracker."_

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitTorrent_(protocol)#Distribut...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitTorrent_\(protocol\)#Distributed_trackers)

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_hash_table>

~~~
dmix
Have there been any good examples of a peer-to-peer distribution of torrent
files? From what I've seen its been either the trackers or search engines
indexing the trackers that distribute the torrents most effectively.

~~~
blasdel
There's not really a coherent distributed system for the torrent files, but
there's not really a need, the ad-hoc system works pretty well.

The real problem is tracking the active clients -- without widespread DHT
trackers like TPB would have collapsed under their own weight years ago. As it
is there's frequent timeouts and massive response latency. It doesn't help
that the software running the trackers is almost universally awful PHP
garbage.

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vaksel
public torrent sites maybe...but there are plenty of private torrent trackers
that won't crash

~~~
dmix
I agree, on every private tracker there is a surplus of "seedboxes" or
dedicated servers with gigabyte connections ready to keep the torrent
community alive. These communities are often where the torrents found on
public trackers originate. Most seedbox providers don't even not allow
torrents from public trackers.

Although the average bittorrent user may be effected, a large migration, as a
result of Pirate Bay shutting down, to private trackers would make it harder
for the copyright owners to shut them down and track users because they are
much more protected.

The nature of bittorrent and the huge communities surrounding them make it an
almost impossible force to stop (outside of direct ISP intervention).

~~~
worldhello
I don't understand the extra level of protection... they are again offering
torrents of copyrighted material. also the value would lie in the users
sharing, which means that both the normal users and the law enforcement guys
will get the same privileges, just as in the case of piratebay.

~~~
dmix
Private trackers are much more protected then public in many ways:

a) Its invitation only, if users give an invitation to a leecher/bad person
then they themselves get banned, this creates an incentive to screen users
thoroughly. Any person could go on a public tracker and have a list of the IPs
of people sharing a particular torrent

b) Finding the trackers is usually difficult

c) Private tracker admins go to great lengths to anonymize data and protect
their own identities

The law enforcement guys would have to be directly involved in these
communities to gain privileges and also be on the edge of technical
advancements. But given the fact that there are thousands of people for each
law enforcement user (maybe hundreds of thousands) its nearly impossible for
them to keep up. There are many similarities to drug trafficking.

~~~
Zev
[http://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en-
us&...](http://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en-
us&q=private+bittorrent+trackers&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8) \- not very hard to find.
Or get into according to the top hit.

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mattmaroon
I suppose if you just purposely leave #2 off of your list of the top 20 you
could come to that conclusion.

[http://siteanalytics.compete.com/thepiratebay.org+mininova.o...](http://siteanalytics.compete.com/thepiratebay.org+mininova.org/)

~~~
tlrobinson
Is Mininova actually a tracker, or do they aggregate other trackers?

~~~
Zev
aggregate

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dimitar
The other trackers will upgrade their hosting plans and will appreciate the
extra ad cash.

Also here at least here no one downloads stuff from tPB - especially since you
have great local trackers (which however require seeding) with users on the
LAN you are connected to; its normal to see speeds of 3Mbit/s.

