
World’s Oldest Torrent Is Still Being Shared After 4,419 Days - yabatopia
https://torrentfreak.com/oldest-torrent-is-still-being-shared-after-4419-days-160124/
======
cesarb
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](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

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

~~~
cesarb
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.

~~~
slyall
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.

------
deckar01
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.

~~~
bane
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.

~~~
cptskippy
> with some color correction and other odds and ends.

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

~~~
emergentcypher
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.

~~~
zodPod
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](http://www.ccc.commnet.edu/grammar/possessives.htm)

~~~
bane
_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."_

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airza
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...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wizard_People,_Dear_Reader#Presentation).

~~~
anonbanker
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.

~~~
airza
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.

------
jedberg
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.

~~~
zmitri
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...](https://www.facebook.com/dmitricherniak/media_set?set=a.550287341792003.1073741839.100004322268391&type=3)

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

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

~~~
zmitri
Believe this one works
[https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.550287341792003.10...](https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.550287341792003.1073741839.100004322268391&type=1&l=0562f8298e)

------
grecy
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?

~~~
chair-law
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.

~~~
jefftk
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.

~~~
chair-law
How complex is an edge detection algorithm?

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

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

~~~
jimrandomh
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".)

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

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

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

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

~~~
iDemonix
I believe you're referring to
[http://www.blinkenlights.nl/services.html](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.

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
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.

------
reptation
The creator emerges: [http://nooga.com/172237/chattanooga-man-responsible-for-
worl...](http://nooga.com/172237/chattanooga-man-responsible-for-worlds-
oldest-torrent-file/)

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

~~~
urda
> 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.

------
LulzSect
Whoa.

------
rocky1138
I'll leave this on Deluge for a while to share :)

------
arnarbi
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?

