
End of an Era: Pirate Bay Tracker Shuts Down - Chirag
http://mashable.com/2009/11/17/pirate-bay-tracker-shuts-down/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Mashable+%28Mashable%29
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rscott
Forgive me, I read the article I just know little about BitTorrent. So people
can still add torrents and they will work for others, it just uses a
decentralized solution to find peers rather than asking TPB's tracker? So,
nothing is really changing except the way your client is working?

~~~
qeorge
Yes, that's right. Your tracker has already been using the DHT to find peers
for quite some time. Here's a brief explanation of trackers and DHT, hope its
helpful:

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?

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pyre
> _the account just gives you access to the demonoid tracker, which you don't
> necessarily need._

This is also why private trackers don't like DHT and discourage its use.

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ivenkys
Ah well , TPB tracker has been irrelevant for a while anyway, this just makes
it formal.

What would really be news is - completely anonymous torrenting.

~~~
eru
Doesn't putting tor underneath suffice?

~~~
aw3c2
No, don't do that. If you want well-working and most appreciated filesharing
on an anonymous network, please join us I2P fans: <http://www.i2p2.de>

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viraptor
Not entirely on-topic, but I was looking through the newsgroup warez search-
engines yesterday with friends and we were wondering - why doesn't anyone sue
those sites?

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?

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InclinedPlane
Geography. Hosting a paid warez site from, say, Russia or China is much safer
(from prosecution) than hosting a torrent tracker from Sweden.

~~~
viraptor
Do you really believe that there are no US/CA entities simply buying the
hosting package in another country to provide this service? I don't have a
proof that it's not true, but it just seems really unlikely.

Also - querying (for example) Giganews location I get "Data Foundry, Inc.,
Austin, TX, US". This really shouldn't be a problem for US lawyers...

~~~
eru
Perhaps because their price for customers is strictly greater than zero, their
user base is limited?

~~~
pyre
Hit the nail on the head. For a lot of people USENET is out of their depth.
The media companies _know_ about USENET, they have to, but it's not the
current popular form of distribution.

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.

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genieyclo
Misleading title. TPB is not dead; it just isn't a tracker anymore.

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Raphael_Amiard
Ummmm . the title says TPB tracker is down, so it's actually very accurate

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sp332
TPB != TPB tracker. They still serve torrent and magnet files, you can still
post comments, etc.

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keatsta
It seems that the general shift in the torrenting community has been towards
private trackers anyways. The average pirate seems more interested now in
finding good quality releases and obscure content. Also, private sites are
usually safer to use on the legal side of it. Of course, I may just be
projecting my own opinions onto a community in which I may be atypical.

~~~
pyre
> _private sites are usually safer to use on the legal side of it._

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.

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fiaz
When will the RIAA and MPAA realize that trying to suppress technology is like
trying to kick your way out of quicksand? This is indeed a win for them in the
short term, but the way I see it, technology is _evolving in response_ to
whatever legal challenges are presented.

~~~
nadam
For me it is more complicated than that. Whether humanity accepts 'Copyright
laws' is more an ethical issue for me than technical. A more trivial (and a
bit demagog) example: if technology enables the creation of very cheap and
very effective weapons, people still should not shoot each other, and there
should be some regulations which in a way 'suppress technology'.

The real question is that will humanity morally accept or reject the concept
we call 'copyright'.

~~~
fiaz
Good response...I was thinking more at the level of legal law versus
technological capability, kind of like an input/output or action/reaction
mechanism.

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.

~~~
trafficlight
Except the MPAA hates Netflix and would love to see it die. For an anecdote:
[http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/a4n1i/so_i_just_...](http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/a4n1i/so_i_just_ran_the_sound_for_a_20th_century_fox/)

The RIAA/MPAA really live in another reality where there can be no compromise.

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selven
Pirates aren't going anywhere. One site shuts down, 5 more pop up. It's an
impossible game of whack-a-mole. This isn't a statement in favor of or against
copyright infringement, it's a simple fact.

~~~
henrikschroder
Funnily enough, the mechanisms behind pirate markets are very well understood,
they appear when there is a large discrepancy between how consumers value a
goods in a market, and the price of the goods in that market.

~~~
chaosmachine
Is 99 cents a large discrepancy? iPhone apps sell for less than a dollar, and
still get pirated in large numbers.

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mmelin
The difference between $0.00 and $0.99 isn't simply 99 cents. It's the
difference between no money (free) and some money, which is probably the
single largest price discrepancy there is.

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jacquesm
Exactly. People always try to make this a price elasticity issue, but it
really isn't. It's about having a transaction or none at all, there is no
'slope' to the problem.

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niyazpk
I guess that the RIAAs of the world will be suing bittorrent users now that
there isn't anyone else to sue.

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dkersten
Meh, who cares. I'm surprised it (the tracker) lasted as long as it did
really. Anyway, the majority of _pirates_ I know appear to have moved or be
moving on to the likes of megaupload and rapidshare and such anyway, it seems.

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.

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genieyclo
Got numbers?

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dkersten
Of course not, but I haven't heard much buzz about torrenting things in quite
a while. A few years back, there was always people going on about it. Now the
latest fad _seems_ to be megaupload and rapidshare style sites.

~~~
henrikschroder
That can only work for so long since those services are centralized. If a
large amount of copyrighted material is distributed illegally through those
services, they will be targeted very quickly by the content industry and
either be shut down, or forced to screen all material.

~~~
CWuestefeld
Anecdotally and from personal observation, piracy through these channels seem
to be huge. There have been some new records released recently, and when I was
searching for reviews of them, some of the top Google results were actually
links to rapidshare and its ilk.

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c00p3r
which means more profit to remaining pirates...

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socram2k
long live TPB!

~~~
henning
copyright infringement is awesome!

