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I very much support GIMP in using their own FTP server. Of course, nothing stops them from hosting their own bittorent tracker though. Using bit-torrent doesn't mean the torrent files has to go through the pirate bay or other torrent sites.

They don't even need to host their own tracker. There are some industrial strength public trackers out there:

PublicBitTorrent
OpenBitTorrent
Demonii

They don't host torrents or anything else, they just provider tracker service. The gimp project would only need to generate a torrent file with one or more of those listed as trackers and then stick the torrent file on their ftp site.

Have you tried adding http://www.openbittorrent.com/ to your torrents?

The issue with attacking NNTP has been that those who run NNTP services don't control the content whatsoever. They aren't held responsible for what's uploaded to their servers, and I think this is a fundamental issue with regarding net-neutrality.

What? NNTP servers store the content, while bittorrent servers (both the torrent files repositories and the trackers) never do. In fact, if you decouple the .torrent file sharing from the tracker, you can have trackers that know nothing about the content, not even the torrent name (only some hashes), or even trackerless torrents.

Bittorrent is much harder to stop; the only way to do it is to convince each ISP to implement DPI filters and play cat and mouse with the developers of bittorrent clients, and it'll only end if they basically turn the Internet into TV 2.0.

We've had decentralized tracking for years now, based on the Kademila distributed hash table. As long as the .torrent creator didn't turn on the private flag DRM, this system works really well, and I think it tends to provide an even richer set of peers from which to choose.

We also have OpenBittorrent which is a tracker that has no idea what it's tracking, putting it in a safer legal position than trackers have normally been in. Any torrent can use that if they wish.

The legal bottleneck is in distributing the .torrent files themselves. This involves more than just distribution, too. You want to have user feedback to weed out malicious or fake torrents. You want to have up-to-date seeder/leacher information. This is the weak spot in BitTorrent right now. That's what makes TPB and Mininova and the like so important.

NowTorrents is good for finding torrents, since it's an aggregator.
As for trackers, OBT seems promising, especially since it's effective a reincarnation of TPB, just redesigned to limit their liability.

They set up an open tracker at openbittorrent.com. Additionally, many modern BitTorrent clients can do decentralized tracking.

People should use this: http://openbittorrent.com/ There's even a tool on there to batch convert the trackers and clean it up.

A back-up is all OK, but the people behind TPB (well I suppose it's them, because they use the same servers as TPB) is working on a decentralized replacement for TPB called openbittorrent.com and torrage.com. This decentralized version will be almost impossible to take out both legally and technically, and according to the ideology behind TPB it will be more democratic.

http://openbittorrent.com/

Interesting, but according to Wikipedia it uses the same tracker servers as The Pirate Bay, and appears to be operated by Fredrik Neij (one of the group behind TPB).

I wonder what will happen if The Pirate Bay is closed down or turned into a site for legal torrents. A lot of the other torrent sites relies on the Pirate Bay tracker. What other large, public bittorrent trackers (not just .torrent mirrors) are there?

http://openbittorrent.com/

This is a tracker (supposedly) by the guys that started TPB: http://openbittorrent.com/

They are only a tracker, and don't host any .torrent files. That way they can't know what is being tracked. You'll have to get the torrents themselves from somewhere else.

All piratebay torrents list tracker.openbittorrent.com as a tracker, and they seem to be the same server. I'm guessing that nothing is going to happen to the tracker, but we might need a new indexing site.

I came across this recently, though I haven't used it yet.

http://openbittorrent.com/

An open tracker, and they don't know what they are tracking since they don't host the .torrent files.