Slashdot Mirror
BitTorrent Community Running For Cover?
govatos writes "Bandwidth issues and DOS Attacks brought Bytemonsoon, a popular BitTorrent
page down, but now pages are closing for scarier reasons. Torrentse.cx 'recieved a cease and desist letter during the day of Wednesday, July 16, 2003 for copyright infringement. The entire website has been removed and will not return.' Will corporate pressure kill the BitTorrent movement, or will it keep flying from site to site before it settles somewhere 'safe' like Sealand's HavenCo?"
Actually, ByteMonsoon has already been re-born -- albeit under a new name.
I'd post the link but the last thing that poor site needs is to get Slashdotted. If you know your way around the BT community, you should be able to find it.
index/key/tracker files
The tracker is a url of a server to contact. Take down that server, and the bittorrent files that contact it are no longer valid.
I took a look at Torrentse.cx the other day when someone linked to it in a /. comment. The whole thing was pretty much full of illegally-traded software, movies, music, the whole 9 yards.
Bittorrent is a great application for those situations when large downloads like the Red Hat ISOs are hard to get through the normal servers. Piracy is piracy, and it should be shut down. End of story.
This is silly. You can't keep people from knowing about them. You're being selfish and elitest. =) How did you find them in the first place? And what makes you so special?
On the matter of high loads, people who make sites should tackle that problem. If *they know* will attract a lot of attention, they should either prepare for that or find some way to reduce traffic to what they can handle (ala filesoup).
Besides there are link sites out there, and people will stumble upon them eventually. Such as...
http://www.btsites.tk/
http://www.torrentlinks.com/
Torrentse.cx died because the lawyers CC'd the co-loc provider and THEY pulled the plug, before torrentse even had a chance to respond. In other words, presumption of guilt.
Doesn't shock me though - they were getting such a cheap rate that it looked like one of those cut-throat co-loc operations anyway and they aren't much into protection of customers.
Just another bit of the mentality of the DMCA: assume guilt, ask questions later.
Natural != (nontoxic || beneficial)
Our office represents Embrace the Future, Inc., and the recording artist professionally known as "BT" in legal matters. Our client owns the registered trademark "BT" and the copyrights in the compositions embodied in the BT Master(s). The sound recording copyrights in the BT Master(s) are owned by Nettwerk Productions, Inc.
7 2116). We have been advised by Net Sentry, Corp. that the IP in question (66.17.156.130) is allocated to a server owned and operated by your company.
It has come to our attention that you have made available for digital download via the so-called file share server at the Torrentse.cx website the BT artist album titled "Emotional Technology" and/or individual BT master sound recordings from said album (hereinafter referred to as "the BT Master(s)") without permission (http://www.torrentse.cx/stats.php?i...7e6a00752d
The unauthorized exploitation of the BT Master(s) constitutes an intentional infringement of our client's rights under the United States Trademarks Act as well as our client's and Nettwerk Productions' rights under the United States Copyright Act. Moreover, our client now has an actionable claim for damages against you for the substantial loss of income caused by your unauthorized exploitation of our client's property and/or your facilitation of the unauthorized exploitation of our client's property by users of the Torrentse file share server ("Torrentse Members").
You are hereby placed on notice that our client intends to prosecute this matter to the fullest extent permitted by the law unless your unauthorized exploitation of our client's property and/or your facilitation of Torrentse Members' unauthorized and illegal exploitation of the BT trademark and copyrighted material owned by our client and Nettwerk Productions is terminated with immediate effect. In order to resolve this matter, you must immediately agree in writing to cease and desist from any further exploitation of the BT Master(s) or any other sound recordings owned by our client, Nettwork Productions or others in connection with the name BT.
If we do not receive your written response by the close of business on Wednesday, July 16, 2003, we will by forced to refer the matter for further legal action.
"coolfish:
Hmm, but the the only things I had ever used bittorrent for were legit(I'm not kidding). Oh well.
Decentralization was never the point. It's just a really cool download method.
Bittorrent was not designed as a way to anonymously get files, or to trick the RIAA, or anything like that.
It was designed as a way for people to distribute large files without paying gobs for bandwidth.
CX is the domain for christmas island:
.com, .net, .org, or .tk.
http://www.nic.cx/
There are a few popular sites with that domain that have some nasty content. But it's still just a domain like
I notice that the link to Torrentse.cx redirects to http://www.redcoat.net/pics/tubgirl.jpg, which is as cheerful a pic as goatse.cx. Am I the only person to follow links?
Nothing for 6-digit uids?
I did and an appalling picture is there, don't know how the hell I got redirected there, but I am offended beyond belief.
A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right.
-Thomas Paine
give parent more informative points, parents parent thinks bit torrents suppose to be like kazaa or gnutella. its not.
use a torrent when you have something you want to 'host' on your site but can't bank the bandwidth necessary for everyone to get a decent download rate.
theres no trying to thwart the *aa built in whatsoever. interesting the poster says some site was shutdown but doesn't say WHY - I'd guess it has nothing to do with the method of hosting but the content
bite my glorious golden ass.
...has anyone noticed that the Torrentse.cx linked has changed, a *bit*? I think the editors *might* want to remove that...just a thought...
Editors should remove the link to torrentse.cx, it goes to the tubgirl picture. yuck.
there's a (crappy) techno "artist" that uses the name BT. his real name is Brian Transeau. it's quite ironic that he's pursuing legal threats against p2p file sharing, since p2p sorta made him famous.
here's an allmusic link: BT
go to a p2p client and type
.torrent
into the search option.
You'll find all sorts of stuff..
BTW, that was just an observation.
I use torrents to get new distros, getting them from the official
ftp sites is impossible when they are hot off the press.
BT lets me download 3 ISO's in less than three hours..
Even if you don't want to share your content on Freenet, which it might not be big enough to handle yet, you could always share your torrent files. Replacing the centralized part with a totally decentralized network.
Why does Bittorrent always get posted up as a "FILE SHARING" program, its no more a "fire sharing" program than windows IIS. Bittorrent happens to make it convenient for a single distributor to allow access to his files without incurring a major bandwidth costs.
IN fact to find out someone who does just that, go to gametab.com, or redvsblue.com
they have saved craploads of bandwidth on there completely legal files. Bandwidth has made it so files can be available that would otherwise be completely unavailable otherwise as the main host went down.
Bittorrent is being abused as a file distribution method for movies and such, but so is IRC, and so are chat programs and e-mail for christ sake.
Are we going to ban file send capabilies from chat now because someone might send the HULK over it?
How about just ban the entire internet? You can argue that Bittorrents greatest use is for downloading large, illegal files,and I might agree with you. But the internet, by your same thinking, is just a big illegal file sharing network too, all you have to do is prove taht more than oh 50% of the bandwidth USED on the internet is used to download illegal content, or hell if your the RIAA just try to prove 20%, and then you could say "well the internet is just a havent for filesharers we should see it shutting down"
what rediculous bullshit. I have loved bittorrent, I use it to download licenced anime, and to download redvsblue episodes and the odd movie that gets slashdoted.
The main difference between bittorrent and kaaza, is bittorrent is not an anonymous fileshare program, there is always a single point of distribution, and thus a single person that can be tracked down to have started it.
why is this a "good" thing? because its not a filesharing program, using bittorrent is not an excercise in your fair use rights, you may be using it as such, but it has a very powerfull, very real legal use for it.
Unlike kaaza, with a littlle tweaking, bittorrent could be the "big" thing patches and such being distributed, even by companies such as IDSoftware, your not going to do that with a program like Kaaza, because you have no trust of what the file is going to be. On bittorrent since it comes from a single original source file, you have complete trust of the content being sent to you.
I dont know, i am repsonding to the few threads i saw "but bittorrent is illegal" and i started in a new thread cause i could easily see them getitng modded down.
Buzz OUT
If you don't vote, you don't matter, so don't waste your time telling me your opinion
Try http://autopr0n.com/torrents/. I doubt this experiment will work well (I haven't personally tested the link quality) and I don't know about legality, but there's a definite stab at appling BT for this purpose.
We recently had heard in the office over one of the Yellow Machine that's made by Anthology Solutions.
I think what BitTorrent badly needs is a way to avoid the tracker bottleneck. If there's a way for more than one tracker to keep track of the same file, it would increase the resilience of the protocol enormously.
;)
If you made this change bittorrent would be just another p2p app. It's main selling point right now is that you can offer up content and still track who's downloading and provide assurance that they are getting a _valid_ file. So RedHat could set up a bittorrent site for their files and still get some idea of how many people go to them for the files plus their users know they are getting a valid file without downloading the hash key from redhat and manually checking their file after the download. (As long as there isn't an untrusted man-in-the-middle between you and redhat.)
You can currently throttle your tracker and ask people to leave the application on after the download if you have bandwidth problems. It would be good to distribute more of the trackers duties, but this isn't trivial if you want to keep the good properties of bittorrent. I actually started working on something like bittorrent when I was on vacation last year, but when I found out about bittorrent it went to the back burner (Mine had FEC(&udp transport), it also conducted route discovery to try to find the cheapest path for the poor australians, and provided a means for ISP's to set-up effective caches, but I have limited time for unpaid work. I'll contribute to bittorrent once I learn some python
Actually, HavenCo is no longer a safe haven. Ryan Lackey will be doing a talk about the events that transpired in 2002 at DEFCON 11. Here's the text from the DEFCON Speakers Page:
HavenCo: What Really Happened
HavenCo, an attempt at creating an offshore data haven, was launched in 2000 by a small team of cypherpunks and pro-liberty idealists.
During 2002, the Sealand Government decided they were uncomfortable with their legal and PR exposure due to HavenCo, particularly in the post-DMCA and post-911 world, and regulated, then took over the remains of the business, forcing the remaining founders out. While HavenCo continues to serve a small number of customers, it no longer is a data haven, and has exposed the ultimate flaw in relying on a single physical location in one's quest for privacy.
Ryan Lackey was with HavenCo from inception until late 2002, and will tell exactly what happened (not the PR-friendly whitewashed version) from day one until the end, what lessons were learned, and how similar goals can be achieved in the future by motivated individuals and groups.
-Shippy
The saddest part of all of this - all of the fines you suggested are lighter than the ones suggested by our beloved Howard Berman as reported in this article and this earlier discussion.
Stop the Slashdot effect! Don't read the articles!
As you will notice (either immediately or after several seconds of high-throughput processing, depending on your current state of drug consumption), the question posed by the submitter is mere speculation. Not only speculation, but very cogent and reasonable speculation. You see, HavenCo is the ONLY place of its kind.
Not only is HavenCo one of a kind, but its hosted on an artificial island in the sea, christened Sealand. Navy sailors originally dubbed the island [expletive deleted], but it renamed after a feud with the local greenpeac..
In any case, no other city is like HavenCo. Except maybe LA. The writer said "like Sealand's HavenCo", emphasis on like. This suggests there may be, in the future hopefully, other service offerings similar to HavenCo's. At the moment, this is not the case. HavenCo has been a subject of several Slashdot postings and Wired articles; it surely piqued my interest.
If I was a major warez dealer, you bet hell I would buy a HavenCo account and setup a public FTP server. I'd have completely Sealand-legal new musical releases, movies (appropriate for children of course), as well as a myriad of software available for selection. My WaReZ site would be public, and I would have no user limits. I would rake in the dough through advertisements appropriate for all audiences. All within the jaundiced eye of the RIAA/MPAA.
They couldn't do a damned well thing.
And that's the point of this point. Its not a plug, its not an advertisement, its not a commercial. Its a way of life.
"The lesson to be learned is not to take the comments on slashdot too literally." --Vinnie Falco, BearShare
But Bittorrent itself hasn't been shut down, just websites with torrents of copyrighted materials. I can still host a bittorrent myself that points to a Red Hat ISO.
Actually, God was being somewhat condescending. Further on in this particular story, God ended up destroying the city anyways, the point being that there weren't even ten people within it to have made the city worth sparing. The actual number was fewer than 5 in the whole city, and according to the story, they were given the opportunity to flee the city before it was destroyed (and they did).
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Of course they have a disclaimer "...The administrator of this site (www.zenith-net.co.uk) cannot be held responsible for what its users post, or any other actions of its users. You may not use this site to distribute or download any material when you do not have the legal rights to do so."
Uh yeah... I was shocked to see almost all the posted torrents were illegal.
The real profit, if any, would be selling the tracker logs to interested parties.
As always, I am surprised by a lack of recognition for eDonkey2000 at Slashdot. The ed2k is, I believe, technologically superior, it has better clients (and larger variety, and the leading ones are also open source). The system is also provides prolonged availablity much better.
.bittorrent files that have to be hosted somewhere. This is also the reason why ed2k-link sites are more resistant to lawsuits.
In addition to this, ed2k is better protected from "anti-piracy" attacks. There is additional server layer, very resistant to servers being temporarily shut off and requiring (I believe) less traffic. A lot of negotiation is performed directly between clients - the Overnet model does not require servers at all. Finally, the actual links are in the form of short text links that can be e-mailed, printed and even spelled over the phone, not in the form of
P.S. This seems to me just one more case of an inferior technology receiving an unfair share of coverage. Like MS dominates the media, BitTorrent seems to dominate Slashdot...
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.