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The Pirate Bay About To Relaunch Suprnova.org
kungfujesus writes "The Pirate Bay crew has been working on this secret project for quite some time now. Back in April they wrote a cryptic post on their blog announcing that something was coming. In a response to this announcement TPB admin Brokep told TorrentFreak: "The past, the present and the future. It's all the same, but one thing's for sure, we will radiate for weeks", today it became clear that he was referring to the resurrection of Suprnova."
who needs suprnova?
... but the symbolic meaning is, IMHO, actually important. From TFA:
We also talked to Brokep, one of The Pirate Bay administrators and asked him why they decided to revive Suprnova. He told us: "We talked it over and decided it was something people would have use for, it would help the torrent community and it would also signal that if you shut one down it will get back up again."Not to be overly dramatic, but things like this show that injustices to the filesharing community (if you see them that way :) ) will, eventually, be overcome.
The English word fart is one of the oldest words in the English vocabulary.
Next week on Fox 11, a story on the torrent downloading terrorist threat to the Universe; threatening to "SuprNova" vans at sports stadiums in solar systems across the Universe.
Am i the only person to notice that their big, uncensored image hosting site lasted about 2 days before they started removing images by the thousand with no explanation? Entire categories disappeared. I'd like to see slashdot or somebody ask them what the heck the point of the site is even supposed to be, since it certainly isn't a place to put things to link to, even generic LOL forum-type images. There's no indication on their FAQ or anywhere else why or how or who will just decide to remove stuff on a whim.
Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
Speaking as a BitTorrent client developer, I have to opine that BitTorrent is a terrible way to distribute pirated content. All the things that make it a good tool for distributing LEGITIMATE content work against it when what's being shipped around is against the law; it's too easy to track down the people involved in downloading and uploading it, and any attempt to limit that significantly reduces the network's ability to handle the load.
The only reason BitTorrent is being used is because there are plenty of scofflaws out there who want to share this data, and BitTorrent works great to amplify their efforts. Tracking down the initial sources is a bit difficult but not impossible, but there are a myriad of other sources waiting in the wings.
Scoffing the law is a grand tradition in the United States; from moonshiners, to ignoring the double-nickel speed limit on the roads, we've turned our noses up at laws which, while they may have some social benefit, we feel they restrict us too harshly. Often those laws wind up causing more problems than they solve; ask someone who wound up poisoned by ethylene glycol from an illegal alcohol still made from a car's radiator.
In this case we have people being sued, fined and jailed for trading long strings of ones and zeros. The "intellectual property" owners tell us these strings belong to them, even though those strings can vary enormously (re-encoding video alters the data entirely) they still assert ownership. One innocuous file on one's desktop may spell disaster. But with hundreds of millions of people around the world throwing them around, it's practically impossible to stop.
One website returning to life doesn't really mean that much in terms of what's being traded, but it is indeed a symbol showing how futile the fight to enforce the ownership of ideas is; after all, how can one own an idea?
Well, let's see.
* A search engine that actually uses booleans correctly.
* A policy that labels for CD or DVD images match what's on them in some consistent format, such as name, author, publisher, comments, with a matching search engine.
* Published checksums for the images: this could be used to reduce or elimiinate the duplicates.
* Open source or creative commons links: Bittorrent is the fastest way to get Linux CD or DVD images, but they *must* be checksum verified for security reasons.
* A policy of sending 3000 volts to the fingertips of the next idiot who uses yet another format for CD or DVD images, wasting my time with bittorrents for formats that no one but some teenager in Slovenia uses.
It's not a tracker. It's an aggregation site. It just stores copies of .torrent files from public trackers, which would include TPB. Most of the special-purpose (TV, movies, games, whatever) torrent sites are aggregation sites as well.
I'm always bothered when I read articles like this because I know the Slashdot party line is always "File sharing good, fuck the content creators". I get upset because I think of my little brother, who's basically been screwed by piracy.
:P
My little brother has a band. The music is quite good. The band is quite popular locally. It's so popular, in fact, that people bootleg their music and share it across the internet.
At first they were quite happy about this. They were reaching a much larger audience. Surely these people will come to their concerts and buy their CDs if they like the music (at least, that's what Slashdot always says will happen).
However, it didn't. Turns out (from conversations with their fans on their message board) that no one wants to buy their music. They like it, but hwy buy the music when fans can download every one of their albums for free online? Also, concert attendance has stayed flat. The pirating of their music hasn't suddenly increased attendance like they hoped it would.
So, while the band has a large fanbase (and it's growing), they've had barely enough to scrap by. My brother personally cleans a local diner's grease pit every night for a free dinner. They haven't (yet) gotten a recording contract, and I personally hope they do before my brother is actually eating the grease.
Long story short: don't believe everything you read on Slashdot. While I agree that the big content holders don't deserve any sympathy, there are artists out there that actually ARE hurting from piracy. It's mostly the little guys, and I haven't found one comment on Slashdot yet that recognizes this is as a problem.
Demonoid requires you to register if you want to access older torrents, whereas TPB, Mininova and the old Suprnova didn't. Registration in the world of bit-torrent seems somewhat counter-intuitive.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
I tried a popular private torrent site when I managed to get an invite. It was, to paraphrase the Angry Video Game Nerd, fucking horrible!
Private sites tend to enforce a ratio, so if you don't seed enough you're eventually banned, which is what happened to me. No matter how much I tried, I was never able to seed properly (about 800 mb at most, and I must have downloaded about 10 gb). I had my client set up exactly like the site instructed me to, and I've never had any issues seeding on public trackers. I tried seeding big torrents, I tried seeding small torrents, I tried seeding small chunks from a large, popular torrent, and I even downloaded a file just so I could try seeding it... nothing worked. To make things even more difficult, what little I managed to seed wasn't properly registered by the site. Another part of the problem was that new users couldn't access new torrents, so by the time the torrents became available to me there was nobody downloading them anymore, or there was such a ridiculous amount of seeders that I couldn't seed anything myself.
Since then, I've had no desire to go anywhere near private torrent sites. And why would I? Public sites usually have anything you need, and if they don't then it's likely to be so rare that private sites don't have it either.