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The Pirate Bay Tops 10 Million Users
An anonymous reader suggests we go over to Slyck for news that The Pirate Bay has cracked 10 million users. The publicity from the upcoming court case probably helped. "Today, The Pirate Bay asserts itself as the self-proclaimed 'World's Largest Tracker' by topping over 10 million peers, while managing over 1 million torrents. Peter Sunde of The Pirate Bay told Slyck, 'We're very happy to be part of all of this and we hope our users keep sharing those files!... And we're looking to break 20 million as well.'"
Pirating is something organized criminals selling copyrighted content for money on the streets in Malaysia do. I don't believe there are any pirates on the pirate bay. Aaargh.
Apparently they make back just about what they lose in bandwidth/server costs. Or so they say.
I guess that will be one of the main points in the upcoming trial.
The PB guys make it sound like it's ideal hobbyist project and the prosecution wants to paint them as IP thieves bathing in money.
Here's one article (unfortunately in Swedish)
http://www.svd.se/nyheter/inrikes/artikel_334410.svd
It "claims" PB is pulling 600k SEK / month with their ads (a sum quoted for last 4 months of activity).
That works to about USD 93k/month. PB claims most/all of the money goes to upkeep of the site, bandwidth and servers.
Interesting to see if the prosecution manages to get a coherent case out of this... I have my doubts.
if 1/2 their registered users visit just once a month and they get another 5 million drive by's (which is easy to see happening) and the average bandwidth used per user is 0.5meg (also pretty mild) it would mean they need 5 terabytes of bandwidth spread out over multiple 100mbit links, not to mention how much all the rackspace would set them back.
if google can make billions providing ad based search results then i can't hold the PB guys to ransom over what ever measley profit they make. after all all the PB stuff is indexed on google anyway.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
"suprnova" never did account for "40% of traffic online". BitTorrent did. Suprnova was just a popular BitTorrent site (among many), and its traffic was measurable in hundreds of megabits/s, not hundreds of gigabits/s
You apparently don't know what's communism. If you see communism as an ideology where people steal and eat each other, you should consider visiting Wikipedia on this matter.
Well, 10 million peers. One USER can constitute many peers in the BitTorrent world -- in fact, every torrent they download is counted as one peer. So if I download 10 files from PirateBay (or seed 10 thereof), suddenly I am 10 peers.
(It's still impressive, but it's NOT 10 million users).
The "tracker" is not searchable at all. It's also not crappy at all -- it supports 10 million peers almost effortlessly, is build on OpenTracker (http://erdgeist.org/arts/software/opentracker/ -- there are also some tpb tracker graphs over yonder if you look around a bit : http://opentracker.blog.h3q.com/mrtg/).
.torrent files from. That's not a tracker (although some crappy PHP projects proclaim this to be so). It's searchable just fine, and most of it is not "shit". Of course, some elitist folks prefer "private" trackers (haha) with "enforced" ratios (bwahaha, especially if you know how BitTorrent works) and consider any file posted on such pure gold. Have fun with that.
The SEARCHING part would be part of the PirateBay website, the one you get the
The best one I ever used was Demonoid, but since they've recently gone down due to the CRIA...
You could find anything on there, and it always had seeders, and it was always well described and had a lot of comments, and there were never fakes, and it was always good quality. Demonoid just plain owned.
:(){
This is a prime example of how FUD exists absent Microsoft in the picture :-)
... How ? Were I to want to join a private tracker and enjoy privileges beyond the "common" user, I could just download a torrent announce simulator (yes, they do exist). Set it to "seed" on a popular torrent on that tracker for a day or two and your ratio will be through the roof -- just from sending announces with faked up= and down= fields (trackers have no other way of tracking ratio, and this is EASILY fak
A "private" tracker (a misnomer, most of those people would refer to as private trackers are not, in fact, private. It's easy to join -- especially if you have an account on another such "private" tracker with a decent "share ratio" you can point to.
Virus-laden files can easily crop up there, anybody simply trusting downloads because it is on a "private" tracker is asking for trouble. While it may take a bit more work, poisoning such torrents would be incredibly more rewarding to a would-be attacker.
Mistagging ? Well, I suppose tpb could increase its tagging capabilities, certainly. Then again, its torrents are not just indexed on their own site, but also on other, independent sites such as mininova and others -- all with their own tagging, popularity, and filtering systems.
Anonymity is not lost. It's usually an easy thing to cycle through multiple usernames, or even to build a network of sock puppet accounts -- contrary to what some administrators on such sites say, it is easy to evade detection with some care. I wouldn't liken TPB or the h3q tracker to a back alley, but rather the more mainstream all-purpose (including sinister) trackers by virtue of them being open. Combined with proper indexing and filtering systems, you can not only get high-quality long-lived torrents, but also a considerable number of peers (and more peers is virtually always better; given the choice between a torrent of a given file with 5 seeding peers and 5 "leechers" on a private tracker and a torrent of that same file with 500 seeding peers and 1500 leechers, I'd choose the latter and will usually get a better torrent-experience out of it (due to locality of peers, longevity of seeding, and total available bandwidth).
There is this inexplicable focus on "giving back what you take", which completely sidesteps the built-in mechanisms of BitTorrent to achieve a somewhat fair distribution of resources based on that exact metric -- sharing. Generally and given a higher-than-2 number of peers, those peers with more upstream bandwidth dedicated to a particular torrent swarm will also get a faster ingress speed (on the protocol level due to tit-for-tat and its associated choking/unchoking, on a higher level when initially seeding due to "superseeding" (i.e. tracking the proliferation of uploaded pieces to one peer through to other connected peers and giving that one peer a higher priority if successful, etc.). This looks only at single-torrent viability, of course, and does not track progress over multiple torrents, but given less-than-infinite upstream bandwidth of your peers, if you upload fast, you will get a fast download. True leechers never reinjecting any pieces into the swarm will still get the file, sure, but at a much slower speed due to constant choking. A certain number of sharing clients is required, of course, but generally the majority DOES have uploading enabled, the question is just whether they go up to a share ratio of > 1.0 after having downloaded the entire file. The seeding base usually increases over time until the death of the swarm approaches (which it does on private trackers, just the same).
You generally don't have a closed userbase. Even those invite-only trackers have a lot of churn. Sure, there are TRULY private trackers, but those do not have invitations either. A "private" tracker without churn will loose members due to attrition and eventually die due to not enough bandwidth or diskspace left to sustain itself.
As for weeding out those who don't contribute
> TPB has no 'registered users'. There's no signup process and no accounts.
You're wrong. They have user accounts and a registration process. It can be used, among others, to place comments on torrent files, filter out porn, upload and delete you own torrents, and have a public list of torrents you uploaded as some kind of a credibility system to filter out fake uploaders.
With bittorrent if I am downloading 5 files, I am registered as a peer 5 times. If I am downloading 100 files I'm in the peer table 100 times. Having 10 million peers is not the same as having 10 million separate people making use of the site.
Caesar si viveret, ad remum dareris.
The "community standard" for porn is "I can't define it, but I know it when I see it." If the average person in a community wasn't terribly offended, it wasn't porn.
The next question is, if its reasonable to apply the community standards test to pornography, why not to other areas? Is it okay to discriminate against rights of people who aren't fans of pr0n (all 3 of them)? Is it okay to say "community standards" for pr0n but not other conduct that communities now find acceptable?
You actually need an account to set the porn filter on/off permanently.
Nothing stops you from figuring out the category from the missing numbers
in the torrent category browser.