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Pirate Bay Shuts Down Tracker, Switches To Distributed Hash Table
think_nix writes "The Pirate Bay has shut down their BitTorrent tracker. Instead TPB is now using Distributed Hash Table to distribute the torrents. The Pirate Bay Blog states that DHT along with PEX (Peer Exchange) Technology is just as effective if not better for finding peers than a centralized service. The Local reports that shutting down the tracker and implementing DHT & PEX could be due to the latest court rulings in Sweden against 2 of TPB's owners, and may decide the outcome of the case."
How do you get rtorrent to load a magnet link (preferably by pasting it into it's window) ???
The docs aren't too clear on this. I've tried and then pasting the magnet link at the "load>" prompt. But no luck.
F......
Proving that technology is always one step ahead of copyright law.
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First "Pirate Bay" and torrents and now Hash?!? What next, cocaine?!
It's NOT me! It's the meds! I'm on 1000mg of Fukitol.
So they go from hosting a tracker to hosting a bootstrap node that gives clients access to the DHT swarm? In short, in the eyes of the law (and probably of the general public), they're still facilitating the illegal distribution of copyrighted material. At the very least, they look guilty as hell, because they seem to do try their hardest to stick it up to da man.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Pirates are like ants and always find a way around obstacles and tend to attract more pirates to use the same path.
Removing a single tracker, no matter how widely used it was won't deal much harm. This may lead to the removal of other trackers in the future, but peer exhange and DHT are pretty much a good subsitute in my opinion.
The question then becomes: does the md5 hash of a file, being linked to a swarm of peers with the files themselves, become symbolic of the property that is being pirated ("stolen") in a convincing enough manner to implicate the hashtable host? It seems to be a stretch.
So lower the maximum open connections in your client. The problem with router is the available RAM for the NAT table. I've set rtorrent to only use 100 per torrent and not only the router holds it nicely, as the connection seems to be more optimized towards actually downloading instead of peer detection, so I get higher throughput.
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As far as I know, the tracker has not been shut down but merely moved to OpenBitTorrent. There are various posts on SuprBay confirming that fact. The (PirateBay) trackers themselves were shut down since august and OpenBittorrent is now the official tracker. I remember reading another post where someone did some research and ran a few traces, which confirmed (at the time) that the trackers were running on the same IP address. Here is another post worth reading.
As for OpenBitTorrent, it has been 404-ing since I tried to open that website. However a google cache exists as early as November 14th. On the cached page it is explained that the tracker operates solely on the info hash and thus knows absolutely nothing about the contents itself. Presumably in an attempt to elude copyright cops. Adding new torrents to that tracker is as simple as adding the tracker address to your newly created .torrent file. The tracker will automatically start tracking the info hash when an announce is made.
grows yet another head. Good luck trying to keep up, MAFIAA.
" just as effective if not better for finding peers", then why did they wait for the ruling to change over?
why not just switch over a long time back??
especially if they are better..
Thank you guys, in the name of technology.
One of the reasons why BitTorrent didn't suffer the legal fate of Napster, Kazaa, etc is that BitTorrent only handles data transfer, not search, and has significant noninfringing uses.
Having trackerless torrents however doesn't help the noninfringing uses, only infringing uses. (If its non-infringing, just host a tracker damnit!), thus trackerless client features start to get very dangerous from a legal perspective for the developers.
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It looks like someone is still confused there about copyright treaties like the Berne Convention.
It is perfectly legal to download and re-distribute the copyrighted material when the copyright owner gives permission. MPAA, RIAA, Disney / Microsoft don't want that discussed. And when formerly copyrighted material has its copyright revoked, either by the rights holder or by the passage of time. For example, the early Elvis recordings are now in the public domain in many countries because the copyright on that particular edition has expired.
Further, in some countries, fair use extends to copies for personal use. So while it may give you the warm and fuzzies to Repeat After Bill his every word, consider that the Internet is a global network and not just limited to your block.
What is likely at the heart of the matter is the issue of whether decentralized communications networks shall be allowed by control-freaks in various companies or their subservient governments. If it's not centralized, it's hard to track or censor.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
Why does the court system care how the data is distributed? If I still point my web browser to TPB, search their website for Movie_HD_1080p, and then it gives me some sort of seed/value, then in the eyes of the law the are still providing the same service. Is this any different from a law standpoint if they switched from an ftp server to an http server to a https server? The basic premise being "still providing access to copyrighted material."
Magnet link is an URI, your browser is supposed to send it to it directly.
It's interesting that TPB takes this stance now when it has become too expensive and hard to keep their trackers working, and while having legal issues shot against them from everywhere. DHT and PEX have been around for years with no significant improvements. This isn't a change because "the technology is ready now", but because the ship is sinking.
DHT and PEX support has been very slow to creep in to clients. It makes sense from a user popularity and user access perspective to resist switching fully to these systems until external pressure forces the issue, otherwise swaths of the community will get pissed and smear your site as refusing to conform to basic standards.
This is basically how every major jump in p2p technology has been implemented. P2p is forever a reactionary technology.
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You may need to greatly reduce the length of time an entry is in your router's NAT table. Some badly-configured routers will keep an entry for a whole day.
Also, as others have said, reduce the number of connections in your client, but that won't necessarily help if your node is popular, because denied connections still count.
If the ISPs get their way and force NAT on everyone then P2P can be shut down pretty fast.
Most NAT arrangements can be pushed through, at least of UDP traffic, using STUN and similar methods.
Many ISPs are moving towards NAT more because that is the least-investment-now way to get around the supply of IP addresses being harder to come by, rather than any desire to break P2P applications anyway.
I predicted this was going to happen (no torrents, just DHT hashes). Even posted it on slashdot. It will be interesting to see how the courts see it.
So, as an end user do I have re-add all my torrents into my client?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Oh oh that looks like the final death blow to mldonkey :(
Why oh why must it die? It's the only bittorrent/edonkey/ftp/http download manager for headless/remote servers there is. And it’s freakin’ great software.
Please, is there anyone who knows a replacement? Or who can write OCaml? We need to save it! Or at least have a replacement that can do the same things.
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