Popular Torrent Site ExtraTorrent Permanently Shuts Down (torrentfreak.com)

ExtraTorrent, the world's second largest torrent index, on Wednesday said it is permanently shutting its doors. The site, which launched in 2006, had steadily climbed the ranks in the piracy world to become the second most popular torrent site, observing millions of daily views. TorrentFreak adds: "ExtraTorrent with all mirrors goes offline.. We permanently erase all data. Stay away from fake ExtraTorrent websites and clones. Thx to all ET supporters and torrent community. ET was a place to beâ¦." TorrentFreak reached out to ExtraTorrent operator SaM who confirmed that this is indeed the end of the road for the site. "It's time we say goodbye," he said, without providing more details. [...] ExtraTorrent is the latest in a series of BitTorrent giants to fall in recent months. Previously, sites including KickassTorrents, Torrentz.eu, TorrentHound and What.cd went offline.

Comments

We pirates must unite

[jediborg]

And use technology to create an amazing decentralized pirate torrenting site that can never be shut down!

Also we need to stop using the word 'pirate' i think we lost the intellectual debate the moment we adopted the term. Its 'file sharing". I bet you if i asked ten random people on the street if they think piracy is wrong, most would say yes. But if i asked 10 random people if 'file sharing' was wrong and should be illegal, they would say 'No! you should be able to share files"

Re:Another victim of terrible leftist laws

[Sigma 7]

Keep in mind that most of the abuse of copyright in the US stems from the Digital Millennium Copyright Act

Any abuse of copyright law can be fixed by amending the law, and the government elected afterwards has not done so.

many other leftists around the world for continually extending copyright protections

That's not a leftist ideology, that's a corporate ideology.

An actual leftist ideology would be something similar to the GPL that recognizes that nothing should be locked down in the long-term by a small elite - especially if it allows people to use computers without having to pay more than they should (e.g. allow computers to have Linux, a basic set of compilers, and basic software required to do practically any common task.)

Distributed index

[PoopJuggler]

Why aren't there any distributed indexes? Seems silly to have an entire distributed distribution system without a matching index.

Re:Distributed index

[Anonymous Coward]

Because indexes are hard and distributed data is hard. And combining the two concepts is hard-squared.

And better yet, indexes are data, so distributing an index requires another index of the index, which then must be distributed, which requires another index of the index of the index... and now we're into infinite recursion territory. Flattening recursion like that creates a koan. There are ways of handling that, too, but it's not simple or obvious.

And once you do this for bittorrent trackers, you'd be a fool not to sink that effort into a replacement for DNS as well.

Re:Distributed index

[behrooz0az]

Technically speaking, It's not impossible; The problem is that it's spammable/DoSable and will need an authority to either allow/deny nodes from inserting to index or someone like our good old friend 'hosts guy' to maintain a list of known good source nodes that people can download and only share the indexes from those.
And/Or other simple restrictions like limiting the number of torrents any node can add to the index.
And/Or a voting system that allows all nodes to vote on others to help the client applications with prioritizing/filtering the index.
For node enrolling, I think a memory-hard cpu-hard hash of parts/some of the index should be viable.

As you can see there are a lot of problems with non-obvious fixes. I've been studying distributed databases for some time and i have problems putting this together. not easy.

Almost positive

[gizmo2199]

That the torrent site operators got spooked after kickass torrents operator, Artem Vaulin lost his extradition request in Poland. Now anybody linked to a torrent site is potentially liable to spend a decade or more in a federal prison, even if they don't live or host anything in the U.S.

Why take his advice?

[Anonymous Coward]

Stay away from fake ExtraTorrent websites and clones.

Ok, "fake" implies fraud, suggesting someone might phish for credentials, but why would people want to stay away from clones? That doesn't make sense. If someone liked this site, surely they'd prefer a clone over simply doing-without.

The big question about stuff like this, is why do torrent site operators not try to have their sites outlast them? Why isn't there a torrent of all their data (maybe without user tables)? That they want their projects to die with them, suggests it's mainly about dicksize than the work itself.

Re:naive question: what's wrong with piratebay

[BitterOak]

Is there a reason one would use a site like extratorrent rather than piratebay? They all just list torrents, right? I recognize I'm terribly uninformed when it comes to piracy, just wondering if I'm missing something.

What's wrong with The Pirate Bay is that it is becoming the only torrent site. All the others are shutting down, which means when The Pirate Bay falls, there will be nothing left. It's dangerous to be too reliant on one site. Think they're too big to be shut down? Kickass Torrents was just as big. There needs to be more options. When there are only a few, they are targets. It will only be a matter of time before The Pirate Bay falls.

Re:Leftist

[quenda]

I view it as "leftist" because it expanded the powers of government at the expense of the people.

The left in theory gives power to the people, while the right gives power to the aristocracy. The terms come from the French revolution.
In the US, it is more government versus the elite and corporations. But since the latter controls the former, its a moot point.