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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.
...rating.to, and what that falls there will be another to take its place. You can't stop the signal...
...rarbg.to
Nyaa.se was shut down voluntarily as well at the beginning of the month, but a group from the fandom and people close to the old site started a replacement that will eventually be just like the old site for all intents and purposes.
How am I going to download all that open-source software, that I used to download with BitTorrent?
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Keep in mind that most of the abuse of copyright in the US stems from the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which was a terrible law signed by Bill Clinton. We have a Democrat to thank for the copyright abuse, and many other leftists around the world for continually extending copyright protections at the urging of liberal companies like Disney. As usual, our problems stem from the left, and I'll be censored by leftist moderators who are unwilling to defend their leaders against my common sense criticisms.
- snruter rotsac
...torrent site is http://www.zooqle.com/
The future of torrenting is private, invite-only. Not worth the trouble of a public one.
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"
mire of decay, here, but what is nEed to scream that
Why aren't there any distributed indexes? Seems silly to have an entire distributed distribution system without a matching index.
There have been multiple volunteer shutdowns in recent weeks, whether it's release groups like JYK or torrent sites like Nyaa. No information is ever revealed as to why they decided to shut down, just that it was voluntary. I assume somebody is putting a lot of pressure on these people and they're doing it to avoid criminal charges.
This is clearly a far better approach to stopping piracy than suing a few downloaders, but I'm not sure they can win this game of whack-a-mole. Nyaa was almost immediately replaced by nyaa.pantsu.cat, while the Pirate Bay is still running as an alternative to ExtraTorrent. It'll be interesting to see what happens if they sustain this attack.
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.
Interesting that you view it as leftist. It's certainly not socialist, but may be capitalist. I'm not sure what the "left" is any more (or the right to tell the truth).
I'm not sure what the "left" is any more (or the right to tell the truth).
Good, that puts you 5 steps closer to the truth than you were when you thought the terms had meaning.
So, here's the history.
Before taking the names that they would be known as later, three sociopolitical philosophies forming in the universities of 1920's Europe called themselves "left, right, and center." Which was right and which was left was kind of arbitrary, but since the other one was a bit of a hybrid of the two, it was called center. They were all being developed to "solve" the problems of individual choice, as seen in the bitter depression that preceded the roaring 20's in the USA.
"Left" was a philosophy of cooperative anarchy. With no government, votes, or other trappings of authority over each other, people would work as well as they could and aid their neighbors in need.
"Right" was a philosophy of tyrannical efficiency. Whenever an industry became important, the government would bring the top players together, determine who should handle that industry, and the rest were absorbed into the monopoly.
"Center" was a philosophy of brutal revolution. No one with any influence was to be trusted, they all had to be dethroned and replaced with loyal members of the government.
All three became more complicated as they debated and discussed real-world issues beyond their initial motivation.
In the 1930's, students of "right" and "center" found their way into political power throughout much of Europe and Asia. The "left" were typically tricked into cooperation with "center." Since all three philosophies knew each-other's tactics, they feared imminent re-revolution more than any form of counter-revolution and immediately outlawed and hunted the other two philosophies once they came to power.
Ever since the mid 1940's, it has been popular for members of whichever philosophy has the most traction in each semi-representative nation to portray anyone who disagrees with them with the terminology of one of the other philosophies from that trio.
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.
This Sig does not Exist.
RIAA, MPAA, television show producers: Enjoy your endless game of Whack-a-Mole. You will never, ever end people's ability to share what they want to share. You could destroy the Internet forever, and it wouldn't matter: we'd all just go back to SneakerNet. You could destroy home computers: we'd just resurrect video tape. You can't stop the signal. Stop wasting your time.
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.
I view it as "leftist" because it expanded the powers of government at the expense of the people. ("It" being the anti-circumvention aspects, not the safe harbor and boat design aspects; I'm not addressing those here.) It created a new crime out of an innocent activity.
This is independent of it also being such an unusually bad idea. Unless you're a perfect anarchist or perfect totalitarian, left/right rarely implies much about good or bad.
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
good fucking riddance.
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.
And use technology to create an amazing decentralized pirate torrenting site that can never be shut down!
And deliver certified safe downloads. Consistently high quality rips --- HD or 4K UHD --- that can compete with legit free or subscription services costing $10--$5/mo US.That don't take an eternity to download or require a major commitment of the pirate's own bandwidth and other resources. And. of course, no signicant legal exposure for its sponsors. Who must still find a way to pay the light bill;
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"
But maybe not OK to share files with 10,000 of your closest friends on the P2P nets. "File sharing" as the geek understands it has always been about unlicensed wholesale distribution --- and that is why juries have been willing to convict;
I feel a type of bbs will make a come back.
I've been right here on Slashdot in 2001 when the first mention of Bittorrent appeared. It was about a RedHat distro (version 7 if I recall correctly?) and everyone wanted to get it asap. The best speed was for the guys torrenting it, compared to ftp which was severely flooded at the moment. After that Bittorrent caught up all over the net and in 2002 we already had Suprnova (RIP).
Why aren't there any distributed indexes? Seems silly to have an entire distributed distribution system without a matching index.
Torrents were made so that you could put a 10kb torrent file instead of a 700 MB Linux ISO on your website, it was a way for a master source to "crowdfund" hosting. It didn't try to be a P2P solution like Napster or Kazaa. That's also why they never got sued, nothing about the tool itself made it dubious in the the eyes of the law. The biggest problem with an index is spam and DDoS. For it to work well I think you'd have to do something more like RSS with digital signatures and PGP's web of trust. Like say if you find a torrent made by a release group, you can subscribe to their "channel" where only they can post new torrents + info about other "channels" they trust/no longer trust.
Even then there's issues of propagation and when a client should start/stop searching for new posts. Then again magnet links are pretty small, might just say that every update is a full replacement with a timestamp and max limit like 1000 torrents * 20 (SHA-1) = ~20kb. So distributed host checks signature and timestamp, if newer replace RSS "feed". Client asks by signature hash and gets the latest version, can verify signature and start downloading the magnet links for more info on each entry. Web of trust can be done similarly, hash of trusted signature + trust value. It all sounds pretty doable...
Yeah, I think you just described USENET + RSS = Subscriber Distributed indexes
Wrong, unlike you I've not been brainwashed into believing that stealing the fruits of someone else's labor is something I'm entitled to do and not theft at all.
Thank you, you know your civics while the person above you is a moron.
That's not leftist. The left wants to protect average people from the rich and powerful who usually control things. Yes that usually amounts to expanded government (because who else has the ability to put checks on the already-powerful?) But expanding government in itself is not the goal. Most leftists would be perfectly happy with a smaller government if they could still get the protections they want.
The DMCA on the other hand protects the profits of a few large corporations (ie: the rich an powerful,) at the cost of smaller corporations and average people. That's exactly the opposite of the leftist ideals. And just like the left generally has no problem shrinking government when its plausible to do so without losing protections, the right wingers generally have no problem expanding government the occasional time it benefits them.
You also have to keep in mind that the Democratic party is only "left" in comparison to the Republicans. They're at best hovering around center if you consider the entire political spectrum. They may try to be more balanced about it but at the end of the day, the democrats are taking just as many bri^W campaign contributions from big corporations as the Republicans are.
Democrats are the party of the professional class and away not the working class. It's one reason why Trump was able to pick up working class voters - they'd been abandoned by a Democrat party looking for upper middle class voters with degrees. Have a look at the percentage of democrat politicians congresspeople and staffers with degrees. Look at the percentage of the average population with degrees. Not that the Repubs are working class, but they do a better job of pretending they are.
People with degrees are better than people without degrees, this is a fact.
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.
This,
It is authoritarian policies that give more power to the government and liberal (as in liberalism) polices that give more power to individuals.
Authoritarian and liberal policies can be anywhere on the left-right spectrum.
The DCMA and Copyright are definitely extreme right and extreme authoritarian as they're designed to empower corporations over everything else. The irony is that copyright was originally designed to empower individuals, it was still right leaning, but more liberal as it gave time limited monopolies to artists.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
fucking thieves, make your own damn content
To get around the spam/DDoS/DMCA takedown issue, would it be possible to somehow insert torrents into the bitcoin blockchain for distribution and preservation?