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

Someone could start a new one.

[SeaFox]

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.

Re:Someone could start a new one.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd say it could become even better

Re:Someone could start a new one.

[Rhapsody Scarlet]

I'd add that a quick look at the fansubs sites I follow shows a fair bit of fragmentation at the moment. AniDex and minglong seem the most popular choices right now, with (new) Nyaa a distant third and Nyaa Pantsu nobody's first choice so far. Anything could change, but that's what I'm seeing so far.

Re:Someone could start a new one.

[nojayuk]

Nyaa was/is a favourite site for foreign-language (JP and CN mainly) drama, anime and manga torrents. I don't think it or its replacement carries a lot of Western stuff.

What will I do now?

[mi]

How am I going to download all that open-source software, that I used to download with BitTorrent?

Re:What will I do now?

[Jamu]

How am I going to download all those illicit copyrighted jokes!

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:We pirates must unite

[WrongMonkey]

Does WireShare meet your "amazing decentralized pirate torrenting site" criteria?

https://sourceforge.net/projec...

Re:We pirates must unite

[jediborg]

If you put the word 'illegally' then yeah, i think most would say no. The problem is, i don't think it is EVER a crime to share ANY information. The only crime one can do with information is to bypass someones firewalls and security measures to gain access to information stored on a hard drive that does not belong to you. That to me is 'digital trespassing' but i don't think sharing information over the internet should ever be a crime, in any form whatsoever

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

[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.

Re:Distributed index

[Kjella]

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...

Re:Distributed index

[Areyoukiddingme]

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.

No authority is needed, because there isn't one already. In the centralized index situation, no human validates torrents uploaded to the centralized indices. Instead, the users do. If you go search for any blockbuster movie you care to name on Pirate Bay, you'll get 50 pages worth of hits. The first 10 to 15 hits might be useful, with various bitrate encodings and various subtitles and audio tracks in them, and then it very very quickly tails off into utter trash. It doesn't seem to hurt Pirate Bay. Nobody ever selects the torrents with zero seeds unless they're looking for something so niche that there's no other option, and no one seeds bogus torrents. Even their pathetic originators give up extremely quickly.

And/Or other simple restrictions like limiting the number of torrents any node can add to the index.

In a decentralized index, that limit is only in the local node, where it is easily removed. Not worth bothering to write the code in the first place.

And/Or a voting system that allows all nodes to vote on others to help the client applications with prioritizing/filtering the index.

The seed count effectively serves as a voting system today. It's by far the most useful metric. About the only other useful metric is a user-defined list of strings. Quality video encodings tend to have some release group tag in the torrent name. Easy enough to push priority up a bit if the user's preferred string is present.

What's missing is implementing support for search within Mainline DHT. Kademlia DHT on which it is based has a scheme already designed:

Filename searches are implemented using keywords. The filename is divided into its constituent words. Each of these keywords is hashed and stored in the network, together with the corresponding filename and file hash. A search involves choosing one of the keywords, contacting the node with an ID closest to that keyword hash, and retrieving the list of filenames that contain the keyword. Since every filename in the list has its hash attached, the chosen file can then be obtained in the normal way.

Mainline DHT has omitted that functionality. If it were implemented, index sites would no longer be required.

Obviously Mainline DHT traffic would increase substantially, but it would still be quite small compared to torrent traffic. Also, if it were implemented exactly as described, clients would be responsible for filtering results coming in from the DHT. Most users want the logical AND of their search terms, but Kademlia specifies a logical OR. Performing that processing is simple enough though, and of course the client could present results much like web search engines do, with results that contain as many of the keywords as possible presented first, followed by results with fewer and fewer matches. You don't get the fuzzy matching most of the web search engines employ doing that, but as it happens, you also don't get fuzzy matching from Pirate Bay search anymore, so that's no loss. Client authors then have the option of preemptively fetching .torrent files in order to get tracker lists to be able to rank the results by how active they are, or of waiting to let users do some manual culling first. That whole process is substantially slower than a centralized index site. Mainline DHT is anything but fast, most of the time. It is, however, bulletproof. As long as the DHT exists, files could be found.

BEP 0005 specifies KRPC methods of ping, find_node, get_peers, and announce_peer. What's needed is a new BEP to extend the protocol, adding search_peers.

Volunteer Shutdowns Everywere

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Another victim of terrible leftist laws

[Plus1Entropy]

The DMCA is a terrible leftist law passed in 1996 by a voice vote in the Republican controlled House and unanimous consent in the Republican controlled Senate.

naive question: what's wrong with piratebay

[interkin3tic]

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.

Re:naive question: what's wrong with piratebay

[blahplusplus]

"Is there a reason one would use a site like extratorrent rather than piratebay?

Stuff on the pirate bay is only high quality if its popular, if you're more into stuff thats niche or you want high qualtiy stuff you need to go to other sites. Take Dragon ball Z a popular anime, you can get better rips from private trackers or specialty trackers who's fans are dedicated to uploading high quality rips. On TPB you will find everything but the quality will vary accordingly, much stuff on the pirate bay is only 'good enough' if you want average to bad video encoding quality and hence private trackers.

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.

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.

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.