The World’s Oldest Active Torrent Turns 18 Soon

https://torrentfreak.com/the-worlds-oldest-active-torrent-turns-18-210912/

by uniqueid • 5 years ago

278 98 5 years ago

torrentfreak.com

nielsole• 5 years ago

easily saved hundreds of thousands of dollars in distribution costs

For reference, a server in Germany in 2003 had bandwidth prices between €.8 and €2 per gigabyte [0]

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20030810125406/http://www.hetzne...

matheusmoreira4• 5 years ago

Makes me wonder how much unnecessary load these streaming services are placing on global networks. Problems created by copyright. How much cheaper, easier and more efficient would things be if we were allowed to use torrents for media distribution?

mindslight3• 5 years ago

A CDN box at a datacenter or ISP is more efficient than uploading through the last mile, especially if that last mile is a half-duplex shared medium like cable. I'm pro-p2p, pro-home-servers, and pro-piracy, but I don't think it's necessarily more efficient in terms of network load.

cheschire• 5 years ago

Streaming services are, for the most part, optimized to only send you a portion of the file at a time, send you lower bandwidth versions when the throughput drops below a threshold, or in the case of COVID lockdowns everyone temporarily dropped the max resolution of their services because there was a sudden surge in home media streaming.

When it comes to video torrents, I suspect a lot of people would start at looking for 4k rips (even if their devices didn't support it), or fall back to standard bluray rips. That's a huge amount of bandwidth when most people probably are fine with DVD or upscaled DVD quality.

rhn_mk1• 5 years ago

An article about the oldest torrent and nary a magnet link in sight? Sure, there's the hash in the picture, but that's weak.

What's the second oldest torrent? That's probably a better measure of the network health, because it doesn't get attention from articles about the oldest active torrent.

belter• 5 years ago

http://www.legittorrents.info/download.php?id=72c83366e95dd4...

em-bee2• 5 years ago

What's the second oldest torrent?

according to the thread here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10962253 an article about the then believed to be oldest torrent, turned out to be a few months less old than this one, so we need to look for the third oldest now to get a good answer.

on piratebay i found a torrent from 2008 that still works.

uniqueid• 5 years ago

The first torrent I, and probably quite a few others, ever downloaded was some Linux distro that Bram Cohen shared with the internet as a demo of the protocol.

hedgehog• 5 years ago

The first torrent I downloaded was one of the demo videos he put on his home page in 2001 (I think there were two). Never seen a reference to them since.

p1mrx• 5 years ago

magnet:?xt=urn:btih:72C83366E95DD44CC85F26198ECC55F0F4576AD4

ivegotnoaccount• 5 years ago

BakaBT still has the three torrents uploaded in december 2003 that the article mentions, and they are still up and well. 25 more between Jan.1 and Apr.30 of 2004, all alive as well.

Though I don't know if it is a good indicator. Even though, at the time, BakaBT was semi-private and not private, lessening the incentives to seed as one could download without limit by logging out, it still has a system that rewards seeding torrents with no/few seders.

mindslight3• 5 years ago

Articles about torrents almost never contain a link to the torrent, even though magnet links are more authoritative than their own crappy https urls that can be arbitrarily changed. Journalists would rather mediate your access to source material than help you experience it directly. See also: Wikileaks.

smoldesu• 5 years ago

Today I learned, The Animatrix and The Fanimatrix are separate, distinct films.

vmoore• 5 years ago

A lot of people learned that today.

cesarb• 5 years ago

Relevant: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10962253

It's funny to be part of that history. As the article says, "for a file to live on, at least one person has to keep sharing it", and for a while, I was that person (see the comments on that HN post).

jghn3• 5 years ago

About 10-15 years ago I went to download a torrent. It never had many seeders and got stuck at 94.8%. It was there for a few years. One day one of the very few, if not the only, humans with the whole torrent must have connected as it was 100%. Serendipity.

And then about 5 years later I lost the files in a hard drive crash. Tried to grab the torrent again and all this time later it is sitting at, you guessed it, 94.8%.

arthurcolle2• 5 years ago

What's the torrent?

leokennis• 5 years ago

I once loooong ago tried downloading a rare music album but it was stuck at 99.8% with 0 seeders and 2 peers (including me) for months so I was pretty bummed.

But I neglected to actually check the download folder. When I did, I found out it actually downloaded all the important files, just the logo of the upload group was still a .part file…

So I quickly downloaded another more popular release by the same group, copied over the logo and lo and behold, now it got to 100%!

That day I actually felt like a hacker…

bserge• 5 years ago

Someone somewhere has the exact same problem and they're hoping a peer with the rest of the torrent will connect. That or a seed box :D

pessimizer2• 5 years ago

I've had that happen more than a couple of times at this point (often on Chinese or Japanese torrents), and I find it very strange. I always assume that some long replaced-but-not-thrown-away computer was turned on to find some old file, and it immediately and automatically resumed its mission to send bits of a 90s soap opera intercontinentally. Then after the owner finds what they need, the computer goes off and into the closet again, as I send those bits back to China, to the other 5 people who are silly enough to leave these things open for years.

SSLy2• 5 years ago

It's strange that your other peers didn't pick up the missing pieces.

dewlinedew2• 5 years ago

"With a limited budget of just $800, nearly half of which was spent on a leather jacket" -- plus we finally know how much clothes cost in the Matrix

dharmab• 5 years ago

"We couldn't afford a wind machine for this shot, so we bought a leaf blower from a hardware store. We kept the receipt, so we can return it after we're done."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G025oxyWv0E

j5r5myk2• 5 years ago

This is basically how all films are made now, even at the highest levels.

I have worked on $100 million+ budget projects with Netflix and Apple. The amount of buying items to return within 30 days is absurd

EliRivers• 5 years ago

This would explain why I've just seen it pulse towards the top of my seeded torrents today. I will be dragging this torrent around in my seeds until the day I die (or until some companies get together to eliminate torrents).

BuyMyBitcoins• 5 years ago

Regardless of what people think about copyright infringement, I see torrenting as an essential tool for the transmission and preservation of information.

In this day and age of convoluted terms of services (TOS/TOC), xyz as a service/subscription, and just plain DRM, no one really owns anything anymore. No one can be sure what version they do have is the original and immutable version. Edits and omissions happen because of licensing issues and just plan social activism. Problematic content should be acknowledged but not purged and erased.

It’s vital people have the means to share data regardless of what the powers that be allow to be shared.

/soapbox

IncRnd• 5 years ago

Problematic content should be acknowledged but not purged and erased.

By problematic content, do you mean stolen content? What do you suggest other than purging and erasing stolen content?

matheusmoreira4• 5 years ago

By problematic he means stupid things like GTA Vice City losing parts of its original soundtrack due to idiotic copyright licensing issues and people having their games replaced with this "updated" version.

Also, you can't steal data. Copying is not stealing.

banana_giraffe• 5 years ago

Mildly interesting to see the recent peer counts for this torrent:

https://imgur.com/a/ur0dUb8

Something like 10,000 peers have been keeping it alive for the past two years. Of course this mention is enough to drastically increase it's popularity.

MomoXenosaga2• 5 years ago

I'm a member of a private torrent site that has been around for 15 years whose very mission is preservation. Everything is well seeded even the obscure stuff.

But it's impressive for a public tracker.

voltaireodactyl• 5 years ago

That sounds like a valuable and amazing resource, and something to which I’d enjoy contributing! Are they open to new members by any chance?

pessimizer2• 5 years ago

They are, but it's a little difficult (hence the longevity.) Now that you know it exists, a little determination will get you there, and it'd love to have you.

Yes, it's good enough that this discussion can only possibly refer to one place.

0des• 5 years ago

Is there a word for this interaction, where an act is taking place with the knowledge that the action is characterized as 'wrong' but done anyway to achieve an outcome that is ultimately benevolent and a benefit to posterity?

edoceo2• 5 years ago

Chaotic-Good

ultra_nick• 5 years ago

Civil disobedience

wincy• 5 years ago

I was pretty disappointed when a games archive torrent site I frequented went down. It had every PS1 game in a nicely organized bundle, and PS2 games. Hundreds of terabytes of archived organized torrents, all gone now.

SSLy2• 5 years ago

that site lives with new staff under new name

washadjeffmad2• 5 years ago

Same, and the outage yesterday gave me the willies. I've accumulated a vast upload in that time, and I'm only waiting to move somewhere without ISPs with packet limits to flesh out the disk shelves and get the better part of it archived.

ryanmm• 5 years ago

I remember using BitTorrent for the first time in the first half of 2003. I'm a bit surprised that absolutely none of those are still around.

washadjeffmad2• 5 years ago

The commercial web devoured the concept of the internet as a place where information was freely shared between any and all minds. I exported my bookmarks frequently all the way back to the 90s, and practically none of the dozens and dozens of communities that I was a part of as late as the 00s are still around.

I remember the year when the ad people started bullying the fan sites off the web because they were "stealing from creators"... by driving clicks away from traffic whoring aggregators that were worse, less curated, depersonalized, less focused in every way than what they cannibalized.

The modern web feels so empty and full of darkness in comparison. Nothing in it seems like it matters unless it enriches someone else's mission of accumulating wealth, and everything else is villainized that doesn't signal loudly for the sake of the dragons how much it costs to keep the lights on.

And I just realized the irony of saying this on HN.

hellbannedguy• 5 years ago

It's too bad what governments, big corporations, did to a great technology.

I don't even go close to a torrent site anymore.

It's just not worth being accused of something.

And to the Copyright Net Nannies--what's the outcome?

Musicians are paid less than before the crackdown.

Books are selling at an all time low.

nerdponx2• 5 years ago

It was never for the benefit of the musicians or the authors, it was for the benefit of the record labels/distributors and book publishers.

__MatrixMan__• 5 years ago

I think it was originally for the benefit of the church, who didn't want people remixing the bible. They just had to add sweetener for the publishers so that they'd cooperate in censorship that would otherwise be to their disadvantage.

NaturalPhallacy• 5 years ago

governments, big corporations,

Behind all of those is lawyers. Contemporary copyright exists exclusively for the benefit of lawyers and people who can afford lawyers.

firecall2• 5 years ago

Fortunately in Australia you can’t claim insane damages from copy right infringement!

The gov DNS block sites, but that’s it really.

kimsant• 5 years ago

In Germany, using torrent means 700€ fine (ISP reports). The goal of this might be that they... - Want to punish people that can't do tunneling - Want to prevent content distribution - found a way to get money from foreigners that don't know (This happened to a friend of min, 1 month after he got installed in Hamburg)

I hope is the 3rd

firecall2• 5 years ago

So just using bit torrent gets you a fine!?

Even for legitimate purposes?

iggldiggl• 5 years ago

I think the OP is overdramatising a little. Torrenting content that you're allowed to redistribute is of course perfectly fine – what is happening is the usual procedure of rightsholders attempting to log IPs that are illegally uploading copyrighted content, obtaining the contact data of the person behind the IP from the ISP and then sending out a cease-and-desist order.

rasz3• 5 years ago

Are you sure it isnt the case of a Prenda Law copycat? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prenda_Law We had one in Poland few years back after UPC customer data leak (name/IP). They filed court pre trial papers and started extorting people, finally vanished after one of the prosecutors got interested.

petamask• 5 years ago

My partner and I were talking about Paprika. And how the file we downloaded didn't work halfway through. Realising we must have downloaded the same torrent long time ago. It was slightly romantic. Don't think I've ever really considered seeders and peers (prob peoplewith similar tasteas yours).

karmakaze• 5 years ago

What immediately came to mind wasn't this but an Aussie matrix spoof Computer Boy. Congrats go out to the Fanimatrix crew and BitTorrent for holding up as well as it has. There seems to be less BT piracy from what I can see/guess but what exists I wish was less of ripping off blockbusters and more of preserving abandoned gems.

skeletonjelly• 5 years ago

Wow! This short film is genuinely one of my favourites (and is generally under appreciated). The lead actor went on to be a very successful stage performer and I think he shied away from this film a bit. I remember pestering the director (who played Agent Smith) about 10 years ago to release a 1080p version. So happy to see someone else talking about it.

Oh and I can't write a comment about it and not acknowledge the tragic passing of Michael Falzon. What a loss

mensetmanusman• 5 years ago

What if the BTC network was also a torrent back end.

rasz3• 5 years ago

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-47130268#:~:text=Images%....

jbj• 5 years ago

The Fanimatrix https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fanimatrix

The World’s Oldest Active Torrent Turns 18 Soon

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