End of an Era: Pirate Bay Tracker Shuts Down

http://mashable.com/2009/11/17/pirate-bay-tracker-shuts-down/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Mashable+%28Mashable%29

by Chirag • 17 years ago

72 63 17 years ago

mashable.com

socram2k• 17 years ago

long live TPB!

henning• 17 years ago

niyazpk• 17 years ago

I guess that the RIAAs of the world will be suing bittorrent users now that there isn't anyone else to sue.

genieyclo3• 17 years ago

Misleading title. TPB is not dead; it just isn't a tracker anymore.

henrikschroder4• 17 years ago

Well, it is an end of an era, the illegal P2P distribution of copyrighted material is now completely decentralized, which means that the content industry has no easy target they can try to shut down to disrupt the distribution.

genieyclo3• 17 years ago

Yet from the title it looks like TPB as an entity is dead. Definitely misleading. Of course, sensational headlines get higher page hits for Mashable.

And all p2p transfer of torrents is not illegal copyrighted material.

Raphael_Amiard• 17 years ago

Ummmm . the title says TPB tracker is down, so it's actually very accurate

sp3322• 17 years ago

TPB != TPB tracker. They still serve torrent and magnet files, you can still post comments, etc.

Xichekolas• 17 years ago

The misleading part was the 'End of an era' phrase. You are right that it was accurate in saying the tracker is gone (not the site), but by throwing on a needlessly epic phrase about the 'end of an era' makes it sound like the whole TPB is dead, especially to those that don't realize the difference, which I'd wager is most.

It's needless linkbaiting... creating a headline out of an event that really isn't one.

rscott• 17 years ago

Forgive me, I read the article I just know little about BitTorrent. So people can still add torrents and they will work for others, it just uses a decentralized solution to find peers rather than asking TPB's tracker? So, nothing is really changing except the way your client is working?

NikkiA2• 17 years ago

Pretty much, yeah, TPB will presumably only be publishing DHT/MAGNET links from their index, which are able to automatically find peers/seeds in a decentralised manner.

... upon looking, they still seem to publish .torrents for now, but the huge magnet icon on their home page pretty much tells it all :)

oikujhgfvg• 17 years ago

So why won't hosting the link be aiding and abetting copyright violation?

GrandMasterBirt2• 17 years ago

Yes and no.

Currently sites like torrentz.com give multiple trackers for torrents so that you can get the best set of peers/seeds for a torrent. These sites are going to become moot.

Also the legal issues associated with running TPB is going to literally go away for all future business. TPB can't be held responsible for holding an MD5 hash of a file, since they don't host trackers anymore they won't be responsible for even facilitating anything. Basically the record industries have to go after the customers yet again.

The only thing left is an IP masker mechanism which is super easy to use in torrents and torrents will become completely untraceable :P ok fine someone will find a way.

eli2• 17 years ago

Really? How is hosting an MD5 hash (but not the file) for the purpose of enabling file sharing any different from hosting a tracker (but not the file) for the purpose of enabling file sharing?

qeorge• 17 years ago

Yes, that's right. Your tracker has already been using the DHT to find peers for quite some time. Here's a brief explanation of trackers and DHT, hope its helpful:

A tracker serves 2 purposes:

1) Hosting the .torrent file (which is basically just a list of checksums for each piece)

2) Initial matchmaking of peers, and keeping track of "who has what"

#1 isn't a huge problem, as the .torrent files are tiny and pretty simple to find. #2 is where most of the value of the tracker comes in, because it lets each peer in a swarm find out about the others, so they can connect directly. However, once peers have found each other they'll connect and communicate directly.

In the traditional torrent model, with a tracker, your client pings the tracker every 20 minutes or so for a list of new peers who have joined the swarm. From that list, you'll attempt to connect directly to new peers.

A DHT (distributed hash table) is a nice hack that is meant to take load off the central tracker. In essence, instead of always asking the tracker for a list of new peers or who has a specific piece, you can ask the peers you are already connected to. Its kind of like an office, where you ask questions of your coworkers before bothering your boss.

This is why you can download torrents even when the tracker is unreachable, or in this case, taken offline completely. This is also why you can download torrents from demonoid without a demonoid account - the account just gives you access to the demonoid tracker, which you don't necessarily need.

I'm a little hazy on how a swarm would start without a tracker, as it seems like a decently sized swarm is needed to get the ball rolling, so to speak. Perhaps someone else can jump in?

pyre5• 17 years ago

> the account just gives you access to the demonoid tracker, which you don't necessarily need.

This is also why private trackers don't like DHT and discourage its use.

dkersten3• 17 years ago

Meh, who cares. I'm surprised it (the tracker) lasted as long as it did really. Anyway, the majority of pirates I know appear to have moved or be moving on to the likes of megaupload and rapidshare and such anyway, it seems.

I don't really care for TPB, I don't think it provided anything useful for me. Bittorrent is a useful tool for sharing things like isos, but I don't need TPB for that.

genieyclo3• 17 years ago

Got numbers?

dkersten3• 17 years ago

Of course not, but I haven't heard much buzz about torrenting things in quite a while. A few years back, there was always people going on about it. Now the latest fad seems to be megaupload and rapidshare style sites.

selven• 17 years ago

Pirates aren't going anywhere. One site shuts down, 5 more pop up. It's an impossible game of whack-a-mole. This isn't a statement in favor of or against copyright infringement, it's a simple fact.

GrandMasterBirt2• 17 years ago

As one other post said, TPB is not shutting down, but marking the end of an era where trackers were needed. Trackerless torrents are going to become vastly popular very very soon.

This is great. Basically the authorities are fighting a superior technology with nothing but the greatest of benefits: everyone contributes when downloading, so the load is not 100% on the server to serve the content. And the authorities are not giving good alternatives. ISPs are not working together with bt developers to make a protocol friendly for everyone, instead they are fighting to keep the protocol down.

O well I like the part about the servers being given to a museum.

henrikschroder4• 17 years ago

Funnily enough, the mechanisms behind pirate markets are very well understood, they appear when there is a large discrepancy between how consumers value a goods in a market, and the price of the goods in that market.

chaosmachine2• 17 years ago

Is 99 cents a large discrepancy? iPhone apps sell for less than a dollar, and still get pirated in large numbers.

fiaz2• 17 years ago

When will the RIAA and MPAA realize that trying to suppress technology is like trying to kick your way out of quicksand? This is indeed a win for them in the short term, but the way I see it, technology is evolving in response to whatever legal challenges are presented.

amackera• 17 years ago

Yeah and it's not really a win for them since the technology has advanced to the point where decentralisation is possible.

nadam• 17 years ago

For me it is more complicated than that. Whether humanity accepts 'Copyright laws' is more an ethical issue for me than technical. A more trivial (and a bit demagog) example: if technology enables the creation of very cheap and very effective weapons, people still should not shoot each other, and there should be some regulations which in a way 'suppress technology'.

The real question is that will humanity morally accept or reject the concept we call 'copyright'.

fiaz2• 17 years ago

Good response...I was thinking more at the level of legal law versus technological capability, kind of like an input/output or action/reaction mechanism.

When it comes to the ethics of copyright law, it boils down to economics. The consumer will always seek to purchase at the lowest price possible, and the corporation will always seek to sell at the highest price possible. Each side is driven by the ethics of what they determine to be "fair" and getting each other to agree on this will be impossible.

Netflix really "gets" the consumer argument for movies. I absolutely think the $10/month fee that I pay (probably a bit less than that) is a bargain and would gladly pay twice as much, but in all likelihood this price is going to go down over time. If the RIAA/MPAA were to take that example and provide us with such a service, then it would make economics-driven ethical sense.

cookiecaper• 17 years ago

I don't think that filesharing is necessarily a wholesale rejection of copyright as a concept. It's just a rejection of certain restrictions imposed by copyright, not the concept altogether.

In my experience, people generally believe that private consumption of copyrighted material should be unrestricted. That is, the part of copyright that gives the copyright holder an exclusive license to control distribution is overreaching, and should only apply to major commercial operations.

ivenkys2• 17 years ago

Ah well , TPB tracker has been irrelevant for a while anyway, this just makes it formal.

What would really be news is - completely anonymous torrenting.

eru2• 17 years ago

Doesn't putting tor underneath suffice?

ivenkys2• 17 years ago

Tor has well known issues with the Bit Torrent protocol, tangentially there was a well known exploit where someone running a Tor exit node ended up capturing all to and fro traffic.

aw3c2• 17 years ago

No, don't do that. If you want well-working and most appreciated filesharing on an anonymous network, please join us I2P fans: http://www.i2p2.de

stse• 17 years ago

Anonymous networks doesn't really help if you are liable for traffic passing through you, like with recent actions against ISPs. I think the future is trust-based networks like friend-to-friend. When broadband speed averages increases, it will become feasible to relay traffic through trusted peers.

viraptor2• 17 years ago

Not entirely on-topic, but I was looking through the newsgroup warez search-engines yesterday with friends and we were wondering - why doesn't anyone sue those sites?

It's a much easier target than TPB - they receive money directly from users and host the files themselves. They officially run a business based on illegal sharing. Yet I haven't heard of them having any large legal problems. Sites that get sued are usually torrent trackers can always argue they don't earn money on this and don't know the contents themselves. Why are they going after the hard to get targets, while the obvious main distribution sites are still running?

InclinedPlane2• 17 years ago

Geography. Hosting a paid warez site from, say, Russia or China is much safer (from prosecution) than hosting a torrent tracker from Sweden.

viraptor2• 17 years ago

Do you really believe that there are no US/CA entities simply buying the hosting package in another country to provide this service? I don't have a proof that it's not true, but it just seems really unlikely.

Also - querying (for example) Giganews location I get "Data Foundry, Inc., Austin, TX, US". This really shouldn't be a problem for US lawyers...

c00p3r• 17 years ago

which means more profit to remaining pirates...

keatsta• 17 years ago

It seems that the general shift in the torrenting community has been towards private trackers anyways. The average pirate seems more interested now in finding good quality releases and obscure content. Also, private sites are usually safer to use on the legal side of it. Of course, I may just be projecting my own opinions onto a community in which I may be atypical.

pyre5• 17 years ago

> private sites are usually safer to use on the legal side of it.

Why's that? It's not like it's impossible for a PI to infiltrate one of these private trackers. Once the tracker is sued/confiscated, they usually have all kinds of information about you.

I joined what.cd just to see what these private trackers were like and they asked my a ton of questions. From 'where do you live' and 'what type of 'net connection do you have' to 'do you know the difference between encoding X and encoding Y' and 'look at these spectral analysis of a music file, which one was converted from mp3->flac instead of source->flac'.

Of course, I don't know how much of that they actually keep on file vs. just running you through the 'gauntlet' to filter out flakey people.

End of an Era: Pirate Bay Tracker Shuts Down

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