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?
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?
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 :)
Because the link doesn't point to an actual resource anywhere, it's just a hash of the file in question.
That doesn't mean the MPAA won't try, they've argued that file hashs are equivalent to the file before, and they may win in the US, however, I'm not sure that arguement would hold up in the EU due to the possibility of hash collisions, and the fact that you can't make the file from the hash.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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?
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...
Hit the nail on the head. For a lot of people USENET is out of their depth. The media companies know about USENET, they have to, but it's not the current popular form of distribution.
Even if bittorrent were to disappear, it seems more likely that sites like Rapidshare would be the next 'mainstream' distribution method.
Besides that, when it comes to bittorrent the end-users have to do some uploading while on the torrent, so the media companies can nail them for distribution. If someone is just downloading content, it's harder to punish them -- from a legal standpoint -- then if you can get them for distributing content.
It hardly matters. If you have to serve a search warrant on a colo facility in Russia in order to get the evidence to take someone to trial then it's irrelevant whether the site operator lives in the US.
As for Giganews, I believe they are protected by safe harbor provisions. For usenet you'd have to go after all of the individual posters, which is something the RIAA/MPAA/BSA doesn't seem to have any interest in currently.
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.
I did not say all torrent traffic was illegal, but if you're legally distributing content through BitTorrent, you have no reason not to use a tracker. This means that the majority of trackerless torrent traffic will be illegal.
Uh, what? Decentralization greatly increases the reliability of the system. All of the Internet's successful systems are decentralized; the web, email, routing, DNS, etc. While decentralization does protect against lawsuits, it also protects against power outages, network outages, "I don't feel like paying for this domain name anymore", and so on.
I will conclude with a thought experiment: Do you know how to host a small file over HTTP? Do you know how to setup and maintain a Bittorrent tracker?
If you answered yes to the first question but no to the second question, decentralized tracking is for you.
> All of the Internet's successful systems are decentralized
HTTP hosting is decentralized and not decentralized. If I run an Apache server hosting my website, it's centralized. Everyone that wants to access my website has to go through my server. They don't have to go through my server to access the whole internet net though. The internet -- for the most part -- is globally decentralized, but locally centralized.
It's the same with Bittorrent and trackers. If a tracker goes down, someone else can start up a new tracker that is serving the same torrent. It's not centralized the way something like Scour.net or Napster were (all peer-finding goes through the same servers).
> Decentralization greatly increases the reliability of the system.
Not necessarily. If you have two groups of 20 peers that are only connected to each other by a single peer, what happens when that one peer goes down? It's now impossible for those two groups to find each other. And consider that it's a lot more likely for a single peer in a torrent swarm to go down (someone's computer crashes, close the torrent, residential internet goes down) than it is for a centrally hosted tracker that is probably on a dedicated server in a colo somewhere.
PEX from Wikipedia:
While it may improve (local) performance and robustness—e.g. if a tracker is
slow or even down—heavy reliance on PEX can lead to the formation of groups of
peers who tend to only share information with each other, which may yield slow
propagation of data through the network, due to few peers sending information
to those outside the group they are in.
> I did not say all torrent traffic was illegal, but if you're legally distributing content through BitTorrent, you have no reason not to use a tracker.
Of course you have a reason you don't want to run a tracker.
Running services is overhead and keeping them up constantly is a pain. (One of the announcements pointed out that torrents from one site and the corresponding content remained available for months after that site went down because of the use of DHT.)
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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'.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The difference between $0.00 and $0.99 isn't simply 99 cents. It's the difference between no money (free) and some money, which is probably the single largest price discrepancy there is.
Exactly. People always try to make this a price elasticity issue, but it really isn't. It's about having a transaction or none at all, there is no 'slope' to the problem.
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.
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.
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.
That can only work for so long since those services are centralized. If a large amount of copyrighted material is distributed illegally through those services, they will be targeted very quickly by the content industry and either be shut down, or forced to screen all material.
Anecdotally and from personal observation, piracy through these channels seem to be huge. There have been some new records released recently, and when I was searching for reviews of them, some of the top Google results were actually links to rapidshare and its ilk.
The only reason RS and MU are still around is because they aren't (and never were) the 'real' problem. If the casual pirates move there (as a result of TPB) you're right, it's an easy kill for the industry.
dkersten, rapidshare/megaupload have been around, and been used for years by pirates and for pron. Any uptick recently in usage is temporary, the real top-tier pirates stopped using BT and TPB years ago, and are already two or 3 moves ahead (think private, secure networks for top end distribution).
Actually, I'd argue that the real top-tier pirates never used bittorrent in the first place but always used private networks. There was a guy I went to uni with who was into that stuff and he sometimes mentioned getting zero day releases minutes after they were made available. I doubt think he ever cared for BT.
