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World’s Oldest Torrent Is Still Being Shared After 4,419 Days
- petra 11y agoActually torrents are pretty bad for storing "rare" files. Maybe someone should offer a fix.
- rakoo 11y agoThe problem is not really torrents. The problem is that seeds are ephemeral. But an equally ephemeral source for any protocol will always make the availability of the resource low. The solution is not to change the protocol; the solution is to have less ephemeral sources.
- blockchainer 11y agoCould this be a problem that a blockchain could help solve?
- TeamMCS 11y agoIt would be interesting to see how a Usenet/Torrent adapter may work to at least supplement loss
- cpeterso 11y agoThe Internet Archive might be a good host for rare (and not copyright infringing) torrents.
- rakoo 11y agoIt actually is, because it already provide torrent access to its content. See, for example, the Matrix ASCII (only the sample though): https://archive.org/details/TheMatrix-InAscii https://archive.org/details/TheMatrix-InAscii (1 more point for how terrific the Internet Archive is) EDIT: it turns out the complete Matrix ASCII is hosted on the IA, making its availability a non-problem for years to come, even though it's not the original torrent anymore
- jimrandomh 11y agoI think this is mostly a consequence of how the clients work. When I download something with BitTorrent, it goes into a Downloads folder. Then I want to move and rename the files to fit into an organized collection, but then the client won't be able to find it anymore. If my client were able to track files across moves and renames, I'd be much more willing to seed things permanently. (It would also need to have good upstream-bandwidth management, use a number of TCP connections that's less than O(n) in the number of torrents, and offer a few bulk operations like "stop seeding torrents with more than N seeds" and "resume seeding torrents with fewer than N seeds".)
- LukeShu 11y agoI've "solved" this by having torrents go to a "Torrents" folder, then symlinking those files into my organized collection.
- doomrobo 11y agoI do the same thing but into multiple folders with a unionfs in read-only mode so I don't accidentally modify the files and cause them to be re-downloaded
- icebraining 11y agoI hardlink them instead. Then I can prune them from the torrents folder without affecting the organized file.
- LukeShu 11y agoEven if I stop seeding, I like to keep them in the torrents folder because it gives me essentially free integrity checking.
- harryh 11y agoYou can deal with the renaming issue with a bunch of symlinks. It's pretty easy to script that up.
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- liotier 11y agoIn the good old days of using (Napster|Audiogalaxy|Gnutella) I could point the file-sharing application to my collection and presto - it was all shared and available to whoever was interested. Nowadays, I just share whatever torrent I have participated in lately, plus a few that seem popular but rare (those most uploaded from my client) - but I have a whole lot of rather rare music that I fail to share for lack of a way to do it. Is there a contemporary way to share a whole collection or is that really missing from the toolset ? Well - maybe I'll finally get around to setting up a heeadless gtk-gnutella node again.
- j3097736 11y agoeMule and derivated have the .emulecollection format, which is just a binary file grouping together multiple ed2k links to files. As for the network eMule/KAD seems do be doing ok with 200K+ peers while Gnutella nowadays seems to be populated mostly by slightly-compatible chinese clients, which bootstrap from traditional gnutella but are incompatible.
- SSLy 11y agoSoulseek is still up and kicking.
- liotier 11y agoI thought about it and found it a bit too social and too insular - having "rooms" as a central feature feels odd to me who would rather use a global search of the whole file-sharing network. Also, having to run a desktop client was putting me off. But then I just found http://www.museek-plus.org http://www.museek-plus.org so I might try that... But it is disappearing from Debian: https://packages.qa.debian.org/m/museek+.html https://packages.qa.debian.org/m/museek+.html - not a good sign...
- SSLy 11y agoBut there is a global search of the whole network, chat rooms are separate thing. Well, it does not match wcd at all anyway.
- Zikes 11y agoThis reminds me of that ASCII Star Wars telnet thing. How long has that been around for?
- iDemonix 11y agoI believe you're referring to http://www.blinkenlights.nl/services.html http://www.blinkenlights.nl/services.html (or 'telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl', as it's more popularly known). On the authors bio page it says he started creating it in 1997.
- TazeTSchnitzel 11y agoOh this is masterful trolling. If you connect over IPv4: The IPv6 version has extra scenes and extra color support. So if you want to experience ascii starwars to it's fullest you really should get IPv6. www.sixxs.net or another IPv6 tunnel broker may help getting IPv6 to your computer. Good Luck, Snore ( Has no life for Hardware ) But if you actually connect over IPv6: Well, the IPv6 version is exactly the same as the IPv4 one. The difference is in the visitors... Je bent een Stoere Bikkel, aka You Rock.
- starshadowx2 11y agoThe telnet version seems to be from 2001, but the ASCII work has been since 1999 at least.
- grecy 11y agoI'd be interested to learn about the software that created the ASCII version of the movie. Is there a simple way to do this, or would they have made something custom?
- projct 11y agoffmpeg can output ascii videos
- iDemonix 11y agoWhilst this statement is true, the torrent predates the earliest versions of ffmpeg, so it wouldn't have been what was used (which was what the OP was asking).
- icebraining 11y agoWhilst this statement is true, the torrent predates the earliest versions of ffmpeg How so? The torrent is 12 years old, while ffmpeg was first released 15 years ago.
- asveikau 11y agoI remember using this program in 2001: http://linux.die.net/man/1/ttv http://linux.die.net/man/1/ttv aalib + video4linux = TV tuner outputting as ASCII. [Shockingly I actually used this for a useful purpose - I had a messed up graphics card that couldn't run X stably due to machine lockups, but Linux console worked fine - so I used this to watch TV. I was a teenager at the time so it was a while before I replaced it.]
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- mmsmatt 11y agoaalib + mplayer would be my guess.
- ryan-c 11y ago
- jedberg 11y agoSlightly off topic, but I find the fascination with ASCII-arting things interesting. I grew up in the days of 2400 baud modems and even ran a BBS briefly. At the time, ASCII art was the only thing you could do to differentiate yourself. Nowadays I suppose it's a combination of nostalgia and ease of transferring since pretty much every system ever has a way of reading ASCII. But I wonder how long the trend will last -- the majority of internet users don't have "nostalgia" for ASCII anymore [0] and there are at least a few image and video formats that are becoming almost as ubiquitous as ASCII readers. [0] I was recently on a discussion with some folks I used to work with at university about how our old workplace was no longer offering shell accounts to the students because they weren't being used. This made us all sad since most of us learned all of our command line foo at that workplace.
- _asummers 11y agoNot EXACTLY the same thing, but there's a really neat Jason Scott talk from Defcon 18 that goes into some of the history of crack screens from early software. [0] [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a5AceLYWE1Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a5AceLYWE1Q
- jimmytucson 11y agoI think some of this stuff will retain its coolness with future generations even though they didn't experience it first hand. Kind of like the way I distributed copies of the Hacker Manifesto when I was in high school even though I was an infant when Mentor wrote it.
- bitL 11y agoIt's a form of art. Imagine Matrix done by arranging small pictures of flowers, by constructing scenes using parabolic approximating curves or fractals. Just an interesting form of art giving you another perspective. And for many text-oriented people ASCII art is like opening up a new visual perspective they were lacking.
- bryik 11y agoI think ASCII art is still somewhat popular on 2ch. http://aa.en.utf8art.com/new http://aa.en.utf8art.com/new
- airza 11y agoif by "Warner Bros. is not known to go after this type of fan-art" you mean "Warner Bros went after someone extremely aggressively for this type of fan-art" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wizard_People,_Dear_Reader#Presentation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wizard_People,_Dear_Reader#Pre....
- anonbanker 11y agoI just sat through a torrent of this movie, thanks to this post. Dear lord, that was painfully long, but I belly-laughed at least five times during the film unexpectedly.
- airza 11y agoYeah, when I watch it, I usually stop around the time of the quiddich game. It's easy to forget how long that movie is, but it's REALLY funny.
- soylentcola 11y agoAh, crap, I just posted this as a reply farther up before seeing your post. Wizard People is indeed hilarious. Oddly, one friend who is a huge Potter fan tried to watch it and said he hated it whereas in my opinion, a good portion of the humor comes from familiarity with the "real" story. Actually I may watch this again tonight as it's been a while. When I wanted to get this friend to check it out, I made a DVD of the movie with the Wizard People audio synced up and the original audio track turned low enough that you can hear the music but the spoken lines don't interfere with the alternate audio. I guess if I was more ambitious I could've gone through and tweaked levels during dialogue and added a filter in those parts to cut out more of the speech frequencies while leaving the music and other ambient sound. Seemed like it would take a lot of time though.
- deckar01 11y agoI really like the idea of torrents being used to distribute anonymous derivative works of copyrighted media. I recently created a fan edit of "Star Wars: Episode II - The Phantom Menace" for my dad for Christmas. I removed Jar Jar Binks and the entire Gungan subplot. I tried to keep the edits as subtle as possible, and I learned a lot about the editing techniques and transitions used in the film. I wanted to release it, but I decided that the risk outweighed my confidence in my anonymity skills.
- dudurocha 11y agoYou can send to him "The Phatom Edit" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Phantom_Edit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Phantom_Edit. It is already widespread all over the internet (even in youtube) and has the same objetive of your edition (Jar Jar binks is gone as well).
- deckar01 11y agoHow did I not know that existed? I named mine "The Gungan Minus". We watched it together on Christmas Eve.
- david-given 11y agoThere's a bunch of Phantom Edits; the name's been reused several times. The one I watched was this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y9LEhOZZbuk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y9LEhOZZbuk All three prequel movies edited down into a single 2-hour film. And you know what? It's actually... still not what you'd call good. But it's embarrassingly better than the originals. But there are others, like the Phantom Re-edit, which tries to improve on characters like Jar-Jar and the Trade Federation by scrambling their speech into traditional Star Wars Alien, and subtitling them. With different dialogue. It's supposed to be pretty good, but I've never tracked down a copy. I do wonder if the lasting legacy of the terrible prequels will turn out to be teaching an entire generation about film editing!
- sawwit 11y ago
- eximius 11y agoFor those of us who feel uncomfortable going to torrentfreak on a work computer, what is the torrent?
- urda 11y ago> A fan-created ASCII version of the 1999 sci-fi classic The Matrix is the oldest known torrent that's still active. Created more than 12 years ago, the file has outlived many blockbuster movies and is still downloaded a few times a week, even though the site from where it originated has disappeared.
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- LulzSect 11y agoWhoa.
- cesarb 11y agoSpeaking of fan-made and Matrix, a long time ago there was a fan-made film in the Matrix universe called The Fanimatrix (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fanimatrix https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fanimatrix). Around a decade ago, I downloaded it through BitTorrent. Then a few years ago, I found it in my old files, still next to its original torrent file. Ever since then, I seed it on and off, in the vain hope that anyone knows it exists, has its torrent file (or magnet link), and wants to get a copy of the full file. If somehow this torrent becomes live again, it's even older than the Matrix ASCII mentioned in this article, by a few months. Name: The-Fanimatrix-(DivX-5.1-HQ).avi Hash: 72c83366e95dd44cc85f26198ecc55f0f4576ad4 Created by: Created on: Sat Sep 27 23:08:42 2003 Piece Count: 516 Piece Size: 256.0 KiB Total Size: 135.0 MB Privacy: Public torrent
- lelandbatey 11y agoWhat trackers are you using for this file? I'd mirror that file for sure.
- cesarb 11y agoTRACKERS Tier #1 http://kaos.gen.nz:6969/announce As I said, it's the original torrent file. The tracker it used is long defunct. Only DHT can be used for it now.
- mmastrac 11y agoI'm not sure, think you can construct a DHT-only magnet link from that hash/filename like so: magnet:?xt=urn:btih:(hash)&dn=(filename)
- slyall 11y agoI used to work with a couple of people that helped with that movie. I think it came out between the first two movies when the whole Matrix thing was huge :) kaos.gen.nz was the personal domain of one of the guys I worked with. He's the "Juggling Goth" at 4:30 and did some other stuff.
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- rocky1138 11y agoI'll leave this on Deluge for a while to share :)
- arnarbi 11y agoThat's a strange title. The article is about "the oldest known torrent that's still active." Assuming "active" means "being shared" then it's a bit of a tautology, isn't it?
- reptation 11y agoThe creator emerges: http://nooga.com/172237/chattanooga-man-responsible-for-worlds-oldest-torrent-file/ http://nooga.com/172237/chattanooga-man-responsible-for-worl...