7 ms·

There's a reason the takedown of a good private tracker is seen like the burning of the Library of Alexandria all over again. It was very sad to see What.CD go

There's a reason the takedown of a good private tracker is seen like the burning of the Library of Alexandria all over again. It was very sad to see What.CD go down recently. They had every release of every LP, EP and demo, of every obscure artist you could possibly imagine. The curation and amount of content made commercial services like Spotify and TIDAL look barren in comparison. Best of all: there was no DRM on the content and you could freely use your VPN. I just hope enough libraries survive for the content to last.

Klathmon 10y ago
why don't these kinds of sites distribute their database in the same way they distribute their content? At least that way if shit goes south the information is still out there even if the curation and "updates" to it will no longer happen.
- optionalparens 10y ago
  There are peer-to-peer sharing options that have tried to do this (now and previously), but aren't widely adopted in the face of bit torrent. Most private trackers are using the same pretty dismal PHP bit torrent tracker libraries/servers that work with mysql or sqlite. It would of course be possible to replicate these or do something as simple as cron jobs, rsync, etc., but that's not often the real issue. The larger issue is the legal aspect. Most of the time a big tracker is taken down, the owners are known to authorities or don't want to risk being known, even by association. As such, continuing the same site, even under different management would put them at risk. If I remember in the case of what.cd and a few others, they put out notices saying they intentionally nuked their databases for this among other reasons. If for example a big site shuts down and one of the members spins up a new instance, the fear is that the original owners would be liable. It doesn't matter if this holds up or not in court or is even a real thing, merely the threat of it is not worth the trouble to many people. Not many people want to sign up to go to jail or deal with financial threats because of sharing movies or music. Distributing the database doesn't solve the legal aspect. In fact, distributing the database might be seen as more ammunition to threaten the original site admins as being "enablers." So in theory what you are saying makes sense and would be a good idea, but in the face of reality and human behavior, it is much harder and more than a technical issue.
  - cryptarch 10y ago
    Why not: one crew builds great P2P software, another uses it? I mean, I do feel like we're ready to start jailing/extrajudicially punishing people just for writing software that the copyright lobby/intelligence community doesn't like, because it makes piracy/privacy more accessible, but it'd be a first for someone not involved in actually commiting piracy to wind up in the sights of the copyright lobby. In the Netherlands everyone has to pay a premium on CD's and DVD's, "for rightsholders", which goes to some shady copyright organization which distributes part of the money to top-40 artists. I don't think "copyright tax" on all storage media is a much larger step, nor do I think government-mandated DRM is. Not having "the right to tinker" like we do now already comes pretty close.
    - optionalparens 10y ago
      Probably not, but IANAL. In the world of big companies and even governments coming after you, it becomes hard to claim innocence when conspiracy charges are levied. Using things that enable further proliferation tend to add to the charges and make the case. Chinese walls/firewalls don't quite hold up in court as well as one might think. Obviously it can depend on the country and circumstances, but anytime people feel there is a criminal conspiracy at work, they come up you hard. It is also hard to keep such a wall "clean" as all it takes is one person being stupid to establish a link. Again, it's also about fear and human nature, not reality. I'm sure there are people with great opsec and planning who don't have this problem, but they also don't necessarily attract enough attention to get shut down. Factor in that many admins start a site because of ego, and that doesn't lead to great opsec. Nor do most people want to use software they know nothing about. I should probably add FWIW, married to a prosecutor who goes after international criminal conspiracies among other things. Not the computer stuff thankfully, but I've seen and heard about what happens when the words criminal conspiracy get thrown about and people with money are involved. Doubly dangerous when extradition treaties exist or the country handling the case is a bigger power like the US.
      - cryptarch 10y ago
        I do feel like it'd be prudent to wait until everyone I love has died, before I even publicly speak about these issues. Power is not something we as a race have learned to tame, and we currently have a bunch of very powerful actors who hate piracy (and free-spirited citizens in general). You can call my fear paranoia, but is it that if you really are constantly being watched by the invisible eyes of powerful and ruthless interest groups and government agencies? I do wonder how much cooperation there is between the copyright lobby and intelligence agencies. Their interests and arenas are very much alligned. Chilling effects matter a lot, and that is part of the reason I do choose to speak up, though it gives me more anxiety than I'd like to have. I can't imagine what a hell it must be to run an actual illegal pirate network.
- cryptarch 10y ago
  I'm not sure, I've never run such a site myself. Maybe someone behind 7 proxies could explain? I do think this could be solved, with for instance public-key addressed content (e.g., a DHT where the content is references to files, addressed by pubkey and muteable only to the owner of the corresponding private key). I've been trying to figure out why this isn't done in practice for a while now. Maybe it's a selection bias, where all dark file distribution networks run that well/securely drop off the map completely?
- pervycreeper 10y ago
  I think it boils down to the culture of those kinds of sites, which reportedly encourage an elitist secret club type of mindset over one which encourages preservation or dissemination of information.
  - 1337biz 10y ago
    Interesting topic! People are ptobably also feeling more motivate to contribute in an isolated community than to some greater good perspective.
  - orik 10y ago
    You can try to critique the culture of What.CD but the truth is that WCD did a better job at preserving music than a community with the express purpose of 'preserving or disseminating information' would have done. The mindset cultivated seeders with the fear of getting kicked out if one was a bad peer / leech; ratios, bounties and freeleech items created a gamification for uploading material and seeding otherwise unpopular items for other users.
    - xg15 10y ago
      ...until it all was gone.
    - pervycreeper 10y ago
      Why can't both those goals be combined?
    - joeberon 10y ago
      Yeah but now that is all for nothing. They could release the torrent database but they're not gonna are they? There's just too much pride attached to it to let it go.
      - legatus 10y ago
        Well, the database contains data about users too... doing so would put users at risk. An interesting concept is ZeroNet [1], which allows entire websites to be shared in a peer to peer way. [1] https://zeronet.io/ https://zeronet.io/
- biggerfisch 10y ago
  Some of the current sites still up are likely to be exploring their options in that regard. The core problem comes down to the fact that a (potential) compromise (as in w.cd) results in the admins hitting the Big Red Button and nuking everything from orbit. Additionally, while much metadata was lost in w.cd's demise, a large amount of the files have already been recovered through various replacements.
  - voltagex_ 10y ago
    Where did w.cd disperse to?
    - cryptarch 10y ago
      Here's a good article on that: https://torrentfreak.com/what-cd-is-dead-but-the-torrent-hydra-lives-on-161202/ https://torrentfreak.com/what-cd-is-dead-but-the-torrent-hyd...
  - ue_ 10y ago
    Do you have any idea where to? I was going to do the WCD interview a few days before it closed for good, not knowing this would happen.
    - cryptarch 10y ago
      https://torrentfreak.com/what-cd-is-dead-but-the-torrent-hydra-lives-on-161202/ https://torrentfreak.com/what-cd-is-dead-but-the-torrent-hyd...
aluhut 10y ago
Those are the reasons why we need not-sharing illegal libraries. For everything. For when the times get better...or worse...
awalton 10y ago
> There's a reason the takedown of a good private tracker is seen like the burning of the Library of Alexandria all over again. The irony of course being that we developed the Internet to prevent Single Points of Failure from destroying our American society, yet we're seeing our culture die over and over again to the crumbling of Single Points of Failure. Maybe at some point we'll start seeing the point of building failure-resilient networks, but as long as there's money to be made in Facebooks and Netflixes and other walled gardens, we're just going to keep seeing these failures wipe us out.
- Spivak 10y ago
  Sure but what made What.CD the gold standard was the control they had over their community to curate and moderate which doesn't seem to have a distributed solution yet. Public torrent sites & trackers are very distributed and failure resistant but they're a cesspool of low quality content. This isn't to say that you can't find what you're looking for but most of the quality stuff is usually repackaged from other higher quality sites/sources that are single points of failure for their niche of content.
  - belorn 10y ago
    I would think that signing is a good method to curate and moderate a distributed solution. Looking at debian repositories, they are both trusted, distributed and failure resistant. People still need a platform to build the community, but that could be built in a separated system from the distribution.
    - Fnoord 10y ago
      > I would think that signing is a good method to curate and moderate a distributed solution. Looking at debian repositories, they are both trusted, distributed and failure resistant. BitTorrent uses cryptography to ensure file integrity. DCPP does too. Even FXP did (although only CRC32 this was reasonable back then). Debian repositories don't compare to the illegal distribution of quality audio (and video) because Debian repositories are legal to host/spread. Because of this reason they're widely available and therefore the supply meets the demand. Unlike with illegal distribution of quality audio (and video). The comparison with Library of Alexandria goes moot. During the burning of the Library of Alexandria many works got lost forever. Thanks to the invention of printing in the 15th century this is already more unlikely to happen. Nevermind storage on computers which has seen tremendous progress. One also needs to keep in mind that all the copies people had from the content on What.CD still exists. So it is more akin to a Library of Alexandria being burned down while all the copies are still spread (multiple times!) among large groups of individuals around the globe. I don't think many people on Earth would be able to figure out where those copies are, except maybe the NSA or GCHQ. But it'd cost them a lot of effort which isn't worth the hassle, besides being outside their scope of interest. This is not to say we're there yet, just that its less dramatic than it seems. The burning of the Library (What.CD) is substantial because it was a meeting place for those interested in the data, akin to the shutting down of Silk Road or Timothy Leary getting busted. However one lost battle doesn't mean the war is lost. Its still important to improve distribution of data, allow anonymity on the Internet, or the combination of both.
davidgerard 10y ago
The trouble was that What.CD wasn't a loss for anyone who didn't have the patience to sit through an examination to be allowed to look at the site. http://rocknerd.co.uk/2016/11/19/what-the-death-of-what-cd-failed-to-mean-for-all-of-humanity/ http://rocknerd.co.uk/2016/11/19/what-the-death-of-what-cd-f... tl;dr the way to preserve culture for all of humanity is to make lots of copies.
- webmaven 10y ago
  TL/DR: "Lots Of Copies Keep Stuff Safe."
- cryptarch 10y ago
  It's an examination over IRC, so yes, you'd have to have your second laptop on idle next to you for 4 hours, but if you're not staring at the chatroom all the time its not much of a chore. There also was a site called "What.CD Interview Prep" with all the knowledge you were supposed to have before joining, e.g. about lossy and lossless encoding and "The Golden Rules". I'm sure no one ever had that open on a second computer, or just closed it for a sec when making the screenshot proof.
  - davidgerard 10y ago
    I’m hard pressed to see how this isn’t a description of a resource sabotaged by its own snobbery. Completely artificial scarcity is not an effective gain for all of humanity, rather than a vanishingly tiny part of it, and now zero. You do realise the attitude you're defending is why What.CD has completely failed to preserve culture.
    - cryptarch 10y ago
      While I do agree it would have been nice if they had released a torrent with all torrent files on their site, I also think they did a very good job overall. Their users might have dispersed, but the content is still out there and the good sharing habits will stick with the ex-members. It has also caused many, many CD's to be ripped, curated and massively distributed to very high standards, for years. The curated metadata and social structure might have been lost, but the content survives. I think they were mostly sabotaged by lack of anonimization and by their centralized architecture.

Klathmon 10y ago

why don't these kinds of sites distribute their database in the same way they distribute their content? At least that way if shit goes south the information is still out there even if the curation and "updates" to it will no longer happen.

optionalparens 10y ago
There are peer-to-peer sharing options that have tried to do this (now and previously), but aren't widely adopted in the face of bit torrent. Most private trackers are using the same pretty dismal PHP bit torrent tracker libraries/servers that work with mysql or sqlite. It would of course be possible to replicate these or do something as simple as cron jobs, rsync, etc., but that's not often the real issue. The larger issue is the legal aspect. Most of the time a big tracker is taken down, the owners are known to authorities or don't want to risk being known, even by association. As such, continuing the same site, even under different management would put them at risk. If I remember in the case of what.cd and a few others, they put out notices saying they intentionally nuked their databases for this among other reasons. If for example a big site shuts down and one of the members spins up a new instance, the fear is that the original owners would be liable. It doesn't matter if this holds up or not in court or is even a real thing, merely the threat of it is not worth the trouble to many people. Not many people want to sign up to go to jail or deal with financial threats because of sharing movies or music. Distributing the database doesn't solve the legal aspect. In fact, distributing the database might be seen as more ammunition to threaten the original site admins as being "enablers." So in theory what you are saying makes sense and would be a good idea, but in the face of reality and human behavior, it is much harder and more than a technical issue.
- cryptarch 10y ago
  Why not: one crew builds great P2P software, another uses it? I mean, I do feel like we're ready to start jailing/extrajudicially punishing people just for writing software that the copyright lobby/intelligence community doesn't like, because it makes piracy/privacy more accessible, but it'd be a first for someone not involved in actually commiting piracy to wind up in the sights of the copyright lobby. In the Netherlands everyone has to pay a premium on CD's and DVD's, "for rightsholders", which goes to some shady copyright organization which distributes part of the money to top-40 artists. I don't think "copyright tax" on all storage media is a much larger step, nor do I think government-mandated DRM is. Not having "the right to tinker" like we do now already comes pretty close.
  - optionalparens 10y ago
    Probably not, but IANAL. In the world of big companies and even governments coming after you, it becomes hard to claim innocence when conspiracy charges are levied. Using things that enable further proliferation tend to add to the charges and make the case. Chinese walls/firewalls don't quite hold up in court as well as one might think. Obviously it can depend on the country and circumstances, but anytime people feel there is a criminal conspiracy at work, they come up you hard. It is also hard to keep such a wall "clean" as all it takes is one person being stupid to establish a link. Again, it's also about fear and human nature, not reality. I'm sure there are people with great opsec and planning who don't have this problem, but they also don't necessarily attract enough attention to get shut down. Factor in that many admins start a site because of ego, and that doesn't lead to great opsec. Nor do most people want to use software they know nothing about. I should probably add FWIW, married to a prosecutor who goes after international criminal conspiracies among other things. Not the computer stuff thankfully, but I've seen and heard about what happens when the words criminal conspiracy get thrown about and people with money are involved. Doubly dangerous when extradition treaties exist or the country handling the case is a bigger power like the US.
    - cryptarch 10y ago
      I do feel like it'd be prudent to wait until everyone I love has died, before I even publicly speak about these issues. Power is not something we as a race have learned to tame, and we currently have a bunch of very powerful actors who hate piracy (and free-spirited citizens in general). You can call my fear paranoia, but is it that if you really are constantly being watched by the invisible eyes of powerful and ruthless interest groups and government agencies? I do wonder how much cooperation there is between the copyright lobby and intelligence agencies. Their interests and arenas are very much alligned. Chilling effects matter a lot, and that is part of the reason I do choose to speak up, though it gives me more anxiety than I'd like to have. I can't imagine what a hell it must be to run an actual illegal pirate network.
cryptarch 10y ago
I'm not sure, I've never run such a site myself. Maybe someone behind 7 proxies could explain? I do think this could be solved, with for instance public-key addressed content (e.g., a DHT where the content is references to files, addressed by pubkey and muteable only to the owner of the corresponding private key). I've been trying to figure out why this isn't done in practice for a while now. Maybe it's a selection bias, where all dark file distribution networks run that well/securely drop off the map completely?
pervycreeper 10y ago
I think it boils down to the culture of those kinds of sites, which reportedly encourage an elitist secret club type of mindset over one which encourages preservation or dissemination of information.
- 1337biz 10y ago
  Interesting topic! People are ptobably also feeling more motivate to contribute in an isolated community than to some greater good perspective.
- orik 10y ago
  You can try to critique the culture of What.CD but the truth is that WCD did a better job at preserving music than a community with the express purpose of 'preserving or disseminating information' would have done. The mindset cultivated seeders with the fear of getting kicked out if one was a bad peer / leech; ratios, bounties and freeleech items created a gamification for uploading material and seeding otherwise unpopular items for other users.
  - xg15 10y ago
    ...until it all was gone.
  - pervycreeper 10y ago
    Why can't both those goals be combined?
  - joeberon 10y ago
    Yeah but now that is all for nothing. They could release the torrent database but they're not gonna are they? There's just too much pride attached to it to let it go.
    - legatus 10y ago
      Well, the database contains data about users too... doing so would put users at risk. An interesting concept is ZeroNet [1], which allows entire websites to be shared in a peer to peer way. [1] https://zeronet.io/ https://zeronet.io/
biggerfisch 10y ago
Some of the current sites still up are likely to be exploring their options in that regard. The core problem comes down to the fact that a (potential) compromise (as in w.cd) results in the admins hitting the Big Red Button and nuking everything from orbit. Additionally, while much metadata was lost in w.cd's demise, a large amount of the files have already been recovered through various replacements.
- voltagex_ 10y ago
  Where did w.cd disperse to?
  - cryptarch 10y ago
    Here's a good article on that: https://torrentfreak.com/what-cd-is-dead-but-the-torrent-hydra-lives-on-161202/ https://torrentfreak.com/what-cd-is-dead-but-the-torrent-hyd...
- ue_ 10y ago
  Do you have any idea where to? I was going to do the WCD interview a few days before it closed for good, not knowing this would happen.
  - cryptarch 10y ago
    https://torrentfreak.com/what-cd-is-dead-but-the-torrent-hydra-lives-on-161202/ https://torrentfreak.com/what-cd-is-dead-but-the-torrent-hyd...

aluhut 10y ago

Those are the reasons why we need not-sharing illegal libraries. For everything. For when the times get better...or worse...

awalton 10y ago

> There's a reason the takedown of a good private tracker is seen like the burning of the Library of Alexandria all over again. The irony of course being that we developed the Internet to prevent Single Points of Failure from destroying our American society, yet we're seeing our culture die over and over again to the crumbling of Single Points of Failure. Maybe at some point we'll start seeing the point of building failure-resilient networks, but as long as there's money to be made in Facebooks and Netflixes and other walled gardens, we're just going to keep seeing these failures wipe us out.

Spivak 10y ago
Sure but what made What.CD the gold standard was the control they had over their community to curate and moderate which doesn't seem to have a distributed solution yet. Public torrent sites & trackers are very distributed and failure resistant but they're a cesspool of low quality content. This isn't to say that you can't find what you're looking for but most of the quality stuff is usually repackaged from other higher quality sites/sources that are single points of failure for their niche of content.
- belorn 10y ago
  I would think that signing is a good method to curate and moderate a distributed solution. Looking at debian repositories, they are both trusted, distributed and failure resistant. People still need a platform to build the community, but that could be built in a separated system from the distribution.
  - Fnoord 10y ago
    > I would think that signing is a good method to curate and moderate a distributed solution. Looking at debian repositories, they are both trusted, distributed and failure resistant. BitTorrent uses cryptography to ensure file integrity. DCPP does too. Even FXP did (although only CRC32 this was reasonable back then). Debian repositories don't compare to the illegal distribution of quality audio (and video) because Debian repositories are legal to host/spread. Because of this reason they're widely available and therefore the supply meets the demand. Unlike with illegal distribution of quality audio (and video). The comparison with Library of Alexandria goes moot. During the burning of the Library of Alexandria many works got lost forever. Thanks to the invention of printing in the 15th century this is already more unlikely to happen. Nevermind storage on computers which has seen tremendous progress. One also needs to keep in mind that all the copies people had from the content on What.CD still exists. So it is more akin to a Library of Alexandria being burned down while all the copies are still spread (multiple times!) among large groups of individuals around the globe. I don't think many people on Earth would be able to figure out where those copies are, except maybe the NSA or GCHQ. But it'd cost them a lot of effort which isn't worth the hassle, besides being outside their scope of interest. This is not to say we're there yet, just that its less dramatic than it seems. The burning of the Library (What.CD) is substantial because it was a meeting place for those interested in the data, akin to the shutting down of Silk Road or Timothy Leary getting busted. However one lost battle doesn't mean the war is lost. Its still important to improve distribution of data, allow anonymity on the Internet, or the combination of both.

davidgerard 10y ago

The trouble was that What.CD wasn't a loss for anyone who didn't have the patience to sit through an examination to be allowed to look at the site. http://rocknerd.co.uk/2016/11/19/what-the-death-of-what-cd-failed-to-mean-for-all-of-humanity/ http://rocknerd.co.uk/2016/11/19/what-the-death-of-what-cd-f... tl;dr the way to preserve culture for all of humanity is to make lots of copies.

webmaven 10y ago
TL/DR: "Lots Of Copies Keep Stuff Safe."
cryptarch 10y ago
It's an examination over IRC, so yes, you'd have to have your second laptop on idle next to you for 4 hours, but if you're not staring at the chatroom all the time its not much of a chore. There also was a site called "What.CD Interview Prep" with all the knowledge you were supposed to have before joining, e.g. about lossy and lossless encoding and "The Golden Rules". I'm sure no one ever had that open on a second computer, or just closed it for a sec when making the screenshot proof.
- davidgerard 10y ago
  I’m hard pressed to see how this isn’t a description of a resource sabotaged by its own snobbery. Completely artificial scarcity is not an effective gain for all of humanity, rather than a vanishingly tiny part of it, and now zero. You do realise the attitude you're defending is why What.CD has completely failed to preserve culture.
  - cryptarch 10y ago
    While I do agree it would have been nice if they had released a torrent with all torrent files on their site, I also think they did a very good job overall. Their users might have dispersed, but the content is still out there and the good sharing habits will stick with the ex-members. It has also caused many, many CD's to be ripped, curated and massively distributed to very high standards, for years. The curated metadata and social structure might have been lost, but the content survives. I think they were mostly sabotaged by lack of anonimization and by their centralized architecture.