16 ms·

ExtraTorrent Shuts Down for Good

146 points by srigi 9y ago

sleepychu 9y ago
It's hard to imagine how you could operate a successful torrenting site in 2017; they represent such a loss of income to so many people with expensive lawyers.
- hart_russell 9y ago
  I'd imagine that most people using them have adblockers on as well.
- Nadya 9y ago
  Define "successful". Many of them are only interested in floating as long as possible. User donations pay for the server and users have motivation to help keep the site running to keep the ability to pirate. Development and moderation is volunteer work. For many of these sites just their continued existence is a success - however many years it ends up being.
- algesten 9y ago
  Expensive lawyers yes, loss of income, probably not much. The majority of torrent users are not likely to suddenly pay for the same content.
  - wlesieutre 9y ago
    sleepychu's point stands either way. It's not a question of whether there's actually a loss of income. If the people with the expensive lawyers think there's a loss of income then you're gonna get dragged into an expensive lawsuit.
  - rhino369 9y ago
    Obviously it's not a 1:1 ratio of lost revenue to pirated material. But I bet many pirates would spend some money / watch commericals if they were forced to for entertainment. I've seen some suggestion that they spend more on average than the average consumer. But I suspect they'd spend even more. And getting some content free and paying for others has discretionary effects.
    - zanny 9y ago
      > if they were forced to for entertainment There is more free content made every day online than one person could consume in their entire life. Even when 99% of it is garbage, that 1% is still more than you can fill your time with. I read a few dozen webcomics, most of which have patreons, but I don't get ads on my rss feeds for them, and there are thousands of webcomics. And artists. And musicians. There are dozens of websites for hobbyist, amateur, and even freelance professional games, animations, etc. There is a fraction of pirates that will pay for content they would otherwise torrent because they want that content. But that doesn't imply they are more likely to buy entertainment. A portion probably just turn to free legal sources.
- rhino369 9y ago
  I assume they just operate in jurisdictions where nobody can really hold them responsible.
- ryanlol 9y ago
  Heh, easily. If you are technically inclined enough to operate a successful torrent site, it shouldn't be very challenging to operate such a site anonymously. Buying bitcoins, and then "laundering" the coins is relatively trivial, you just run them through a few of the more anonymity-inclined altcoins. Using those bitcoins to get torrent-friendly hosting? Hit up Infium in Ukraine, they won't mind a few threatening abuse emails. https://infiumhost.com/ https://infiumhost.com/ Domains you can get from Njalla, Namecheap and a plethora of Chinese registrars who won't even read English abuse emails. Want to earn money? It gets slightly trickier. There's a few solutions here. If you get lucky, you might find a well paying VPN affiliate program that'll pay you in bitcoin. But the more common solution is setting up a shell company and bank accounts in a friendly jurisdiction to accept payments from different advertising companies until you find one that won't kick you off. I suppose it might even be possible (probably not legal however) to do that in an anonymous manner, you can register businesses online with bitcoin (or if you need a mastercard, you can get an anonymous one from https://advcash.com https://advcash.com right now!) and opening bank accounts over the internet isn't exactly impossible either. Later you'd just wire all that money to a bitcoin exchange.
sergiotapia 9y ago
I was about to add them to our tracker list. :( https://github.com/sergiotapia/magnetissimo https://github.com/sergiotapia/magnetissimo There's something really sad when these sites die, a part of my teenage life is gone for good. I felt the same way when Demonoid shut down. Can these sites skate the legality line by offering only magnet links? Why are their costs so high if they can just host magnet links and cache the site with Varnish or something similar?
- photoGrant 9y ago
  edit: SuprNova! What was one of the first ones I'll never remember the name of? I swear it was part-run by the guy that actually invented Bit Torrent, but it also might've been a spin-off. I can visualise the website in my head but I can't place the name!
  - JTon 9y ago
    I was hit hard by btjunkie [1] going down. IMO, nothing yet has been able to replace it [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BTJunkie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BTJunkie
    - j_s 9y ago
      If you have time would you mind sharing the top 3 unique/favorite features? I'm not an expert in this space but I'm curious what it was that made BTJunkie so special.
      - JTon 9y ago
        The search results felt a lot like Google's. That is, the end user puts in minimal effort and automagically their torrents showed up with high ranking. The site itself was fast and minimal. The torrents had comments where an active community left notes (e.g. media quality, warnings, etc)
  - seanp2k2 9y ago
    isohunt was later but was also really good for quite a while.
dbg31415 9y ago
https://www.skytorrents.in/ https://www.skytorrents.in/
unicornporn 9y ago
It's 2017 and I'm so surprised that BT is still the dominant way to share copyrighted works illegally. Why hasn't a fully decentralized and E2E encrypted alternative replaced it? Who wants to actually run trackers these days? F2F software like http://retroshare.net/ http://retroshare.net/ exists, but nobody is using it.
- amelius 9y ago
  How would that work? I believe you can still get caught with such systems, because if somebody can download from your machine, that somebody could just as well be a government agent. Unless it uses something like Tor, but in that case it could become illegal to run exit nodes. The person running the exit node could legally be considered an accomplice.
  - mynewtb 9y ago
    Retroshare has anonymous tunnels.
- Cyph0n 9y ago
  I learned about IPFS the other day and it seems like an interesting alternative. Although I don't believe that bandwidth can be shared among nodes (seeding).
- rakoo 9y ago
  Because it has the lowest friction ? There are dozens of software speaking bittorrent already (instead of only retroshare speaking retroshare), there is a lot of resource on the web explaining how to start download, there is no need to gather friends as a F2F desires.
- sp332 9y ago
  Bittorrent doesn't need trackers anymore. Use DHT to find a node with part of the file you want, and peer exchange to query that node for the other nodes that have the rest of the file.
- zanny 9y ago
  People flock to huge public trackers and reputable private ones for the accuracy of finding what you are looking for. On fully distributed systems, anyone can call anything whatever they want, and you need an authorship or rating system for users to give support to reputable sources. I don't believe any decentralized network, including ipfs, has come up with a way for consensus accreditation of a source as being legitimate. If you look for a movie on piratebay, you have the ratings users give the torrents, the comments they write on it, and the number of active swarmers on that torrent all as credence to the legitimacy of it. If you lose any of that information you lose accuracy in finding what you actually want.
JimSmith84 9y ago
Torrenting aside, this is the second large movie forum to shut down this year (IMDb closed its message boards in February). For ExtraTorrent Forum users searching for a new home, check out https://MovieChat.org https://MovieChat.org
paol 9y ago
I'm continually surprised that Bittorrent is still relying on content indexing websites. The edonkey community solved this problem years ago with fully distributed search that only relies on the peers themselves[0]. Can anyone with insight into the BT comunity/technology offer any ideas why they never moved in this direction? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kademlia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kademlia
- math0ne 9y ago
  Its because bit torrent trackers are much more than just an index of torrents. They need a huge support system with forums, membership systems, point systems, funding drives, etc. If you look at the software that runs these sites you will see that moving to a distributed platform would not be so easy.
  - paol 9y ago
    Unless I misunderstood you, none of that is relevant if you're not using index sites in the first place.
    - bubblethink 9y ago
      I'm not sure if you can make magnet links work in a private tracker setting. Private trackers embed the user's key in the torrent file.
    - Ketchup901 9y ago
      There is more of an incentive if you have a private site with a forum and community and you're not just releasing illegal shit onto the internet.
    - maratd 9y ago
      > none of that is relevant if you're not using index sites in the first place One of the reasons that bittorrent has been successful and all the other protocols have failed is precisely because it allows for the use of private index sites. This allows for the creation of custom software that can provide all those extras (forums, comments, ratings, descriptions, etc.), but most importantly, user tracking. If you track the user, you can solve the sharing problem. For someone to download, someone else has to upload. Using index sites allows you to solve the hit-and-run problem, where someone just downloads, but then doesn't upload. You just ban those people. You then end up with a community where everyone plays nice, which leads to fast speeds and an eagerness to share content.
tu7001 9y ago
R.I.P ExtraTorrent
awqrre 9y ago
http://torrentproject.se/ http://torrentproject.se/ is interesting...
jumpkickhit 9y ago
Isn't this the third big site that's gone down this year? I guess they're getting bought out by media companies or something. So much for the hydra.
samat 9y ago
Where should I get all the latest shows from ettv and ethd now?
throwaway20101 9y ago
My memory might serve me wrong, but I recall very interesting article years ago about playing monetary-gain games in Japan. Hazard where you win money is banned, so as a loophole what they did instead is that you were still playing but instead of wining cash, you were winning tiny white plastic balls (with serial numbers). Those balls were technically worthless and just made of cheap plastic. But once you won some, on the other side of the street where you played, was unrelated business owner, who all business was buying sad white plastic balls for hard cash from you. No law is broken here. You can run a casino as long as people don't win money or anything worth a lot. You can run a store where you buy out white plastic balls at a premium value. And life goes on :) I think Japanese government had hardship proving that one business is somewhat owned or operated by another and eventually AFAIK they gave up, giving birth to Japanese biggest mafia. So.. long story short... run a torrent site where all you have is a database of copyrighted content (only names such as IMDB) and provide half of a magnet link :) Quietly find someone on the other side of the world who will host website that does the same thing just provide second part of magnet link. Don't know each other, don't talk with each other; wait until third person builds an app to glue both link and viola! Long live ExtraTorrent/PirateBay/Whatever about to die next.

146 points by srigi 9y ago

It's hard to imagine how you could operate a successful torrenting site in 2017; they represent such a loss of income to so many people with expensive lawyers.

hart_russell 9y ago
I'd imagine that most people using them have adblockers on as well.
Nadya 9y ago
Define "successful". Many of them are only interested in floating as long as possible. User donations pay for the server and users have motivation to help keep the site running to keep the ability to pirate. Development and moderation is volunteer work. For many of these sites just their continued existence is a success - however many years it ends up being.
algesten 9y ago
Expensive lawyers yes, loss of income, probably not much. The majority of torrent users are not likely to suddenly pay for the same content.
- wlesieutre 9y ago
  sleepychu's point stands either way. It's not a question of whether there's actually a loss of income. If the people with the expensive lawyers think there's a loss of income then you're gonna get dragged into an expensive lawsuit.
- rhino369 9y ago
  Obviously it's not a 1:1 ratio of lost revenue to pirated material. But I bet many pirates would spend some money / watch commericals if they were forced to for entertainment. I've seen some suggestion that they spend more on average than the average consumer. But I suspect they'd spend even more. And getting some content free and paying for others has discretionary effects.
  - zanny 9y ago
    > if they were forced to for entertainment There is more free content made every day online than one person could consume in their entire life. Even when 99% of it is garbage, that 1% is still more than you can fill your time with. I read a few dozen webcomics, most of which have patreons, but I don't get ads on my rss feeds for them, and there are thousands of webcomics. And artists. And musicians. There are dozens of websites for hobbyist, amateur, and even freelance professional games, animations, etc. There is a fraction of pirates that will pay for content they would otherwise torrent because they want that content. But that doesn't imply they are more likely to buy entertainment. A portion probably just turn to free legal sources.
rhino369 9y ago
I assume they just operate in jurisdictions where nobody can really hold them responsible.
ryanlol 9y ago
Heh, easily. If you are technically inclined enough to operate a successful torrent site, it shouldn't be very challenging to operate such a site anonymously. Buying bitcoins, and then "laundering" the coins is relatively trivial, you just run them through a few of the more anonymity-inclined altcoins. Using those bitcoins to get torrent-friendly hosting? Hit up Infium in Ukraine, they won't mind a few threatening abuse emails. https://infiumhost.com/ https://infiumhost.com/ Domains you can get from Njalla, Namecheap and a plethora of Chinese registrars who won't even read English abuse emails. Want to earn money? It gets slightly trickier. There's a few solutions here. If you get lucky, you might find a well paying VPN affiliate program that'll pay you in bitcoin. But the more common solution is setting up a shell company and bank accounts in a friendly jurisdiction to accept payments from different advertising companies until you find one that won't kick you off. I suppose it might even be possible (probably not legal however) to do that in an anonymous manner, you can register businesses online with bitcoin (or if you need a mastercard, you can get an anonymous one from https://advcash.com https://advcash.com right now!) and opening bank accounts over the internet isn't exactly impossible either. Later you'd just wire all that money to a bitcoin exchange.

sergiotapia 9y ago

I was about to add them to our tracker list. :( https://github.com/sergiotapia/magnetissimo https://github.com/sergiotapia/magnetissimo There's something really sad when these sites die, a part of my teenage life is gone for good. I felt the same way when Demonoid shut down. Can these sites skate the legality line by offering only magnet links? Why are their costs so high if they can just host magnet links and cache the site with Varnish or something similar?

photoGrant 9y ago
edit: SuprNova! What was one of the first ones I'll never remember the name of? I swear it was part-run by the guy that actually invented Bit Torrent, but it also might've been a spin-off. I can visualise the website in my head but I can't place the name!
- JTon 9y ago
  I was hit hard by btjunkie [1] going down. IMO, nothing yet has been able to replace it [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BTJunkie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BTJunkie
  - j_s 9y ago
    If you have time would you mind sharing the top 3 unique/favorite features? I'm not an expert in this space but I'm curious what it was that made BTJunkie so special.
    - JTon 9y ago
      The search results felt a lot like Google's. That is, the end user puts in minimal effort and automagically their torrents showed up with high ranking. The site itself was fast and minimal. The torrents had comments where an active community left notes (e.g. media quality, warnings, etc)
- seanp2k2 9y ago
  isohunt was later but was also really good for quite a while.

dbg31415 9y ago

https://www.skytorrents.in/ https://www.skytorrents.in/

unicornporn 9y ago

It's 2017 and I'm so surprised that BT is still the dominant way to share copyrighted works illegally. Why hasn't a fully decentralized and E2E encrypted alternative replaced it? Who wants to actually run trackers these days? F2F software like http://retroshare.net/ http://retroshare.net/ exists, but nobody is using it.

amelius 9y ago
How would that work? I believe you can still get caught with such systems, because if somebody can download from your machine, that somebody could just as well be a government agent. Unless it uses something like Tor, but in that case it could become illegal to run exit nodes. The person running the exit node could legally be considered an accomplice.
- mynewtb 9y ago
  Retroshare has anonymous tunnels.
Cyph0n 9y ago
I learned about IPFS the other day and it seems like an interesting alternative. Although I don't believe that bandwidth can be shared among nodes (seeding).
rakoo 9y ago
Because it has the lowest friction ? There are dozens of software speaking bittorrent already (instead of only retroshare speaking retroshare), there is a lot of resource on the web explaining how to start download, there is no need to gather friends as a F2F desires.
sp332 9y ago
Bittorrent doesn't need trackers anymore. Use DHT to find a node with part of the file you want, and peer exchange to query that node for the other nodes that have the rest of the file.
zanny 9y ago
People flock to huge public trackers and reputable private ones for the accuracy of finding what you are looking for. On fully distributed systems, anyone can call anything whatever they want, and you need an authorship or rating system for users to give support to reputable sources. I don't believe any decentralized network, including ipfs, has come up with a way for consensus accreditation of a source as being legitimate. If you look for a movie on piratebay, you have the ratings users give the torrents, the comments they write on it, and the number of active swarmers on that torrent all as credence to the legitimacy of it. If you lose any of that information you lose accuracy in finding what you actually want.

JimSmith84 9y ago

Torrenting aside, this is the second large movie forum to shut down this year (IMDb closed its message boards in February). For ExtraTorrent Forum users searching for a new home, check out https://MovieChat.org https://MovieChat.org

paol 9y ago

I'm continually surprised that Bittorrent is still relying on content indexing websites. The edonkey community solved this problem years ago with fully distributed search that only relies on the peers themselves[0]. Can anyone with insight into the BT comunity/technology offer any ideas why they never moved in this direction? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kademlia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kademlia

math0ne 9y ago
Its because bit torrent trackers are much more than just an index of torrents. They need a huge support system with forums, membership systems, point systems, funding drives, etc. If you look at the software that runs these sites you will see that moving to a distributed platform would not be so easy.
- paol 9y ago
  Unless I misunderstood you, none of that is relevant if you're not using index sites in the first place.
  - bubblethink 9y ago
    I'm not sure if you can make magnet links work in a private tracker setting. Private trackers embed the user's key in the torrent file.
  - Ketchup901 9y ago
    There is more of an incentive if you have a private site with a forum and community and you're not just releasing illegal shit onto the internet.
  - maratd 9y ago
    > none of that is relevant if you're not using index sites in the first place One of the reasons that bittorrent has been successful and all the other protocols have failed is precisely because it allows for the use of private index sites. This allows for the creation of custom software that can provide all those extras (forums, comments, ratings, descriptions, etc.), but most importantly, user tracking. If you track the user, you can solve the sharing problem. For someone to download, someone else has to upload. Using index sites allows you to solve the hit-and-run problem, where someone just downloads, but then doesn't upload. You just ban those people. You then end up with a community where everyone plays nice, which leads to fast speeds and an eagerness to share content.

tu7001 9y ago

R.I.P ExtraTorrent

awqrre 9y ago

http://torrentproject.se/ http://torrentproject.se/ is interesting...

jumpkickhit 9y ago

Isn't this the third big site that's gone down this year? I guess they're getting bought out by media companies or something. So much for the hydra.

samat 9y ago

Where should I get all the latest shows from ettv and ethd now?

throwaway20101 9y ago

My memory might serve me wrong, but I recall very interesting article years ago about playing monetary-gain games in Japan. Hazard where you win money is banned, so as a loophole what they did instead is that you were still playing but instead of wining cash, you were winning tiny white plastic balls (with serial numbers). Those balls were technically worthless and just made of cheap plastic. But once you won some, on the other side of the street where you played, was unrelated business owner, who all business was buying sad white plastic balls for hard cash from you. No law is broken here. You can run a casino as long as people don't win money or anything worth a lot. You can run a store where you buy out white plastic balls at a premium value. And life goes on :) I think Japanese government had hardship proving that one business is somewhat owned or operated by another and eventually AFAIK they gave up, giving birth to Japanese biggest mafia. So.. long story short... run a torrent site where all you have is a database of copyrighted content (only names such as IMDB) and provide half of a magnet link :) Quietly find someone on the other side of the world who will host website that does the same thing just provide second part of magnet link. Don't know each other, don't talk with each other; wait until third person builds an app to glue both link and viola! Long live ExtraTorrent/PirateBay/Whatever about to die next.