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World’s Oldest Surviving Torrent Still Alive After 15 Years
- jumelles 8y agoThe torrent: https://www.thefanimatrix.net/The-Fanimatrix-(DivX-5.1-HQ).avi.torrent https://www.thefanimatrix.net/The-Fanimatrix-(DivX-5.1-HQ).a...
- krispbyte 8y ago> "The Fanimatrix" is a fan-made, zero-budget short film set within the Matrix universe, specifically shortly before the discovery of "The One" (i.e. the first "Matrix" feature film). It tells the story of two rebels - Dante and Medusa - and of their fateful mission onto the virtual reality prison world that is The Matrix.
- prablenha 8y agoAnd the magnet link... magnet:?xt=urn:btih:72C83366E95DD44CC85F26198ECC55F0F4576AD4 ;-)
- Sir_Cmpwn 8y agoIt's actually pretty good!
- 4ad 8y agoTorrents are only 15 years old?? Wow, I could have sworn they came before that. I feel like I've been doing torrents forever. Windows XP is older than torrents, but in my mind it feels much newer for some reason. I wonder why.
- tomrod 8y agoNapster/Limewire predate it a bit.
- Insanity 8y agoLimewire, that takes me back. I alternated between using Limewire and Bearshare back in the day. Vague memories but somehow their UI stuck with me. Makes me even more happy we have Spotify nowadays :)
- berbec 8y agoI have a screenshot somewhere of my XP machine running DU meter & Napster to show off my brand new, 2nd in my county, cable modem pulling 400KB/sec. I felt like a God.
- _emacsomancer_ 8y agoI think it's just that this is oldest surviving torrent. Torrents/torrent software came out around 2001, which is more than 15 years.
- pervycreeper 8y agoTitle is misleading. Really it means to say that the oldest still active torrent is 15 years old.
- pmcginn 8y agoNo it's not. If you talk about the world's oldest woman, no one expects you to include Cleopatra in the running.
- yesenadam 8y agoWell, I for one thought it meant the first ever torrent is still going. Why wouldn't people assume 'world's oldest torrent' means just that?! And 'the world's oldest running torrent is still running' is like 'world's oldest living human is still alive' - of course they are.
- parsadotsh 8y agoYeah I thought the same.
- berbec 8y agoHas it really been that long since the fall (at least of major popularity) of Napster, direct connect, Kazaa, lime wire, audio galaxy etc? I believe (please correct me) that both Blizzard, Microsoft and many other major software firms distrubute software using BitTorrent, in addition to all Linux distros.
- ryukafalz 8y agoIt's astounding to me that BitTorrent isn't used more often for media distribution. There are entire industries built around distributing content from huge datacenters, and meanwhile the economics of distributing something through BitTorrent are exactly the opposite of how things traditionally work - content is easier and cheaper to send the more people are interested in it!
- kevin_thibedeau 8y agoMany ISPs throttle you when they see BitTorrent activity. It isn't a commercially viable transport.
- zzzcpan 8y agoNot sure about many, but most ISPs in the world definitely don't throttle torrents (or you for using torrents).
- albertgoeswoof 8y agoAgree I think that used to be the case when torrents were a major source of traffic- now it’s more likely to be a family with a couple of gamers, Netflix users etc who are using up all the bandwidth
- maxxxxx 8y agoI think it has a bad name and torrent traffic often gets blocked or throttled. I think with some rebranding it could be successful.
- krispbyte 8y agoAnd encryption so your ISP doesn't get to see it is torrent traffic.
- TheSpiceIsLife 8y agoI could be wrong but I don’t think encryption helps in the case of BitTorrent? Encrypted or not, BitTorrent traffic still looks like BitTorrent traffic. The BitTorrent protocol has a peculiar connection pattern.
- berbec 8y agoI love BT and think it's great, but I always wonder: Is it a net (for the bandwidth of whole internet) gain? I believe the major advantage is to transfer the cost of distrubutio away from the original host and distrubute it among those downloading IT. Does it reduce bandwidth used appreciably or just shuffle it around?
- dan-robertson 8y agoIt also leads to more balance between upload/download. This is perhaps less good on typical broadband which usually has a much higher bandwidth for downloads but a typical datacentre will have a much greater upload demand to download (there’s a reason that downloading to an aws box is much cheaper than uploading). On the other hand, big networks can be more efficient by caching things near the edge so that the total “bit miles” (I.e. the total over all packets sent of distance traveled * bits of data) are decreased.
- jjeaff 8y agoI'd say BitTorrent is likely just as efficient or much more so at keeping distances short. At least, it optimizes by taking the fastest available peers. Your typical big torrent file could have thousands of peers. That's more endpoints than most any other big CDN and more likely to have a few peers really close to you. Heck, it could even download from someone on your local network if they happened to be serving up the file you are looking for.
- flatline 8y agoCentralization will always be more efficient, generally speaking. Access to a centralized channel for distribution can be prohibitive for many reasons - cost and censorship being the foremost in my mind.
- StudentStuff 8y agoI'm doubtful of this premise, especially in the context of peering disputes. Here in the states, Netflix had/has serious issues with Comcast/Verizon/Centurylink not peering with their upstream providers sufficently to handle the number of video streams that needed to be carried. This was not an issue with the last mile connection itself, but a middle mile peering problem. From the testing I have done, on certain carriers that play games like this (Deutsch Telekom in Germany, Centurylink, Verizon & others in the US, and most Asian/South American ISPs) torrenting updates to users is significantly faster than an HTTPS download from Amazon, Google Cloud & the like. Once you get a handful of seeders internal to the network, the other downloaders in that network start to get the torrent significantly faster than they would over traditional HTTPS. If the content isn't extremely time sensitive (eg: live sports games, video calls) and is of a noteworthy size, using P2P tech to speed up downloads is not a bad idea.
- vortico 8y agoThe title should technically be "World's Oldest Currently-Alive Torrent Still Alive After 15 Years". The first part is pretty much a tautology. This doesn't mean that the first torrent created happens to still be seeded.
- dang 8y agoI think it's reasonable to take that bit as implied. Making it explicit leaves the title sounding a bit weird. Edit: since people are continuing to comment about this, I've added the word "surviving" above.
- techload 8y agoI uploaded one torrent in 2004 and it is still alive with seeders.
- zipwitch 8y agoA few years back, there was a story about how a different Matrix fan work, The ASCII Matrix, was the oldest torrent: https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/kb7wex/how-ascii-matrix-survived-490-times-longer-than-the-average-torrent-bittorrent-file-sharing https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/kb7wex/how-ascii-... (And this all makes me feel old.)
- ehsankia 8y agoThere seems to be a link between Matrix fans and torrent technology fans.
- Endy 8y agoI hope no one here finds this a shocking revelation.
- cesarb 8y agoThe funny thing is, it was in the HN comments about the source of that story (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10962253 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10962253) that was revealed that the Fanimatrix torrent was still being seeded.
- dEnigma 8y agoThat's fascinating! I also was still under the impression that the ASCII Matrix was the oldest surviving torrent and even started seeding it, back when I first heard about that story. Great to see such connections being made; that's what the internet is, or should be, all about.
- petecooper 8y agoSee also: https://torrentfreak.com/oldest-torrent-is-still-being-shared-after-4419-days-160124/ https://torrentfreak.com/oldest-torrent-is-still-being-share... Another Matrix-related torrent from yesteryear.
- gms 8y agoI feel so old.
- ezoe 8y agoIt's alive because original author keep seeding the content. Nothing headline worthy to read.
- dEnigma 8y agoThat's not correct, see this Hacker News comment and the reply by the creator: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10962253 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10962253
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- userbinator 8y agoIt makes me wonder what the actual very first widespread torrent was (even if it has no more seeds) --- my guess is some Linux distro.
- kwhitefoot 8y agoIt had 49 seeders when I downloaded it just now.
- mrhackerpoland 8y agoP2P is already used for hot cache fill in ISP hosted blackboxe cache servers of services like Microsoft, Netflix, Google.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- black_puppydog 8y ago> With a limited budget of just $800, of which nearly half went into a leather jacket This is my favorite bit :)
- csstrick 8y agohttps://www.skptricks.com/2018/09/image-resizing-in-react-native.html https://www.skptricks.com/2018/09/image-resizing-in-react-na...
- thrownaway954 8y agolegitimate question: why not upload it to YouTube? You can still have the torrent link in the description if people want to download it, you will reach a wider audience and you might actually make some money off it to fund future fan projects.
- nyolfen 8y agoor, it might be arbitrarily demonetized or deleted, or have a a spurious takedown put on it
- em-bee 8y agounlikely, it's independent work that may contain some copyrighted designs but not anything copied directly of the original film, so the content-id won't detect it. star trek fan films also stay on. you just can't/shouldn't monetize it because that would motivate the owners of the original film to stop you. greetings, eMBee.
- M2Ys4U 8y ago>unlikely, it's independent work that may contain some copyrighted designs but not anything copied directly of the original film, so the content-id won't detect it. That is incredibly naive. Content ID has been picking up things as innocuous as applause at the end of an entirely novel recording as being copyright infringement.
- em-bee 8y agodo you have a reference for that? (not that i don't believe you, but i'd like to read that story and share it as a good example how bad this system is) given the amount of star trek fan-films on youtube (there are thousands, literally) spurious takedowns would be noticeable. so i don't think i am naive here. as long as all your sound and images are original or from a creative commons source a takedown should be unlikely. (that doesn't mean it can't happen though) greetings, eMBee.