11 ms·

The World’s Oldest Active Torrent Turns 18 Soon

278 points by uniqueid 5y ago

nielsole 5y ago
> easily saved hundreds of thousands of dollars in distribution costs For reference, a server in Germany in 2003 had bandwidth prices between €.8 and €2 per gigabyte [0] [0] https://web.archive.org/web/20030810125406/http://www.hetzner.de/pdf/DediServerTrafficModule.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20030810125406/http://www.hetzne...
- matheusmoreira 5y ago
  Makes me wonder how much unnecessary load these streaming services are placing on global networks. Problems created by copyright. How much cheaper, easier and more efficient would things be if we were allowed to use torrents for media distribution?
  - mindslight 5y ago
    A CDN box at a datacenter or ISP is more efficient than uploading through the last mile, especially if that last mile is a half-duplex shared medium like cable. I'm pro-p2p, pro-home-servers, and pro-piracy, but I don't think it's necessarily more efficient in terms of network load.
    - Retric 5y ago
      Not in comparison to other customers closer than the ISP’s data center. BitTorrent has significant overhead but can scale really well for extremely popular downloads like the latest WoW patch at it’s peak. It’s really hard to beat when your exchanging data with a dozen people in the same apartment complex.
      - mindslight 5y ago
        Only if that apartment complex is wired with ethernet and a local switch [0]. GPON, cable, and DSL would all still go back to the ISP's core, transiting the last mile link twice. There are definitely efficiency gains to be had with decentralized identifiers and distributed systems, but with the centralized nature of the physical Internet they're not always a win. [0] or roommates want the same files and their router supports hairpin NAT or the software uses local segment discovery.
        Retric 5y ago
        Last mile link twice, but still saves hops on an ISP’s core network as their CDN’s are still generally centralized.
    - AnthonyMouse 5y ago
      The network load from P2P is about the same as it is from a very well distributed CDN. In theory the CDN could be a little better, e.g. if the network topology is such that a user uploading to another user on the same segment has to make a round trip through the head end, that will be somewhat less efficient than a CDN box which is already at the head end. But not by a lot. Linearly worse, not polynomially or exponentially worse. And that's assuming the CDN is perfect. That it has a node in every place there are users. Which none of them actually do because the world is really big. Worse, the places without them are the places with the slowest networks in general. If you're using twice as much bandwidth on some 100Gbps piece of fiber in New York City, the users aren't even going to notice that and the ISP can just send more light through the glass. But when there are a hundred users sharing some 40Mbps microwave link in some third world village and all trying to download the same thing, there isn't going to be a CDN node there and only having to suck it through the straw once multiplies the efficiency improvement by the number of users on the far end of the line, which in that case would be a factor of a hundred. Moreover, you can get the efficiency benefit of the CDN by replacing the CDN box with a box in the same place that seeds popular content using a P2P protocol, without losing the efficiency benefits of P2P for the people not near one of those.
      - myself248 5y ago
        Thank you for saying, succinctly and clearly, what I've always figured was the case. However. If the majority of traffic came p2p, then the asymmetry of upload/download bandwidth on shared media like cable modems would start to be a significant issue, wouldn't it? Only on the local segment, but on _every_ such segment. In that case, the seedbox-as-CDN-node route would be a no-brainer for ISPs to install. Are we reinventing the topology of Usenet?
        AnthonyMouse 5y ago
        Cable connections are typically asymmetric, but the average user doesn't max out their connection 100% of the time. Even if you have a 100 Mbps down 10 Mbps up connection, your average transfer rate might be 5 Mbps because most of the time your connection is idle. Which means you can feed it from peers with an upload cap of 5 Mbps, in theory, if they kept their uplinks saturated all the time. Or an upload cap of 10 Mbps if they all kept their uplinks half saturated all the time. And you can still get 100 Mbps downloads that way by downloading from multiple peers at once, which doesn't change the average transfer rate required from each peer because then twenty people upload at 5 Mbps for 10 seconds instead of one peer having to upload at 5 Mbps for 200 seconds to transfer the same amount of data. But the asymmetric link speed is artificial anyway. There is no technical reason they couldn't make fully symmetric cable modems -- in fact they did so in DOCSIS 4.0, though it's not widely deployed yet. The main reason they're hesitant to offer it is, ironically, that P2P isn't sufficiently widely used. Because then hosting is scarce and people will have the incentive to do high volume hosting on their own connections. Which is bad for the ISP who offers a fast uplink, because they rely on over-subscribing their connections to offer the prices they do. If you give someone a fast uplink, it's quite easy to saturate it 24/7 by serving files to millions of users. So the ISPs don't want to do that. But if P2P distribution was the default then that wouldn't be a problem because nobody would need to do that. You'd upload your thing once or some small number of times and then the users could get it from each other instead of millions of people all trying to get it from the one host. Everyone could have a 100 Mbps uplink and the average upload speed would still equal the average download speed, e.g. 5 Mbps, because that's all you need when the load is evenly distributed.
  - cheschire 5y ago
    Streaming services are, for the most part, optimized to only send you a portion of the file at a time, send you lower bandwidth versions when the throughput drops below a threshold, or in the case of COVID lockdowns everyone temporarily dropped the max resolution of their services because there was a sudden surge in home media streaming. When it comes to video torrents, I suspect a lot of people would start at looking for 4k rips (even if their devices didn't support it), or fall back to standard bluray rips. That's a huge amount of bandwidth when most people probably are fine with DVD or upscaled DVD quality.
    - Aeolun 5y ago
      Hmm, personally I look for 720p. Who needs multiple 100gb files sitting around on their disk.
      - xvector 5y ago
        I spend many thousands on my AV setup so I'm inclined to max it out, even if that requires 100gb+ movies.
        55555 5y ago
        Wow you're really into Adult Video!
      - Dylan16807 5y ago
        With reasonable encoding settings, you can get pretty nice 1080p at 2GB/hour. 720p will save what, 40% of that? I don't need space that badly. I haven't really seen much 4k to know how I'll feel about that jump. Though I've definitely seen some split-screen streams where I wished it was 4k.
        Aeolun 5y ago
        Hmm, anecdotally, 1h at 720p is like 600mb, where 1 hour at 1080p is 2600mb (for me, I assume it depends on encode settings like you say).
rhn_mk1 5y ago
An article about the oldest torrent and nary a magnet link in sight? Sure, there's the hash in the picture, but that's weak. What's the second oldest torrent? That's probably a better measure of the network health, because it doesn't get attention from articles about the oldest active torrent.
- belter 5y ago
  http://www.legittorrents.info/download.php?id=72c83366e95dd44cc85f26198ecc55f0f4576ad4&f=The%20Fanimatrix%20Run%20Program%20Full%20Release.torrent http://www.legittorrents.info/download.php?id=72c83366e95dd4...
- em-bee 5y ago
  What's the second oldest torrent? according to the thread here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10962253 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10962253 an article about the then believed to be oldest torrent, turned out to be a few months less old than this one, so we need to look for the third oldest now to get a good answer. on piratebay i found a torrent from 2008 that still works.
- uniqueid 5y ago
  The first torrent I, and probably quite a few others, ever downloaded was some Linux distro that Bram Cohen shared with the internet as a demo of the protocol.
  - hedgehog 5y ago
    The first torrent I downloaded was one of the demo videos he put on his home page in 2001 (I think there were two). Never seen a reference to them since.
- p1mrx 5y ago
  magnet:?xt=urn:btih:72C83366E95DD44CC85F26198ECC55F0F4576AD4
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
smoldesu 5y ago
Today I learned, The Animatrix and The Fanimatrix are separate, distinct films.
- vmoore 5y ago
  A lot of people learned that today.
cesarb 5y ago
Relevant: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10962253 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10962253 It's funny to be part of that history. As the article says, "for a file to live on, at least one person has to keep sharing it", and for a while, I was that person (see the comments on that HN post).
- jghn 5y ago
  About 10-15 years ago I went to download a torrent. It never had many seeders and got stuck at 94.8%. It was there for a few years. One day one of the very few, if not the only, humans with the whole torrent must have connected as it was 100%. Serendipity. And then about 5 years later I lost the files in a hard drive crash. Tried to grab the torrent again and all this time later it is sitting at, you guessed it, 94.8%.
  - arthurcolle 5y ago
    What's the torrent?
    - jghn 5y ago
      A (mostly bootleg) video bundle from a not super popular band. I'm pretty sure everything in there is easily accessible via Youtube now but it's the principle of the thing
      - arthurcolle 5y ago
        yeah for sure, I was just curious - cheers
  - leokennis 5y ago
    I once loooong ago tried downloading a rare music album but it was stuck at 99.8% with 0 seeders and 2 peers (including me) for months so I was pretty bummed. But I neglected to actually check the download folder. When I did, I found out it actually downloaded all the important files, just the logo of the upload group was still a .part file… So I quickly downloaded another more popular release by the same group, copied over the logo and lo and behold, now it got to 100%! That day I actually felt like a hacker…
dewlinedew2 5y ago
"With a limited budget of just $800, nearly half of which was spent on a leather jacket" -- plus we finally know how much clothes cost in the Matrix
- dharmab 5y ago
  "We couldn't afford a wind machine for this shot, so we bought a leaf blower from a hardware store. We kept the receipt, so we can return it after we're done." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G025oxyWv0E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G025oxyWv0E
  - j5r5myk 5y ago
    This is basically how all films are made now, even at the highest levels. I have worked on $100 million+ budget projects with Netflix and Apple. The amount of buying items to return within 30 days is absurd
    - Red_Leaves_Flyy 5y ago
      How is that not fraud? Hardware stores rent equipment for exactly these use cases..
      - j5r5myk 5y ago
        The stores don't like it. I know art directors who are banned from Ikea and Home Depot for returning ~$10,000 in a single month. At higher levels it's mostly Amazon returns. Mind you plenty of above board renting goes on as well
      - charwalker 5y ago
        If they catch you it's fraud. If they catch you much less often (or cheaper) than doing it the 'right' way then the for profit group will default to the cheaper option.
EliRivers 5y ago
This would explain why I've just seen it pulse towards the top of my seeded torrents today. I will be dragging this torrent around in my seeds until the day I die (or until some companies get together to eliminate torrents).
BuyMyBitcoins 5y ago
Regardless of what people think about copyright infringement, I see torrenting as an essential tool for the transmission and preservation of information. In this day and age of convoluted terms of services (TOS/TOC), xyz as a service/subscription, and just plain DRM, no one really owns anything anymore. No one can be sure what version they do have is the original and immutable version. Edits and omissions happen because of licensing issues and just plan social activism. Problematic content should be acknowledged but not purged and erased. It’s vital people have the means to share data regardless of what the powers that be allow to be shared. /soapbox
- IncRnd 5y ago
  > Problematic content should be acknowledged but not purged and erased. By problematic content, do you mean stolen content? What do you suggest other than purging and erasing stolen content?
  - matheusmoreira 5y ago
    By problematic he means stupid things like GTA Vice City losing parts of its original soundtrack due to idiotic copyright licensing issues and people having their games replaced with this "updated" version. Also, you can't steal data. Copying is not stealing.
    - handmodel 5y ago
      Jumping the fence at a concert and sitting in an empty seat is not stealing. But that doesn't mean it is moral, legal, or to the benefit of the musicians + concert venue that invested in the act.
      - albertgoeswoof 5y ago
        If that seat would remain empty otherwise, is it not more moral to fill it? After all who wants a concert with no fans
banana_giraffe 5y ago
Mildly interesting to see the recent peer counts for this torrent: https://imgur.com/a/ur0dUb8 https://imgur.com/a/ur0dUb8 Something like 10,000 peers have been keeping it alive for the past two years. Of course this mention is enough to drastically increase it's popularity.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
MomoXenosaga 5y ago
I'm a member of a private torrent site that has been around for 15 years whose very mission is preservation. Everything is well seeded even the obscure stuff. But it's impressive for a public tracker.
- voltaireodactyl 5y ago
  That sounds like a valuable and amazing resource, and something to which I’d enjoy contributing! Are they open to new members by any chance?
  - pessimizer 5y ago
    They are, but it's a little difficult (hence the longevity.) Now that you know it exists, a little determination will get you there, and it'd love to have you. Yes, it's good enough that this discussion can only possibly refer to one place.
    - sdenton4 5y ago
      ...Zion?
    - jumelles 5y ago
      Honestly you could be talking about several sites. MYS? HDB?
      - alternatetwo 5y ago
        MYS has been closed forever, so it can't be that one.
    - sugarpile 5y ago
      There’s no good general torrent site, don’t mislead people. Specialized, yes. General, no.
- 0des 5y ago
  Is there a word for this interaction, where an act is taking place with the knowledge that the action is characterized as 'wrong' but done anyway to achieve an outcome that is ultimately benevolent and a benefit to posterity?
ryanmm 5y ago
I remember using BitTorrent for the first time in the first half of 2003. I'm a bit surprised that absolutely none of those are still around.
- washadjeffmad 5y ago
  The commercial web devoured the concept of the internet as a place where information was freely shared between any and all minds. I exported my bookmarks frequently all the way back to the 90s, and practically none of the dozens and dozens of communities that I was a part of as late as the 00s are still around. I remember the year when the ad people started bullying the fan sites off the web because they were "stealing from creators"... by driving clicks away from traffic whoring aggregators that were worse, less curated, depersonalized, less focused in every way than what they cannibalized. The modern web feels so empty and full of darkness in comparison. Nothing in it seems like it matters unless it enriches someone else's mission of accumulating wealth, and everything else is villainized that doesn't signal loudly for the sake of the dragons how much it costs to keep the lights on. And I just realized the irony of saying this on HN.
hellbannedguy 5y ago
It's too bad what governments, big corporations, did to a great technology. I don't even go close to a torrent site anymore. It's just not worth being accused of something. And to the Copyright Net Nannies--what's the outcome? Musicians are paid less than before the crackdown. Books are selling at an all time low.
- nerdponx 5y ago
  It was never for the benefit of the musicians or the authors, it was for the benefit of the record labels/distributors and book publishers.
  - __MatrixMan__ 5y ago
    I think it was originally for the benefit of the church, who didn't want people remixing the bible. They just had to add sweetener for the publishers so that they'd cooperate in censorship that would otherwise be to their disadvantage.
    - nerdponx 5y ago
      There are copyright claims on the Christian bible?
      - MomoXenosaga 5y ago
        You'd be amazed, it gets a new retranslation/adaptation all the time. They don't give them away in a bookshop.
        wernercd 5y ago
        https://christianity.stackexchange.com/a/16378/586 https://christianity.stackexchange.com/a/16378/586 List (as of 2019) of public domain versions.
      - joshuaissac 5y ago
kimsant 5y ago
In Germany, using torrent means 700€ fine (ISP reports). The goal of this might be that they... - Want to punish people that can't do tunneling - Want to prevent content distribution - found a way to get money from foreigners that don't know (This happened to a friend of min, 1 month after he got installed in Hamburg) I hope is the 3rd
- firecall 5y ago
  So just using bit torrent gets you a fine!? Even for legitimate purposes?
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - iggldiggl 5y ago
    I think the OP is overdramatising a little. Torrenting content that you're allowed to redistribute is of course perfectly fine – what is happening is the usual procedure of rightsholders attempting to log IPs that are illegally uploading copyrighted content, obtaining the contact data of the person behind the IP from the ISP and then sending out a cease-and-desist order.
- rasz 5y ago
  Are you sure it isnt the case of a Prenda Law copycat? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prenda_Law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prenda_Law We had one in Poland few years back after UPC customer data leak (name/IP). They filed court pre trial papers and started extorting people, finally vanished after one of the prosecutors got interested.
petamask 5y ago
My partner and I were talking about Paprika. And how the file we downloaded didn't work halfway through. Realising we must have downloaded the same torrent long time ago. It was slightly romantic. Don't think I've ever really considered seeders and peers (prob peoplewith similar tasteas yours).
karmakaze 5y ago
What immediately came to mind wasn't this but an Aussie matrix spoof Computer Boy. Congrats go out to the Fanimatrix crew and BitTorrent for holding up as well as it has. There seems to be less BT piracy from what I can see/guess but what exists I wish was less of ripping off blockbusters and more of preserving abandoned gems.
- skeletonjelly 5y ago
  Wow! This short film is genuinely one of my favourites (and is generally under appreciated). The lead actor went on to be a very successful stage performer and I think he shied away from this film a bit. I remember pestering the director (who played Agent Smith) about 10 years ago to release a 1080p version. So happy to see someone else talking about it. Oh and I can't write a comment about it and not acknowledge the tragic passing of Michael Falzon. What a loss
mensetmanusman 5y ago
What if the BTC network was also a torrent back end.
- rasz 5y ago
  https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-47130268#:~:text=Images%20of%20child%20sexual%20abuse,by%20using%20a%20payment%20processor https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-47130268#:~:text=Images%....
jbj 5y ago
The Fanimatrix https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fanimatrix https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fanimatrix

278 points by uniqueid 5y ago

> easily saved hundreds of thousands of dollars in distribution costs For reference, a server in Germany in 2003 had bandwidth prices between €.8 and €2 per gigabyte [0] [0] https://web.archive.org/web/20030810125406/http://www.hetzner.de/pdf/DediServerTrafficModule.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20030810125406/http://www.hetzne...

matheusmoreira 5y ago
Makes me wonder how much unnecessary load these streaming services are placing on global networks. Problems created by copyright. How much cheaper, easier and more efficient would things be if we were allowed to use torrents for media distribution?
- mindslight 5y ago
  A CDN box at a datacenter or ISP is more efficient than uploading through the last mile, especially if that last mile is a half-duplex shared medium like cable. I'm pro-p2p, pro-home-servers, and pro-piracy, but I don't think it's necessarily more efficient in terms of network load.
  - Retric 5y ago
    Not in comparison to other customers closer than the ISP’s data center. BitTorrent has significant overhead but can scale really well for extremely popular downloads like the latest WoW patch at it’s peak. It’s really hard to beat when your exchanging data with a dozen people in the same apartment complex.
    - mindslight 5y ago
      Only if that apartment complex is wired with ethernet and a local switch [0]. GPON, cable, and DSL would all still go back to the ISP's core, transiting the last mile link twice. There are definitely efficiency gains to be had with decentralized identifiers and distributed systems, but with the centralized nature of the physical Internet they're not always a win. [0] or roommates want the same files and their router supports hairpin NAT or the software uses local segment discovery.
      - Retric 5y ago
        Last mile link twice, but still saves hops on an ISP’s core network as their CDN’s are still generally centralized.
  - AnthonyMouse 5y ago
    The network load from P2P is about the same as it is from a very well distributed CDN. In theory the CDN could be a little better, e.g. if the network topology is such that a user uploading to another user on the same segment has to make a round trip through the head end, that will be somewhat less efficient than a CDN box which is already at the head end. But not by a lot. Linearly worse, not polynomially or exponentially worse. And that's assuming the CDN is perfect. That it has a node in every place there are users. Which none of them actually do because the world is really big. Worse, the places without them are the places with the slowest networks in general. If you're using twice as much bandwidth on some 100Gbps piece of fiber in New York City, the users aren't even going to notice that and the ISP can just send more light through the glass. But when there are a hundred users sharing some 40Mbps microwave link in some third world village and all trying to download the same thing, there isn't going to be a CDN node there and only having to suck it through the straw once multiplies the efficiency improvement by the number of users on the far end of the line, which in that case would be a factor of a hundred. Moreover, you can get the efficiency benefit of the CDN by replacing the CDN box with a box in the same place that seeds popular content using a P2P protocol, without losing the efficiency benefits of P2P for the people not near one of those.
    - myself248 5y ago
      Thank you for saying, succinctly and clearly, what I've always figured was the case. However. If the majority of traffic came p2p, then the asymmetry of upload/download bandwidth on shared media like cable modems would start to be a significant issue, wouldn't it? Only on the local segment, but on _every_ such segment. In that case, the seedbox-as-CDN-node route would be a no-brainer for ISPs to install. Are we reinventing the topology of Usenet?
      - AnthonyMouse 5y ago
        Cable connections are typically asymmetric, but the average user doesn't max out their connection 100% of the time. Even if you have a 100 Mbps down 10 Mbps up connection, your average transfer rate might be 5 Mbps because most of the time your connection is idle. Which means you can feed it from peers with an upload cap of 5 Mbps, in theory, if they kept their uplinks saturated all the time. Or an upload cap of 10 Mbps if they all kept their uplinks half saturated all the time. And you can still get 100 Mbps downloads that way by downloading from multiple peers at once, which doesn't change the average transfer rate required from each peer because then twenty people upload at 5 Mbps for 10 seconds instead of one peer having to upload at 5 Mbps for 200 seconds to transfer the same amount of data. But the asymmetric link speed is artificial anyway. There is no technical reason they couldn't make fully symmetric cable modems -- in fact they did so in DOCSIS 4.0, though it's not widely deployed yet. The main reason they're hesitant to offer it is, ironically, that P2P isn't sufficiently widely used. Because then hosting is scarce and people will have the incentive to do high volume hosting on their own connections. Which is bad for the ISP who offers a fast uplink, because they rely on over-subscribing their connections to offer the prices they do. If you give someone a fast uplink, it's quite easy to saturate it 24/7 by serving files to millions of users. So the ISPs don't want to do that. But if P2P distribution was the default then that wouldn't be a problem because nobody would need to do that. You'd upload your thing once or some small number of times and then the users could get it from each other instead of millions of people all trying to get it from the one host. Everyone could have a 100 Mbps uplink and the average upload speed would still equal the average download speed, e.g. 5 Mbps, because that's all you need when the load is evenly distributed.
- cheschire 5y ago
  Streaming services are, for the most part, optimized to only send you a portion of the file at a time, send you lower bandwidth versions when the throughput drops below a threshold, or in the case of COVID lockdowns everyone temporarily dropped the max resolution of their services because there was a sudden surge in home media streaming. When it comes to video torrents, I suspect a lot of people would start at looking for 4k rips (even if their devices didn't support it), or fall back to standard bluray rips. That's a huge amount of bandwidth when most people probably are fine with DVD or upscaled DVD quality.
  - Aeolun 5y ago
    Hmm, personally I look for 720p. Who needs multiple 100gb files sitting around on their disk.
    - xvector 5y ago
      I spend many thousands on my AV setup so I'm inclined to max it out, even if that requires 100gb+ movies.
      - 55555 5y ago
        Wow you're really into Adult Video!
    - Dylan16807 5y ago
      With reasonable encoding settings, you can get pretty nice 1080p at 2GB/hour. 720p will save what, 40% of that? I don't need space that badly. I haven't really seen much 4k to know how I'll feel about that jump. Though I've definitely seen some split-screen streams where I wished it was 4k.
      - Aeolun 5y ago
        Hmm, anecdotally, 1h at 720p is like 600mb, where 1 hour at 1080p is 2600mb (for me, I assume it depends on encode settings like you say).

rhn_mk1 5y ago

An article about the oldest torrent and nary a magnet link in sight? Sure, there's the hash in the picture, but that's weak. What's the second oldest torrent? That's probably a better measure of the network health, because it doesn't get attention from articles about the oldest active torrent.

belter 5y ago
http://www.legittorrents.info/download.php?id=72c83366e95dd44cc85f26198ecc55f0f4576ad4&f=The%20Fanimatrix%20Run%20Program%20Full%20Release.torrent http://www.legittorrents.info/download.php?id=72c83366e95dd4...
em-bee 5y ago
What's the second oldest torrent? according to the thread here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10962253 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10962253 an article about the then believed to be oldest torrent, turned out to be a few months less old than this one, so we need to look for the third oldest now to get a good answer. on piratebay i found a torrent from 2008 that still works.
uniqueid 5y ago
The first torrent I, and probably quite a few others, ever downloaded was some Linux distro that Bram Cohen shared with the internet as a demo of the protocol.
- hedgehog 5y ago
  The first torrent I downloaded was one of the demo videos he put on his home page in 2001 (I think there were two). Never seen a reference to them since.
p1mrx 5y ago
magnet:?xt=urn:btih:72C83366E95DD44CC85F26198ECC55F0F4576AD4
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]

smoldesu 5y ago

Today I learned, The Animatrix and The Fanimatrix are separate, distinct films.

vmoore 5y ago
A lot of people learned that today.

cesarb 5y ago

Relevant: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10962253 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10962253 It's funny to be part of that history. As the article says, "for a file to live on, at least one person has to keep sharing it", and for a while, I was that person (see the comments on that HN post).

jghn 5y ago
About 10-15 years ago I went to download a torrent. It never had many seeders and got stuck at 94.8%. It was there for a few years. One day one of the very few, if not the only, humans with the whole torrent must have connected as it was 100%. Serendipity. And then about 5 years later I lost the files in a hard drive crash. Tried to grab the torrent again and all this time later it is sitting at, you guessed it, 94.8%.
- arthurcolle 5y ago
  What's the torrent?
  - jghn 5y ago
    A (mostly bootleg) video bundle from a not super popular band. I'm pretty sure everything in there is easily accessible via Youtube now but it's the principle of the thing
    - arthurcolle 5y ago
      yeah for sure, I was just curious - cheers
- leokennis 5y ago
  I once loooong ago tried downloading a rare music album but it was stuck at 99.8% with 0 seeders and 2 peers (including me) for months so I was pretty bummed. But I neglected to actually check the download folder. When I did, I found out it actually downloaded all the important files, just the logo of the upload group was still a .part file… So I quickly downloaded another more popular release by the same group, copied over the logo and lo and behold, now it got to 100%! That day I actually felt like a hacker…

dewlinedew2 5y ago

"With a limited budget of just $800, nearly half of which was spent on a leather jacket" -- plus we finally know how much clothes cost in the Matrix

dharmab 5y ago
"We couldn't afford a wind machine for this shot, so we bought a leaf blower from a hardware store. We kept the receipt, so we can return it after we're done." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G025oxyWv0E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G025oxyWv0E
- j5r5myk 5y ago
  This is basically how all films are made now, even at the highest levels. I have worked on $100 million+ budget projects with Netflix and Apple. The amount of buying items to return within 30 days is absurd
  - Red_Leaves_Flyy 5y ago
    How is that not fraud? Hardware stores rent equipment for exactly these use cases..
    - j5r5myk 5y ago
      The stores don't like it. I know art directors who are banned from Ikea and Home Depot for returning ~$10,000 in a single month. At higher levels it's mostly Amazon returns. Mind you plenty of above board renting goes on as well
    - charwalker 5y ago
      If they catch you it's fraud. If they catch you much less often (or cheaper) than doing it the 'right' way then the for profit group will default to the cheaper option.

EliRivers 5y ago

This would explain why I've just seen it pulse towards the top of my seeded torrents today. I will be dragging this torrent around in my seeds until the day I die (or until some companies get together to eliminate torrents).

BuyMyBitcoins 5y ago

Regardless of what people think about copyright infringement, I see torrenting as an essential tool for the transmission and preservation of information. In this day and age of convoluted terms of services (TOS/TOC), xyz as a service/subscription, and just plain DRM, no one really owns anything anymore. No one can be sure what version they do have is the original and immutable version. Edits and omissions happen because of licensing issues and just plan social activism. Problematic content should be acknowledged but not purged and erased. It’s vital people have the means to share data regardless of what the powers that be allow to be shared. /soapbox

IncRnd 5y ago
> Problematic content should be acknowledged but not purged and erased. By problematic content, do you mean stolen content? What do you suggest other than purging and erasing stolen content?
- matheusmoreira 5y ago
  By problematic he means stupid things like GTA Vice City losing parts of its original soundtrack due to idiotic copyright licensing issues and people having their games replaced with this "updated" version. Also, you can't steal data. Copying is not stealing.
  - handmodel 5y ago
    Jumping the fence at a concert and sitting in an empty seat is not stealing. But that doesn't mean it is moral, legal, or to the benefit of the musicians + concert venue that invested in the act.
    - albertgoeswoof 5y ago
      If that seat would remain empty otherwise, is it not more moral to fill it? After all who wants a concert with no fans

banana_giraffe 5y ago

Mildly interesting to see the recent peer counts for this torrent: https://imgur.com/a/ur0dUb8 https://imgur.com/a/ur0dUb8 Something like 10,000 peers have been keeping it alive for the past two years. Of course this mention is enough to drastically increase it's popularity.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

MomoXenosaga 5y ago

I'm a member of a private torrent site that has been around for 15 years whose very mission is preservation. Everything is well seeded even the obscure stuff. But it's impressive for a public tracker.

voltaireodactyl 5y ago
That sounds like a valuable and amazing resource, and something to which I’d enjoy contributing! Are they open to new members by any chance?
- pessimizer 5y ago
  They are, but it's a little difficult (hence the longevity.) Now that you know it exists, a little determination will get you there, and it'd love to have you. Yes, it's good enough that this discussion can only possibly refer to one place.
  - sdenton4 5y ago
    ...Zion?
  - jumelles 5y ago
    Honestly you could be talking about several sites. MYS? HDB?
    - alternatetwo 5y ago
      MYS has been closed forever, so it can't be that one.
  - sugarpile 5y ago
    There’s no good general torrent site, don’t mislead people. Specialized, yes. General, no.
0des 5y ago
Is there a word for this interaction, where an act is taking place with the knowledge that the action is characterized as 'wrong' but done anyway to achieve an outcome that is ultimately benevolent and a benefit to posterity?

ryanmm 5y ago

I remember using BitTorrent for the first time in the first half of 2003. I'm a bit surprised that absolutely none of those are still around.

washadjeffmad 5y ago
The commercial web devoured the concept of the internet as a place where information was freely shared between any and all minds. I exported my bookmarks frequently all the way back to the 90s, and practically none of the dozens and dozens of communities that I was a part of as late as the 00s are still around. I remember the year when the ad people started bullying the fan sites off the web because they were "stealing from creators"... by driving clicks away from traffic whoring aggregators that were worse, less curated, depersonalized, less focused in every way than what they cannibalized. The modern web feels so empty and full of darkness in comparison. Nothing in it seems like it matters unless it enriches someone else's mission of accumulating wealth, and everything else is villainized that doesn't signal loudly for the sake of the dragons how much it costs to keep the lights on. And I just realized the irony of saying this on HN.

hellbannedguy 5y ago

It's too bad what governments, big corporations, did to a great technology. I don't even go close to a torrent site anymore. It's just not worth being accused of something. And to the Copyright Net Nannies--what's the outcome? Musicians are paid less than before the crackdown. Books are selling at an all time low.

nerdponx 5y ago
It was never for the benefit of the musicians or the authors, it was for the benefit of the record labels/distributors and book publishers.
- __MatrixMan__ 5y ago
  I think it was originally for the benefit of the church, who didn't want people remixing the bible. They just had to add sweetener for the publishers so that they'd cooperate in censorship that would otherwise be to their disadvantage.
  - nerdponx 5y ago
    There are copyright claims on the Christian bible?
    - MomoXenosaga 5y ago
      You'd be amazed, it gets a new retranslation/adaptation all the time. They don't give them away in a bookshop.
      - wernercd 5y ago
        https://christianity.stackexchange.com/a/16378/586 https://christianity.stackexchange.com/a/16378/586 List (as of 2019) of public domain versions.
    - joshuaissac 5y ago

kimsant 5y ago

In Germany, using torrent means 700€ fine (ISP reports). The goal of this might be that they... - Want to punish people that can't do tunneling - Want to prevent content distribution - found a way to get money from foreigners that don't know (This happened to a friend of min, 1 month after he got installed in Hamburg) I hope is the 3rd

firecall 5y ago
So just using bit torrent gets you a fine!? Even for legitimate purposes?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- iggldiggl 5y ago
  I think the OP is overdramatising a little. Torrenting content that you're allowed to redistribute is of course perfectly fine – what is happening is the usual procedure of rightsholders attempting to log IPs that are illegally uploading copyrighted content, obtaining the contact data of the person behind the IP from the ISP and then sending out a cease-and-desist order.
rasz 5y ago
Are you sure it isnt the case of a Prenda Law copycat? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prenda_Law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prenda_Law We had one in Poland few years back after UPC customer data leak (name/IP). They filed court pre trial papers and started extorting people, finally vanished after one of the prosecutors got interested.

petamask 5y ago

My partner and I were talking about Paprika. And how the file we downloaded didn't work halfway through. Realising we must have downloaded the same torrent long time ago. It was slightly romantic. Don't think I've ever really considered seeders and peers (prob peoplewith similar tasteas yours).

karmakaze 5y ago

What immediately came to mind wasn't this but an Aussie matrix spoof Computer Boy. Congrats go out to the Fanimatrix crew and BitTorrent for holding up as well as it has. There seems to be less BT piracy from what I can see/guess but what exists I wish was less of ripping off blockbusters and more of preserving abandoned gems.

skeletonjelly 5y ago
Wow! This short film is genuinely one of my favourites (and is generally under appreciated). The lead actor went on to be a very successful stage performer and I think he shied away from this film a bit. I remember pestering the director (who played Agent Smith) about 10 years ago to release a 1080p version. So happy to see someone else talking about it. Oh and I can't write a comment about it and not acknowledge the tragic passing of Michael Falzon. What a loss

mensetmanusman 5y ago

What if the BTC network was also a torrent back end.

rasz 5y ago
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-47130268#:~:text=Images%20of%20child%20sexual%20abuse,by%20using%20a%20payment%20processor https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-47130268#:~:text=Images%....

jbj 5y ago

The Fanimatrix https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fanimatrix https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fanimatrix