5 ms·

End of an Era: Pirate Bay Tracker Shuts Down

72 points by Chirag 17y ago

keatsta 17y ago
It seems that the general shift in the torrenting community has been towards private trackers anyways. The average pirate seems more interested now in finding good quality releases and obscure content. Also, private sites are usually safer to use on the legal side of it. Of course, I may just be projecting my own opinions onto a community in which I may be atypical.
- pyre 17y ago
  > private sites are usually safer to use on the legal side of it. Why's that? It's not like it's impossible for a PI to infiltrate one of these private trackers. Once the tracker is sued/confiscated, they usually have all kinds of information about you. I joined what.cd just to see what these private trackers were like and they asked my a ton of questions. From 'where do you live' and 'what type of 'net connection do you have' to 'do you know the difference between encoding X and encoding Y' and 'look at these spectral analysis of a music file, which one was converted from mp3->flac instead of source->flac'. Of course, I don't know how much of that they actually keep on file vs. just running you through the 'gauntlet' to filter out flakey people.
socram2k 17y ago
long live TPB!
- henning 17y ago
  copyright infringement is awesome!
niyazpk 17y ago
I guess that the RIAAs of the world will be suing bittorrent users now that there isn't anyone else to sue.
genieyclo 17y ago
Misleading title. TPB is not dead; it just isn't a tracker anymore.
- henrikschroder 17y ago
  Well, it is an end of an era, the illegal P2P distribution of copyrighted material is now completely decentralized, which means that the content industry has no easy target they can try to shut down to disrupt the distribution.
  - genieyclo 17y ago
    Yet from the title it looks like TPB as an entity is dead. Definitely misleading. Of course, sensational headlines get higher page hits for Mashable. And all p2p transfer of torrents is not illegal copyrighted material.
    - henrikschroder 17y ago
      I did not say all torrent traffic was illegal, but if you're legally distributing content through BitTorrent, you have no reason not to use a tracker. This means that the majority of trackerless torrent traffic will be illegal.
      - Quiark 17y ago
        > trackerless torrent traffic How do you do that? I heard about something like this some time ago, but that's all I know.
        sp332 17y ago
        http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_hash_table http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_hash_table http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peer_exchange http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peer_exchange
      - anamax 17y ago
rscott 17y ago
Forgive me, I read the article I just know little about BitTorrent. So people can still add torrents and they will work for others, it just uses a decentralized solution to find peers rather than asking TPB's tracker? So, nothing is really changing except the way your client is working?
- NikkiA 17y ago
  Pretty much, yeah, TPB will presumably only be publishing DHT/MAGNET links from their index, which are able to automatically find peers/seeds in a decentralised manner. ... upon looking, they still seem to publish .torrents for now, but the huge magnet icon on their home page pretty much tells it all :)
  - oikujhgfvg 17y ago
    So why won't hosting the link be aiding and abetting copyright violation?
    - pyre 17y ago
      I suspect that the lack of a tracker helps them out more (legally) than hosting .torrent files vs magnet urls.
    - NikkiA 17y ago
      Because the link doesn't point to an actual resource anywhere, it's just a hash of the file in question. That doesn't mean the MPAA won't try, they've argued that file hashs are equivalent to the file before, and they may win in the US, however, I'm not sure that arguement would hold up in the EU due to the possibility of hash collisions, and the fact that you can't make the file from the hash.
- GrandMasterBirt 17y ago
  Yes and no. Currently sites like torrentz.com give multiple trackers for torrents so that you can get the best set of peers/seeds for a torrent. These sites are going to become moot. Also the legal issues associated with running TPB is going to literally go away for all future business. TPB can't be held responsible for holding an MD5 hash of a file, since they don't host trackers anymore they won't be responsible for even facilitating anything. Basically the record industries have to go after the customers yet again. The only thing left is an IP masker mechanism which is super easy to use in torrents and torrents will become completely untraceable :P ok fine someone will find a way.
dkersten 17y ago
Meh, who cares. I'm surprised it (the tracker) lasted as long as it did really. Anyway, the majority of pirates I know appear to have moved or be moving on to the likes of megaupload and rapidshare and such anyway, it seems. I don't really care for TPB, I don't think it provided anything useful for me. Bittorrent is a useful tool for sharing things like isos, but I don't need TPB for that.
- genieyclo 17y ago
  Got numbers?
  - dkersten 17y ago
    Of course not, but I haven't heard much buzz about torrenting things in quite a while. A few years back, there was always people going on about it. Now the latest fad seems to be megaupload and rapidshare style sites.
    - henrikschroder 17y ago
      That can only work for so long since those services are centralized. If a large amount of copyrighted material is distributed illegally through those services, they will be targeted very quickly by the content industry and either be shut down, or forced to screen all material.
      - josefresco 17y ago
        The only reason RS and MU are still around is because they aren't (and never were) the 'real' problem. If the casual pirates move there (as a result of TPB) you're right, it's an easy kill for the industry.
      - CWuestefeld 17y ago
        Anecdotally and from personal observation, piracy through these channels seem to be huge. There have been some new records released recently, and when I was searching for reviews of them, some of the top Google results were actually links to rapidshare and its ilk.
selven 17y ago
Pirates aren't going anywhere. One site shuts down, 5 more pop up. It's an impossible game of whack-a-mole. This isn't a statement in favor of or against copyright infringement, it's a simple fact.
- GrandMasterBirt 17y ago
  As one other post said, TPB is not shutting down, but marking the end of an era where trackers were needed. Trackerless torrents are going to become vastly popular very very soon. This is great. Basically the authorities are fighting a superior technology with nothing but the greatest of benefits: everyone contributes when downloading, so the load is not 100% on the server to serve the content. And the authorities are not giving good alternatives. ISPs are not working together with bt developers to make a protocol friendly for everyone, instead they are fighting to keep the protocol down. O well I like the part about the servers being given to a museum.
- henrikschroder 17y ago
  Funnily enough, the mechanisms behind pirate markets are very well understood, they appear when there is a large discrepancy between how consumers value a goods in a market, and the price of the goods in that market.
  - chaosmachine 17y ago
    Is 99 cents a large discrepancy? iPhone apps sell for less than a dollar, and still get pirated in large numbers.
    - mmelin 17y ago
      The difference between $0.00 and $0.99 isn't simply 99 cents. It's the difference between no money (free) and some money, which is probably the single largest price discrepancy there is.
      - jacquesm 17y ago
deleted 17y ago
[deleted]
fiaz 17y ago
When will the RIAA and MPAA realize that trying to suppress technology is like trying to kick your way out of quicksand? This is indeed a win for them in the short term, but the way I see it, technology is evolving in response to whatever legal challenges are presented.
- amackera 17y ago
  Yeah and it's not really a win for them since the technology has advanced to the point where decentralisation is possible.
- nadam 17y ago
  For me it is more complicated than that. Whether humanity accepts 'Copyright laws' is more an ethical issue for me than technical. A more trivial (and a bit demagog) example: if technology enables the creation of very cheap and very effective weapons, people still should not shoot each other, and there should be some regulations which in a way 'suppress technology'. The real question is that will humanity morally accept or reject the concept we call 'copyright'.
  - fiaz 17y ago
    Good response...I was thinking more at the level of legal law versus technological capability, kind of like an input/output or action/reaction mechanism. When it comes to the ethics of copyright law, it boils down to economics. The consumer will always seek to purchase at the lowest price possible, and the corporation will always seek to sell at the highest price possible. Each side is driven by the ethics of what they determine to be "fair" and getting each other to agree on this will be impossible. Netflix really "gets" the consumer argument for movies. I absolutely think the $10/month fee that I pay (probably a bit less than that) is a bargain and would gladly pay twice as much, but in all likelihood this price is going to go down over time. If the RIAA/MPAA were to take that example and provide us with such a service, then it would make economics-driven ethical sense.
    - trafficlight 17y ago
ivenkys 17y ago
Ah well , TPB tracker has been irrelevant for a while anyway, this just makes it formal. What would really be news is - completely anonymous torrenting.
- eru 17y ago
  Doesn't putting tor underneath suffice?
  - ivenkys 17y ago
    Tor has well known issues with the Bit Torrent protocol, tangentially there was a well known exploit where someone running a Tor exit node ended up capturing all to and fro traffic.
  - aw3c2 17y ago
    No, don't do that. If you want well-working and most appreciated filesharing on an anonymous network, please join us I2P fans: http://www.i2p2.de http://www.i2p2.de
- stse 17y ago
  Anonymous networks doesn't really help if you are liable for traffic passing through you, like with recent actions against ISPs. I think the future is trust-based networks like friend-to-friend. When broadband speed averages increases, it will become feasible to relay traffic through trusted peers.
viraptor 17y ago
Not entirely on-topic, but I was looking through the newsgroup warez search-engines yesterday with friends and we were wondering - why doesn't anyone sue those sites? It's a much easier target than TPB - they receive money directly from users and host the files themselves. They officially run a business based on illegal sharing. Yet I haven't heard of them having any large legal problems. Sites that get sued are usually torrent trackers can always argue they don't earn money on this and don't know the contents themselves. Why are they going after the hard to get targets, while the obvious main distribution sites are still running?
- InclinedPlane 17y ago
  Geography. Hosting a paid warez site from, say, Russia or China is much safer (from prosecution) than hosting a torrent tracker from Sweden.
  - viraptor 17y ago
    Do you really believe that there are no US/CA entities simply buying the hosting package in another country to provide this service? I don't have a proof that it's not true, but it just seems really unlikely. Also - querying (for example) Giganews location I get "Data Foundry, Inc., Austin, TX, US". This really shouldn't be a problem for US lawyers...
    - eru 17y ago
      Perhaps because their price for customers is strictly greater than zero, their user base is limited?
      - pyre 17y ago
        Hit the nail on the head. For a lot of people USENET is out of their depth. The media companies know about USENET, they have to, but it's not the current popular form of distribution. Even if bittorrent were to disappear, it seems more likely that sites like Rapidshare would be the next 'mainstream' distribution method. Besides that, when it comes to bittorrent the end-users have to do some uploading while on the torrent, so the media companies can nail them for distribution. If someone is just downloading content, it's harder to punish them -- from a legal standpoint -- then if you can get them for distributing content.
c00p3r 17y ago
which means more profit to remaining pirates...

72 points by Chirag 17y ago

It seems that the general shift in the torrenting community has been towards private trackers anyways. The average pirate seems more interested now in finding good quality releases and obscure content. Also, private sites are usually safer to use on the legal side of it. Of course, I may just be projecting my own opinions onto a community in which I may be atypical.

pyre 17y ago
> private sites are usually safer to use on the legal side of it. Why's that? It's not like it's impossible for a PI to infiltrate one of these private trackers. Once the tracker is sued/confiscated, they usually have all kinds of information about you. I joined what.cd just to see what these private trackers were like and they asked my a ton of questions. From 'where do you live' and 'what type of 'net connection do you have' to 'do you know the difference between encoding X and encoding Y' and 'look at these spectral analysis of a music file, which one was converted from mp3->flac instead of source->flac'. Of course, I don't know how much of that they actually keep on file vs. just running you through the 'gauntlet' to filter out flakey people.

socram2k 17y ago

long live TPB!

henning 17y ago
copyright infringement is awesome!

niyazpk 17y ago

I guess that the RIAAs of the world will be suing bittorrent users now that there isn't anyone else to sue.

genieyclo 17y ago

Misleading title. TPB is not dead; it just isn't a tracker anymore.

henrikschroder 17y ago
Well, it is an end of an era, the illegal P2P distribution of copyrighted material is now completely decentralized, which means that the content industry has no easy target they can try to shut down to disrupt the distribution.
- genieyclo 17y ago
  Yet from the title it looks like TPB as an entity is dead. Definitely misleading. Of course, sensational headlines get higher page hits for Mashable. And all p2p transfer of torrents is not illegal copyrighted material.
  - henrikschroder 17y ago
    I did not say all torrent traffic was illegal, but if you're legally distributing content through BitTorrent, you have no reason not to use a tracker. This means that the majority of trackerless torrent traffic will be illegal.
    - Quiark 17y ago
      > trackerless torrent traffic How do you do that? I heard about something like this some time ago, but that's all I know.
      - sp332 17y ago
        http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_hash_table http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_hash_table http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peer_exchange http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peer_exchange
    - anamax 17y ago

rscott 17y ago

Forgive me, I read the article I just know little about BitTorrent. So people can still add torrents and they will work for others, it just uses a decentralized solution to find peers rather than asking TPB's tracker? So, nothing is really changing except the way your client is working?

NikkiA 17y ago
Pretty much, yeah, TPB will presumably only be publishing DHT/MAGNET links from their index, which are able to automatically find peers/seeds in a decentralised manner. ... upon looking, they still seem to publish .torrents for now, but the huge magnet icon on their home page pretty much tells it all :)
- oikujhgfvg 17y ago
  So why won't hosting the link be aiding and abetting copyright violation?
  - pyre 17y ago
    I suspect that the lack of a tracker helps them out more (legally) than hosting .torrent files vs magnet urls.
  - NikkiA 17y ago
    Because the link doesn't point to an actual resource anywhere, it's just a hash of the file in question. That doesn't mean the MPAA won't try, they've argued that file hashs are equivalent to the file before, and they may win in the US, however, I'm not sure that arguement would hold up in the EU due to the possibility of hash collisions, and the fact that you can't make the file from the hash.
GrandMasterBirt 17y ago
Yes and no. Currently sites like torrentz.com give multiple trackers for torrents so that you can get the best set of peers/seeds for a torrent. These sites are going to become moot. Also the legal issues associated with running TPB is going to literally go away for all future business. TPB can't be held responsible for holding an MD5 hash of a file, since they don't host trackers anymore they won't be responsible for even facilitating anything. Basically the record industries have to go after the customers yet again. The only thing left is an IP masker mechanism which is super easy to use in torrents and torrents will become completely untraceable :P ok fine someone will find a way.

dkersten 17y ago

Meh, who cares. I'm surprised it (the tracker) lasted as long as it did really. Anyway, the majority of pirates I know appear to have moved or be moving on to the likes of megaupload and rapidshare and such anyway, it seems. I don't really care for TPB, I don't think it provided anything useful for me. Bittorrent is a useful tool for sharing things like isos, but I don't need TPB for that.

genieyclo 17y ago
Got numbers?
- dkersten 17y ago
  Of course not, but I haven't heard much buzz about torrenting things in quite a while. A few years back, there was always people going on about it. Now the latest fad seems to be megaupload and rapidshare style sites.
  - henrikschroder 17y ago
    That can only work for so long since those services are centralized. If a large amount of copyrighted material is distributed illegally through those services, they will be targeted very quickly by the content industry and either be shut down, or forced to screen all material.
    - josefresco 17y ago
      The only reason RS and MU are still around is because they aren't (and never were) the 'real' problem. If the casual pirates move there (as a result of TPB) you're right, it's an easy kill for the industry.
    - CWuestefeld 17y ago
      Anecdotally and from personal observation, piracy through these channels seem to be huge. There have been some new records released recently, and when I was searching for reviews of them, some of the top Google results were actually links to rapidshare and its ilk.

selven 17y ago

Pirates aren't going anywhere. One site shuts down, 5 more pop up. It's an impossible game of whack-a-mole. This isn't a statement in favor of or against copyright infringement, it's a simple fact.

GrandMasterBirt 17y ago
As one other post said, TPB is not shutting down, but marking the end of an era where trackers were needed. Trackerless torrents are going to become vastly popular very very soon. This is great. Basically the authorities are fighting a superior technology with nothing but the greatest of benefits: everyone contributes when downloading, so the load is not 100% on the server to serve the content. And the authorities are not giving good alternatives. ISPs are not working together with bt developers to make a protocol friendly for everyone, instead they are fighting to keep the protocol down. O well I like the part about the servers being given to a museum.
henrikschroder 17y ago
Funnily enough, the mechanisms behind pirate markets are very well understood, they appear when there is a large discrepancy between how consumers value a goods in a market, and the price of the goods in that market.
- chaosmachine 17y ago
  Is 99 cents a large discrepancy? iPhone apps sell for less than a dollar, and still get pirated in large numbers.
  - mmelin 17y ago
    The difference between $0.00 and $0.99 isn't simply 99 cents. It's the difference between no money (free) and some money, which is probably the single largest price discrepancy there is.
    - jacquesm 17y ago

deleted 17y ago

[deleted]

fiaz 17y ago

When will the RIAA and MPAA realize that trying to suppress technology is like trying to kick your way out of quicksand? This is indeed a win for them in the short term, but the way I see it, technology is evolving in response to whatever legal challenges are presented.

amackera 17y ago
Yeah and it's not really a win for them since the technology has advanced to the point where decentralisation is possible.
nadam 17y ago
For me it is more complicated than that. Whether humanity accepts 'Copyright laws' is more an ethical issue for me than technical. A more trivial (and a bit demagog) example: if technology enables the creation of very cheap and very effective weapons, people still should not shoot each other, and there should be some regulations which in a way 'suppress technology'. The real question is that will humanity morally accept or reject the concept we call 'copyright'.
- fiaz 17y ago
  Good response...I was thinking more at the level of legal law versus technological capability, kind of like an input/output or action/reaction mechanism. When it comes to the ethics of copyright law, it boils down to economics. The consumer will always seek to purchase at the lowest price possible, and the corporation will always seek to sell at the highest price possible. Each side is driven by the ethics of what they determine to be "fair" and getting each other to agree on this will be impossible. Netflix really "gets" the consumer argument for movies. I absolutely think the $10/month fee that I pay (probably a bit less than that) is a bargain and would gladly pay twice as much, but in all likelihood this price is going to go down over time. If the RIAA/MPAA were to take that example and provide us with such a service, then it would make economics-driven ethical sense.
  - trafficlight 17y ago

ivenkys 17y ago

Ah well , TPB tracker has been irrelevant for a while anyway, this just makes it formal. What would really be news is - completely anonymous torrenting.

eru 17y ago
Doesn't putting tor underneath suffice?
- ivenkys 17y ago
  Tor has well known issues with the Bit Torrent protocol, tangentially there was a well known exploit where someone running a Tor exit node ended up capturing all to and fro traffic.
- aw3c2 17y ago
  No, don't do that. If you want well-working and most appreciated filesharing on an anonymous network, please join us I2P fans: http://www.i2p2.de http://www.i2p2.de
stse 17y ago
Anonymous networks doesn't really help if you are liable for traffic passing through you, like with recent actions against ISPs. I think the future is trust-based networks like friend-to-friend. When broadband speed averages increases, it will become feasible to relay traffic through trusted peers.

viraptor 17y ago

Not entirely on-topic, but I was looking through the newsgroup warez search-engines yesterday with friends and we were wondering - why doesn't anyone sue those sites? It's a much easier target than TPB - they receive money directly from users and host the files themselves. They officially run a business based on illegal sharing. Yet I haven't heard of them having any large legal problems. Sites that get sued are usually torrent trackers can always argue they don't earn money on this and don't know the contents themselves. Why are they going after the hard to get targets, while the obvious main distribution sites are still running?

InclinedPlane 17y ago
Geography. Hosting a paid warez site from, say, Russia or China is much safer (from prosecution) than hosting a torrent tracker from Sweden.
- viraptor 17y ago
  Do you really believe that there are no US/CA entities simply buying the hosting package in another country to provide this service? I don't have a proof that it's not true, but it just seems really unlikely. Also - querying (for example) Giganews location I get "Data Foundry, Inc., Austin, TX, US". This really shouldn't be a problem for US lawyers...
  - eru 17y ago
    Perhaps because their price for customers is strictly greater than zero, their user base is limited?
    - pyre 17y ago
      Hit the nail on the head. For a lot of people USENET is out of their depth. The media companies know about USENET, they have to, but it's not the current popular form of distribution. Even if bittorrent were to disappear, it seems more likely that sites like Rapidshare would be the next 'mainstream' distribution method. Besides that, when it comes to bittorrent the end-users have to do some uploading while on the torrent, so the media companies can nail them for distribution. If someone is just downloading content, it's harder to punish them -- from a legal standpoint -- then if you can get them for distributing content.

c00p3r 17y ago

which means more profit to remaining pirates...