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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 p

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
  > 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. Of course you have a reason you don't want to run a tracker. Running services is overhead and keeping them up constantly is a pain. (One of the announcements pointed out that torrents from one site and the corresponding content remained available for months after that site went down because of the use of DHT.)
- jrockway 17y ago
  Uh, what? Decentralization greatly increases the reliability of the system. All of the Internet's successful systems are decentralized; the web, email, routing, DNS, etc. While decentralization does protect against lawsuits, it also protects against power outages, network outages, "I don't feel like paying for this domain name anymore", and so on. I will conclude with a thought experiment: Do you know how to host a small file over HTTP? Do you know how to setup and maintain a Bittorrent tracker? If you answered yes to the first question but no to the second question, decentralized tracking is for you.
  - pyre 17y ago
    > All of the Internet's successful systems are decentralized HTTP hosting is decentralized and not decentralized. If I run an Apache server hosting my website, it's centralized. Everyone that wants to access my website has to go through my server. They don't have to go through my server to access the whole internet net though. The internet -- for the most part -- is globally decentralized, but locally centralized. It's the same with Bittorrent and trackers. If a tracker goes down, someone else can start up a new tracker that is serving the same torrent. It's not centralized the way something like Scour.net or Napster were (all peer-finding goes through the same servers). > Decentralization greatly increases the reliability of the system. Not necessarily. If you have two groups of 20 peers that are only connected to each other by a single peer, what happens when that one peer goes down? It's now impossible for those two groups to find each other. And consider that it's a lot more likely for a single peer in a torrent swarm to go down (someone's computer crashes, close the torrent, residential internet goes down) than it is for a centrally hosted tracker that is probably on a dedicated server in a colo somewhere. PEX from Wikipedia: While it may improve (local) performance and robustness—e.g. if a tracker is slow or even down—heavy reliance on PEX can lead to the formation of groups of peers who tend to only share information with each other, which may yield slow propagation of data through the network, due to few peers sending information to those outside the group they are in.

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
> 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. Of course you have a reason you don't want to run a tracker. Running services is overhead and keeping them up constantly is a pain. (One of the announcements pointed out that torrents from one site and the corresponding content remained available for months after that site went down because of the use of DHT.)
jrockway 17y ago
Uh, what? Decentralization greatly increases the reliability of the system. All of the Internet's successful systems are decentralized; the web, email, routing, DNS, etc. While decentralization does protect against lawsuits, it also protects against power outages, network outages, "I don't feel like paying for this domain name anymore", and so on. I will conclude with a thought experiment: Do you know how to host a small file over HTTP? Do you know how to setup and maintain a Bittorrent tracker? If you answered yes to the first question but no to the second question, decentralized tracking is for you.
- pyre 17y ago
  > All of the Internet's successful systems are decentralized HTTP hosting is decentralized and not decentralized. If I run an Apache server hosting my website, it's centralized. Everyone that wants to access my website has to go through my server. They don't have to go through my server to access the whole internet net though. The internet -- for the most part -- is globally decentralized, but locally centralized. It's the same with Bittorrent and trackers. If a tracker goes down, someone else can start up a new tracker that is serving the same torrent. It's not centralized the way something like Scour.net or Napster were (all peer-finding goes through the same servers). > Decentralization greatly increases the reliability of the system. Not necessarily. If you have two groups of 20 peers that are only connected to each other by a single peer, what happens when that one peer goes down? It's now impossible for those two groups to find each other. And consider that it's a lot more likely for a single peer in a torrent swarm to go down (someone's computer crashes, close the torrent, residential internet goes down) than it is for a centrally hosted tracker that is probably on a dedicated server in a colo somewhere. PEX from Wikipedia: While it may improve (local) performance and robustness—e.g. if a tracker is slow or even down—heavy reliance on PEX can lead to the formation of groups of peers who tend to only share information with each other, which may yield slow propagation of data through the network, due to few peers sending information to those outside the group they are in.