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ExtraTorrent Shuts Down for Good

torrentfreak.com

11–20 of 86 posts

Re: ExtraTorrent Shuts Down for Good

#11

I was about to add them to our tracker list. :( 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?

Perhaps your project can include a "memorial" in the readme or some other wiki page as sites shutdown, including the site url, any claim to fame, and the date it died. This page may eventually serve this purpose: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_BitTorrent_sites

As it is, if you were to [edit:actually link] the list of sites you currently support I'm certain your project would draw some unwanted attention!

Re: ExtraTorrent Shuts Down for Good

#12

I was about to add them to our tracker list. :( 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?

>Why are their costs so high if they can just host magnet links and cache the site with Varnish or something similar?

Just from personal experience, but here is my view of it.

A good search engine for millions of torrents costs several hundred a month. Scrapers to keep torrent seeders / leechers up to date cost another fifty to hundred (depending on how up to date you want your torrents). Now add in a few website servers and a load balancer for another hundred or two. You are looking at three to five hundred a month. Doesn't seem like a lot, but this is just a smallish torrent site. Isn't large enough to generate ad revenue or have enough donators to keep running. Maintaining that by yourself soon get's expensive unless you have a good job with plenty of disposable income.

Re: ExtraTorrent Shuts Down for Good

#13

I was about to add them to our tracker list. :( 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?

Related project: https://github.com/kevinlynx/dhtcrawler2

DHT crawler written in erlang. It can join a DHT network and crawl many P2P torrents. The program save all torrent info into database and provide an http interface to search a torrent by a keyword

Re: ExtraTorrent Shuts Down for Good

#14
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/ exists, but nobody is using it.

Re: ExtraTorrent Shuts Down for Good

#15

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.

Expensive lawyers yes, loss of income, probably not much. The majority of torrent users are not likely to suddenly pay for the same content.

Re: ExtraTorrent Shuts Down for Good

#16
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

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

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.

Re: ExtraTorrent Shuts Down for Good

#17

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.

Expensive lawyers yes, loss of income, probably not much. The majority of torrent users are not likely to suddenly pay for the same content.

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.

Re: ExtraTorrent Shuts Down for Good

#18

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/ exists, but nobody is using it.

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.

Re: ExtraTorrent Shuts Down for Good

#19

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/ exists, but nobody is using it.

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).
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