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ExtraTorrent Shuts Down for Good

torrentfreak.com

41–50 of 86 posts

Re: ExtraTorrent Shuts Down for Good

#41

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?

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!

isohunt was later but was also really good for quite a while.

Re: ExtraTorrent Shuts Down for Good

#42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Has anything close popped back up yet? There was stuff that I couldn't even buy if I wanted to.

Yes actually: redacted.ch is the continuation of it. Quite a large community at the moment. I would however say that the original torrents that were uploaded when they first re-opened it (it was called Pass The Headphones) a lot of the torrents were junk, but the moderators have done a wonderful job allowing torrents to be "trumped".

Does it come close to Oink's pink palace? For me what.cd and waffles.fm never came close to the community there.

Re: ExtraTorrent Shuts Down for Good

#43

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.

People flock to huge public trackers and reputable private ones for the accuracy of finding what you are looking for. On fully distributed systems, anyone can call anything whatever they want, and you need an authorship or rating system for users to give support to reputable sources.

I don't believe any decentralized network, including ipfs, has come up with a way for consensus accreditation of a source as being legitimate. If you look for a movie on piratebay, you have the ratings users give the torrents, the comments they write on it, and the number of active swarmers on that torrent all as credence to the legitimacy of it. If you lose any of that information you lose accuracy in finding what you actually want.

Re: ExtraTorrent Shuts Down for Good

#44
post #37

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?

no RARBG? There was an article on HN recently about automatically bypassing their anti-scraping measures. Interesting read.

Rarbg has an API, they actually let me know in my PR to include Rarbg: https://github.com/sergiotapia/magnetissimo/pull/45#issuecom...

Re: ExtraTorrent Shuts Down for Good

#45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Obviously it's not a 1:1 ratio of lost revenue to pirated material. But I bet many pirates would spend some money / watch commericals if they were forced to for entertainment. I've seen some suggestion that they spend more on average than the average consumer. But I suspect they'd spend even more. And getting some content free and paying for others has discretionary effects.

> if they were forced to for entertainment

There is more free content made every day online than one person could consume in their entire life. Even when 99% of it is garbage, that 1% is still more than you can fill your time with.

I read a few dozen webcomics, most of which have patreons, but I don't get ads on my rss feeds for them, and there are thousands of webcomics. And artists. And musicians. There are dozens of websites for hobbyist, amateur, and even freelance professional games, animations, etc.

There is a fraction of pirates that will pay for content they would otherwise torrent because they want that content. But that doesn't imply they are more likely to buy entertainment. A portion probably just turn to free legal sources.

Re: ExtraTorrent Shuts Down for Good

#47
post #40
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been imagining a grooveshark like site, run on magnet links, using browser based torrenting, and with all URLs and playlists user contributed. What's the legal precedent for suing that out of existence?

Pretty much all torrent index that have closed ? They were in a very similar position (no content is hosted, but they help piracy) and we can see where that lead them. Your idea is probably even harder to defend, because you'd be sending the webtorrent code directly along the list of torrents, instead of having to copy-paste a link in another application. As a user, it feels like I'm just clicking on a button to down…

At some point I hope the media conglomerates sue Google and lose. Long has it been the case where I can search "watch x [for free|online]" and Google will helpfully point me to a site where I can do just that, no need to install torrent software or anything. The difference from a torrent/magnet link hosting site may just be one of broad vs specific searching purpose but is that enough to continuously keep Google clean and torrent sites dirty?

Re: ExtraTorrent Shuts Down for Good

#48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Has anything close popped back up yet? There was stuff that I couldn't even buy if I wanted to.

Yes actually: redacted.ch is the continuation of it. Quite a large community at the moment. I would however say that the original torrents that were uploaded when they first re-opened it (it was called Pass The Headphones) a lot of the torrents were junk, but the moderators have done a wonderful job allowing torrents to be "trumped".

Could you please send me an invite ? My email is in my profile. Thank you.

Re: ExtraTorrent Shuts Down for Good

#50
post #39
post #21

I'm continually surprised that Bittorrent is still relying on content indexing websites. The edonkey community solved this problem years ago with fully distributed search that only relies on the peers themselves[0]. Can anyone with insight into the BT comunity/technology offer any ideas why they never moved in this direction? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kademlia

Distributed indexing is very hard, slow and easily gamed. If you remember Kazaa, for example, it had an enormous problem with low quality content and malware. The best solution is not fully distributed indexing, rather decentralized indexing, such as IPFS.

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