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ExtraTorrent Shuts Down for Good

torrentfreak.com

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Re: ExtraTorrent Shuts Down for Good

#71

Post by ValentineC »

some-guy wrote: post #25
duckarmada wrote: post #22

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".

There's a couple of invite requests in this thread, so I thought I should point out that one of the rules at Redacted is:

> Even if you offer the invite in a personal message it is still considered a giveaway and against the rules. Responding to public invite requests is prohibited.

Redacted has an interview process if anyone's interested in joining the site, but don't know any current members personally: https://interviewfor.red/en/index.html

Re: ExtraTorrent Shuts Down for Good

#72

Post by ValentineC »

daedalus_j wrote: post #62
some-guy wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

Definitely would be interested in an invite. Alternately, some information on where any former what people should be looking for more info. Any observations you have about their apparent opsec would also be interesting.

> Alternately, some information on where any former what people should be looking for more info.

They're conducting interviews: https://interviewfor.red/en/index.html

Re: ExtraTorrent Shuts Down for Good

#73

Post by derefr »

Prefinem wrote: post #12
sergiotapia wrote: post #3

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 ser…

> Scrapers to keep torrent seeders / leechers up to date cost another fifty to hundred (depending on how up to date you want your torrents).

This part could be eased if there was a protocol for search engines to subscribe to a push-based firehose of presence events on trackers, no?

Re: ExtraTorrent Shuts Down for Good

#74

Post by derefr »

rakoo wrote: post #40
flavor8 wrote: 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…

What if the website itself doesn't do web-torrenting—in fact, it doesn't even make the magnet links links, instead just showing raw magnet hashes as text—but there also happens to be a well-known "unaffiliated" browser extension that does "gradual enhancement" of any site using the magnet-hash text "microformat", into a web-torrent download button?

The site doesn't link to copyrighted content. It doesn't link to anything, in fact.

And the extension doesn't contain any references to copyrighted content. It contains no content, and is completely unaware of any sources of content. (No explicit whitelist patterns for sites it should run on, etc.)

And—at least as far as anyone can tell—the two things have different authors.

But put them together, and oops! You've got a piracy program! User's fault for putting them together, of course.

Re: ExtraTorrent Shuts Down for Good

#75

Post by ryanlol »

sleepychu wrote: post #2

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.

Heh, easily. If you are technically inclined enough to operate a successful torrent site, it shouldn't be very challenging to operate such a site anonymously.

Buying bitcoins, and then "laundering" the coins is relatively trivial, you just run them through a few of the more anonymity-inclined altcoins.

Using those bitcoins to get torrent-friendly hosting? Hit up Infium in Ukraine, they won't mind a few threatening abuse emails. https://infiumhost.com/

Domains you can get from Njalla, Namecheap and a plethora of Chinese registrars who won't even read English abuse emails.

Want to earn money? It gets slightly trickier. There's a few solutions here. If you get lucky, you might find a well paying VPN affiliate program that'll pay you in bitcoin. But the more common solution is setting up a shell company and bank accounts in a friendly jurisdiction to accept payments from different advertising companies until you find one that won't kick you off.

I suppose it might even be possible (probably not legal however) to do that in an anonymous manner, you can register businesses online with bitcoin (or if you need a mastercard, you can get an anonymous one from https://advcash.com right now!) and opening bank accounts over the internet isn't exactly impossible either. Later you'd just wire all that money to a bitcoin exchange.

Re: ExtraTorrent Shuts Down for Good

#76

Post by j_s »

borne0 wrote: post #37
sergiotapia wrote: post #3

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.

Web Scraping: Bypassing “403 Forbidden,” captchas, and more | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13884357

Re: ExtraTorrent Shuts Down for Good

#77

Post by rakoo »

derefr wrote: post #74
rakoo wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

What if the website itself doesn't do web-torrenting—in fact, it doesn't even make the magnet links links , instead just showing raw magnet hashes as text—but there also happens to be a well-known "unaffiliated" browser extension that does "gradual enhancement" of any site using the magnet-hash text "microformat", into a web-torrent download button? The site doesn't link to copyrighted content. It doesn't link to any…

You define technical subtleties, but again the intent remains the same: sharing content without asking the relevant rights holders for authorization. You will still provide a search box to the user, where they will enter the title of the latest episode of the series they want to watch, and you're going to give them the relevant infohashes. You're trying to obfuscate but we all know what your end goal is.

Re: ExtraTorrent Shuts Down for Good

#78

Post by smithsmith »

sergiotapia wrote: post #3

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?

try skytorrents.in does something similar.

Re: ExtraTorrent Shuts Down for Good

#79

Post by Prefinem »

derefr wrote: post #73
Prefinem wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 ser…

> Scrapers to keep torrent seeders / leechers up to date cost another fifty to hundred (depending on how up to date you want your torrents). This part could be eased if there was a protocol for search engines to subscribe to a push-based firehose of presence events on trackers, no?

Trackers already do a lot of work in keeping peers up to date. Adding a subscription system would probably overload many trackers and make running one of those extremely expensive. Granted, I would have loved a system like that to subscribe to new torrents that get announced to a tracker with peer updates every so often, but that sort of addon would be incredibly high resource intensive.

A better way IMO is to allow the DHT network to query a little bit more information and have arbitrary data attached to a torrent. BEP 44 [1] should really help with that and actually might be a start with truly decentralizing the whole system. With a large enough DHT node base, you don't need to run a tracker to get peer information. On top of that, if you created an immutable record for each torrent with the torrent information (or ran a lightweight torrent system to pull torrent information from a single peer) you can easily get the torrent information to store in the search engine, and then query the DHT for unique peers to get peer information. You can then create comments or ratings with mutable data signed by your server to keep track of good / bad torrents.

I built the first half of that (DHT Crawler essentially) but it was always the peer information that was a pain. It was easier to grab the information from a tracker

1: http://www.bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0044.html

Re: ExtraTorrent Shuts Down for Good

#80

Post by WhiteOwlLion »

derefr wrote: post #74
rakoo wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

What if the website itself doesn't do web-torrenting—in fact, it doesn't even make the magnet links links , instead just showing raw magnet hashes as text—but there also happens to be a well-known "unaffiliated" browser extension that does "gradual enhancement" of any site using the magnet-hash text "microformat", into a web-torrent download button? The site doesn't link to copyrighted content. It doesn't link to any…

Hashes whether linked or not are still gateways to copyright content.

What you're describing is not that different Google in some ways. ISOHunt tried to make the Google argument about just being a search engine... but the distinction is that your visitors come specifically for torrents (mostly of a copyright nature) and your index provides copyright content. Google on the other hand is a general purpose search engine where copyright infringement make up a small percentage of their search. Your site would have to be a general search engine site to have any compelling legal argument.

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