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The Pirate Bay Will Stop Serving Torrents

torrentfreak.com

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Re: The Pirate Bay Will Stop Serving Torrents

#61

Post by the_tubes »

ianlevesque wrote: post #55
kissickas wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the information, this part was always a mystery to me as well. To clarify, if someone has never downloaded a torrent before and starts with a rarely downloaded file, would the use of only magnet links mean they will probably not be able to find another peer? It sounds like unless you already have torrents downloaded, your list of possible peers to check for the file is very short.

If your client connects to just one peer you essentially gain access to the entire bittorrent DHT network. As a dramatic simplification, your request for the rare torrent would propagate until it found the peers seeding or downloading it.

so if you hit a dead end you get nothing

Re: The Pirate Bay Will Stop Serving Torrents

#62

Post by tomp »

noch wrote: post #51
gojomo wrote: post #26

Hey! I invented the magnet link, almost 10 years ago. Great to see it still evolving and spreading, based simply on its loosey-goosey merits.

When multiple downloads of the same file are available it's usually beneficial to see and select the one with the highest number of seeds. If DHTs become the norm, will it still be possible to obtain and use such data?

If I understand magnet protocol correctly, it doesn't matter. If two files are the same, they have the same hash, so the system (DHT) cannot tell them apart.

If the files are different (e.g. 256 and 320 bitrate mp3 files), then that is a completely different problem.

Re: The Pirate Bay Will Stop Serving Torrents

#63

Post by tomp »

Zirro wrote: post #18
Joakal wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That would be a restriction of freedom of speech and Internet Freedom for blacklisting magnet urls. Linux Distro excuse comes to mind. A cynical person might say that the intent would also further kill free content creators, restricting the supply of content; consumers then see only paid content.

Sadly, that hasn't prevented censorship of "neutral" keywords before. See: https://torrentfreak.com/googles-anti-piracy-filter-110712

Maybe the next file-sharing protocol should be named `apple`.

Re: The Pirate Bay Will Stop Serving Torrents

#64

Post by jmtame »

From what I understand, DHT has a big trade-off vs BitTorrent: DHTs are crawlable[1] and copyright holders can more easily track who holds copies of what yet it's easier to duplicate search engines like TPB within hours for the same reason.

So the effect seems to be that the RIAA, MPAA, etc. will likely not be able to take down trackers; they'll have to revert back to suing their "customers" (or lobbying to pass absurd legislation for that matter).

[1] http://z.cs.utexas.edu/users/osa/unvanish/papers/vanish-brok...

Re: The Pirate Bay Will Stop Serving Torrents

#65

Post by chimeracoder »

nestlequ1k wrote: post #40
gojomo wrote: post #26

Hey! I invented the magnet link, almost 10 years ago. Great to see it still evolving and spreading, based simply on its loosey-goosey merits.

It's weird, I've been seeing it for years but I never understood what it is. I still don't really. But when I click on the magnets things seem to download immediately. So looks like you built something pretty amazing. Congrats!

The other two comments are (correctly) describing what a magnet link is in the sense of its implementation. On the off chance that you wanted a more abstract/basic description, a magnet link is defined by what you're linking to, as opposed to where it is.

This is kind of cool, because a file can change locations (how many times have you seen a dead link/File Not Found?), and with a magnet link, if you have a file that matches the description, you can be reasonably certain that you've found the right file (unlike the URIs you're familiar with, which can change the content stored at each location). On the flip side, actually finding the file from the description is a bit more complicated, but as you can see, it's still pretty easy for the user when implemented correctly.

It's better for TPB, because they're no longer telling you 'where' the file is, just what it 'looks' like. Legally, I'm sure that makes some difference.

Re: The Pirate Bay Will Stop Serving Torrents

#66

Post by chimeracoder »

> Perhaps even better, without the torrent files everyone can soon host a full copy of The Pirate Bay on a USB thumb drive, which may come in handy in the future.

I've been saying this for years: governments playing an arms race with hackers is like playing Whack-a-mole or cutting of heads of hydras. Every time you block one means of communication (starting in this case with Napster), a new, more decentralized, harder-to-combat protocol is going to emerge. Even if you're the MPAA and don't like copyright violations, you have to face that fact. That doesn't mean you (necessarily) have to throw in the towel and abandon the idea of copyright infringement altogether, but it does mean you need to start being creative instead of engaging in a direct legal-technological battle - an arms race.

I wonder how long it will take before the big players realize this and try to figure out a way to use this new playing field (the Internet) to their advantage, instead of trying to squelch any technological development so that they can cling to old models of payment and distribution. It was nice while it happened, but let's face it - we're past the point of no return. Even if they everyone hosted their own copies of TPB on their thumb drives and then they found some way to shut that down, I'm certain there'd be some hacker smart enough (like gojomo above) to come up with something that just makes things even less centralized, more difficult to track, and more difficult to shut down.

Re: The Pirate Bay Will Stop Serving Torrents

#67

Post by gnoupi »

drewblaisdell wrote: post #59
ianlevesque wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If your client connects to just one peer you essentially gain access to the entire bittorrent DHT network. As a dramatic simplification, your request for the rare torrent would propagate until it found the peers seeding or downloading it.

But what if the users sharing the file are also connecting for the first time? It seems like if my friend wants to seed a file and I want to download it, it only works if we knows peers (who know peers who know peers who...) know peers of me. Is this correct?

In theory (assuming that there are links to everyone, and no way to have separate networks) (it's of course a theory only, but seems very likely that there are "massive users", who have files of "every kind", connecting the different groups), as long as you both connect to one who is connected, it will work.

Although this is quite the extreme case, and not really the purpose for Bittorrent to begin with, I guess. The main interest is load balancing of popular downloads, not finding the one person with the one file for you.

Re: The Pirate Bay Will Stop Serving Torrents

#68

Post by chimeracoder »

pornel wrote: post #31

I hope that before .torrent files are gone, they (or some scraper) will publish them all as a torrent. Somebody did that last time PB was in trouble, e.g. one of the pieces: magnet:?xt=urn:btih:4232363a47fe29acdf2c77874365a5e3368854b4& That's a pretty interesting dataset to mine.

Why? What would the point of the .torrent files be if the magnet links are still there?

Re: The Pirate Bay Will Stop Serving Torrents

#69

Post by ward »

> This is topical, since this week courts in both Finland and the Netherlands ordered local Internet providers to block the torrent site.

Is there a list of countries where this has been ordered by courts? I know it's already the case in my country (Belgium) as well[1].

[1]: http://torrentfreak.com/belgium-starts-blocking-the-pirate-b...

Re: The Pirate Bay Will Stop Serving Torrents

#70

Post by gojomo »

invalidOrTaken wrote: post #43
gojomo wrote: post #26

Hey! I invented the magnet link, almost 10 years ago. Great to see it still evolving and spreading, based simply on its loosey-goosey merits.

Finding this sort of thing always makes me stop short and realize, "Oh yeah, no matter how smart I think I am, there are people a million times more accomplished than me on HN." Not to make me despair so much as take care to avoid blathering the first thing on my mind before reading and considering what others have said.

The 'magnet URI' was merely the right suggestion, for a tiny sliver of shared convention, at the right time.

You can look at the original writeup – http://magnet-uri.sourceforge.net/magnet-draft-overview.txt – and find a goofy ad-hoc mechanism where local software interested in 'magnet' links listened for localhost web hits, in a certain port range, rather than fighting over the 'magnet' URI scheme handler. That could be seen as either a blathering kludge or a very early attempt at 'web intents'.

I don't know if any code other than my demo ever implemented that localhost-handler trick. But the main idea – of a generically-named URI that was descriptive rather than location-centric – had its own legs. It spread from software to software, even without any formal spec stewardship/revisions. A key step for its longevity, when 'magnet' was adopted to wrap the 'btih' identifiers for DHT-based torrent tracking, happened long after my attention moved elsewhere.

I'd like to think the continuing adoption was because the original draft, even though crude and incomplete, had the right mix of a familiar/defensible URI syntax, wide-open descriptor semantics, and a catchy name/icon.

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