Why don't torrent site owners just release their sites as a torrent file itself? Like a sqlite dump with search indexes? They could either self-update the torrent [1] or just release the new torrent via forums/groups/chats etc. Would bring the costs down to zero. 1. http://www.bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0046.html
Sites can't be offered as torrents, because generally torrents are immutable once they have been created. You can't say "oops, that version of the file is wrong" and start offering the new version within that same torrent swarm. However, there was an update to the protocol, BEP44, that did allow you to update the already-in-progress torrent. Furthermore, there is a protocol called WebTorrent that swaps out some of th…
Torrents are immutable but they could just give us new torrents (with updated indexes) via chats/forums/etc. Then thanks to https://www.bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0038.html we can just download the diff.
It's absolutely insane how many of these incredibly important torrent sites are just managed and hosted by a rag-tag group of people with the site barely clinging to life.
KickAssTorrents made millions of dollars a year in advertising revenue. I doubt their decision to start Rarbg was charitable or even ideologically driven. They probably just want out now. Lower margins may have been a part of that.
Can be both. Even Marx participated in the stock market
Someone already mentioned the Comcast angle, and they are correct. The ISP isn't involved until they get the notification from an agent of the owner of the content. The honeypot isn't the torrent site. You can use any site in the world or no site at all and still get busted. It's a peer to peer network, and the people busting you are seeding the torrents themselves. They catch you when you peer with them. Use a VPN,…
Just to be clear, the rights holders probably aren't publishing torrents, they just also download them and monitor anybody that happens to connect with their seed. In a way, they are helping us with better download speeds.
I'm sure they are capping their upload speeds to basically nothing and just monitoring the IPs that connect to it.
o7 thank you for your service, keeping the Internet awesome and anti-corporate. Where one piracy site dies, a thousand spawn from its corpse. Maybe the media companies will eventually pull their heads out of their collective arses and quit their cartel, allowing the existence of legal, paid streaming sites a-la-Spotify with access to 99% of the repertoire. Until then, torrent is how we protest while they create more…
lots of password-protected plex/media servers shared in invite-only discords, like a regression back to the days of knowing the phone number and login of that one BBS you knew about from a friend of a friend that posted cracked software
I have been very excited to see us returning to private forums. This is not a harmful regression, certainly!
If you don't know anybody in meat space who can invite you or tell you about it, how do you get in? How do you meet people?
Most of the time when I search for something, I sort by more seeders first. Some type of signature can be used too.
Sorting by number of seeders will probably get you a file that is fast to download because of the number of seeders, but it will rarely get you quality. Let's go take a stroll over to a popular public torrent site and search for, say, a recent superhero movie. I see 100 (!) results for that movie's name. 49 of them have zero seeders at all. I don't know what even is the point. 29 of the results have one seeder. So al…
Great example. Some private trackers have strict rules about quality, e.g. at most one 720p and at most one 1080p (probably 1080p and 4k nowadays), bitrate must be above a certain threshold, whichever was published first stays, unless there is an "official" version published by the same people maintaining the website. The exact opposite of decentralized torrent sites, and works really well. Takes a lot of work, obviously.
Why don't torrent site owners just release their sites as a torrent file itself? Like a sqlite dump with search indexes? They could either self-update the torrent [1] or just release the new torrent via forums/groups/chats etc. Would bring the costs down to zero. 1. http://www.bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0046.html
Because they make money off of ads and people who have the skills and resources to do that without profit motive also probably are afraid of getting entangled in legal battles.
From the announcement doesn't seem like they were making money?
While we are at it, an honest question: Why should _anyone_ undertake the legal risk, monetary cost and development time burden for maintaining a public tracker?
What would release teams gain from setting up encoding pipelines and upholding their networking infrastructure?