How to become a pirate archivist

Our bittorrent tracker was very short lived. It did well and had some pretty good sets on it! But in 2010 when bittorrent was getting a really bad name right after The Pirate Bay case it was easy to get torrent trackers shut down.

One day I got a downtime alert, I think it was mid-2010. I checked the site, gone. The server, unresponsive. I got in touch with the host. He said he'll check with the data center. After a while he got back to me and said: "German police came in and seized your servers." There had been no notice, no warning, no nothing. Just boom, and gone. I asked him: "How can they do this? What do we do?". He said: "Nothing, they just come and take whatever they want every now and then."

I hired a lawyer in Frankfurt to go and check on the case. He said that they had closed the case with no further process because the person in question was unknown. And he ended that email with: "But Nintendo may try something else".

Until that moment, I had no idea that Nintendo was behind the server seizure. I was relieved that the case was closed. Anyway, I still went ahead and resurrected the site sans bittorrent tracker. YOLO and all that.

For the next 8 years, we never really had much trouble after that except the usual DMCA takedown notice here and there and a threatening legal letter sometimes. But pressure kept piling up. I did consider myself small and unimportant fish to fry (compared to say, The Pirate Bay or even current gen videogame piracy websites) but that didn't stop them from going after LoveROMs.

There was always the chance that one day they would just catch me at an airport or immigration (like the kickasstorrents dude) or something and that would be it. Or the police would just knock at my door. I mean, they would have to know who I was provably but I don't think it would be that hard for a government agency. It was just a matter of time that the powers that be would need to lobby the government to get at me.

I didn't want to live my life like that any more.

Someone could use this to

A) Remotely check the presence of any specific file on your machine.

B) Exfiltrate the contents of any file they know the hash of (or possibly more specifically, the hash of each piece? I don't know the protocol details).

Fine if you have a dedicated "I expect the contents to be public" drive or directory, but not something I'd want to do on my OS drive.

Yes, absolutely, a lot.

Even though some people have automated their setup very well and have been downloading (and uploading on the newer trackers) a lot, it's just a giant amount of content, it's unlikely for any one person to have it all, and coordination was very limited back then.

The birthday release of the torrent db of what.cd includes 2.6m torrents in 1.2m groups (aka individual releases), in total weighing in at 588TB (or 421TB is you discard mp3, but there was content that hadn't been available in FLAC). That's doable on an SWE salary today if you're dedicated, but what.cd was shut down in 2016, and you'd still need to deal with the ratio system during collection.

Everyone else is left with scraps, trickling data out to whoever comes later. Or maybe you get lucky and you're the lone seeder, you get a 1:1 copy. You just better hope that was on a 24-Bit FLAC release, given how big they can get.

There's many many threads on https://old.reddit.com/r/trackers about REDs economy problems. OPS has a bonus point system and suffers less, but has worse content than RED. My opinion only though

rutracker is all about putting content out there. A lot of stuff is mislabelled or lower quality, less retention, identified wrong, seeded slowly. But you can sure find a lot of oddities there.

> was any data lost

yes, absolutely. I've hundreds of albums not on RED, and I can't bother to reupload them. it's a total waste of time when you know they're unseeded in a week if not for me hanging on.

time better spent finding new music and sharing everything on soulseek instead.

not with most RED bounties you can fill. if you only sort by biggest bounties, you get albums that realistically can't be filled, or that would require serious money and effort to find.. rare asia specific releeases and stuff.

you can do specific requests if you have accounts for streaming platforms but nobody makes bounty requests for those