BT Sites Going Down Like Bowling Pins Or Cheap Hookers

[napho]

One after another, whether due to the police politely knocking on their doors or voluntarily.

http://www.phoenix-torrents.com/

[Kris404]

I thought Phoenix died a long time back. Youceff is history too by the way.

[napho]

Now Torrentbits is MIA. http://irc.netsplit.de/channels/?num...ry=torrentbits

[TankGirl]

SuprNova has just announced that they will shut down permanently:

Greetings everybody,

As you have probably noticed, we have often had downtimes. This was because it was so hard to keep this site up!
But now we are sorry to inform you all, that SuprNova is closing down for good in the way that we all know it.
We do not know if SuprNova is going to return, but it is certainly not going to be hosting any more torrent links.
We are very sorry for this, but there was no other way, we have tried everything.

Thank you all that helped us, by donating mirrors or something else, by uploading and seeding files, by helping people out on IRC and on forum, by spreading the word about SuprNova.org.

It is a sad day for all of us!

Please visit SuprNova.org every once in a while to get the latest news on what is happening and if there is anything new to report on.

As we wish to maintain the nice comunity that we created, we are keppig forums and irc servers open.

Thank you all and Goodbye!
sloncek & the rest of the SuprNova Team

Even if the message does not say it, the timing and the mentioning about not hosting any torrent links in the future suggest strongly that they have also been targeted in the MPAA's campaign.

The ongoing events are likely to change the p2p landscape in a major way. BitTorrent in its present form - relying on public link websites and centralized trackers - has been vulnerable to attacks all along. Considering its huge popularity there will be a great demand for a safer decentralized network operating on the same efficient file distribution principles. We know that SuprNova guys themselves were working on a project called Exeem that was meant to decentralize at least some of their functionality. It remains to be seen if they will continue with the project... in any case it is certain that the resourceful p2p developer community will come up with new solutions for the distribution of large files. Yet another case of forced technological evolution.

- tg

[multi]

wb...tg


[2c]
if i am not mistaken many of the ed2k hashlink sites are getting taken down also
tho i am looking forward to trying a new safer BT client
i think emule or some hybrid in the future can be more effective
in decentralising the verified hashlinks
could it be possible maybe the huge verified hashlink community
could move from the forum envionment to publish the links
to publishing them to xml/rss and having them read in the actual program itself
(users would have to find and enter the right ip recieve the file-like say a server list)
not that this wouldn't still be attcked by the pigs..
but i think you could make it alot harder with something like this
[/2c]

[TankGirl]

Originally Posted by multi

i think emule or some hybrid in the future can be more effective
in decentralising the verified hashlinks

The distribution of hashlinks (.torrent files) through alternative channels is not a big technical problem... basically any p2p network can be used for it. A bigger problem is the vulnerability of the trackers. In principle this could be handled by building the tracker functionality into clients so that any client with a good bandwidth, unrestrictive firewall and enough processor power could take the role of a tracker, being a sort of supernode in the network (although technically not similar to what Kazaa supernodes do). I think Azureus already has an embedded tracker. This still leaves the problem of link reliability/moderation, something that is quite easy to handle through a trusted website but more challenging to implement in a fully decentralized system.

- tg

[multi]

ok i am not a BT user..of any great magnitude

just some crazy idea i have been having for about 6 months..
mainly focused at ed2k and similar apps
probably because
i loved having the shareactor/shareconnector feeds
available
if they could go more underground and have
these feeds available from different ip's on the network itself
the client would just need a simple browser interface somewhere
and some added php ability to parse the xml
there could spawn a new type of p2p publishing medium
ppl would bookmark maybe a p2pnews feeds as well..
i am pretty sure someone will come up with something like this one day..
there is a torrent RSS project of some sort but i am not quite sure about it..

[JackSpratts]

Originally Posted by TankGirl

The distribution of hashlinks (.torrent files) through alternative channels is not a big technical problem... basically any p2p network can be used for it. This would still leave the problem of link reliability/moderation, something that is quite easy to handle through a trusted website but challenging to implement in a fully decentralized system.

- tg

yep. since the bt community is not cleaned automatically but rather inspected and cultivated by hand by a group of mods (and an amazingly small group of them at that), any scheme hoping to keep the torrent community pollution free would need to come up with some potocol allowing trusted gatekeeping that at the same time is robust enough to thwart attacks. personally if i was a seeding participant i'd migrate my tracker site to WASTE right now or even Freenet until something better develops.

- js.

[multi]

waste would be perfect for the organising and getting the releases varified ..ect
(most likely they will..some diehard irc ones will stick to that of course)
i was wondering..
maybe something like ants or mute to distribute the links to the users..?
gnutella?
or an app just for getting the links?
like a specialised newsreader..
a plugin for firefox?

[TankGirl]

Originally Posted by multi

waste would be perfect for the organising and getting the releases varified ..ect
(most likely they will..some diehard irc ones will stick to that of course)
i was wondering..
maybe something like ants or mute to distribute the links to the users..?
gnutella?
or an app just for getting the links?
like a specialised newsreader..
a plugin for firefox?

To implement a SuprNova+BT style infrastructrure decentrally you would still need a publicly trusted party whom you would believe to do a good screening job for the new releases. This in itself is no problem, e.g. the present SuprNova moderator crew would probably be widely trusted as a good screening team. You wouldn't be downloading torrent links from any websites but a willing screener/publisher group could still use a website to make known its digital identity in the form of say a public encryption key. Then it could use any available channels to send out timestamped and digitally signed torrent lists. On the client end there would have to be a corresponding mechanism to check the digital signatures and to ignore torrents from untrusted parties (nothing too fancy).

If the screener/publisher team would desire further anonymity they could use e.g. MUTE for the initial torrent distribution. After being pushed through MUTE the torrents could be safely (from the point of view of the screening team) distributed on any puclic channels and networks.

While the security issues for possible screener/publisher teams are quite solvable with arrangements like above, decentralizing the tracker functionality and protecting the anonymity of the original seeds are challenges on their own.

- tg

[multi]

a good slashdot article on BT
check out the bit torrent mesurements.pdf
and some of the replies..
/.

[JackSpratts]

still active as of post time:

http://lokitorrent.com
http://torrentreactor.to
http://isohunt.com/
http://www.filelist.org/

- js.

[TankGirl]

Also up the world's biggest tracker:

http://thepiratebay.org/frame.html

The site is Swedish but some of the announcements are in English, and overall it is easy enough to use for an international user. No registration needed unless you want to search for pr0n.

- tg

[napho]

Originally Posted by TankGirl

Also up the world's biggest tracker:

http://thepiratebay.org/frame.html

The site is Swedish but some of the announcements are in English, and overall it is easy enough to use for an international user. No registration needed unless you want to search for pr0n.

- tg

I was going to mention that site (not the pron part though)
Also this http://www.torrentspy.com/latest.asp

[TankGirl]

Check this good commentary on BitTorrent & SuprNova shutdown by Mark Pesce.

Back to today, when the hammer came down. SuprNova.org and TorrentBits.com each played host to thousands of BitTorrent trackers. When these sites went down the torrents went Poof!, as if they’d never existed. This evening the members of the MPAA must be feeling quite satisfied with themselves - they see this danger as passed; never again will BitTorrent threaten the revenues of the Hollywood studios.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

As Hollywood is so fond of sequels, it seems perfectly fitting that today’s suppression of the leading BitTorrent sites bears an uncanny resemblance to an event which took place in July of 2000. Facing a rising sea of lawsuits and numerous court orders demanding an immediate shutdown, the archetypal peer-to-peer service, Napster, pulled the plug on its own servers, silencing the millions of users who used the service as a central exchange to locate songs to download. That should have been the end of that. But it wasn’t. Instead, the number of songs traded on the Internet today dwarfs the number traded in Napster’s heyday. The suppression of Napster lead to a profusion of alternatives - Gnutella, Kazaa, and BitTorrent.

If Napster hadn’t been run out of business by the RIAA, it’s unlikely that any need for Gnutella would have arisen; if the RIAA hadn’t attacked that single point of failure, there’d have been no need to develop a solution which, by design, has no single point to failure. It’s as though both sides in the war over piracy and file sharing are engaged in an evolutionary struggle: every time one side comes up with a new strategy, the other side evolves a response to it. This isn’t just a cat-and-mouse game; each attack by the RIAA, generates a response of increasing sophistication. And, today, the MPAA has blundered into this arms race. This was, as will soon be seen, a Very Bad Idea.

Pointing up the single greatest weakness of BitTorrent - take down the tracker and the torrent dies - has only served to energize, inspire and mobilize the resources of an entire global ecology of software developers, network engineers and hackers-at-large who want nothing so much, at this moment, as to make the MPAA pay for their insolence. Imagine a parent reaching into a child’s room and ripping a TV set out of the wall - while the child is watching it. That child would feel anger and begin plotting his revenge. And that scene has been multiplied at least hundred thousand times today, all around the world. It is quite likely that, as I type these words, somewhere in the world a roomful of college CS students, fueled by coke and pizza and righteous indignation, are banging out some code which will fix the inherent weakness of BitTorrent - removing the need for a single tracker. If they’re smart enough, they’ll work out a system of dynamic trackers, which could quickly pass control back and forth among a cloud of peers, so that no one peer holds the hot potato long enough to be noticed. They’ll take the best of Gnutella and cross-breed it with the best of BitTorrent. And that will be the MPAA’s worst nightmare.

Hey, Hollywood! Can you feel the future slipping through your fingers? Do you understand how badly you’ve screwed up? You took a perfectly serviceable situation - a nice, centralized system for the distribution of media, and, through your own greed and shortsightedness, are giving birth to a system of digital distribution that you’ll never, ever be able to defeat. In your avarice and arrogance you ignored the obvious: you should have cut a deal with SuprNova.org. In partnership you could have found a way to manage the disruptive change that’s already well underway. Instead, you have repeated the mistakes made by the recording industry, chapter and verse. And thus you have spelled your own doom.

It’s said that the best sequels are just like the original, only bigger and louder. Ladies and gentlemen, prepare yourselves for one hell of a crash. This baby is now fully out of control.

[TankGirl]

Also up and running:
http://www.tvtorrents.tv/
(formerly TVTorrents.net)

[theknife]

Originally Posted by TankGirl

Check this good commentary on BitTorrent & SuprNova shutdown by Mark Pesce.

great stuff, the Napster analogy is dead on - every end is just a beginning