Pirate Bay has new, decentralized system - trackers abolished

[Cramulus]

okay so, help me break this down


the technological shift is that there's no longer a need for a central torrent tracker, meaning that even if they successfully shut down every pirate bay and mininova, (har!) people are still going to be trading torrents?

I can totally see how a decentralized network is a lot easier to protect. They can't just cut off its head.


I do, however, love the idea that they're holding some guy in sweden (russia now?) responsible for all the illegal trading I've been doing. Does this make me more responsible?

[bds]

As a heavy user of private torrenting trackers, I have to say I'm not terribly keen on DHT. Bittorrent generally has some of the best quality sites and content, and I think decentralisation (even of just the public networks) would detract from that. I don't wanna see torrenting become the next Limewire, is all.

[Requia ☣]

This has nothing to do with the sites you find a torrent on, you still need Pirate Bay or Isohunt or whatever else to find the starter file, this is an under the hood change.

[Triple Zero]

Not entirely sure but a magnet:// link should activate your torrent client and then the client itself will contact whatever's at the magnet location and then get the torrent by itself, so you don't actually need to download anything.

But by all means, google it, there's probably something incredibly smart and useful about it too.

[Shibboleet The Annihilator]

okay so, help me break this down


the technological shift is that there's no longer a need for a central torrent tracker, meaning that even if they successfully shut down every pirate bay and mininova, (har!) people are still going to be trading torrents?

I can totally see how a decentralized network is a lot easier to protect. They can't just cut off its head.


I do, however, love the idea that they're holding some guy in sweden (russia now?) responsible for all the illegal trading I've been doing. Does this make me more responsible?

People will always be trading torrents or some equivalent of it, even if it was centralized. Before TPB there was KaZaa, before that Napster, before that UseNet and FTP.

THE PIRATES ARE DEAD! LONG LIVE THE PIRATES!

[Captain Utopia]

The magnet link itself contains a hash of the content, so the bittorrent client then asks the DHT hosts it knows about to see if they have any content which matches the hash.

[LMNO]

You know, I still think I'm not doing this TPB thing right.

I've been looking for certain files there, many which are very popular, but all my searches turn up with no hits.

Is there some sort of trick I need to know?

[Captain Utopia]

I usually just append "torrent" to a google search, I guess you could add "site:thepiratebay.org".. but I personally find thepiratebay search function to be to slow/overloaded on the site itself.

[Cramulus]

yeah, I never seem to get any hits when I search ON the pirate bay. Search via google with a phrase like,

"It's always sunny s05e10 torrent" or "Red hot chili peppers torrent" or whatever


the first few links returned are often garbage


look for something with a lot of seeds

[Cain]

Or you could just use Demonoid, which is back up.

[LMNO]

Don't you need to be a member in order to download?

[Cain]

Yes.  I have an invite, if you want one.

[LMNO]

Yes, please.  Do you need an email?  I shall PM.

[Triple Zero]

I usually use isohunt.com myself. I configured it as a Search in Opera (right-click in the search form > "Create Search"), so now I can just type "iso Gamer 2009" to look for a certain movie.

tip: if your movie title consists of a relatively common phrase, you can narrow down the search by appending the release year. this is also included in the torrent title and probably does not occur in the non-hits you werent looking for.

also, Cram's search query, for those who didnt know "s05e10" stands for "season 5, episode 10", which is the usual way season/episode numbers are included in the title. sometimes you need to try a variation like "s5e10" or something.

and, LMNO, in case you were searching for music, torrents are often a collection of several albums by the same artist (because people prefer to get larger torrents at once), so it's a good idea to just search for the artist, and not specific albums. In most torrent search engines (like Isohunt) you can see a list of files that are in the torrent before you download it, so you know if the one you were looking for is there. Also, if you use uTorrent (which you should, it's good and doesn't use a lot of memory), you can de-select any files or directories in the torrent you do not want. (I always deselect the tiny text files that say "downloaded from here and here.txt", cause even if they're tiny I don't need them crudding up my HD)

[LMNO]

Many thanks to all you young whippersnappers for helping out a technofail old person.