BitTorrent Survival: The Way of the Hydra
Written by enigmax on June 28, 2007As more and more people hear about BitTorrent, each day the major sites get bigger, with more and more visitors, members, seeds and peers. Mainstream awareness of P2P is driving this new surge but with copyright and law enforcement agencies clamping down hard, some are considering tactics for survival.
The BitTorrent community is growing at an almost alarming rate, its popularity is surging and more people than ever before are discovering its wonders. The mighty Suprnova captured the imagination of millions around the world, giving huge momentum to this file-sharing phenomenon, collecting millions of daily hits before its demise.
Today, sites like Mininova and The Pirate Bay are enjoying unprecedented levels of interest. Mininova served up 1 billion torrents in their first 2 years of operations, then stormed to 2 billion in just a further 6 months whilst capturing almost double the daily traffic of Suprnova in its prime.
The Pirate Bay almost needs no introduction, such is its size and comparable infamy. A jaw-dropping BitTorrent behemoth, gathering thousands of visitors each day who between them download 4 million torrents. Its vistors make 86 searches per second, its servers handle 1150 requests in the same timeframe and it tracks 50% of the world’s torrents.
That’s 50% of ALL public torrents. That is a dangerously high number of eggs in a basket that’s frequently coming under an attack of one form or another.
With the authorities always looking to take the biggest scalps to grab the headlines, sites such as LokiTorrent and EliteTorrents stood no chance, especially considering the huge financial implications of residing in the USA. Major BitTorrent site admins realized this and mainly moved their operations to the Netherlands, a location which is now looking less of a safe haven. The Dutch situation is of particular concern - there are dozens of strategically important torrent sites hosted there.
So what is the solution? brokep of The Pirate Bay has some thoughts that I happen to completely agree with.
“There are too few sites and trackers right now” he said, “things have been to concentrated to the big sites and that really sucks!”
Although it’s great initially for the mainstream to have visible big ‘brands’ such as The Pirate Bay, Mininova and TorrentSpy, it’s a precarious situation to have such a top heavy structure to the BitTorrent community. It’s great having a ‘multi-headed hydra’ but not so great when just one of those heads carries half of all the public torrents. This situation must be addressed. Resources need to be spread around in a manner which ensures that a few ‘big bombs’ are unable to dismantle major parts of the infrastructure.
There is a solution, as brokep says, “I really love the small specialized sites, I hope to see more of them. I would love to help out with starting up more, but it’s also important that we who already run sites do not start more of them.”
He’s right. The more sites like The Pirate Bay provide what the BitTorrent community want, the less likely it is that people will venture out on their own to create their own sites. In the current environment, the hydra needs thousands of heads which are resource-hungry to target, not just a dozen juicy fat ones which stay nice and still, with the authorities just waiting for a subtle change in, or interpretation of, the law. A change which is inevitable, in both Sweden and the Netherlands.
TorrentFreak asked the admin of a US-based tracker how they manage to stay alive, despite having 20,000 members. “People are too hung up on MPAA and RIAA content. There’s an enormous library of material out there which you can track and no-one bothers you. We’ve got over 4000 torrents and we’ve had just two or three informal takedown requests in the last couple of years. If people want to start a tracker, indexing non-RIAA/MPAA content and specializing in something else is a great way to start building a community, even when you’re hosted in the States”
brokep gets the last words. Very wise words;
“So public message to people - start up your own torrent sites, make the internet the hydra it is and needs to be. If there’s hundreds of sites, they can’t all be shut down. And well, if they shut down the few that are today, there will be hundreds of sites, I’m sure, but let’s start them before so we can spread the word of them easier.”
Previously: Anti-Piracy Organization Tries to Shut Down Demonoid
Next: Pirate Parties Prepare for the 2009 European Elections
45 Responses
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Good article. Why not post some info about how to go about starting a tracker? I think there are even ready made tracker scripts!
Jpeezy, that’d be a great next-article.
It does not mater.
Cut of the head from a Hydra, and it will regrow. In case of bittorrent, it will spawn dozens of smaller heads.
Take down the Pirate Bay, and sure, the first few months the effect will be felt. But the moment the Pirate Bay or any other big site is taken down, dozen or more “Pirate Ship, MiniPirate, etc” will spawn. After that, they will grow to form a even larger community.
This is what Suprnova has shown use. Free advertisment! Every site on the globe will be posting that news, and everywhere where you can post comments on those article, you will have people posting like to alternative sites, new sites etc.
In other words, this will drive a new influx of people who hardly used torrents to those sites. We have seen it again, and again.
And with the lessons learned from the take down, more security measures will be taken by the admins.
Its a never ending cycle that can’t be stopped by just trying to take down the sites. On the contrary, the take down from Napster, Suprnova etc, has only increased the general publics about all the alternatives.
One can say, that in effect, they helped expand the p2p community with every big take down ( and this has been documented. After a big take down there is a large drop. After a few month’s, there are more people on those networks, then the normal growth without the take down will have produced ).
Its like showing a things on the tv news, like a pyro, family drama etc. The effect is, that you will have copycat incidents because it gave people that ideas. And as with Napster, Suprnova etc, all published on the web, tv, etc. It only fuels the growth.
Its a fight they can never win! There are so many ways to get ‘copyrighted’ content, that they can’t stop it.
And, also with the decrease in bandwidth prices, major drop in server prices, john doe can afford a nice server, and can start serving torrents, acting like a hub, setting up a network, or running a irc bot.
And Jpeezy, yes, there are hundreds of tracker scripts available on the web.
Unless they start dealing with the root of the problem, this will not change. And the root of the problem is: To expensive, to restrictive, hard to get.
People are lazy in nature. Why drive to the store, stand in line, pay 60€’s for a game, when you can download it while you work on your pc, pay nothing, and have easy to use programs that do it for you…
Thats why we are seeing more sites like Steam, GamersGate, direct2drive, itunes etc. While i do find that Steam, direct2drive, itunes are to expensive for a direct to customer sale.
You cut out the middle man, yet you charge almost the same as the stores? That aint right. But the future will fix that. As more stores like this show up, the competition will grow, and so will the prices drop.
What I think is that Pirate Bay might thinking about making themselves more distributed.. Why shouldn’t a site dedicated to torrents itself become P2P.. A TPB grid, now that’d be something! Otoh, I think I’m agonna try and get ahold of brokep and take him up on his offer of help (Assuming I can figure out how).. I’ve got in mind some tracker features that neeed to be done..
Anyone else interested in helping out can PM me as bad_andy on fst.. :)
Why make everyone make their own indexing site? Everyone is going to be too scared to make their own site and when half of the people get an order in their e-mail to shut it down… they will.
Trying to make a site and advertise it is hard. Very hard to build up a good base and nevermind build up a good amount of torrents. Sure someone might be able to make the next OiNK but it would be tough.
What’s the point of having ten thousand different sites? I already have trouble looking through the amount of torrent sites out there. With hundreds then it would be even harder.
I don’t see how having hundreds of sites will make it easier. Yes, it will make it harder for them to shut it down.
Thinking about this I think of Gravity’s MMO Ragnarok. There is thousands of Ragnarok private servers out there and Gravity just has given up on shutting them down. The private servers have found loopholes in order to get around the law. What we need is a torrenter to study law and find us a half dozen loopholes that can be followed.
@Andrew
P2P survives through loopholes already.
Agree with most of the comments so far.
Pirate bay should break down into smaller more covert secs as opposed to one giant entity or just have pirate bay type clone sites ready to go up immediately after the bay is compromised. Its nice that its all in one place but that just means that authorities have only 1 needed place to look at. Stretch the authorities out and it the money situtation will eventually set it. The more places to get the content we want the harder time authorities will have to track people down. More money will be spent and eventually they will stop. Whats free for us costs them millions.
What about many servers in many locations that are attached to one specific site with many mirrors?
More trackers would be great, but I think we are missing the point and the true problem with p2p applications, esspecially Bittorrent. Thing is, it is a downfall that has been known since the protocol’s introduction.
Search.
There is no p2p search, mostly because of the decentralized methods of p2p that have be come popular (putting ISPs in a VERY tight place, this is the reason for the anti-net neutrality initiatives. unregistered p2p traffic comes from bandwidth blocks where more useage increases costs but not revenues). Once we have a method of searching the cloud we won’t need a centralized tracker like mininova or the Pirate Bay. What we need is someone to get down and work on that fuctionality, not more sites, as nice as that would be =).
Peace
If only boneheads would learn how to create and edit multi-tracker .torrent files, they could upload the same hash to any site they want.
And leave DHT *on*, you idiots — how do you expect people to find your torrent if all the announce URLs go dead?
Does your private site demand (or worse, alter your uploaded torrent automatically) that DHT be shut off? Give ‘em the finger and go elsewhere.
All well and good. But it does sound like people are going to have to go and set up ISPs in countries where there isn’t a chance in hell of being done for ‘IP theft’. What do we do when every country treats downloading as more important than rape? It may not be that far off in countries that are totally obsessed with commercial profiteering. Maybe we need to start donating to an anti-copyright satellite or something, fuck knows.
But what is that a sudden, sinking realization to anybody who’s been living outside of a cave over the last few years?
You’d think so-called technically-savvy people would have a better forecasting handle on the situation…but apparently not.
Is it possible to have a Warez like technology just for Torrent files.
I mean we can find things in Warez if this search can be decentralized then we wont need PirateBay.
I’ve done something, even though it’s minuscule and will take a few days to have everything done. I’ve made a new tracker lebishop.org. Don’t get all mad if it’s not on at like 3AM, sometimes it will, sometimes it won’t, it’s being run on my home computer. I thought somebody might like to know.
You’d think that the major companies would recognize the pattern, but they are too blinded by their money-grubbing, sue-happy lawyers.
The first instance of the pattern that I recognized was with lyrics.ch back in the mid 90’s. Back then, when you wanted the lyrics to a song, the only place that was pretty much guaranteed to have it was the site, lyrics.ch.
The big companies took on that site, and made it practically worthless. What happened? A hundred lyrics sites popped up, none as comprehensive as lyrics.ch, but together, they greatly exceed the information available from that parent site.
The various lawsuits against P2P software providers have done the same thing for that industry. Napster got killed, Morpheous died, AudioGalaxy bit it. So Kazaa, Bittorrent, Limewire, Gnutella, et al picked up the banner.
Who is getting rich in these fights? The RIAA? MPAA? Nope. Their lawyers. Nobody else.
If we want to facilitate such exponential growth. we need a very easy-to-install tracker app. just like wordpress or drupal are for blogging.
Wow. Maybe i’ll start work on
( Project HYDRA ) this summer.
Torrent site scripts have been avalible for ages.
http://www.tbdev.net/
Look at this ScreenShot
http://hotimg3.fotki.com/a/121_247/66_70/Transform.gif
i can find .torrent files without need of a website; all we need is to create a decentralized software with new torrent files specific features.
Just checkout that sancho software
OK, just something that may not be directly related to this article, but take a look at it.
I’ve been reading all of these articles about the Americans ordering other countries to shut down this, and shut down that. Well I say they shouldn’t be interfering with stuff that’s none of their damn business, so to speak. Seriously, each country has
their own laws and if they can’t put them through properly that’s their problem. As far as torrents are concerned, give it a break. I don’t care whatever some blind-legal follower has to say about pirating software and distributing copyrighted material in such a way, but the fact is - a game, retail, in a box, from a store, costs a rough average of 50$ (let me just generalize the currency here for a bit…) and when you take into account that not everyone is American with a pay of 5000$, especially in the poorer countries, do you really wanna give 10% of your salary on a video game? Seriously, it’s a VIDEO GAME. It’s meant, for entertainment, for killing time, not to rob you blind.
I live in Croatia, just to prove a point, here the average salary is 500$ dollars. And that’s if your lucky. A whole lot of people work for 300$, EVEN less. That’s barely enough to cover your bills. The bare minimum. What about broadband, cable TV, and the other luxuries? You can just forget about it. Yeah, not everyone has plasma TV’s in their living room and XBOX 360’s, that’s a fact. So can these people really afford to give 10-20% of their pay for a damn VIDEO game? Seriously, a Croatian video game has been released now, for about 10$. And yes, I’m going to buy it. Because that’s about the right price to pay for a video game.
In my house the income is about 2000 dollars, but when you take out all the credits and monthly bills there’s not much left. (I pay 30$ for 1 mbit flatrate…) I still can’t afford original videogames.
So does that mean I shouldn’t be playing anything?
And that’s just video games. What about programs like adobe photoshop that cost about 200 dollars? What, am I gonna give 200 dollars to make myself a damn forum signature from time to time? Like hell I am. The prices on PC stuff is outrageous as it is. That’s why I give full support to these guys who have the guts to stand up to the stuck-up fools in these government institutions that think they can actually change something. As long as there’s software, there’ll be piracy. As long as they make protections, cracking groups will break them. Starforce and all these morons be damned. I’m sure if they’d lower the prices on all of this stuff just a bit, they’d get a lot more sales.
That’s just my 2 cents.
Peace
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