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PublicBitTorrent and OpenBitTorrent Trackers Return

openbittorrentOpenBitTorrent (OBT) and PublicBitTorrent (PBT) are back online today after three weeks of protest.

On Sunday we reported that the trackers were planning to come back after a much-needed improvement to the BitTorrent protocol, and they’ve kept their word.

Thanks to the improvement, which was coined by Pirate Bay co-founder Fredrik Neij, the trackers will enjoy a great reduction in bandwidth and resources.

“This is going to save us a considerable amount of money and will benefit the BitTorrent community in the long run. It’s a great step forward and guarantees the survival of open BitTorrent trackers,” OpenBitTorrent’s owner told us previously.

The protocol improvement, which will be implemented in the upcoming uTorrent release, also gives web admins the ability to prevent their sites being hammered by BitTorrent traffic.

OBT and PBT are the two largest BitTorrent trackers on the Internet. Both coordinate the downloads of millions of people at any given time.

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  • Guest

    Its a wonder that the US government hasn’t tried to shut these down in stating that these trackers are used to facilitate copyright infringement. I bloody hope not.

  • Soulhacker

    “It’s worth noting that this could potentially allow ISPs to prevent
    trackers from operating by injecting entries into DNS records.”

    What the fuck?
    We can be damn sure ISPs are going to do that.
    I hope they keep a fallback and an option in clients to ignore these DNS records.

    • Christopher Brown

      Of course.

  • Safcuk009

    dragontorrents.biz

    Is the real deal, come sign up for the best private tracker around

  • Guest

    Thanks for coming back!!!

  • Rekrul

    I still use version 1.8.2, which doesn’t even support UDP, however I always manually delete all non-working trackers.

    • Bosnian

       You need to upgrade…atleast to 2.2.1…UDP helps the trackers out, everyone should be using it…

      • Madrona8

        There is one particular site that really doesn’t like anyone using anything over 1.8.3. It’s a pain, but they always have what you are looking for.  That would be the main reason for not updating.

  • Browneyes23

    Hmm, you say “are back online today” but if you check the ‘BITTORRENT’ DNS txt record for openbittorrent.com it explicitly says ‘The host is not running any trackers’
    as defined by BEP-34 (the referenced protocol improvement).
    So it’s ‘online’ but saying “no trackers here, move along”

    • Mika Suomalainen

      What if you try tracker.openbittorrent.com?

      I receive

      “`
      ;; ANSWER SECTION:
      tracker.openbittorrent.com. 1480 IN     TXT     “BITTORRENT UDP:80 UDP:6969″
      “`

  • http://sektori.org/ Niko

    Does anyone know of a place where I could promote my public opentracker bigfoot1942.sektori.org:6969/ . I can’t find a site that would list public opentrackers.

  • Guest

    Is Openbittorrent working? I have a few downloads with this tracker. My uTorrent has message the target machine active refused it

    • xen

      It’s been

  • xen

    It’s been timing out for me for the last few months.

  • BTGuard - BitTorrent Anonymously

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