PublicBT Tracker Set To Patch BitTorrent’s Achilles’ Heel
Written by Ernesto on July 12, 2009Along with the lingering uncertainty surrounding the future of The Pirate Bay comes an increasingly urgent demand for alternative public BitTorrent trackers. PublicBitTorrent, operated by the people behind some of today’s most prominent torrent sites, is one of these much needed alternatives.
For years the majority of all BitTorrent users have relied almost exclusively on the services of The Pirate Bay. Even those who never actually visited the site have done so, since more than half of all the publicly available torrents were tracked by the Swedish tracker.
The Pirate Bay’s prominence has been the Achilles’ heel of BitTorrent. If the tracker should fail today, hundreds of thousands of torrents would begin to slow down significantly or stop working entirely. With the upcoming sale of The Pirate Bay this weakness has become even more salient.
Good and stable alternatives are needed, and luckily some of the leading figures in the BitTorrent community realize this. Last week we already reported on OpenBitTorrent, a free service that is already tracking 1,828,973 torrents for more than 20 million peers.
Still, replacing one tracker with another wont add much redundancy. The founder of BTjunkie and another major torrent sites came to the same conclusion and decided to launch a tracker of their own – PublicBitTorrent. Similar to OBT, PublicBT uses the Beerware licensed Opentracker software.
PublicBT goes live
“Me and others felt that too much of BitTorrent tracking relies on one group and we would like to share some of that responsibility,” BTjunkie’s founder told TorrentFreak. “If anything were to happen to TPB, hundreds of thousands of torrents that are only tracked by TPB could be lost,” he added.
PublicBT has just launched, and although the site was almost entirely copied (without authorization) from the OBT website, it is operated independently. To get the ball rolling all torrents on BTjunkie will soon be updated with the new OBT and PBT trackers, BTjunkie’s founder told TorrentFreak.
Operating a standalone BitTorrent tracker, especially one that tracks millions of peers, can be a costly project but is a prerequisite for the BitTorrent ecosystem. It’s good to see that more BitTorrent site admins stepping up to take responsibility.
Previously: Pirate Bay Buyer’s Stock Back to Square One
Next: Stephen Fry Admits He’s a BitTorrent Pirate
72 Responses
lol
Thats how it should be!
i can’t win with you people!
ugh!
MOAR!
The thing the authorities seem to not realise is, the whole BT system will evolve, until the current heavy handed processes will be redundant.
They might change and update themselves (doubt it otherwise they would provide quality cheap downloads themselves) but they will always be playing 2nd fiddle.
But downloading is fraut, so join a DVD rental company, copy the dvds from originals and sell them to your mates to cover the cost of the rentals…. where would they go then!!!!
I still don’t believe that another central point of attack is the right way to go, a fully decentralized solution such as Vuze’s and others DHT tracker is better as it uses the resource that is available en mass in bittorrent: user bandwidth.
nice one :-D
http://www.h33t.com who wishes they had the cash for an open tracker that big
welcome to the party!!!! ;)
“Two are better than one, because they have a good return for their work: If one falls down, his friend can help him up. But pity the man who falls and has no one to help him up! Though one may be overpowered, two can defend themselves. A cord of three strands is not quickly broken.”
@7 Well as more and more people join this “Cloud Tracker” the cost on each provider will decrease :D
way2go
Thank you BTJUNKIE!!
AND THANK YOU TF FOR REPORTING THIS GREAT NEWS!!
BTJUNKIE, TORRENTFREAK, WE LOVE YOU!
openbittorent is tpb tracker just different domain
if this tracker source pre-configured and setup was available every single user could setup their own tracker on a domain.
no indexer needed just means when ever someone creates a torrent you’d have to add the tracker announce too a multiple list.
Soon i see 100’s of theses setup then someone will make a new program where it has the option to include a imported list all the open trackers of this kind when a user makes the torrent.
this could be huge, if all the private trackers of the world decided to stop with their stupid invite only and signups and everyone of the owners got together in this list, it would be impossible to shut down BT totally impossible
but sadly all the tracker owners wont adapt to this new method of an open tracker.
The big con with this is there is no indexer so how would anyone find the torrents?
catch 22
“PublicBT goes [u]Public[/u]”
LOL
Nameservers and owner of openbittorent.com has suddenly changed. hmm….
Good. Maybe the sale of TBP was the kick in the ass that was needed.
@16
You can’t spell. Fail
OBT is TPB just a different name. Also, they have plenty of money to run it now, a whole 4mil left over :P
Next step: a tracker of public trackers :-)
openbittorent is tpb tracker just different domain
^- This. *Please* stop trying to pass it off as something else, TF staff.
It’s incredibly lame to keep referring to OBT as a separate entity from TPB.
I can see it now that eventually all torrent files will be traded around privately through e-mail and IM so the RIAA/MPAA can’t possibly do anything about it, and with TPB going legit (dead) and with the RIAA/MPAA beating the dead horse, they’ll have no one to go after soon. ;)
I used to think private trackers were “elitist” but now I see how wonderful the world would be if everyone simply swapped private torrents.
With things going private and underground, then what will the RIAA/MPAA do? They won’t be able to do a thing. This is precisely why they should never have sued little old grannies, college students, single parent families and people who don’t even have a computer creating negative publicity which backfires and sends everyone swarming to the torrent technology, and then driving it all underground out of sight and out of their reach.
In the end, I think it’s what we all wanted karma to be. I have a warm fuzzy feeling inside now. Thank you RIAA/MPAA/neo.troll/reasoned troll/et al. :)
FINALLY this is what smart people have been waiting for. Less pressure for reliance on TPB and more open trackers! Hopefully these things will start popping up all over the internet and this whole “TPB owns all” mess will vanish and we can move on with our lives, besides the private trackers need bigger meat shields :P
Good News :D
I don’t think it’s about having 2 of these public trackers. I think we should have 1 million.
post 20
>Next step: a tracker of public trackers :-)
An INDEXER of open trackers.
I tried to start an open torrent tracker like this in the USA about a year ago (just a tracker, no website or torrent files etc.) and I had to take it down because of DMCA notices. Otherwise it would still be running, I just didn’t want to fight with my ISP.
how hard would it be to create a freenet style network that is tailored to only track torrents and host torrent files? Do the downloading etc in the regular web.
The network traffic for retrieving hosts and torrent files is quite small, that in cooperation with the use of DHT would make it a viable but not perfect alternative.
The client could be integrated into a regular bit-torrent client. If everyone ran it and hosted 500Mb – 1Gb of torrent files it would remain reletively fast.
Wow, you have to admit he bring s up some good points!
RT
http://www.anonymize.us.tc
@18
What do you mean “can’t spell”?
Do a whois and ns lookup at openbittorrent.com and you’ll see that both owner and dns changed from few days ago. Few days ago it was same as TPB.
@30 sometimes posts get deleted, I suspect he was referring to what is now 14.
(though I suppose he’s still a moron for commenting on spelling on a site that is frequented by people around the globe)
Good now let’s hope demonoid joins this quickly.
Good work guys. Hope I can join you some days. Next should be Mininova.
Could BTjunkie become the new Pirate Bay?
Thanks a lot, TorrentFreak. :-)
Please, keep informed about new open trackers as these.
I need a list of these new (open) trackers as replacements of TPB trackers (which I used often) for continuing uploading things… :-)
(I am a torrent releaser, btw).
I bet publicbt.com is also owned by one of the TPB guys. They just got a server in Netherlands this time. The private registration on the domain name just makes it even more likely that its owned by one of the TPB guys.
News flash.. If a pirate can access the site, so can the MPAA, RIAA, or law enforcement.
Those law suits had nothing to do with it. The entertainment industry is finally taking action against piracy and the pirates simply dont want to admit defeat. They would rather get dragged through a whole bunch of legal trouble and face fines, jail time, etc than just pay for things like a decent human being.
How to search opentracker torrents without indexing? Is it possible to do this?
I still think this is a lot of thin ice that could crack again just as easily… is there no way we can’t make the trackers more robust? Surely someone can design a system like DNS or router protocals to keep a network of trackers updated with at least 2 trackers dealing with one torrent.
Also I’ve been thinking… We need to use Twitter more to spread torrents… copy a magnet URI into a post, with a #torrent tag and then any other tags that describe the torrent etc.
quite lame to copy the OBT project (design). Shouldn’t that hard to create such a site at your own BTjunkie…
so that? how it? beging, and sooon all internets user are real criminals… my my where this world would go, but I will go with it, Long Live TPB… yaaar, where is mhy rum.
@41: I’m sure the OBT operators would appreciate the irony and completely approve of such ‘piracy’ ;)
this is good. there shouldn’t be one ‘central’ place (if that exists) for people to go nor a ‘central’ tracker for people to rely on for their torrenting needs.
i believe there should be a large number of small trackers, as opposed to a small number of large trackers.
Selling TPB apparently caused the hydra to burst up more heads. Always better news for BT-communities. ^_^
@14:
“The big con with this is there is no indexer so how would anyone find the torrents?”
The indexers will be independant of the tracker, run by different and completley unrelated sysops. That’s the point, the more decentralised the protocol it is, the harder it will be for the MPAA, RIAA, etc. to file lawsuits.
As long as btjunkie is legit, we just fucked the TPB and RIAA in their asses. hahahahaha. Fuck you Peter Sunde. We need a few more though just to be safe.
Btjunkie just spoiled some RIAA plans…uh oh, looks like you faggot RIAA guys will have to go to plan B because we just fucked Openbittorrent and TPB in their asses. hahaha.
Long live TPB??? No, more like long live Btjunkie.
actually, can anyone tell me what is going on? At first I thought BTjunkie copied the contents but now it appears that Btjunkie and Publicbittorrent are working together to make a new tracker…I don’t like the sound of this. I think bittorrent is under attack by RIAA. Lots of new shit going on that is really suspicious. Head over to emule and limewire.
what do you guys think of Demonoid.com ? It was taken down in in September of 2007 and then put back up in April of 2008. That’s really suspicious if you ask me. Supposedly, Deimos’ “close friend” is now running it. hmmm. Man, what the fuck is going on with bittorrent networks. I trust Gnutella network more than bittorrent now.
can’t rely on one public bt after TPB backstabbed us !
we need more
Did I miss something? What is wrong with DHT?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kademlia
“Mainline DHT is supported by
BitTorrent v4.1.0+, µTorrent v1.2+, BitSpirit v3.0+, BitComet v0.59+, KTorrent, Azureus 3.0+ (via a Plugin), Transmission 1.70+ , BitFlu.pl, and many libtorrent-based: They all share a DHT based on an implementation of the Kademlia algorithm, *for trackerless torrents*.”
We only need websites for searching, no more tracker.
Great work guys, shove the stick far up the RIAA’s ass. The stupid idiots over there won’t have any solution to the “internet problem” for another decade, so we need to keep playing the whack-a-mole game.
50–>”Did I miss something? What is wrong with DHT?”
————
Nothing wrong mate, I also don’t understand as DHT is not used more often.
I have made many experiments with DHT, and always I get the same conclusion:
“Today, DHT is very robust and with this already is not necessary the use of any tracker(s)”
The ONLY problem with trackerless torrents is that the indexers sites (Mininova, TorrentPortal, etc.) don’t show the stats from these.
Would be necessary modifying the already existing indexers sites for that they read and show stats from trackerless torrents; and in addition the new indexers sites could have this feature… problem solved!!
Although great it’s not resilient or robust enough, there is still a server that can be target.
A real solution would be to use P2P technology to put all tracking in the cloud but that would require a new client and some space in all computers that use that.
Prototypes of this kind of thing already exist like the serverless Osiris.
Here is the link:
http://osiris.kodeware.net/
I think the idea is great and so do google LoL
You see once it’s in the cloud unless they confiscate all computers and forbid all privacy for the population it will be impossible to censure anything and you cannot know who is behind it.
Basically it’s an internet on top of the other internet, it is encrypted and anonymous so it renders all discussions mute, the bad thing about it,is that it is slow for people without a broadband a real broadband in the megabytes range.
So I tried running a public bittorrent tracker in the US again (just for the hell of it). Within 12 hours my ISP received over 100 complaints!
39 Jul 13, 2009 at 08:55 by neo.troll|nvDX
Once again, your stupidity amazes me. I’d have much better luck explaining torrent technology to my house plant then having to explain my point to you.
But here goes…
Todays model: so let’s just say I had an account with TPB, and I’ve posted my name and the torrent hash file that I’ve created and am sharing audiovisual file with the world. The RIAA/MPAA can see instantly what I’m doing, and they could target me from the very beginning. So yes, neo.troll, I could be an instant target.
So I create this private torrent of the biggest block busting movie of the day. I’m using an open tracker and no one knows I’m using this tracker because they don’t keep any logs. I send the torrent hash file to my best friends and family through e-mail or IM. Everyone enjoys the file and movie, and who knows perhaps they start giving it to their friends and their family, and they do the same thing, etc. By then I’ve already seen the movie and stopped sharing it. The chances of my best friends and family being friends with the RIAA/MPAA of obtaining the torrent hash file is nil unless they had access to everyones e-mail and IM information.
The RIAA/MPAA could never see what we’re doing because it’s gone completely underground and out of site. They could try to shut down the open/public tracker sites but those sites also carry legitimate and legal files too.
So you see neo.troll the RIAA/MPAA would never succeed. They would have to shut down the entire internet which is never going to happen either. If they shut down the internet at least there wouldn’t be any trolls like you around anymore. ;)
It looks like Public trackers are fucked. Now signing on to one of my many Private Trackers
#39
Newsflash Neogay, if instead of a 10-Million-at-once tracker there will end up being 10k-sliced private trackers spread all over the world, just how much more work and how much less likelyhood will your so much beloved piracy prosecution end up having?
In the end, you can’t have a personalized sting operation for every single tracker out there, let alone constantly subpoena the whole world.
What you AND the industry fail to understand is that it isn’t a problem of not having enough legal pressure, but that there is simply a real and existing DEMAND for this type of service. And nothing will change that.
You could try and compete and actually gain something yourself and make something of it, or keep doing the stupid thing and constantly invest resources into trying to prevent it…imho rather stupid.
And as for those damned society destroying, artists killing pirates: You can’t get blood from a stone. I don’t (and I know many don’t) have the excess income to buy the shit in the first place, and although that neither in YOUR EYES makes it legally or morally RIGHT, it still makes it financially senseless to eliminate these entities, as they have ZERO impact on your revenue stream in the first place.
A LOT of pirates are called kiddies rightfully so – tons of them are teens with zero of their own income..they’ve already spent what they can on their n-th Xbox-PS2345-Wii-Sims-2-Expansion-Nr-5000-whatever, and at that point when you and your industry buddies come ringing for the money-milking, they’re just shit out of luck.
I’d also like to add to that the new way of thinking of media goods as a flatrate / always on service, and anyone who wants to can see that we’re moving ahead, away from the single item / product marktplace, and into a service providing environment. Get with the friggin’ program..
Again: blood from a stone, blood from a stone..
http://tracker.openbittorrent.com/stats
18946474
9802946
opentracker serving 1809595 torrents
opentracker
http://tracker.publicbt.com/stats
853
72
opentracker serving 179 torrents
opentracker
Looks like PublicBT has some catching up to do.
I think it’s about time we separated the tracker lists from the torrent files. What I mean is that the torrent’s tracker list should not be the authoritative source for trackers – the BT client should be. Any torrent added should be announced on the user’s preferred trackers. The user should be able to whitelist or blacklist specific trackers.
@56, if this cloud computing thing was so good for the people then why is Amazon and Google interested in implementing it. You say it can’t be censored but I disagree. What this cloud thing, I bet you 100 %, there will be a way for these companies to search it and block whatever content they want. That’s why they want it implemented.
This is a setup I like. Torrents in one place, trackers in another! Hard to do shit about trackers alone, but if both are under the same roof it’s too easy.
Why Kan’t ernesto read?
so many people told him the last time that openbittorrent and tpb trackers are SAME. but he won’t listen.
If you give him a bottle of Coke, he will still say, “No, I want Coca-Cola” nothing else.
Well soon TPB and OBT won’t be the same and the argument is over.
But yes, it would be nice if lots of public trackers spawn all over the place. They are not strictly needed, DHT does work (especially if your client can handle both AZ and ML) but it is nice to have some pretty stats.
The other parallel effort is to keep having many torrent indexers. This will keep us in free countries happy, those in oppressed regimes under the rule of US corps should switch to anonymous p2p, especially to release.
Good job to both sites!
I wonder however, if tracker.prq.to is being sold as well to the “New World Media Channel”, GGF.
This was the original, old TPB tracker and it is accepting public torrents today.
<3 <3 <3 <3
Great! Those trackers will surely be added to my new uploads along with my favorite private tracker =D
@#60
You speak the truth my friend!
@#60
You took the words outta my mouth, you speak the truth and nothing but the truth I like. :)
You and me are on same wave length aye!!! ^_^
We are all doomed to servitude to the internet cock…If you are on it, you are toast, with mayo cheese tomato and steak.
If a torrent was trackerless (and us eye-patch wearing, parrot-supporting shipmates just added the openbittorrent.com address manually)… why would it still be illegal?
1) It would NOT contain copyrighted content.
2) It would NOT faciliate the LINK to copyrighted content.
It would just be a chunk of numbers that confirm the validity of copyrighted data… BUT would NOT be a reproduction or resemble the copyrighted content in any way, and therefore should NOT be protected by intellectual property rights.
Otherwise, we’re talking about making a sequence of numbers, that do NOT resemble any likeness to copyrighted content and do not allow individuals to connect to that copyrighted content… illegal.
I say… go host a torrent site, but just remove all trackers from the torrents, let people figure out which tracker addresses to enter and you will not be guilty of facilitating piracy as you will not have provided anyone with a link to actually retrieve copyrighted content.
Yay??? or Nay???
Yaaaarrrrrrrrrr!!!
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