Run a Free BitTorrent Tracker on Google
Written by Ernesto on September 10, 2009With both the Pirate Bay and OpenBitTorrent trackers down at the moment, many people are unable to download torrents unless they enable DHT. Luckily there are a few backup trackers that people can use, and thanks to Google’s free App Engine, everyone can setup a tracker of their own in a few minutes.
In their defense, operators of BitTorrent sites often argue that they do nothing more than Google does. They offer a search platform for people to find content on the web, specifically torrent files. To a certain extent they are right, Google can be used to find torrent files in several ways.
For example, the mother of all search engines has a special search command that allows you to find torrent files scattered across the Internet.
Google’s custom search also allows everyone to create their own torrent search engine, and Google’s App Engine enables users to start a free torrent search engine for free by using Google’s servers.
It is quite clear that there are several ways to find torrents through Google. However, just finding torrents is not enough. In order to download content through BitTorrent successfully, one also needs a working tracker in order to locate those all-important peers. Luckily Google can help here too.
By using Google’s App Engine, everyone can run a tracker without having to invest a single dime in hardware or bandwidth. The only problem is making the tracker compatible with the App Engine, but thanks to the newly released Atrack software it is a piece of cake to set one up.
The Atrack Bittorrent tracker is designed to run on Google App Engine and its main goals are a minimal memory use, speed, low bandwidth usage and efficient CPU use. On top of this the tracker wont store any data at all, making it as secure as possible for its users.
“Atrack also aims to respect your privacy: other than what is needed for the most basic tracking, Atrack gathers no information whatsoever. Beyond that no aggregate statistics are kept of anything, and nothing is stored permanently anywhere, not even hashes and ip/ports,” the Atrack team writes.
So now everyone can set up a standalone BitTorrent tracker at no cost aside from the the time it takes to set things up. The Atrack software is released into the public domain, and a test tracker is up and running on Google’s App Engine.
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97 Responses
Does this mean what I think it does?
Yup…
Can’t stop filesharing. =D
Of course, if you have millions of individual trackers around, you’d also have to have .torrents that use them…
But I guess tying all your torrents to one tracker is unnecessary.
Not a news. Anybody’s able to searh for .torrents on google just by adding +ext:torrent to a search query.
thanks but no thanks..
google = the root of fascism to come
Hmmm yes, looks like I missed Atrack, it’s a python script that allows you to create your own torrent tracker with little use of bandwidth and server load. Quite intresting indeed.
Hmm, wow good for you, your special.
Security in my as… how can a tracker be safe to use.
Every tracker need to make a list of P2P users IP’s that is just right now sharing something.
So if a tracker would be able to make such a tracking list, then the name tracker would not be appropriate to this service the server is doing.
So every Tracker makes LOGs and list of its user’s habits, and if it could not do that the P2P system would not work right, because the clients would not know who is sharing what.
Server peer exchange.
Somebody needs to build an exchange-, possibly DHT, -mechanism to load-balance the trackers. That way, the whole ‘this or that tracker is down’-thing becomes a non-issue. And when one tracker has (almost) eaten its free bandwidth from its google accout, it can just refer to someone else.
@ P2P Worshipper
You’re always going to need to by exposed to someone. That you’re using Tor, (or whatever) if nothing else. Trackers are nice because quite reliable, but not entirely. Good 99% of the time, deniable, always.
There’s been freely available code that does this around for a while, see http://tracko.appspot.com
Running a tracker on Google and trying to be ‘privacy concious’ is a bit of a joke.
both trackers are back online
ahh, well thank god..
but why were they down ? and how long ?
didn’t pay the lectro bill ?
I wonder when an anti-piracy group is going to sue Google.
@:11
Because they was probably hosted by Black Internet IPS, and after was forced to close The Pirate Bay, then all theirs services where down incl. all trackers
And sue Google would probably be the best reason to set up a million trackers on Google. Like the Big G or not, they won’t sit still for that bullshit and it would set the precedent that all any tracker is doing is what google coulda did in the first place.
Ergo, if Google is legal, so be my tracker.
” 12 Sep 10, 2009 at 22:13 by Anonymous
I wonder when an anti-piracy group is going to sue Google. ”
Yeeehh right just like this will ever happen in the File Sharing age, that MPAA will sue one of there oven.
It’s always easy to yell at the neighbour kids, than at your oven even if they make the most noises.
I wouldnt trust google.They keep information abotu you when you search through their search engine. For gods sake, look at google chrome.They want your information.And now they are going to create their own OS now.Who knows what information they can keep now about > >You< <.Innovative they are but if you are looking for privacy…maybe not google.
@13
thx, so that was A while ago…puh
nice to hear they’re back up again..
public trackers make the scene!
This could be very useful for legal torrents. Thanks for pointing this out, TF =)
Whoa sweet <3 Google :D
Well, appengine logs a lot in the background. Some of it you can see in the appengine dashboard – but not all!
Also to run an appengine you normally have to identify yourself via a mobile phone. Also Google logs your IP, meaning that if it comes to court case they may reveal you info.
Google revealing your name and address? Impossible?
http://gawker.com/5354523/everybody-wants-google-to-rat-someone-out
i thought the point of having open tracker was encase tpb trackers stopped working we still had the open tracker?
TBP tracker is working intermittently, btw.
eMule/Kademlia FTW people!!
Some went down, but publicbt stayed up. Got slow for a while, but not dead. Add openbittorrent and publicbt to every torrent, and never worry.
What popular, open trackers are still up? (Is there a service that monitors which of open trackers are operational?)
#24: publicbt is up, but looks like openbittorrent is down :/
Here’s a thought… how about we stop using trackers altogether and just use DHT as it was intended… for trackerless torrents.
No, you guys would rather take 3 steps back than one forward… worry about your ratios on private trackers and pay for seedboxes that you didn’t really need.
Gee, why didn’t Bram think of that?
Oh right, because it’s stupid.
Personally, I’d rather spend my money on a Usenet account, than deal with the daily dramas of BitTorrent.
FYI, even when the HTTP tracker whet offline from openbittorrent and tpb, the udp tracker is still online, so unless your still using an old version, then ya might want to look at a client that uses udp trackers. the latest utorrent 2.0 beta is awesome
@ P2P Worshiper
Why would anyone yell at their oven?
@28
I would if it burned my pizza :D
did everyone forget about openbittorrent.kg . When tpb & openbittorrent go downk openbittorrent.kg is up just like publicbittorrent.
Add openbittorrent.kg trackers to all of your files & this means releasers too and no need to worry about downtime
So hold on, because this stuff (software) is now in the public domain, it will actually be illegal to stop file sharing.
Well, unless there’s another technicality that I’ve forgotten.
retreat respect warmest political 1990 amplified apple consensus
@ #3
For the love of god do yourself a favor and google the term fascism before you post something as mind suckingly retarded as that
@ Mr. Briggs
no, file sharing is not illegal. Copyrighted content sharing is, regardless of the method of sharing.
@phishy
Briggs wasn’t saying that filesharing is illegal. Re-read his comment pls.
Google = end of privacy on the internet.
Don’t trust them because, in the end, they are in it for the profits, they don’t care about your privacy, they profit off exploiting it.
by design App Engine is free up to about 5 million page views/month
http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/quotas.html#Free_Changes
the h33t tracker stats tell me the average number of tcp calls per torrent per month = approx 58,000
http://www.h33t.com:3310/stats
divide 5 million by 58,000 give the number of torrents Atrack will track before you must pay for the App Engine service = 59 torrents
http://www.h33t.com last year analysed a model of a distributed load balancing tracker on App Engine and decided the service is too expensive to be useful for bittorrent trackers
Why all the Google hate? They have brought some amazing services into existence, and not only that; they have given you these services for free. I would actually like to know what Google has done to bring this hate upon them. Are there legitimate reasons or is it just a handful of people who like to complain?
On topic, so E please leave this message on this site. Your teachers should have tought you it’s not good to have a God-complex.
To anyone interested, here’s an explanation as to why Google is different from your average Bittorrent site:
http://www.futureofcopyright.com/kb/45.pdf
Hey guys did you notice that thepiratebay trackers have started working again???
Oh sorry about that…Didn’t read the earlier comments in my overzealousness…
@36
People will always find something to complain about. Google is an extremely innovative company that has revolutionized the way we search, advertise and much much more. And all without asking for payment from the end user. People are suspicious of this. In the end, they use the same statistical data that everyone else uses, but instead of storing it for internal use, they use that data to make out Google experience even better. Localized, personalized search results and advertisements are pretty important for both consumers and searching and clicking ads, and clients who are selling ads, because selling irrelevant ads is only a waste of money, and showing useless search results a waste of time.
If you are scared of Chrome OS or Android OS, feel free to examine the code personally. Why would Google put tracking software in an open source project where millions of developers can examine every line of code and find it? That makes absolutely no sense. Even if it is there, it can be easily removed by deleting the code and recompiling and reinstalling.
Please, think before you say silly things.
“To a certain extent they are right, Google can be used to find torrent files in several ways.” That “extent” is minimal.
Google doesn’t host torrents and Google doesn’t track torrents, nor do they provide a community platform for a very specific end-user.
Search is just a fraction of what a torrent site does, and claiming anything else is an insult to the people who spend time developing both the sites and the protocol.
So let’s all just stop this nonsense that torrent sites “do the same thing Google does”, it’s not that “holy blanket of protection” that file-sharers want it to be and it negates whatever point the article tried to make by making it look like it was written by an amateur, which you clearly aren’t by judging from your other articles.
And I think I’ll end my rant right here.
yet another great invention from google. god love the internet =)
Nothing really new, been out for years now; but cool nevertheless.
“With both the Pirate Bay and OpenBitTorrent trackers down…”
What? OBT works fine for me. Just tested it – picked a random .torrent from TPB, removed all other trackers but OBT and disabled DHT. I still receive peers IPs and I can D/L, so OBT is surely up and running.
This is why Google > Yahoo and Bing/Microsoft.
@40, your missing the point entirely. if google wanted to come into your house and catalogue everything you own and did monthly check-ups to find out what you bought in the last month, then went a step further and backed up all your HDD’s archived them and catalogued them, then took a DNA sample & fingerprints(sure a unique way to login to gmail/os) then and linked them to your gmail account. in exchange of better more focused advertising, would you let them? no.
to draw a parallel, google street view is/was on an opt out basis, a lot of people don’t/didn’t even know there houses were on google.
its not about making their engine as functional as possible, but instead violating your right of privacy. and, as many people already said before me google would sell there mother if it meant they got more money. they dont care about users privacy, maybe once they do the hate will go away.
42, sorry.
I don’t know how old are you ernesto, but there were web search engine way before Google was born. Lycos, Atlavista, Yahoo, Excite were all popular before Google came and if someone can be called mother of search engine, it would be WebCrawler.
@48, if you dislike how Google functions then don’t use it. Simple as that. No one has ever forced Google onto you. Though, I agree with you on one point. If Google came to my house, looked at what I bought, backed up and cataloged my hard drive, and took a DNA sample it would not be acceptable to me. But Google doesn’t do that. They keep a record of searches to optimize their search engine and allow you to get where you’re going faster. This has made Google the best search engine I have ever used. The act of keeping a log of searches to optimize your experience is a completely incomparable to what you mentioned. Also, I have never heard of Google using the collected data to violate ones privacy. Do you think the Google has a team of people who spend all day examining the details of your life through your searches? One more thing you seem to forget, Google bring services to the public for free. That makes the idea of Google “selling their mother to get more money” seem kinda silly.
@48
It doesn’t do any harm to you and it is completely legal for them to take a picture of anything from public land(street) and put it online. They can even charge for people to look at a picture of your house if they wanted to and it would be completely fine.
Stop being such an idiot and spewing your nonsense and anger everywhere. Google is a key part in distributing content to the end user for practically free(adverstiments don’t bother many people)
Save your hate for companies that oppose your rights and views.
@phishybongwater
Fascism happens when the government only serves the big corporations. That’s how Mussolini defined it.
What is google except for a leviathan that will on the middle-long term threaten all our liberties, because it will detain a monopoly on nearly everything online ?
The simple fact that riaa/other mafiaa organisations didn’t sue them yet, while their reasons are always “facilitating copyright infringment” should give you a clue.
Guys you should all get a clue. It’s a world made for business. If the industry could make as much out of torrents as of the old business models, it would be a pay thing for a long time, and nobody could dl anything for free anymore.
Geez, I can’t believe how blind most people are. Maybe you should get a brain and start to get some education before thinking your words mean anything. sheeple.
or you could always just use http://www.thegooglebay.com
@48, I was about to respond to you when I saw @50. Like he said, no one is forcing you to use Google.
They are able to provide free services because they make money successfully marketing/advertising to consumers that use said services. They use some general info to yield better marketing/advertising results which make them more money which allow them to provide more free stuff and improve their products, and the cycle of life continues.
If you’re really so concerned about some faceless server knowing about your tentacle-rape porn fetish, I suggest using a different search engine. I’m sure MS/Bing would in no way exploit any info they collect.
/sarcasm.
Wow! Never would I imagine the Google fanboys were also torrent enthusiasts! Who is feeding you guys this crap. Google’s not worth billions of dollars because of all the great free stuff they offer you, data mining is big business. I bet if 80% of you Google fanboys knew what they did with all of the data you give them you would change your mind, the other 20% of you are just hopeless idiots.
JUST WEAR A FAKE BEARD TO DOWNLOAD UR TORRENTS AND THEY WILL NEVER KNOW WHO U ARE !!!!
@42 Karai
“If you are scared of Chrome OS or Android OS, feel free to examine the code personally. Why would Google put tracking software in an open source project where millions of developers can examine every line of code and find it? That makes absolutely no sense. Even if it is there, it can be easily removed by deleting the code and recompiling and reinstalling.
Please, think before you say silly things.”
Maybe you should think before you say silly things. PARTS of Google Chrome have the source available for inspection. However a large chunk of the browser that does the ‘phone homing’ is NOT OPEN SOURCE NOR CAN ANY TOM DICK OR HARRY INSPECT IT.
Please, think before you say silly things.
Wonderful news…
Just, well, Pirate Bay is down, but openbittorrent and publicbt are up for me, and I hope, they are not going to be sold together with tpb.
same here: openbittorrent is up and running just fine.
i don’t get the argument that they do they same thing as google. they also host .torrent files (i know, google has a few in their cache).
http://btreannouncer.net/
Find more trackers for your torrent.
I’ve ad great success with this.
@52
I tell you what, when google partners with the US government you can call them fascist.
Until then you can’t, simple as that.
all the telcos are fascist then because they RETAIN, not detain, a monopoly on the technology that runs the internet
Cisco is fascist because they retain a monopoloy on most of the routers running the backbone of the internet.
But, as we all know, when you resort to calling anyone who disagrees with you “sheeple” you sir are an idiot.
You clearly aren’t, but you come off as one.
No one makes you use google, they are a single website hosting various resources you can avoid.
Until you HAVE to use google, you are wrong.
You really don’t want to have this debate because i understand what I’m talking about, you clearly don’t
anyways, openbittorrent has nothing to do with the TPB sale, so fear not
Sue google haha that will never happen. TPB blocked in your country? Use: http://piratebayproxy.org
i dont believe for one minute that the debate is narrowing to the point of comparing apples with pears. it is nonsense to say google and TPB have parallels
the issue remains that tracker operators are not doing it for the purposes of circumventing anyone’s rights and suggesting such is to misunderstand what filesharing is about
the content doesnt touch the servers or the administration of the tracker systems. an operator does not need any knowledge of what is being shared to operate the system
proposals for moderating content are inoperable because naming conventions and hashes are ultimately dynamic and there is not enough resources in God’s good earth to download and check every content link for copyright material. in the same way that some sites will remove torents because of reports/comments from community members then the MAFIAA can also have torrents removed by making the proper application. why has the argument for proper business to business reporting become lost? because the MAFIAA dont want to co-operate in the reporting of torrents because they also realise the impossibility of the exercise
http://www.h33t.com wishes freak could make a verified account system to stop people posting using my name
Google will turn evil at some point it is an inescapable path to all companies that get mega big. CEO’s change and when they start putting lawyers and accountants as CEO’s, manager and consultants you will see a whole different face from google. Microsoft too was once beloved
@50, who said that i used google? google keep all data for 3 years(it could be longer now) theres no need to hold on to it for that long, because when you search for something and find what your after you dont then google it for the next 3 years. so all there data is irrelevant, much like cataloguing your worldly good, you’ve already got a toaster, why would you buy another, unless it broke?
@51, yep your right, its not illegal. but it is an incredibly useless service. and the fact remains that in order to get your house removed from street view you must send a complaint to google, which my gran cant do, she doesn’t know what google is or even have the internet to use or in fact a computer. if shes offended by it, she has to rely on other people telling her whats happening and then complain for her, its the wrong approach and on a much larger and public scale that most private companies could ever achieve, for this reason they need to ask home owners, in person.
^^”Save your hate for companies that oppose your rights and views.”
they do oppose my rights and views.
also, im not angry, im sitting here very calm and relaxed, it seems your the one with the anger issues:)
@66 Sep 11, 2009 at 16:01 by R3P71L14_C0R4X:
I’m sorry, but I don’t see the evil on the street view thing even though people say that is being used by criminals to plan robberies. I can understand the fear about people not wishing to have their homes there because they know or think they know people don’t like them and they could do something, but that is pointless as technology has evolved and anyone with a radio controlled air-model can make the same thing with even better resolution, you can even do it with a kite, what worries me about google is not that, is what they could do with all the information they collect, there are proof of concepts already showing how one can guess your social security number from your date and place of birth, how you can identify anonymous post by tracking a user and that is really scary and there is no legislation or rules about that kind of thing.
Street view is not really a problem, data mining in massive amounts is. I don’t mind the collection, I mind the use. I know is futile to try and say no to collection it only stop the good guys from doing it because real criminals have none off those constraints so no, collecting data is ok, but if you are caught doing something wrong with it and that it harms someone else those should be punished.
To all you guys moaning about google keeping records of your online activities, try https://ssl.scroogle.org/ instead !!!
it has an https interface
it keeps logs
it runs on google servers
it is US based
this: http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2009/08/google_cofounder_sergey_brin_s.html
has https interface: only the client and the server know what you’re asking for no middle man
keeps logs: it is very easy to map ip’s to requested info hashs
google servers: if *anyone* wants to see who accessed what they have to convince google to give access to logs
is US based: a court might be able to convince google
this: if they want the logs they might have a huge fight over them.
I think a lot of people are missing what a tracker does.
A tracker stores IPs and hashes of torrent files, temporarily, and serves them up to other IPs with the same hash.
That’s it. They don’t do anything else, really. They don’t have to. Just keep track of who’s downloading the torrent and be ready to pass that info along to anybody else with the same torrent (as identified by the hash). Thus allowing the peers to find each other and connect.
A tracker doesn’t know what is in the torrent. It doesn’t have to even know the *name* of the thing.
So something like this is perfect. Storing the data in a memcached means that the data expires eventually, and is only ever in memory, never written to disk. But then that’s pretty much what you’d want it to do, IPs don’t stay on torrents forever.
People complaining about privacy don’t really get it. A tracker contains *zero* incriminating information, by definition. Until you associate those hashes with a specific torrent and then show that the content is infringing, there’s nothing proving anything.
All a tracker needs is a fair amount of bandwidth and a fair amount of temporary memory. So AppEngine is pretty perfect for it. Especially if there’s lots of them.
15 Sep 10, 2009 at 22:26 by P2P Worshiper
” 12 Sep 10, 2009 at 22:13 by
Yeeehh right just like this will ever happen in the File Sharing age, that MPAA will sue one of there oven.
It’s always easy to yell at the neighbour kids, than at your oven even if they make the most noises.
Do you have an oven fetish?
hansel and gretel man,
he just wants to throw the neighbor’s kids into the oven
@67, the difference is it takes alot more brain power to make a remote controlled air-model than it does to use google
I understand this site appeals to people that are anti-the-man and anti-big-corporations. But HELLO, use your head. Do you really think that Google somehow magically obtains more info about you than every other site on the web? Do you somehow think this saved info from Google is a bigger risk than that say info from MSN/Hotmail, Yahoo, FaceBook, or every other site on the net you are a member of?
To be perfectly honest, I would trust Google more as they have more to lose from bad publicity and they have a huge pool of lawyers to draw from rather a small site that would just cave from minor scare tactics if anything ever went south.
That said, this is pretty cool idea about running a tracker from Google’s App Engine.
@73 Sep 11, 2009 at 18:37 by R3P71L14_C0R4X:
Not really, they are selling RC mini blimps already that have all that is needed to make it a spycam in the air. and being a blimp you don’t even need to learn how to fly the thing and don’t have to buy an arduino and program it yourself either.
But don’t trust me type RC blimp in your search engine and see it for yourself :)
@56
EXACTLY! That’s what I do. All these newbies crying about trackers and anonymity are doing things the hard way. It’s easy to be anonymous on the internet. Anyone who says 100% anonymity isn’t possible is thinking inside the box.
Well it’s Sep 11 and The Pirate bay is working just fine.
As it was 2 days ago on the 9th when I went looking for something.
Seems like these “TPB is Up” and “TPB is Down” articles are too quick at jumping the gun.
So until it actually goes down and stays down – IT’S NOT NEWS!
@2
you can search ‘filetype:torrent’ on any search engine (:
Sounds cool haha XD
Stop the filter > http://nocleanfeed.com
@76
this is not a tpb post, it’s mentioned on the first paragraph but i think this talks about the technology developed with the name Atrack.
Hey set one of these trackers up on google apps and am testing, let me know what you think.
http://theninjahideout.appspot.com/
join the forms at http://forums.theghostbay.org/
and keep the pirate bay alive
@75, ironically you would have to google what you needed to purchase. why not just use what google had already provided, and it would save you money, unless your going to steal that too.
Use scroogle scraper, because they delete information about who searches for what. Ftw
@23: AMEN!
ed2k/kad :D
So, for the non-website-building savvy people are there directions to setup a track using Atrack? Or other simillar software?
Indeed, how would a normal person set up a tracker in 10 minutes? How did you do it NINJA?
@87
There really is no need for everyone to run one, unless you are doing something useful with it. I’d *only* consider running one if i was to support it’s growth and/or develop further the current code of the tracker.
Having said that, here’s what you need:
The development SDK:
http://code.google.com/appengine/downloads.html#Google_App_Engine_SDK_for_Python
The Atrack code:
http://hg.cat-v.org/atrack/archive/tip.zip
Some documentation:
http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/python/gettingstarted/
@88
i’d like to add that it’s probably a better idea to focus the efforts on running public tracker at home or on private servers.
http://erdgeist.org/arts/software/opentracker/
google is allready complying with dmca complaints though in their searches.
@90
thanks for remembering that.
here’s an example:
http://www.google.com/#hl=en&safe=off&q=kazaa+lite&revid=1747066656&ei=uMurSv70HZvajQeOsanbBw&sa=X&oi=revisions_inline&resnum=0&ct=broad-revision&cd=1&fp=137e64894ebd337c
@81 Hey ninja, cool that you got it running, let me know if you have any issues, I do recommend you to update to the latest code because the experimental code that I released still had much debuging crap that took more quota than the tracker itself, the latest code in the mercurial repo should be much better.
@87 This stuff is still rather experimental, but I hope to write a howto at some point, it should really be very simple.
Share and enjoy! ( http://marvin.cat-v.org )
“So every Tracker makes LOGs and list of its user’s habits, and if it could not do that the P2P system would not work right, because the clients would not know who is sharing what.”
Obviously you don’t know what logging means. Logs are historical documents. They are not needed for concurrent operation.
“MPAA will sue one of there oven.”
Awesome spelling… You must be American.
“This could be very useful for legal torrents.”
There are legal torrents??? :)
“Microsoft too was once beloved”
Funny. I’ve been around since 1985 and I don’t remember that ever being the case. :D
“Seems like these “TPB is Up” and “TPB is Down” articles are too quick at jumping the gun.”
Did you take even a brief look at the actual article? Maybe you did, but your eyes were closed!
tracko works fine. ;) thx
for those in need,
http://betadoctor.appspot.com/announce
https://betadoctor.appspot.com/announce (For secure SSL connections)
thx
Thanks for the replies everyone. ;)
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