Together with open tracker initiatives like OpenBitTorrent, torrent storage services such as Torrage could provide the building blocks for many new torrent index sites. This week the idea became reality with the launch of Torrage, which is already in use by some of BitTorrent’s most reputable sources.

The site, which also allows individual users to store torrents online, is hosting hundreds of thousands of torrents already. It is currently in use by Suprnova and the new and improved EZTV site. To get started, Torrage has an API and some example code available for torrent sites owners.

Once the torrent files are uploaded they can be accessed through a url that is based on the info_hash value of the torrent. “You can not search or list torrent files that are stored here, you can only access them if you already know the info_hash value of the torrent you want to download,” the Torrage site explains.

TorrentFreak spoke to several torrent site owners who all agreed that it is a welcome addition to the range of tools they have available now, and we can expect to see more sites with Torrage powered download links in the near future.

Without having to operate a tracker and store the .torrent files, maintaining a torrent site will be less complicated and much cheaper. This aside, some might argue that this decentralized setup will reduce the legal liability for site owners since their part in the BitTorrent chain has been significantly reduced.

Whether the various copyright holders and anti-piracy watchdogs such as BREIN, IFPI and the MPAA will agree with this assessment remains to be seen. Regardless of what they think, Torrage is a service that has the potential to help out many torrent sites, old and new.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

The SuprNova team is proud to relaunch this piece of Internet history and they let us know: “SuprNova has been down for some years due to some heavy pressure from the copyright lobby. The former owner sloncek donated SuprNova to The Pirate Bay – and as you know, we like to kick ass and bow for noone!”

The new and improved version of SuprNova will be a combination of old and new features. It will have a different look and feel, but it is clearly inspired by the old SuprNova design.

The first weeks after its launch will be used as a public beta test. This means that there will probably be some bugs and minor problems that need to be taken care of, but nothing too serious hopefully.

SuprNova crawls more than 25.000 trackers and has a huge database of more than 1.000.000 torrents with nearly 25.000.000 peers. This means that SuprNova will start where it left of, as one of the biggest BitTorrent indexing sites.

Last but not least, the SuprNova team has a strong message for the anti-pirates:

“This is how it works. Whatever you sink, we build back up. Whomever you sue, ten new pirates are recruited. Wherever you go, we are already ahead of you. You are the past and the forgotten, we are the internet and the future.”

Y’arr! WAFFLES!

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

Suprnova will be extremely friendly to BitTorrent illiterates. One of the new features is a Java applet that allows you to download .torrent files without having a BitTorrent client installed. This is not only useful for newbies, but also if you’re working on a PC that doesn’t allow you to install a BitTorrent client like some workplaces or Universities have. The Java applet that will be integrated into SuprNova will be similar to BitLet.

Torrents and Trackers

SuprNova’s aim was and is to index more content than any other site. Unlike The Pirate Bay, SuprNova will also index torrents from other sources. Upon its release it will crawl more than 25.000 trackers and have a database of more than 1.000.000 torrents. This will make SuprNova one of the biggest BitTorrent indexing sites right from the start.

Search

Suprnova wasn’t perfect, but the really annoying thing was that there was no search feature. In the early days this wasn’t really a problem, only a couple of torrents were added every day. But as the site grew bigger and bigger it became nearly impossible to find what you want without spending minutes digging through the categories. The new Suprnova will therefore have a search function, a significant change, but a good one.

Design

Sloncek, the former owner of SuprNova donated the domain to TPB under the condition that they would keep the nostalgic design more or less intact. There will be some changes design wise, but most people will still see that it’s inspired by the old Suprnova look. Brokep, one of the TPB admins told TorrentFreak: “The idea was to bring SuprNova to what it would have been today it if never closed. So, it’s supposed to be an updated version of the old beloved site! We hope that people still get the SuprNova-feeling and that it also feels like a modern website.”

Community

The new Suprnova will have its own IRC channel, just like in the old days. In fact, it is already up and running, so if people want to chat about Suprnova (or other things), go to #suprnova at freequest. As mentioned in our previous post, Suprbay.org will be the new forum for the Suprnova and TPB community, over 5000 people signed up already, and SuprNova hasn’t even been launched yet.

Another new feature related to the community is the comments system. Similar to other BitTorrent sites people are now allowed to post comments on every torrent. Apart from the usual rants the comments are useful to get an indication of the quality of the files.

Front Page

Like in the good old days the frontpage will show all the latest torrents by category. The categories will be on top of the page, and they will be the same as before: Games, Movies, TV-Shows, Anime, Music, Apps, Mac & Misc.

This was only a sneak peek at some of the changes on the new Suprnova. I guess you have to wait for the launch if you want to check out all of the changes and new features, the wait will soon be over.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

With well over 300.000 members, the old SuprNova forum(s) was one of the biggest online communities back in 2004. To give you an idea how big it was, Mininova’s forum now has 75,364 members, and TorrentSpy only 32,346, even though these sites have more visitors than SuprNova ever had.

Similar to the old SuprNova forums, SuprBay is hosted on a separate domain. It currently has some general sections, and because it is a joint operation, also sections related to TPB and SN specifically.

Brokep, one of the administrators of The Pirate Bay officially announced the opening of the forum a few minutes ago on the TPB blog. He further told TorrentFreak that SuprBay will have the same moderators for both sites. However, some will be more dedicated to The Bay and some to SuprNova.

Sloncek, the former owner of SuprNova told us earlier that he is looking forward to getting involved in the new community. He will not be working on Suprnova anymore, but he is one of the moderators at SuprBay.

In just a few days 647 members signed up at SuprBay, but this number is expected to grow bigger soon, a LOT bigger.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

In a response to this breaking news, the former owner of Suprnova told TorrentFreak why he decided to donate the domain: “The domain was doing nothing. I know that domain has some nostalgic value and some people would be more then happy to see it back online. I don’t use it, and TPB is the only team that I know will use it correctly.”

“I will be involved in the community [Forums] on a separated domain”, Sloncek said and added, “The site has to look almost exactly like it looked before. They can upgrade it, but they cannot change it appearance completely. We further agreed that the site has to be community orientated (not private).”

Together with the relaunch of Suprnova, which will be a torrent indexer and not have it’s own tracker, a new community will be launched that will be linked to both Suprnova and The Pirate Bay. The forums will be hosted on SuprBay.org and are already up and running (more or less).

We also talked to Brokep, one of The Pirate Bay administrators and asked him why they decided to revive Suprnova. He told us: “We talked it over and decided it was
something people would have use for, it would help the torrent community and it would also signal that if you shut one down it will get back up again.”

Here’s a preview of the updated Suprnova logo. The new site is scheduled to go live this week!

For the people who are relatively new to BitTorrent, here’s a brief history of Suprnova (previously posted here).

The Rise of Suprnova.

Suprnova.org launched in the fall of 2002. At that time it was one of the few BitTorrent sites on the Internet. Suprnova was founded by Andrej Preston, a Slovenian teenager better known as Sloncek. Initially he wanted to name the site Supernova, but that name was already taken.

Suprnova.org started as a fun project, with a very primitive setup. In fact, it was hosted on a linux box at Sloncek’s home in the early days. As soon as Suprnova was ready to go public, he started to advertise the site among friends and on IRC, and it slowly started to attract more and more visitors.

The word about the “universal BitTorrent source” spread like wildfire. It was no surprise that it didn’t take long before the traffic generated by Suprnova was maxing out the meager 16kb/s upload capacity.

The increased popularity of Suprnova came around the same time when other torrent sites like donkax.com, bytemonsoon.com and torrentse.cx, decided to quit. These sites were more or less forced to go offline, either due to bandwidth constraints, or cease and desist letters. But Suprnova made it very clear that it wasn’t going anywhere.

Suprnova continued to grow, and Sloncek spent most of the time looking for mirrors, to guarantee that the site stayed in the air. At it’s top it indexed almost 60.000 torrents and about 1.5 million visitors per day. Suprnova had a very active community, and its forum was among the biggest on the Internet.

The fall of Suprnova.

In November 2004 Suprnova’s ISP told Sloncek that the servers were taken into custody by the Slovenian police. The raid was initiated by the French anti-piracy lobby RetSpan. The police never contacted Sloncek about this personally, but is was a sign that things were about to change.

Around the same time Reuters wrote about Sloncek in one of their articles, which soon after spread out to the Slovenian press. This was the turning point for Sloncek. He later said: “So I ended up reading about myself in Slovenian newspapers. And right about that time, I had a feeling something was wrong. I do not really know what the feeling was or where it was coming from, but I decided it was time to take SuprNova.org offline.”

Sloncek eventually pulled the plug December 19, 2004, which marked the end of an era.

October 18, 2005, almost a year after the servers were raided, Sloncek received a letter form the prosecutor stating that the charges against him were dropped. This was a great relief, and he later said: “This has been a huge pressure on me and I think it left some permanent marks on me. I hope none of you will ever have to go through something like this.”

Early 2006 Suprnova.org shortly resurrected as a P2P news site, but that project ended after a couple of months.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

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.”

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

Amen…

For all the other believers out there, put your own aXXo prayer in the comments.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

A year after the closedown, Sloncek, the brain behind the legendary torrent site told what really happened:

..there was a door bell at 6:30 in the morning, saying it’s the police. Actually I was not expecting anything anymore, since SuprNova.org has been taken offline long before that. They showed me a court order to search my place and they did so. They took as far as I remember, two of my computers and lots of documents.

Today the site is for sale at sedo, the end of an era.

Bye Suprnova.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

This obviously came as a shock to all the people who donated money. They thought the money was going to be spend on paying penalties, but intead, lokitorrent’s users were penalized. The MPAA said they were going to use the collected ip-adresses from Lokitorrent’s logfiles in future court cases.

John G. Malcolm, head of the MPAA’s anti-piracy efforts said, “It will have a lot of records as to who these people are and what they provided, and that information will be of great interest to our members. The MPAA would turn over information to prosecutors in appropriate cases.”

As I said, a rough start.

part 1: A rough start
part 2: Legal stuff
part 3: Going Down
part 4: Bram Talking
part 5: Filling the gap
part 6: Torrent Clients
part 7: Advancing

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.