The Hydra Project, THP for short, is developed with privacy, anonymity and survivability in mind. One of innovative features of the project is to make an OpenID for users of private BitTorrent sites so their login information and upload/download ratios can be shared across different websites. The torrents can also be shared among different trackers. This ensures that user ratios and uploaded torrents will not be lost if for some reason one of the BitTorrent trackers ceases to exist.
Shanti Braford, the developer of the project explained to TorrentFreak: “The idea is that a group of admins can get together and form a sort of distributed set of private BitTorrent trackers. bacon.org, eggs.com, ham.net and sausage.fm can all get together, share user databases, torrents, upload/download ratios, etcetera. If eggs.com gets raided, the rest of the sites are still alive and the torrents people have downloaded will still work because they’ll be associated with multiple tracker URLs.”
THP will be one of the most private and anonymous BitTorrent trackers, something that most users will absolutely appreciate. For example, no email addresses will be collected, the IPs will not be stored (only memcached) and .torrent files will not be connected to users. There is even an option for the administrator to delete all data via a memcached shutdown in case the server loses its connection to the network, which will happen if there’s a raid.
The tracker script is developed in Ruby on Rails. “The code is about 90% there,” Shanti told us “I’ve kept it very simple and rudimentary, but functional. If any PHP coders are interested perhaps it could be ported over.” I would encourage all developers who are interested in the project to take at the project page and THP’s Sync API wiki.
If THP lives up to its expectations the Hydra will be more flexible and stronger than ever.
