most popular BitTorrent tracker. Unfortunately their current tracker system is not performing as it used to and has reached its effective limit. The TPB team is currently working on a more efficient Open Source tracker system that, among other things, will guarantee better protection against anti-piracy outfits." />

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The Pirate Bay is Developing a New BitTorrent Tracker

The Pirate Bay is without a doubt the most popular BitTorrent tracker. Unfortunately their current tracker system is not performing as it used to and has reached its effective limit. The TPB team is currently working on a more efficient Open Source tracker system that, among other things, will guarantee better protection against anti-piracy outfits.

The Pirate Bay is Developing a New BitTorrent TrackerSome of you might have noticed that the Pirate Bay trackers were down for a couple of hours today. The reason for the downtime is not related to an anti-piracy organization this time, on the contrary. TPB has moved its servers to a new datacenter and added some extra servers to their already pretty impressive server lineup. The tracker currently runs on 12 servers, and 4 brand new ones will be added later today.

Adding new servers is not the only reason for the move of course. The new datacenter has better routers which handle their requirements better. It allows TPB to install better protection against DDoS attacks and nullrouting the spam-nets from anti-piracy organizations.

However, a complete overhaul of the current tracker system is needed to ensure the future effectiveness of the tracker and to ensure protection against spammers and fake torrents. According to the tracker design page, this new tracker will be capable of blocking and/or logging known p2p vandals such as MediaDefender, BayTSP, MediaSentry and EZ2net. The new tracker will ensure the privacy of its users and is designed to be as efficient as possible, meaning more peers with less bandwidth.

TiAMO, one of the developers of the new tracker system told TorrentFreak that they are still looking for skilled coders who want to join the Open Source project and help the BitTorrent community. If you think you are the guy, let him know. The current source code can be downloaded over here.

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  • ~

    I wish them good luck with this.

  • Deimon

    Is there something the TPB can’t do?

  • IsoMonster

    #2

    Meny, meny things…

  • Consuming Hatred

    [quote comment="178721"]Is there something the TPB can’t do?[/quote]

    Bring world peace?

  • Pastafari

    “Is there something the TPB can’t do?”

    Yes. Don’t say “The The Piratebay.”

  • Lulzarian

    [quote comment="178749"]“Is there something the TPB can’t do?”

    Yes. Don’t say “The The Piratebay.”[/quote]
    stfu n00b

  • kan1

    power to the people

  • Konzine

    [quote comment="178770"]power to the people[/quote]

    Rock on Bro.

    [quote comment="178749"]“Is there something the TPB can’t do?”

    Yes. Don’t say “The The Piratebay.”[/quote]

    Go die in a hole..

    [quote comment="178721"]Is there something the TPB can’t do?[/quote]

    If there is, then god help us all..

    Rock on Pirate Bay, rock the hell on.

  • John

    I hope they’re not working on too much stuff at once.

    I’d prefer to see thevideobay.org launching…

  • Conformist

    ThePiratebay can’t stop anti-piracy groups.

    ThePirateBay CAN however, be the shit!
    And keep the fight going as long as possible!
    When I get paid again, I can’t wait to buy some merch from them!
    To help support them!

    I hope they get an island, that would be sick!

  • Conformist

    To Number 9, yes, that would be great.
    Don’t they have multiple projects that they’d like to work on?
    They’re just busy.
    I’d be happy to help, if I knew how. :P

  • Justice

    number 11: the best way to help out for us none coding n00bs is to buy their produckts :)

    Go TPB!!!

  • pwnagepanda

    awesome. definitely the best public tracker out there, and here is another reason why. keep up the good work

  • Jeff

    What a foolish waste of developer resources. They are trying to address 2 issues,
    1 – Scalability
    2 – Redundancy
    3 – Resiliency to attack

    The solution to 1 & 2 is decentralization and large scale distribution (e.g. DHT). For some types of attacks (e.g. tracker DoS or take down) it is also the solution to 3. For other types of attacks like spoofing or corrupt data poisoning it would seem far more effective to be able to automatically use information from ‘good’ peers to determine ‘bad’ peers than to try ‘manually’ maintain lists on the trackers (a la peerguardian). And again, this works better in a distributed setting.

    Consequently, if you are a developer it would seem more prudent to spend time on implementing DHT-search and solving the spoofing and poisoning through some sort of distributed trust network than to work on this tracker.

  • Smartass

    Wasn’t there an episode of the Bitlord show where one of TPB admins told them that they where working on a new tracker system that would make all peers Un viewable.

  • Anonymous

    [quote comment="178872"]Wasn’t there an episode of the Bitlord show where one of TPB admins told them that they where working on a new tracker system that would make all peers Un viewable.[/quote]I thought it was just future of p2p being anonymous.

  • n33t

    the evil DHT is not the answer because the evil DHT permits peers blocked by a safe tracker to join a swarm and log downloads

    evil DHT = **AA logging your downloads
    ______________________________________

    TPB are making some errors

    1. tracker ipfiltering and logging at the db level has a VERY VERY VERY high cost. it is infinitely better to do the ipfiltering in the kernel and if necessary design services to poll the kernel logs
    2. their current (published) server specs are a jumble of computers the best of which is barely one step up from a multi-media desktop system … they cannot be serious. please please please get yourself a hardware specialist to give you some advise on what a real server looks like
    3. there is plenty redundancy in clustered services with dedicated hardware buffers (slack in the system) ie. use a 8x dual-core cpu server with 64GB RAM instead of 12 individual boxes

    i wish the guys luck but it is not a good start. TPB tracker has been unreliable and slow for years and they need a NEW plan, NOT a plan which builds on their past mistakes

  • ScytheNoire

    is this why nothing from NewTorrents has been working?

  • An0num0s

    The way it looks … everyone is putting everything on TPB… the weight of the world being on their shoulders … shit is bound to hit the fan…

  • shelia

    screw bitorrent and trackers. im going straight to newgroups. ill gladly pay $50 a year for all the movies music and porn i can imagine. its hell worth it. im tired of the riaa the mpaa and the whatever aass. im tired of the torrent sites the ads the fake shit. i want my stuff and i want it now.

  • shelia

    think about it, no lawsuits no ass holes breathing down ur neck. feels good dont it? well worth the price. go down to wallgreens pick up a green dot temporary credit card and BOOM easy.

  • nublet

    17. yes most likely if the torrent is using the pirate bays tracker.

    should see something like: hxxp://tpb.tracker.thepiratebay.org/announce or similar somewhere, and its currently down atm for some.

    on topic: great their trying to make a better tracker ;) always good!
    and hopefully they will win their law cases so they wont have trouble getting their new nice shiny tracker spammed down by lobby organisations..:p

  • Spanky

    @ shelia, what are you doing reading a Torrent blog if you hate BitTorrent so much? You go pay your $50 a year. I guaranty I’ll get better quality downloads, with less hassle, for £0.00, every day of the week.

    Just need to know the right trackers, with the best community’s. No ads, No fake shit, No RIAA/MPAA

    Good luck TPB, sounds great. But for me, privet trackers are where it’s at.

  • Shinoda

    [quote comment="178968"]im tired of the torrent sites the ads[/quote]
    lol, ads. ABP anyone?

  • Anonymous

    As long as the Pirate Bay tracker is open to the public, anti-piracy groups will be able to retrieve retrieve your IP from the tracker.

    The only real way to get security is to go Private.

  • Whats An Ad?

    Do they still put those silly things on sites…ever since I downloaded firefox and some extension named Ad Block Professional they seemed to auto-magically disappeared.

  • grapes

    i think the tpb is a great website and good luck to them on future developments good job

  • grace

    And I spent the whole day thinking my stupid router was blocking ports……
    http://tech–info.blogspot.com/2007/10/zune-2-leaks-out-in-three-flavors.html

  • Hell you said?=

    [quote comment="178721"]Is there something the TPB can’t do?[/quote]

    If there is, then god help us all..

    Rock on Pirate Bay, rock the hell on.[/quote]

    As you consume your electricity, are you aware of that of every electron there’s a downside…A electron has to get to earth based plugs…and where does those go? go figure…in the earth which gives of more heavy weather and more lighting storms and so on…etc…

    so hell is broken loose now :)

  • Raghu Nayak

    Best of Luck TPB. :)

  • old timer

    I think that the one feature Bittorrent would benefit from most is the adoption of an eMule-style user-identification system. Bittorrent identifies peers by IP address, but eMule clients identify each other using a secure userhash; a public/private encryption key set which makes each user uniquely identifiable — and each peer’s transfer history and other behavior remembered — regardless of IP address. Then in addition to keeping a “bad list” of IPs, a site can keep a “good list” of userhashes of clients with a history of good behavior.

    Another possible idea I’d like to see is the OPTION of choosing a “secure tracker”. By that I mean a tracker that :

    1. blocks out bad IPs
    2. supports multiple swarm cells — The tracker gives out the fewest number of peers needed for a reasonably fast download. So instead of one giant swarm, there are many tiny ones. Yes, this will result in a slower download, but will be more private and safer because everyone’s IP address is only given out to a few other peers. Because the IP addresses are filtered from the peerlist before peers are returned to the downloader, the chance of coming in contact with an anti are greatly reduced.

    @shelia –

    Please list the Usenet provider where you “pay $50 a year for all the movies music and porn i can imagine” – i think we’ll all be lining up for that one.

    The cheapest of the cheap charge several times that price for unlimited usenet service.

  • English Teacher

    I’m really LMAO. “The The PirateBay”.

  • Dot360.Net

    For more torrents checkout http://www.dot360.net

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  • henry

    What about blocking all the academic researchers who’s papers are getting read at **IA? Most do stats from single IP.

    Am I the only person whose never heard of EZ2net?

  • Earl

    Very nice the world really needs a good oss tracker.

    The thing is it’ll probably be difficult to get it right for everyone. Since it’s being developed by tpb they’ll focus on public tracker stuff (bandwidth, load balancing, cache, open fds and whatnot). They’ll have to limit the dev team which leaves not much space for interoperability.
    I sure hope this doesn’t become a fork fest.

  • Sean

    Good stuff, keep it up TPB!

  • Solitaris

    PBay dont work properly today, site shows 2 seeds insteed 300

  • Jeff

    the evil DHT is not the answer because the evil DHT permits peers blocked by a safe tracker to join a swarm and log downloads

    Haha. How exactly do you think that a tracker based system will prevent monitoring? IP addresses are easy to get (Mediadefender was using their employees home connections). Retrieving peer IP addresses is normal behaviour for a Bittorrent client. How will they detect people that are not actually spoofing files? Even if you could detect most of them it still wouldn’t be good enough: In contrast to spoofing, very few ‘rogue’ peers are needed to monitor successfully.

    The only way to prevent monitoring are onion networks or Friend-to-Friend networks, both of which necessarily suffer from far slower speeds than non-anonymous networks like Bittorrent.

  • Brosef McNuttyfuck

    [quote comment="179156"]For more torrents checkout http://www.dot360.net/quote
    thanks alot bro.

  • Anonymous

    I often see a note on their site”upgrading…” what’s going on?

  • hehe

    test.

  • Earl

    [quote comment="179419"]I often see a note on their site”upgrading…” what’s going on?[/quote]
    I’m guessing they are upgrading something ^^

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  • Ink

    @ old timer
    Call me paranoid but I’d change this ID every announce if possible and at least every time I start my client.

    More than that you can poison the stats pretty easy if you relay on client information and there is not much else to relay on.

    Last but not least this would create more stress for the tracker (bandwidth, load and memory -wise) with virtually no improvements to the protocol.

    BT is not an anonymous protocol. Sorry but that idea is just bs.
    Splitting the swarm… em no thank you! It would improve privacy though.

  • Jaho

    “The new tracker will ensure the privacy of its users” – come one now, it will still be BitTorrent. How could it possibly “ensure the privacy of its users” unless it routes all connections through a proxy, at which point you lose all the bandwidth advantages of a swarming protocol?

  • The Prophet

    Let them work on it even if all you say is true, they will come up with something, have faith in the pirates they are a resilliant bunch.

    Use what talent you possess: the woods would be very silent if no birds sang except those that sang best.
    ~ Henry Van Dyke

  • Earl

    Concerning privacy there is nothing to work on unless you make MAJOR changes to the protocol and these changes would be so big you can better create a new protocol from scratch.

    Which would probably be a good thing but since uT is owned by BitTorrent, Inc. the days of developing (more or less effective) encryption stuff and such with Azu are over… so the guys from TPB will probably not get much love from the biggest client distributor on the net. What ever they do.

    No changes to the client means no changes to the server. Unless we all change clients *cough* and all the sites change along with that. New tracker new everything… never gonna happen.

    So… gz we are stuck with what we got for now hence new tracker even though new a system would be better.

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  • Jeff

    Concerning privacy there is nothing to work on unless you make MAJOR changes to the protocol and these changes would be so big you can better create a new protocol from scratch.

    No need to start from scratch. Anonymous P2P and semi-anonymous (e.g. friend-to-friend) networks have existed for years and are continually be worked on. If you want to use them all they need is a userbase.

  • Earl

    Wrapping another layer around an existing protocol is not exactly what I was talking about and pretty much all the solutions that exists today relay on methods that don’t stand a chance of surviving a big user base such as TPBs. Mostly due to a bottleneck effect but spoofing doesn’t really work either. I’ve not yet seen a working solution.

    At any rate anonymity will severely reduced download speeds and that’s just not a good start, people will stick with their old stuff if the new stuff ‘doesn’t work’.

    Although starting from scratch is of course a bit exaggerated every new protocol benefits from its predecessors but again just adding new features doesn’t cut it imo.

  • Don

    Blocking Traffic of Canadaians to any site is fascism. I feel violated. Some free country. The internet as I knew is now gone. I think I will get rid of it now and move on to outdoor activities. Maybe I’ll should start wearing all grey and salute the flag every morning while I wait in line with my commarades for toilet paper and rice. What a crock of shit….

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  • Anonymous

    [quote comment="182624"]Blocking Traffic of Canadaians to any site is fascism. I feel violated. Some free country. The internet as I knew is now gone. I think I will get rid of it now and move on to outdoor activities. Maybe I’ll should start wearing all grey and salute the flag every morning while I wait in line with my commarades for toilet paper and rice. What a crock of shit….[/quote]
    Demonoid is the one doing any blocking. And that’s because they were pressured.
    Just get a proxy and relak(k)s?

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  • saper

    Well, the presence of the DEADJOE file in the archive is not very promising…. :-)

    –m

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