Where Have All The Torrent-sites Gone?

[haybilly]

Hi All,

having watched the legal shenanigans with Pirate Bay and now how Mininova has been emasculated [ legalised]--are there still any good sites, with plenty of seeds, available--- that don't involve signing your life away??

Guess we are treading a tightrope with regard to the legality of this question--so, if you prefer, please feel free to P.M.me, instead of 'exposing' yourself!

[haybilly]

Thanks for the PM--you know who you are.

[tonititan]

Can you explain what's going on with The Pirate Bay? Is it "safe" to use?

[haybilly]

Can you explain what's going on with The Pirate Bay? Is it "safe" to use?

Not quite sure what you mean by 'safe'--it seems to be running and still lists a bunch of torrents from various sources--but, whenever I try to access their torrents there seem to be a lack of seeds.

[thaimite]

Can you explain what's going on with The Pirate Bay? Is it "safe" to use?

Not quite sure what you mean by 'safe'--it seems to be running and still lists a bunch of torrents from various sources--but, whenever I try to access their torrents there seem to be a lack of seeds.

I believe Pirate bay has gone trackerless. (DHT)

[tonititan]

Well, you mentioned legal shenanigans. I was wondering if it was safe to download from the site, or if has become one those "Napster" type sites that are monitored. (As you can tell, I'm not not really a computer person, so sorry I can't use the correct terminology ). I just started using it recently, and I haven't had any problems, except that sometimes it's really slow. I thought that might be my internet connection, though.

[nikster]

Can you explain what's going on with The Pirate Bay? Is it "safe" to use?

The pirate bay works but they changed from hosting the torrents to merely providing links to the torrents. They also released a statement that basically says that all torrents from now on need to use DHT.

This technology is basically a torrent-without-a-server scheme. There are some DHT entry points, and a vast peer to peer network then figures out who needs / seeds what torrent and connects peers and seeds. The main advantage is that "nobody's responsible" anymore. There are the entry points, but those can come and go, and they're not actively hosting torrents either, they just relay information.

Hosting a torrent meant that peers would ask the server who the other peers / seeds were, and the server would keep track of everything. It also meant that there was a single point of failure - a server, hosted by someone, and owned by someone, and so it was exposed to legal action. See Mininova.

Providing DHT links to torrents is really very light weight and the thinking right now is that this cannot be stopped by legal action. Of course, things might change in the future. It's not illegal. For now.

DHT is slower to start up - it takes a while until seeds and peers are found. But once it's started, speeds would be the same as before.

The idea with DHT is actually pretty interesting. Basically, it means that instead of one server keeping track of everything, there's a giant cloud out there, made up of tens, or even hundreds of thousands of machines. All the information resides in the cloud, and is dynamically shared between nodes. To shut it down, you'd have to hunt down all nodes in the cloud. Since they are constantly changing, that's impossible. You could go after the entry points, but with a huge cloud there's also a huge number of entry points, and shutting all those down should not be possible either.

[Crushdepth]

Pirate Bay is moving to a more decentralised system to make them harder to kill.

[tonititan]

Thanks for the explanations! That helps a lot. Someone else set it all up for me and showed me what to do, but I had no idea how it was actually working.

[haybilly]

Thanks to all you guys who bothered to post replies--and also for the definition of DHT.

My recent experiences with Pirate Bay have been that they list the torrents, ok, but some of the links lead to pretty slow, or even dead, torrents, hats off to them for managing to keep afloat and not throwing in the towel after all the c**p that's been dumped on them; there are several other [ actually many other] good sites which seem to be able to provide links to zillions of torrents--so, all in all you guys, with the help of a few PMs, have answered my question--some have gone, some are resting and loads more are joining the fray.

Thanks for all the help.

[XCom]

Check out "BTJunkie.org"

[rgs2001uk]

Can you explain what's going on with The Pirate Bay? Is it "safe" to use?

The pirate bay works but they changed from hosting the torrents to merely providing links to the torrents. They also released a statement that basically says that all torrents from now on need to use DHT.

This technology is basically a torrent-without-a-server scheme. There are some DHT entry points, and a vast peer to peer network then figures out who needs / seeds what torrent and connects peers and seeds. The main advantage is that "nobody's responsible" anymore. There are the entry points, but those can come and go, and they're not actively hosting torrents either, they just relay information.

Hosting a torrent meant that peers would ask the server who the other peers / seeds were, and the server would keep track of everything. It also meant that there was a single point of failure - a server, hosted by someone, and owned by someone, and so it was exposed to legal action. See Mininova.

Providing DHT links to torrents is really very light weight and the thinking right now is that this cannot be stopped by legal action. Of course, things might change in the future. It's not illegal. For now.

DHT is slower to start up - it takes a while until seeds and peers are found. But once it's started, speeds would be the same as before.

The idea with DHT is actually pretty interesting. Basically, it means that instead of one server keeping track of everything, there's a giant cloud out there, made up of tens, or even hundreds of thousands of machines. All the information resides in the cloud, and is dynamically shared between nodes. To shut it down, you'd have to hunt down all nodes in the cloud. Since they are constantly changing, that's impossible. You could go after the entry points, but with a huge cloud there's also a huge number of entry points, and shutting all those down should not be possible either.

Carrying on from the excellent post by nikster above, the following explains the latest.

http://bigozine2.com/feature/?p=308