BitTorrent Community Running For Cover? 740
govatos writes "Bandwidth issues and DOS Attacks brought Bytemonsoon, a popular BitTorrent
page down, but now pages are closing for scarier reasons. Torrentse.cx 'recieved a cease and desist letter during the day of Wednesday, July 16, 2003 for copyright infringement. The entire website has been removed and will not return.' Will corporate pressure kill the BitTorrent movement, or will it keep flying from site to site before it settles somewhere 'safe' like Sealand's HavenCo?"
The what now? (Score:1, Interesting)
Who done it? (Score:2, Interesting)
Does anyone know who hit them with the cease and desist? (Be nice if their site said who it was. They can't sue you for just saying their name.)
Re:don't post links!! (Score:5, Interesting)
Tougher solution with profit (Score:3, Interesting)
Remember that not all people are as generous as your group is, and they want to make profit off of their creativity and music.
Re:All your fancy freedom rhetoric aside (Score:5, Interesting)
While I'm at it, given the distribution systems and marketing that exsit for porn in the USA (i.e. largely aimed at video stores or serious junkies), do you think they care if someone steals some rather than buying a tape for $5 at the local video store?
OK, that aside, bittorrent seems to work great for high-demand files. I've followed torrent links of
So, um, in the interests of science, where's bittorrent-porn?
Explanation (Score:4, Interesting)
Combine Bittorrent with Freenet (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:BitTorrent is a valid technology (Score:5, Interesting)
The past month I've been using bittorrent to distribute a 500 meg DivX of someone playing a game, basic jist of it was they ran around kicking ass with a VCR running, and they decided to edit it up and distribute it. I put it on my site.. in less than 12 hours I had run up about 20GB of outgoing traffic. Poor server was doing so much I/O working at a shell was almost impossible.
After panicing (thank someone I don't have bandwidth metering) I threw up a bittorrent tracker and told people what to do. I've been running it since then, maybe 3 weeks now. Been averaging about 100k/sec output since then (sometimes much higher, sometimes much lower). Bittorrent doesn't give me a way to look at how many completed downloads the file has had, but judging from the feedback I've recieved several hundred people have the movie.. who knows how many downloaded it that never said a word.
Bittorrent amazes me far more than napster ever did.
Re:Combine Bittorrent with Freenet (Score:3, Interesting)
Plenty of other uses (Score:2, Interesting)
Even if its not gaming you can usually find whatever file you're looking for with bt. BT itself does not make you download warez or copyrighted music but if you do thats your business and no one else's.
actually... (Score:3, Interesting)
They are selfish shits who didnt even release their code (which bytemonsoon did).
The least they could have done is stand up to the DMCA , i mean, theres a very notable and recent case that streamcast/grokster won against RIAA/MPAA http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/04/25/1
that applies perfectly to them.
Could have hired some lawyer time with the money....instead they blow it like the children they are.
So much for the New Server (Score:2, Interesting)
Now the site has gone forever, and people's donations have simply gone to buy somebody out there a brand new kick-ass server for whatever they want to use it for.
Nice.
You mean like... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:All your fancy freedom rhetoric aside (Score:5, Interesting)
Warez never truely dies, it just gets a good solid punch, you know the type where you can't breath for a few seconds, and then it catches its breath and comes back with a vengence.
Just to summarise it:
Warez started with BBS, when found they were easy to kill.
Moved to password and ratio BBS, a little harder, but not much.
On the internet it really came of age with FTP, often with ratio still, this was still trackable thou and sites got killed often.
Somewhere along the line, someone figured out that using centralised distribution methods was sorta the real problem leading to getting caught.
Along comes P2P, mp3's at first but it scaled well, and so moved quickly to anything.
So they started killing the search servers, ie napster, so we moved to P2P searches too.
Here is where it gets interesting, the problems with P2P were not created by the copyright holders as much as by the users. Leechers are a huge problem, and basically that leads to speed issues.
Now appears bittorrent, it attempts to resolve a lot of bandwidth issues, but it was not designed to be used in a obscured way. It tells the world everything and does not have search built in, but it is fast.
People come up with search engines for BT files, but those are like Napster servers, easy kills for the copyright holders.
That is where we stand now...
So the next step is to create, either as a hybrid of BT and something else, as P2P network that allows for distributed searches with content insertion abilities and BT style forced bandwidth sharing.
What is the attack that occures after that? The copyright holders have found it hard to kill KaZaA and the like, but they are too slow for a lot of people, and they can kill the fast BT. What happens when the two merge? No one has figured out how to DoS the P2P nets, and you cannot successfully sue everyone who uses it(there is more to the world then the US)...
Just some thoughts and ideas...
Re:pretty pix (Score:5, Interesting)
Your kind words were too late for me, but I've never updated my hosts file faster.
Hey, look at it this way: I'm no longer interested in that unneeded late night snack now...
Yup, the heat is on. (Score:5, Interesting)
This in a non-US country without a DMCA-equivalent.
Re:All your fancy freedom rhetoric aside (Score:5, Interesting)
If technologies begin to be judged "good" or "evil" based on the majority of its usage rather than its intent or capability, then all it takes is to spawn as many instances... no matter how trivial... that aren't "evil" as are necessary to win. If bittorrent's life is in the balance, a few bittorrent mirrors of sunsite, debian, and rpmfind should do the trick.
BitTorrent's use (Score:5, Interesting)
Plenty of LEGAL music on BitTorrent (Score:5, Interesting)
Maybe there was a lot of unauthorized content on BT, but there is a large group of users using it to download legal, live music. Look at Etree's Box of Rain forum [etree.org], Groove Salad [groove-salad.com], and Sharing in the Groove [sharingthegroove.org] as just a few example of the many message boards that have gigabytes of 100% legal, 100% lossless (.shn and .flac) music posted daily.
When the Phish summer tour aud sources come out, BT is going to be key. It sure beats trying to log in to someone's 3-slot FTP.
Re:All your fancy freedom rhetoric aside (Score:2, Interesting)
IP BLOCKERS (Score:1, Interesting)
http://www.suprnova.org/ [suprnova.org]
http://www.zenith-net.co.uk/ [zenith-net.co.uk]
btlinks.no-ip [slashdot.org]
http://sakstream.tk/ [sakstream.tk]
http://www.torrentialbits.tk/ [torrentialbits.tk]
http://www.digitaldistractions.org/torrents.php [digitaldistractions.org]
http://kung.servehttp.com:8080/live/index.asp [servehttp.com]
http://absolutesega.bounceme.net:79/ [bounceme.net]
http://homepages.nildram.co.uk/~crosses/eyesonly/ [nildram.co.uk]
http://nx01.us/index.php?page=torrent [nx01.us]
http://www.hawkie.org.uk/ [hawkie.org.uk]
http://www.sakstream.cjb.net/ [cjb.net]
http://www.downloadparadise.tk/ [downloadparadise.tk]
http://bittorrent.kicks-ass.net/dvdrtorrents/inde
Re:BitTorrent's use (Score:5, Interesting)
As for anonymity I totally agree with you, however you're already too late. I can already turn off my upload (and the *AA's seem preoccupied with only those who are serving).
Re:So what? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:HavenCo (Score:5, Interesting)
There is still hope for secure hosting -- I'm doing distributed hardware tamper-resistant location in a multiplicity of jurisdictions, which I think is ultimately a much better solution.
Sealand is still physically there, but I'd no longer consider HavenCo a "data haven" after the events in 2002 and 2003.
Re:All your fancy freedom rhetoric aside (Score:2, Interesting)
> you're shutting down a torrent movement. Anyone
> downloading the torrent can connect to the
> tracker, the tracker is definitely easiest and
> first to die
So all you need is to develop a "jumping tracker"
that hops from host to host.
The bigger picture (Score:5, Interesting)
You can use a chainsaw to cut your winter firewood, or you can use it to commit a Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Does that mean we should outlaw chainsaws? No, of couse not. The act of killing is already against the law and has nothing to do with chainsaw technology. It is about actions and not tools.
So too is it with technologies like BitTorrent. Yes, certainly a large community of cheap-ass slackers who want goodies for free have exploited this great content delivery system for their own purposes. But to be sure, there are so many other legit uses for it. The LEGAL online music trading community has also taken up BitTorrent to distribute high quality live recordings of bands that permit taping. (The Dead, Phish, Dave Matthews, Pearl Jam, etc to name even a few!) Sites like Sharing the Groove [sharingthegroove.org] and eTree [etree.org] provide legal lossless audio in FLAC and Shorten format to fans of the music. These lossless files can be quite large and the demand for them can be quite strong the night after a good concert. Well, gosh... This is Just the sort of thing that BitTorrent does and does well. It serves high bandwidth and high demand files with grace and ease. This isn't about piracy. It's about access to technology. The Supreme Court ruled in the betamax case that there were enough legit uses for the technology that it couldn't be outlawed simply because some people were using it to copy porn tapes. I reserve the right to use this technology in a lawful fashion despite what others may choose to do with it.
More than once I have turned to a Torrent link to get a copy of some content that was in high demand at the time. (Animatrix previews, Gollum's Acceptance speech, etc.) All were legit downloads when the normal methods of acquiring the content were under heavy /. effect.
Let's try to keep this in mind during these troubling times of heavy litigation by big media. They killed Napster, they'll try to kill BT and any other centralized system they can find. The chilling new bill introduced in congress should be a warning to us all. The concept of p2p itself is under attack. Fight for your rights to these tools.
(Stepping down from my sagging soapbox.)
Re:Facts (Score:2, Interesting)
I live in Kitchener Waterloo, Ontario. I've visited Ottawa. The only major difference between the cities (from what I could see) is that you have Parliament, and a downtown that's actually nice at night.
I think the populations are even similar, but I could be wrong on that.
>Just because I haven't been hit by a car doesn't mean I don't daily and consistently see people drive poorly.
I don't disagree, I just state facts. What you are seeing them do, though, isn't the major cause of accidents, it's just annoying. Like the people who have 200 dB stereos in their cars. Some things aren't worth an officer's time (being one of the people with loud stereos, even when speeding, I've not been pulled over yet -- unless you drive in a manner that is dangerous, or the cop has a quota to meet, he really has better things to do -- like arrest robbers, etc).
>If you drive drunk your license is taking away.
Often, depending on the nature of the offense (say you blow a 0.10) you may be allowed to drive to work and back, if it is necessary. Exceptions are made for tools so important to daily life that living without them makes like a torture (even many dimmer switches would be outlawed -- some of them include microcontrollers).
>If you smuggle goods your car can be impounded.
You can buy a new car. And, besides that, the extreme laws against drugs are so pathetic, Canada's getting ready to give up on policing the weaker illegal drugs, like MJ.
>Why should pirates be protected?
They aren't being protected. They're being punished like any other criminal. If a robber breaks into a shop (an arguably much more serious crime than piracy) with a crowbar, does the judge outlaw his handling of basic tools? No.
>It will teach parents a lesson that ignoring their responsibilities is their fault.
No problems there, but I'd say a $100,000 fine would probably hit home a lot more than having to deal with their child's government imposed disability.
>We already have that
True, and it's a VERY controversial topic.
>For example, "americas most wanted" and "crimestoppers" both work on the sole premise of citizens reporting crimes/facts/tips.
[OT] The funny thing about those is that they say they're anonymous, but all toll free numbers are required to record ANI information, so they're not.
>We don't live in complete anarchy or dictatorships as far as I can tell.
That's because the cops "ignore" most of the tips, as they're just nuisance calls. I put ignore in quotes, because they don't really ignore them, just just take them down and do a half-assed job following them up.
True Example: An idiot driver threw some liquid out of their vehicle at my parents walking down the sidewalk. Having noticed the license plate number, they complained, and the police basically said "We'll do what we can". Nothing came of it. The police need a lot more than a whine call about a non-violent, non-serious crime, to put the gears into motion.
>If I'm at a college [which I am] and people around me in a lab are pirating [which they do often] I'd love to report them, collect say 100$ for getting them convicted. Not only do I pocket 100$ but I get bandwidth wasting jackasses off the already stressed computer network.
And you pay $1,000 in increased police taxes. It costs many thousands of dollars to give everyone their fair trial and investigation.
There's a fine balance between what's worth the RCMP's time, and what's an expensive nuisance that is better sorted out in private (for example, whining to the sysadmin that allowing piracy is putting the college at increased risk of lawsuits, etc). Busting students (which, when convicted, simply go bankrupt and don't pay anything, thereby costing the system money) isn't worth the police's time.
>Sorry your bleeding heart liberal arguments don't quite cut it.
Actually, I'm a cold-hearted libertarian -- I'm surprised you didn't notice that from the last paragaph in my previous comment. Oh well.
Use Freenet! (Score:3, Interesting)
Why I use bittorrent (Score:1, Interesting)
I don't really buy the whole "Warez = loss of potential profit, and should be punished as cuh" Take, for instance, the case of keygens. Keygens allow you to make names for serial numbers for software products. Say I make a 9999 copy license for a shareware game that costs $20. That's 200,000 dollars. I've seen keygens that'll give "multiple user licenses" for as many as 100 programs. So, theoretically, a pirate could generate a list of serial numbers that'd cost something on the order of 20 billion dollars. I actually have such a list for the products of one company - all for registered products that I had paid money for, mind you, but I was curious. You think the game maker would get such profit if the program wouldn't exist? Hell no! People pirate stuff when it's easier to pirate than to buy. I can't spend $400 on photoshop - I don't have a job and this economy isn't helping. I'd have to work an infinite number of hours to buy that program. Hell, it might not even work on my computer - imagine buying a $400 product and have it inexplicably not work on a computer - I've seen it happen before. And they'd just issue another upgrade, and then I'd be in the hole another couple of hundred of dollars. I mean, I already have spent thousands of dollars on programs in my lifetime. Most of the time, I can't even try out the stuff I'm buying before I buy them. It's not even done half the time - I can usually find repeatable bugs in final releases within an hour or two if it's particularly well made. I mean, hell, you can buy a MICROWAVE OVEN for $40 that not only has a turn-table, but does a great job of popping popcorn, and has absolutely 100% bugless software.
It's the same thing with Music. It sucks. It sucks big time. I'd like to be able to listen to a disk once before buying it. You can drive a car before you buy it, right?
All I want is a way of previewing releases before I spend money that could be better used on eating and finding a job on crappy software. If that means violating a few copyrights - so be it! I defy movies to stop sucking, music to stop sucking, software to stop sucking. Yes, your profits would increase a miserablely small percentage if there were no way to violate copyrights, you miserable RIAA cocksockers, but that's no reason to shut down a service that elimantes the suck from gaming like a bittorrent tracker.
Re:if you didn't download the hulk by now... (Score:-1, Interesting)
There never WAS a 'cease and desist' order, at least not a real one. But it was planned for a long time. The scam was to squeeze as much money out of the filesharing community as possible, via donations for a new server.
The 'new' server (which was the same box as previously) would be up for a week, then suddenly get brought down by this invented C&D, before anyone would notice that there's been no performance improvement.
Mister "Hello.Jpg" is now richer to the tune of several thousand dollars, definitely proving there's no honor amongst thieves.
Nice work if you can get it.
Re:All your fancy freedom rhetoric aside (Score:3, Interesting)
Shareaza [shareaza.com] supports bittorrent. I believe you'll need 1.9 beta.
Re:if you didn't download the hulk by now... (Score:3, Interesting)
the amount of coding and stuff that would be needed to make a site of that quality (and the tracker?) would probly be worth a couple grand in normal work time..
If its true.. it sucks to get scammed but seems like a whole lot of work for a scam. In my experiance scammers are lazy, thats why they dont get real jobs..
Re:Bittorrent vs Piracy (Score:5, Interesting)
I've been thinking about a project like this for a while. Everyone who wants to help out, please see http://mod-torrent.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net] and get in touch with me.
If the seeding of files can be fully transparent (that's the easy part) and the tracking be made less resource intensive (the hard part) why would a company not want to distribute their own legal content with BitTorrent? Sure, the client must be installed first, but more and more sites are already requiring special download managers. The BitTorrent client is small and simple. It, or something like it, could easily become a standard requirement or the funtionality integrated into existing download mangers.
I have a T3 connection. Some might think that's fast but when you distribute content on even a moderate scale it won't cut it. With BitTorrent I've suddenly got a T3+whatever upload bandwith is not otherwise used by the people downloading from me. If even a couple of college kids with 10Mbit connections in their dorms download from me my effective serving capacity is multiplied. The base service, the T3, remains the same, the added capacity is pure free bandwith. Mini-Akamai networks for everyone!
Cohen Speaks (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:BitTorrent's use (Score:5, Interesting)
I, as the author of BitTorrent, would like to make it very clear than I have nothing to do with any of the BitTorrent sites, and that BitTorrent is not and never will be designed to be good for illegal distribution.
The spirit of this statement seems to be in stark contrast to what you say on your website at http://bitconjurer.org/a_technological_activists_a genda.html [bitconjurer.org] :
So, which is it?
Is Sealand's Havenco all that safe? (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:if you didn't download the hulk by now... (Score:2, Interesting)
Go back to being banned, Kenspy. It's obvious you DON'T know the people involved seeing as I'm in IRC with them practically every day and I've never seen you around. e..e
Your +4 moderation just shows how well sensationally ludicrous posts are received on Slashdot. Congratulate yourself on having misled some random
I've been following the process of bringing Torrentse back ever since the first server went down. On the day that the second one was taken down, the site's other admin was in the middle of writing a PHP forum for the site and debugging his C tracker. Having bug-tested it personally ( and seen the code in progress ) I highly doubt he would put in so much effort for something that was "planned to be closed from the start".
And unlike yourself, who posted anonymously so as to avoid the backlash of hundreds of people who know you and your treacheries so well, I had to do so because Slashcode won't let someone with my karma (BAD) post more than 10 times a day. Come, check out my user info. [slashdot.org] I have nothing to hide. You, however, have plenty.
Re:All your fancy freedom rhetoric aside (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Simple Solution (Score:3, Interesting)
I always wondered who was behind Homestar Runner. Nice to know it is (/was, perhaps) a couple of guys in their basement kinda deal.
Re:BitTorrent's use (Score:3, Interesting)
"tracker decentralization is absolutely necessary if bittorrent is going to thirve in a competetive (legal) environment."
What do you mean by 'thrive'? Seems to me, bittorrent is working quite well. How do you grab
What 'products' does bittorrent compete against?
Gnutella? Kaaza? Furthernet?
Nope.
Those are filesharing network tools. They need cataloging, searching, and distributed control.
Bittorrent is not a fileshareing tool. It's a software/data distribution tool. Keep the design goals in mind, and the REASONS for the features will be obvious.
Now, what we've seen, is some folks creating 'filesharing applications' by writing web sites that catalog
or fix the damn country, and strip 'Personhood' from Corporations. Then there wouldn't be the exploitation of Congress' authority under Article I, section 8... But that's another rant...
and you go on to offer,
"1.) 2 really cheap servers can do the same job as 1 really really expensive server"
This appears to be a comment to the effect that bittorrent trackers require really really expensive servers to operate effieciently. I have no evidence to support that claim, but have seen a number of properly operating bittorrent trackers on quite modest hardware. Anyone with more experience in scaling trackers care to chime in?
and
"2.) redundancy is necessary to achieve stability."
Ok, again, all the evidence I've seen is negative. I've never known the fact that a tracker's a single-point-of-failure to be any more of an issue than, say, hosting content on a ftp server.
Maybe it's helpful to think of it as a really fast ftp server. If you know what you want, and the 'server' is up (which in this case is a combo of tracker/seeds/clients), then everything works great. If you don't know what you want, or the infrastructure doesn't cooperate, then, well, no one said life would be fair...
Really, who couldn't see this coming? (Score:3, Interesting)
BitTorrent was a step back towards the days when the web and ftp was the main source of getting MP3s or whatever content.
I know BitTorrent has technical advantages when it comes to handling load. But in terms of anonymity, it is easier to find the person sharing on the web (or giving an access point) then it is via a peer to peer network. The site is always there. It is hosted by someone who is associated with the owner of a domain name.
Re:if you didn't download the hulk by now... (Score:2, Interesting)
Seriously.
Now he does have a private tracker still up as far as I know...........
Re:There's no "bittorrent movement" (Score:2, Interesting)