[HN Gopher] The World's Oldest Active Torrent Turns 18 Soon
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The World's Oldest Active Torrent Turns 18 Soon
Author : uniqueid
Score : 214 points
Date : 2021-09-12 11:36 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (torrentfreak.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (torrentfreak.com)
| ryanmm wrote:
| I remember using BitTorrent for the first time in the first half
| of 2003. I'm a bit surprised that absolutely none of those are
| still around.
| washadjeffmad wrote:
| The commercial web devoured the concept of the internet as a
| place where information was freely shared between any and all
| minds. I exported my bookmarks frequently all the way back to
| the 90s, and practically none of the dozens and dozens of
| communities that I was a part of as late as the 00s are still
| around.
|
| I remember the year when the ad people started bullying the fan
| sites off the web because they were "stealing from creators"...
| by driving clicks away from traffic whoring aggregators that
| were worse, less curated, depersonalized, less focused in every
| way than what they cannibalized.
|
| The modern web feels so empty and full of darkness in
| comparison. Nothing in it seems like it matters unless it
| enriches someone else's mission of accumulating wealth, and
| everything else is villainized that doesn't signal loudly for
| the sake of the dragons how much it costs to keep the lights
| on.
|
| And I just realized the irony of saying this on HN.
| nielsole wrote:
| > easily saved hundreds of thousands of dollars in distribution
| costs
|
| For reference, a server in Germany in 2003 had bandwidth prices
| between EUR.8 and EUR2 per gigabyte [0]
|
| [0]
| https://web.archive.org/web/20030810125406/http://www.hetzne...
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| Makes me wonder how much unnecessary load these streaming
| services are placing on global networks. Problems created by
| copyright. How much cheaper, easier and more efficient would
| things be if we were allowed to use torrents for media
| distribution?
| cheschire wrote:
| Streaming services are, for the most part, optimized to only
| send you a portion of the file at a time, send you lower
| bandwidth versions when the throughput drops below a
| threshold, or in the case of COVID lockdowns everyone
| temporarily dropped the max resolution of their services
| because there was a sudden surge in home media streaming.
|
| When it comes to video torrents, I suspect a lot of people
| would start at looking for 4k rips (even if their devices
| didn't support it), or fall back to standard bluray rips.
| That's a huge amount of bandwidth when most people probably
| are fine with DVD or upscaled DVD quality.
| mindslight wrote:
| A CDN box at a datacenter or ISP is more efficient than
| uploading through the last mile, especially if that last mile
| is a half-duplex shared medium like cable. I'm pro-p2p, pro-
| home-servers, and pro-piracy, but I don't think it's
| necessarily more efficient in terms of network load.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| The network load from P2P is about the same as it is from a
| very well distributed CDN. In theory the CDN could be a
| little better, e.g. if the network topology is such that a
| user uploading to another user on the same segment has to
| make a round trip through the head end, that will be
| somewhat less efficient than a CDN box which is already at
| the head end. But not by a lot. Linearly worse, not
| polynomially or exponentially worse.
|
| And that's assuming the CDN is perfect. That it has a node
| in every place there are users. Which none of them actually
| do because the world is really big.
|
| Worse, the places without them are the places with the
| slowest networks in general. If you're using twice as much
| bandwidth on some 100Gbps piece of fiber in New York City,
| the users aren't even going to notice that and the ISP can
| just send more light through the glass. But when there are
| a hundred users sharing some 40Mbps microwave link in some
| third world village and all trying to download the same
| thing, there isn't going to be a CDN node there and only
| having to suck it through the straw once multiplies the
| efficiency improvement by the number of users on the far
| end of the line, which in that case would be a factor of a
| hundred.
|
| Moreover, you can get the efficiency benefit of the CDN by
| replacing the CDN box with a box in the same place that
| seeds popular content using a P2P protocol, without losing
| the efficiency benefits of P2P for the people not near one
| of those.
| myself248 wrote:
| Thank you for saying, succinctly and clearly, what I've
| always figured was the case.
|
| However.
|
| If the _majority_ of traffic came p2p, then the asymmetry
| of upload /download bandwidth on shared media like cable
| modems would start to be a significant issue, wouldn't
| it? Only on the local segment, but on _every_ such
| segment.
|
| In that case, the seedbox-as-CDN-node route would be a
| no-brainer for ISPs to install.
|
| Are we reinventing the topology of Usenet?
| Retric wrote:
| Not in comparison to other customers closer than the ISP's
| data center. BitTorrent has significant overhead but can
| scale really well for extremely popular downloads like the
| latest WoW patch at it's peak. It's really hard to beat
| when your exchanging data with a dozen people in the same
| apartment complex.
| mindslight wrote:
| Only if that apartment complex is wired with ethernet and
| a local switch [0]. GPON, cable, and DSL would all still
| go back to the ISP's core, transiting the last mile link
| twice. There are definitely efficiency gains to be had
| with decentralized identifiers and distributed systems,
| but with the centralized nature of the physical Internet
| they're not always a win.
|
| [0] or roommates want the same files and their router
| supports hairpin NAT or the software uses local segment
| discovery.
| Retric wrote:
| Last mile link twice, but still saves hops on an ISP's
| core network as their CDN's are still generally
| centralized.
| EliRivers wrote:
| This would explain why I've just seen it pulse towards the top of
| my seeded torrents today. I will be dragging this torrent around
| in my seeds until the day I die (or until some companies get
| together to eliminate torrents).
| smoldesu wrote:
| Today I learned, _The Animatrix_ and _The Fanimatrix_ are
| separate, distinct films.
| vmoore wrote:
| A lot of people learned that today.
| dewlinedew2 wrote:
| "With a limited budget of just $800, nearly half of which was
| spent on a leather jacket" -- plus we finally know how much
| clothes cost in the Matrix
| dharmab wrote:
| "We couldn't afford a wind machine for this shot, so we bought
| a leaf blower from a hardware store. We kept the receipt, so we
| can return it after we're done."
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G025oxyWv0E
| cesarb wrote:
| Relevant: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10962253
|
| It's funny to be part of that history. As the article says, "for
| a file to live on, at least one person has to keep sharing it",
| and for a while, I was that person (see the comments on that HN
| post).
| jghn wrote:
| About 10-15 years ago I went to download a torrent. It never
| had many seeders and got stuck at 94.8%. It was there for a few
| years. One day one of the very few, if not the only, humans
| with the whole torrent must have connected as it was 100%.
| Serendipity.
|
| And then about 5 years later I lost the files in a hard drive
| crash. Tried to grab the torrent again and all this time later
| it is sitting at, you guessed it, 94.8%.
| bserge wrote:
| Someone somewhere has the exact same problem and they're
| hoping a peer with the rest of the torrent will connect. That
| or a seed box :D
| leokennis wrote:
| I once loooong ago tried downloading a rare music album but
| it was stuck at 99.8% with 0 seeders and 2 peers (including
| me) for months so I was pretty bummed.
|
| But I neglected to actually check the download folder. When I
| did, I found out it actually downloaded all the important
| files, just the logo of the upload group was still a .part
| file...
|
| So I quickly downloaded another more popular release by the
| same group, copied over the logo and lo and behold, now it
| got to 100%!
|
| That day I actually felt like a hacker...
| FalconSensei wrote:
| That's nice! When it happens with me, it's like a torrent
| with 1 large file + the unnecessary files (txt, nfo from
| the upload group), and the missing .1% is on the file I
| want :/
|
| But then, occasionally 1 or 2 gets completed, and then I'm
| happy
| pessimizer wrote:
| I've had that happen more than a couple of times at this
| point (often on Chinese or Japanese torrents), and I find it
| very strange. I always assume that some long replaced-but-
| not-thrown-away computer was turned on to find some old file,
| and it immediately and automatically resumed its mission to
| send bits of a 90s soap opera intercontinentally. Then after
| the owner finds what they need, the computer goes off and
| into the closet again, as I send those bits back to China, to
| the other 5 people who are silly enough to leave these things
| open for years.
| SSLy wrote:
| It's strange that your other peers didn't pick up the missing
| pieces.
| arthurcolle wrote:
| What's the torrent?
| [deleted]
| hellbannedguy wrote:
| It's too bad what governments, big corporations, did to a great
| technology.
|
| I don't even go close to a torrent site anymore.
|
| It's just not worth being accused of something.
|
| And to the Copyright Net Nannies--what's the outcome?
|
| Musicians are paid less than before the crackdown.
|
| Books are selling at an all time low.
| NaturalPhallacy wrote:
| >governments, big corporations,
|
| Behind all of those is lawyers. Contemporary copyright exists
| exclusively for the benefit of lawyers and people who can
| afford lawyers.
| nerdponx wrote:
| It was never for the benefit of the musicians or the authors,
| it was for the benefit of the record labels/distributors and
| book publishers.
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| I think it was originally for the benefit of the church, who
| didn't want people remixing the bible. They just had to add
| sweetener for the publishers so that they'd cooperate in
| censorship that would otherwise be to their disadvantage.
| nerdponx wrote:
| There are copyright claims on the Christian bible?
| MomoXenosaga wrote:
| You'd be amazed, it gets a new retranslation/adaptation
| all the time. They don't give them away in a bookshop.
| banana_giraffe wrote:
| Mildly interesting to see the recent peer counts for this
| torrent:
|
| https://imgur.com/a/ur0dUb8
|
| Something like 10,000 peers have been keeping it alive for the
| past two years. Of course this mention is enough to drastically
| increase it's popularity.
| rhn_mk1 wrote:
| An article about the oldest torrent and nary a magnet link in
| sight? Sure, there's the hash in the picture, but that's weak.
|
| What's the second oldest torrent? That's probably a better
| measure of the network health, because it doesn't get attention
| from articles about the oldest active torrent.
| mindslight wrote:
| Articles about torrents almost never contain a link to the
| torrent, even though magnet links are more authoritative than
| their own crappy https urls that can be arbitrarily changed.
| Journalists would rather mediate your access to source material
| than help you experience it directly. See also: Wikileaks.
| em-bee wrote:
| _What 's the second oldest torrent?_
|
| according to the thread here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10962253 an article about
| the then believed to be oldest torrent, turned out to be a few
| months less old than this one, so we need to look for the third
| oldest now to get a good answer.
|
| on piratebay i found a torrent from 2008 that still works.
| uniqueid wrote:
| The first torrent I, and probably quite a few others, ever
| downloaded was some Linux distro that Bram Cohen shared with
| the internet as a demo of the protocol.
| hedgehog wrote:
| The first torrent I downloaded was one of the demo videos he
| put on his home page in 2001 (I think there were two). Never
| seen a reference to them since.
| belter wrote:
| http://www.legittorrents.info/download.php?id=72c83366e95dd4...
| ivegotnoaccount wrote:
| BakaBT still has the three torrents uploaded in december 2003
| that the article mentions, and they are still up and well. 25
| more between Jan.1 and Apr.30 of 2004, all alive as well.
|
| Though I don't know if it is a good indicator. Even though, at
| the time, BakaBT was semi-private and not private, lessening
| the incentives to seed as one could download without limit by
| logging out, it still has a system that rewards seeding
| torrents with no/few seders.
| p1mrx wrote:
| magnet:?xt=urn:btih:72C83366E95DD44CC85F26198ECC55F0F4576AD4
| [deleted]
| MomoXenosaga wrote:
| I'm a member of a private torrent site that has been around for
| 15 years whose very mission is preservation. Everything is well
| seeded even the obscure stuff.
|
| But it's impressive for a public tracker.
| wincy wrote:
| I was pretty disappointed when a games archive torrent site I
| frequented went down. It had every PS1 game in a nicely
| organized bundle, and PS2 games. Hundreds of terabytes of
| archived organized torrents, all gone now.
| washadjeffmad wrote:
| Same, and the outage yesterday gave me the willies. I've
| accumulated a vast upload in that time, and I'm only waiting to
| move somewhere without ISPs with packet limits to flesh out the
| disk shelves and get the better part of it archived.
| 0des wrote:
| Is there a word for this interaction, where an act is taking
| place with the knowledge that the action is characterized as
| 'wrong' but done anyway to achieve an outcome that is
| ultimately benevolent and a benefit to posterity?
| edoceo wrote:
| Chaotic-Good
| voltaireodactyl wrote:
| That sounds like a valuable and amazing resource, and something
| to which I'd enjoy contributing! Are they open to new members
| by any chance?
| pessimizer wrote:
| They are, but it's a little difficult (hence the longevity.)
| Now that you know it exists, a little determination will get
| you there, and it'd love to have you.
|
| Yes, it's good enough that this discussion can only possibly
| refer to one place.
| [deleted]
| BuyMyBitcoins wrote:
| Regardless of what people think about copyright infringement, I
| see torrenting as an essential tool for the transmission and
| preservation of information.
|
| In this day and age of convoluted terms of services (TOS/TOC),
| xyz as a service/subscription, and just plain DRM, no one really
| owns anything anymore. No one can be sure what version they do
| have is the original and immutable version. Edits and omissions
| happen because of licensing issues and just plan social activism.
| Problematic content should be acknowledged but not purged and
| erased.
|
| It's vital people have the means to share data regardless of what
| the powers that be allow to be shared.
|
| /soapbox
| IncRnd wrote:
| > Problematic content should be acknowledged but not purged and
| erased.
|
| By problematic content, do you mean stolen content? What do you
| suggest other than purging and erasing stolen content?
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| By problematic he means stupid things like GTA Vice City
| losing parts of its original soundtrack due to idiotic
| copyright licensing issues and people having their games
| replaced with this "updated" version.
|
| Also, you can't steal data. Copying is not stealing.
| handmodel wrote:
| Jumping the fence at a concert and sitting in an empty seat
| is not stealing. But that doesn't mean it is moral, legal,
| or to the benefit of the musicians + concert venue that
| invested in the act.
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| 'Legality' of some actions is not a Sacred Cow. A lot of
| essential freedoms we now take for granted were once
| illegal.
|
| As famous quote goes, 'Slavery, Apartheid and Holocaust
| were legal'
| Lev1a wrote:
| Or as Bill Burr said [0]:
|
| > (imitating a woman defending ridiculous divorce
| settlements): "That's what the law says!"
|
| > (himself): "A hundred years ago I could beat you with a
| mop handle, that's what the law said! Doesn't make it
| _right_! "
|
| [0]: https://youtu.be/x0gaYyNk7QA?t=603
| albertgoeswoof wrote:
| If that seat would remain empty otherwise, is it not more
| moral to fill it? After all who wants a concert with no
| fans
| moehm wrote:
| Moreover, if the trespassing fan buys merchandise after
| the concert, you could argue it was better for the
| artists that they jumped the fence.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| > Jumping the fence at a concert and sitting in an empty
| seat is not stealing.
|
| Of course not. That's trespassing, a real crime unlike
| copyright infringement. Physical space at the venue is
| limited and the actual artists are the most scarce
| resources there is. It makes sense to pay to see artists
| you love play live.
|
| No idea why you're applying physical world concepts to
| digital "content" which can be infintely copied. It
| doesn't work. Mental gymnastics like copyright exist
| purely to enable rent seeking monopolists. It's not even
| morally defensible. Artists receive what, 30% of the
| profits of their record sales?
| handmodel wrote:
| Artists receive a fraction of their profits because the
| distribution network is immensely valuable to them.
|
| The 30% is pulled out of your ass. If I did all my own
| editing and released songs on Spotify without any
| assistance I would get a much higher cut. If I don't like
| Spotify I am allowed to sell mp3s on my own website.
| However - if I was trying to produce a high quality album
| a year and coordinate worldwide tours then it is worth it
| to me to share my profits with hundreds of talented
| artists/marketers/engineers on my team or in contract
| with my team.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| > The 30% is pulled out of your ass.
|
| I pulled it off a search engine. And that was one of the
| better figures. Do you have better data?
| edoceo wrote:
| ASCAP, SEACAM and BMG I think are the big three licensing
| orgs (USA). When you buy licenses from them they give you
| some paperwork that explains where the fees go. They even
| have a person explain it to you on the phone. (They took
| steps to pre-emptively high prices) I've cancelled those
| contracts awhile ago so I don't have handy numbers. It
| might even be on their sites?
| [deleted]
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