Other Bit Torrent News - Good, This Time

Lots of people know of Demonoid and Pirate Bay, but these two somewhat behind the scenes giants make things harder in the bit torrent universe if either goes down. When they both are down it is not good. Thankfully all appears to be resolved now.

Via TorrentFreak:

Two weeks ago OpenBitTorrent and PublicBitTorrent, the two largest BitTorrent trackers on the Internet, went on strike. The trackers protested BitTorrent Inc.’s unresponsiveness to a protocol improvement proposed by Pirate Bay co-founder Fredrik Neij. Soon after the news broke the BitTorrent developer team sprung into action to address the issue, and as a result the tracker operators have confirmed to TorrentFreak that they will restart their services within a week. [As of this posting, though, I'm seeing both of them still offline.]

OpenBitTorrent (OBT) and PublicBitTorrent (PBT) are two non-profit BitTorrent trackers running on the beerware licensed Opentracker software.

Neither tracker hosts torrent files, but they do coordinate the downloads of millions of BitTorrent users every day.

Considering the high volume of requests the two trackers have to deal with, one can presume that they have pretty significant bills to pay at the end of each month. Both OBT and PBT therefore abandoned TCP support last year and became UDP-only trackers.

However, since many users kept adding HTTP addresses to their torrents, and because many old torrents also still list these, both trackers became overloaded with resource intensive HTTP requests.

To address this issue, Pirate Bay co-founder Fredrik Neij submitted an official proposal to the developer forum which is operated by uTorrent’s parent company BitTorrent Inc. His solution was to create special DNS entries where tracker owners can specify what traffic they allow and what not.

The operators of OBT and PBT welcomed this request, but weeks went by without even a single comment on the proposal. In protest, the two largest BitTorrent trackers decided to strike and go offline.

Read the rest of the article here.