back to article IsoHunt releases roll-your-own Pirate Bay

Torrent site ISOhunt has created a roll-your-own, open source, version of infamous file-sharing site The Pirate Bay. IsoHunt's motive for the release seems to be a belief that big targets like The Pirate Bay will inevitably be picked off by law enforcement agencies. Lots of sites, however, present a tougher target. Open- …

  1. Ketlan
    Pirate

    Tor Bay anyone?

    I wonder how difficult it would be to set this up for use only with Tor?

    1. Mark 65

      Re: Tor Bay anyone?

      Not sure that's a good name...

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torbay

  2. PleebSmash
  3. Tsunamijuan

    Wack a Mole.

    You make it sound difficult to win at wack-a-mole. With my Giant American cheeseburger eating ass, I just sit across the top of the game and its nothing but wins.

    Though this tactic has gotten me banned from a number of arcades in my youth. I guess they just feared my leet skills back in the day.

    1. Thorne

      Re: Wack a Mole.

      The police might have a giant cheeseburger eating ass too but by releasing the source to anyone, the whack-a-mole board is now the size of the Milky Way.........

      1. John Brown (no body) Silver badge
        Joke

        Re: Wack a Mole.

        "the size of the Milky Way........."

        Like Wagon Wheels, they are smaller now than when I was a kid.

    2. Frankee Llonnygog

      Re: Wack a Mole.

      If you wouldn't mind unclenching, the arcades would like their moles back

  4. Sampler

    But really..

    ..who's going to be dumb enough to host one of these?

    Coupled with how many freetards are altruistic enough to host something that helps others - most aren't altruistic enough to seed torrents, what makes you think they're going to volunteer their head on the slab?

    So this "international game of whack-a-mole" quickly becomes a handful invested in the warez scene suddenly making themselves far easier to identify and be picked up.

    Unless Kim Jong Un fancies running one out of Pyongyang to cheese off the feds..

    1. AustinTX

      Re: But really..

      We have freetards because existing fileshare systems facilitate them. We can stop that. For instance, we require they build some reputation first, by donating equivalent storage and bandwidth for a bit of time, before we let them download the files they've searched for and queued up for download. To prevent use of hacked clients, we store their seed files in encrypted form until they've earned the key to unlock them.

    2. PleebSmash

      Re: But really..

      There are plenty of jurisdictions that look amenable to file sharing. At a glance I'd say Canada or Spain. isohunt.to is supposedly hosted in Australia. As for the TPB itself, it was a mix of magnet links and some torrents. Is a pure magnet site illegal? If the law says that "facilitating copyright infringement" is a crime, maybe.

  5. AustinTX

    Mmmm.... mole~!

    Can't whack a mole if the mole stays underground. Doubtless, we need a bittorrent client that works by setting up as a darknet hidden service - and as a relay at the same time, so we're contributing, not leeching off of it. These services will be the resources listed in magnet links, so we just need a Bay that is also set up as a hidden service. I'd actually prefer to see the old Bearshare search system come back, where we shoot a search request to our known peers, and they shoot it outwards to their peers, and anyone with a matching item routes a response back to the searcher.

    The system would work with both public IPs as well as hidden services. Like BS, our initial list of peers will be from public IP addresses that are in sharing-friendly countries, or manually entered from trusted sources. Magnet links on the public trackers will start to include the hidden service addresses. Our personal peer lists will be refreshed and expanded every time we download something. I also like Freenet and I2P's concept of donating storage and bandwidth in return for higher reputation.

    The hidden "bay" can automate the tracker process by monitoring popular searches as they pass through, then caching results so it can be a first port of call before the search moves on to the distributed type. You'd never have to rely upon any central database at all. Each client node could carry a duplicate portion of the database and feedback/comments. Reputation could be protected with a public-key encrypted feedback system. It could still look and feel like a Bay website, but searches would be queued and results could take time to come back. We'll temporarily lose the convenience of firing up the Bay and having a 2GB ISO downloaded 5 mins later, for a system where we *may* have to leave the search in the queue overnight for that obscure indie movie, but that's fine.

    1. Sampler

      Re: Mmmm.... mole~!

      peer searches, because they were always reliable, it's how we ended up with indexed sites in the first place

      1. AustinTX
        Devil

        Re: Mmmm.... mole~!

        I think we keep ending up with centralized indexed networks because there's been enough safe places in the world to run them from. Then there's a big bust and we go back to decentralized for a while. It's kind of just laziness. IMHO, peer searches worked great for me if I simply left the search queued for a good while. With experience, it's easy to pick out the poisoned and fake downloads. I think peer to peer searches need to be improved, not abandoned.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Mmmm.... mole~!

          What Tribler really needs is comments. Even if comments can become a shit show, they are still useful as TPB proved. Decentralized comments can be pretty difficult... since you typically just load the comments from peers, which can be few and far between compared to a centralized site like TPB.

    2. Ogi

      Re: Mmmm.... mole~!

      https://www.tribler.org/ seems to be heading in the direction you want. From the site:

      "Tribler is the first client which continuously improves upon the aging BitTorrent protocol from 2001 and addresses its flaws. We expanded it with, amongst others, streaming from magnet links, keyword search for content, channels and reputation-management. All these features are implemented in a completely distributed manner, not relying on any centralized component. Still, Tribler manages to remain fully backwards compatible with BitTorrent."

      So, like the P2P of old (Gnutella/eDonkey/etc...), but with bittorrent underneith. Apparently it also uses its own Tor-like service for anonymity.

  6. Any mouse Cow turd

    torrent

    First off let me say I know nothing about what I'm about to suggest (so there is probably a good reason it hadn't been done).

    Would it be possible to have the database or list of torrents as a torrent itself. Not sure how it would get updated or you would add a new item to it though. Some simple block chain maybe?

    1. Charlie Clark Silver badge

      Re: torrent

      That would be a peer-to-peer network of which there are already several. They have the advantage of being robust and the disadvantage of being slower due to that robustness.

    2. PleebSmash
      Pirate

      Re: torrent

      What's the problem here? When TPB went mostly magnet only, they massively reduced the resources needed to run the site and said it would make it easy to run TPB clones.

      http://torrentfreak.com/download-a-copy-of-the-pirate-bay-its-only-90-mb-120209/

      Using this script, “allisfine” managed to copy the title, id, file size, seeds, leechers and magnet links of 1,643,194 torrents. Comments were not copied to keep the files as small as possible, and the end result is a full copy of all magnet links (magnet) on The Pirate Bay in a 90 megabytes file, 164 megabytes unzipped. There is some confusion as to whether the 1,643,194 torrents are indeed a full copy of the site, as The Pirate Bay itself lists 4,199,832 torrents in the footer link on its site. However, the latter stats apply to the number of torrents that are available on several public trackers, The Pirate Bay itself only hosts a fraction of those.

      Update: Here’s a copy of 17 million torrents from Bitsnoop.com, pretty much the same format but nicely categorized. It’s only 535 MB.

      1. e^iπ+1=0

        Re: torrent

        "When TPB went mostly magnet only, they massively reduced the resources needed to run the site and said it would make it easy to run TPB clones."

        They did, however still host the torrent files; the site was configured to only show the magnet link for torrents with 10 or more peers; if you wanted the torrent file you could could calculate the link and download it from the 'dark web'.

  7. blueyon

    there is already a product called openbay

    http://www.opencart.com/index.php?route=extension/extension/info&extension_id=4220&filter_search=openbay

  8. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    can you turn it into something useful? If the search component is nice, fast and simple and it can index something handy I can imagine it being a handy little tool.

  9. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    TPB copy ?

    Where will uploaders upload their files ? To wich copy ?

    How these copies will share new information between them ?

    There is the risk of anonymous hosters to use the website copy as a vector for malware and other risks as well.

    If there is no authority for the website, it will be unsafe.

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