ThePirateBay tracker shuts down
Yes sad but true, thepiratebay tracker will not work any more. They have decided to shutdown it permanently. You might also have noticed that the tracker has been down lately? And that the upload page don’t recommend trackers anymore!
Well ThePirateBay says they will be online except the tracker. The main reason behind this is, the bittorrent technology has reached a level where the need of trackers are becoming lesser and lesser. The technology behind this is, DHT and PEX.
PirateBay blog Post says,
The development of DHT has reached a stage where a tracker is no longer needed to use a torrent. DHT (combined with PEX) is highly effective in finding peers without the need for a centralized service. If you run uTorrent you might have noticed in the tracker tab of your torrents that the [Peer Exchange] (PEX) row is often reporting a lot more peers than the trackers you might have for that torrent. These peers all came to you without the use of a central tracker service!
“Now that the decentralized system for finding peers is so well developed, TPB has decided that there is no need to run a tracker anymore, so it will remain down! It’s the end of an era, but the era is no longer up2date. We have put a server in a museum already, and now the tracking can be put there as well.”
Refer WikiPedia for Detailed technical explanations of DHT and PEX.
DHT (Distributed Hash Table) is a decentralized p2p network which modern BitTorrent clients join by default, enabling them to find peers for a download. PEX (Peer Exchange) is another way of helping you find peers on the network. Combining these two we dont need the trackers anymore.
But still its sad to see Pirate Bay slowly being shut down, part by part.
Yes its the starting of the Ending of an ERA. :’(
End of an Era: Pirate Bay Tracker Shuts Down
November 17th, 2009 | by Stan Schroeder5 Comments and 211 Reactions
Do you know how BitTorrent works? I mean, really know the technology behind it? Even if you’re not all too familiar with it, you probably know that it requires a tracker – a computer that coordinates the distribution of a file within the network.
But the trick is, it doesn’t – not anymore. Two technologies called DHT and PEX enable trackerless BitTorrent; in the simplest of terms, the BitTorrent technology has evolved to the point where trackers are no longer necessary for operation. Thus, the folks over at The Pirate Bay have decided to permanently shut down the Pirate Bay tracker.
From the Pirate Bay blog:
“Now that the decentralized system for finding peers is so well developed, TPB has decided that there is no need to run a tracker anymore, so it will remain down! It’s the end of an era, but the era is no longer up2date. We have put a server in a museum already, and now the tracking can be put there as well.”
Yes, seeing Pirate Bay slowly being shut down, part by part, may be sad, but the beauty of this is that little has changed in the site’s operation for the end user. You can still share and download files on The Pirate Bay, even if the tracker doesn’t work.
