bit torrent tracker

h-crimm

Well-known member
does anyone have any interest setting up a bit torrent tracker to make things discussed on this message board available?

we'd have to come to some conclusion on the digital rights thread, but it could be very useful for opening up access to the music and film thats talked about.
its an interesting principal to make everything thats discussed uniformly available to members... maybe not daytrippers like me...
we could take an unlimited-access supscription and issue an anonymous dividend direct to artists... or only share stuff by dead people or thats out of print or not for commercial release (e.g. radio sets)...
make it an alternative model, like that torrent site did for windows SP2

theres also the technical side but i think its got easier with recent releases... anyone know anything about eXeem?
 

turtles

in the sea
h-crimm said:
anyone know anything about eXeem?
Don't know too much except that you should use Exeem Lite, which is the spyware-free version. Get it at http://exlite.net/

Network is still in its early stages though seemingly. Fair amount of bugs and I'm having problems connecting to the network. I'm sure it'll get big soon though, given suprnova's dominance of the bitorrent world prior to this.
 

seahorsegenius

It's just me.
yea i second this idea. make torrent is easy enough to use. just don't know how to get a tracker or whatever. it's pretty hard to hear half the stuff on here, especially when you live in the US.
 

h-crimm

Well-known member
hey,

i just managed to sucessfully seed crazy titch 'gully' using the inbuilt tracker in the bit torrent azureus client. i dont have a fixed IP and i'm about to go home from work so theres no point telling you were it is, but if we use this bit torrent front end all we need for a tracker is a fixed IP address that we can use to announce the torrents and host the seeds. i guess we could ask for an area on the riddims.ca site
in most sensible countries hosting torrent seeds isnt illegal because they do not contain the copyrighted material... i think canada is one of those countries...

a big thing we'd need to discuss for this to happen is what we consider fair use.... i kno alot of people already use filesharing to get hold of grime because its nearly impossible any other way outside of london. to me thats totally okay but not everyone agrees.
perhaps only live/radio sets (things that arnt for release) are allowed or we could agree a flat subscription to the group and pay dividends to the artists... dont kno how workable that is and whether people would get pissed off when they found out what was up.
i do think wider distribution is in all the artists interest but thats obviously just my opinion


i should get round to emailing the riddims.ca guy....
 

Pearsall

Prodigal Son
I'm actually one of the administrators at Riddim.ca. Paul (da big boss) and I talked about this in email the other day. I'd be up for it personally, just cos I have tons of sets that if they were uploaded directly to the site would eat Paul's bandwidth alive.

For the moment I'd say probably keep it to radio/live sets, and maybe dvd rips and mix cd's as well (although we'd have to email the people who've put em out).

I dunno, though, email Paul with what you know and we can see about it.
 

nomos

Administrator
Here I am (the riddim.ca guy). I like this Torrent idea, although I'm not totally clear on how it works from the seeding end of things. When you host a seed does it mean that you're hosting a small .torrent file rather than the actual audio file? If it's the former, then I can't imagine the server load being too heavy, right? All all of the actual audio files just user to user without going throught the torrent server, correct?

I'd be totally up for this, but I'm really concerned about one thing: it becoming a hub for trading copywritten and pre-release material without permission. Personally, I'd love to get my hands on whatever's available, but I don't want to get my webspace shut down or to inspire anyone's (or worse, anyone's lawyer's) wrath. I 'm not sure how to make certain that people only trade what they're supposed to.

What do you folks think?
 

Pearsall

Prodigal Son
autonomicforthepeople said:
Here I am (the riddim.ca guy). I like this Torrent idea, although I'm not totally clear on how it works from the seeding end of things. When you host a seed does it mean that you're hosting a small .torrent file rather than the actual audio file? If it's the former, then I can't imagine the server load being too heavy, right? All all of the actual audio files just user to user without going throught the torrent server, correct?

The actual website only hosts the little torrent file, and people use it to connect to the seeders from their Bit Torrent app. See http://filemp3.org for an example of how a typical BT site works.

I'd be totally up for this, but I'm really concerned about one thing: it becoming a hub for trading copywritten and pre-release material without permission. Personally, I'd love to get my hands on whatever's available, but I don't want to get my webspace shut down or to inspire anyone's (or worse, anyone's lawyer's) wrath. I 'm not sure how to make certain that people only trade what they're supposed to.

What do you folks think?

Well, either limit uploading privileges to certain people, or maybe have a minimum file size (say 10-15 megs) so that individual tracks can't get traded. Probably at first it wouldn't be too busy so it would be easy to take down torrents with copyright material and ban persistent offenders, which would give time to come up with some better solution.
 

fldsfslmn

excremental futurism
I share many of the concerns voiced here. I am firmly on Canadian soil and so is my webserver. Got some bandwidth to spare, but wonder what the hit would be?
 

nomos

Administrator
In the meantime, I've just set up an area in the Riddim Links section for links to pages with audio. Any member of the site can submit a link. An Admin has to approve it (in the Submissions area of the Admin Page) before it gets added to the database.
 

h-crimm

Well-known member
hey sorry,

i will reply eventually... i think this should be uite easy to set up. the main problem being helping people understand how to set up the software and seed material...
i'm stresssing out quite alot this week, its the collaboration meeting for my experiment and i'm giving a talk about my work tomorrow so grime trading's on hold for now.
 

nomos

Administrator
I'm in about the same boat as h-crimm - very interested but too busy this week to do much about it. Still interested in any practical info people dig up.
 

h-crimm

Well-known member
i'm on night shift at the tevatron this week so i have to be online midnight to 8a.m.
we can do a test any day this week during those hours if people want.

i linked to some help pages to install the neccessary programs then for some reason closed my browser :( so i'll have to start again

heres where to download azureus and the java you need (if you dont have it)

and heres the azureus user guide

i run it in linux and set it up using the instructions here... for fedora core 3

interestingly i appear to be given the same IP at work everytime i use my laptop... okay so i only looked the last few times...
this means we can do a test on my personal announce url to see if its worth doing with a small number of people sharing

i'm not sure how to set up an outside url to be the announce page, although its pretty straight forward to input it into the make torrent wizard in azureus once we kno the address. you may need to have a port opened to bittorrent in the websites firewall which might be a problem for the commercial company who host the riddims.ca site since bittorrent is being targetted at the moment by the lawyers.
but i'm not sure about this anyway... it might be we just need any url

dyou know what the riddims.ca fixed IP is? does that make sense? i can try announcing to a port on it and see if i can find the seed served there...

also if you have the client set up and you want to test it i'm seeding some radio sets so i'll give you the port o. and my IP and you we try it out
just message me on here and i'll tell you where (only if i recognise your dissensus alias tho)
 

sufi

lala
communal webspace

well i don't know fa about bit-torrent, i tried it once but it was too complex to set up in one sitting so i gave up, so is there any particular reason you favor it?
because....
i got plenty of webspace - i have a pc linked to adsl so i can add HDs as necessary - currently a couple of gigs are spare
you can up & download anonymously at:
ftp://railtonroad.com/upload/

simple as that really

welcome all from dissensus
mebbie email me if you drop anything nice, or got any question? sufi@metronet.co.uk

speed seems fine atm, tho it may reduce if the site gets busier, i can sort out more permanent webspace on that server if anyone wants some .... let me know

i'm also working on an oscommerce site on a secure server for selling stuff: mixes, promos, download, mailorder, whatever..... anyone interested in being involved? emails/pm !

peace & love to you all
soofa
xxx
 
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nomos

Administrator
That's a really nice offer, Sufi. Thanks.

I'm actually starting to think that my server may be a little more capable than I'd originally thought. I'm supposed to have a 40 Gb/month bandwidth limit, which I may exceed now that stuff on Riddim is being leached by external links. But I went into the Admin panel the other day and noticed that under Bandwidth Limit it said "N/A." So we'll see how N/A it really is.
 

Canada J Soup

Monkey Man
If Blog Torrent does what it says on the tin, I can really see it taking off. I don't have any webspace of my own currently, but I'm incredibly tempted to set something up just to see if it's as idiot proof as they claim.

As far as regular old tracker sites are concerned, the people who run indietorrents.com seem to have developed an efficient model. The site is invite only, uploads are monitored to ensure they are as 'RIAA Safe' as possible and users' access rights are predicated on seed/leech ratios so everyone who wants something has to contribute to the network. They also have guidelines in place that keep traffic moving very quickly that I have yet to see elsewhere (use of default ports on BT client is discouraged to prevent ISP throttling, port forwarding is required). Maybe not the best place to go if you're not keen on rules (or computers), but it certainly runs more smoothly than any other trackers I've been on.

The source code used on indietorrents should be available somewhere at http://www.t2k2.com (the direct link I had is dead).
 
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Woebot

Well-known member
am i alone in thinking that torrent downloads are unethical?

so tempting to get a bunch of classic films but don't think i'd be cool with it.

leading to another question... why the totally absurd pricing model for movies to download from iTunes?

is there a solid legal alternative?
 
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