Busting Common Trackerless Torrent Myths
source: http://torrentfreak.com/common-bittorrent-dht-myths-091024/
-
-
- atomiclegion
- added this
The Pirate Bay tracker has been in a state of flux for a few weeks now, mostly offline. If your torrent relies on it, what can you do? The easiest solution is to go ‘trackerless’ and use the Distributed Hash Table (DHT), but there are many myths and misunderstandings that can put people off using it.
DHT has been included with many clients since it first debuted in the summer of 2005. however, over the 4 years of life, many myths and misunderstandings have been spread around. These can put people off using it and can give these users difficulties when a tracker goes down. Currently the Pirate Bay is popping on and offline, and Demonoid has been down for a week or two.
The main problem is that most people just don’t understand what DHT is, what it does, and how it works. Not really a surprise since the documentation and even the Wikipedia page are filled with technical jargon, and no simple explanation. Without that basic understanding confusion is inevitable. We did explain DHT in our jargon piece back in 2006 but after 3 years, we decide to cover it again.
The easiest way to think about DHT is to imagine it as a form of ’super tracker’, in some ways a lot like WinMX and Kazaa of old. A large ad-hoc network of peers pass on information requests about torrents without a central server, meaning no control or single point of failure. No information about the contents or even the names of torrents are passed around, making this legal and hard to shut down.
DHT has been included with many clients since it first debuted in the summer of 2005. however, over the 4 years of life, many myths and misunderstandings have been spread around. These can put people off using it and can give these users difficulties when a tracker goes down. Currently the Pirate Bay is popping on and offline, and Demonoid has been down for a week or two.
The main problem is that most people just don’t understand what DHT is, what it does, and how it works. Not really a surprise since the documentation and even the Wikipedia page are filled with technical jargon, and no simple explanation. Without that basic understanding confusion is inevitable. We did explain DHT in our jargon piece back in 2006 but after 3 years, we decide to cover it again.
The easiest way to think about DHT is to imagine it as a form of ’super tracker’, in some ways a lot like WinMX and Kazaa of old. A large ad-hoc network of peers pass on information requests about torrents without a central server, meaning no control or single point of failure. No information about the contents or even the names of torrents are passed around, making this legal and hard to shut down.
-
- groups:
- Tech, Current Tonight, Upstream, Geek Out Culture, 1 more
-
- tags:
- Torrents, Bittorrent, TorrentFreak, Torrent, 16 more
