bittorrent

13 Articles

The Oldest Living Torrent Is 20 Years Old

September 28, 2023 by 41 Comments

Twenty years ago, in a world dominated by dial-up connections and a fledgling World Wide Web, a group of New Zealand friends embarked on a journey. Their mission? To bring to life a Matrix fan film shot on a shoestring budget. The result was The Fanimatrix, a 16-minute amateur film just popular enough to have its own Wikipedia page.

As reported by TorrentFreak, the humble film would unknowingly become a crucial part of torrent history. It now stands as the world’s oldest active torrent, with an uptime now spanning a full 20 years. It has become a symbol of how peer-to-peer technology democratized distribution in a fast-changing world.

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Raspberry Preserve – A BitTorrent Sync Client In A Mason Jar

May 9, 2015 by 17 Comments

[Matt Reed] used a few off-the-shelf parts and built a Raspberry-Pi based BitTorrent Sync client to help backup files. What makes it stand out is the idea of using a Mason Jar as the enclosure and the nice build finish. Mason Jars have long been used to preserve food. [Matt] wanted to use the Mason Jar to help preserve family memories.

Basically, he just stuffed a Raspberry Pi inside a jar with some LED’s and put BitTorrent Sync on it. He started off with a nice, square piece of wood and mounted the lid on it. Holes were drilled to fix the four LED’s and faux crystal drawer pull knobs. The Pi was connected to power and Ethernet and the LED’s wired up. The software is quite straightforward – just install BitTorrent Sync on the Raspberry Pi. He wrote a Node.js script to constantly check if BitTorrent Sync is transferring any data, and if it is, blink the LED’s so it looks cool. If no data is being transferred, the LED’s just glow solid red. Once it is plugged into power and connected to the internet, any photo or video (or any file for that matter) that is put inside a special folder called “Preserve” on any of his devices, gets sync’ed and copied to the “Raspberry Preserve” – preserved for posterity.

Making A Dropbox With A Chumby And Bittorrent

July 25, 2013 by 24 Comments

chumby

Since the Chumby servers went offline earlier this year, [Huan] found himself with a few of these tiny, extremely hackable internet devices lying around. He’s also getting tired of his NAS and wanted a way to sync folders between all his computers. Combine the two desires, and you can make a personal cloud with a Chumby, thanks to some help from the people at BitTorrent Labs.

[Huan] is using BitTorrent Sync for his Dropbox-like server. After creating a webkit interface for BitTorrent Sync, [Huan] loaded up his Chumby with new firmware, set up a few folders to be synced, and let the Chumby do all the work.

It’s not exactly fast, given the Chumby’s wireless connection and USB 1.1 for an external disk drive, but it’s more than enough to keep your personal project folders synced across multiple computers. As a bonus, it’s also very, very secure, getting around most of the security problems cloud solutions entail.

Pirate Bay Verdict: Guilty

April 17, 2009 by 149 Comments

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As you’ve undoubtedly seen on every other website in the universe, the verdict is in. The four defendants from the Pirate Bay have been found guilty of copyright infringement and sentenced to 1 year in prison and some pretty large fines. This could be a pretty important case since it deals with the blurry area between supplying material and supplying a means to get material. Though the verdict is obviously bad for the individuals, the site seems to be thriving from the media exposure. They’ve stated that the site will stay up. We’ve been watching this since it began, and now we’re curious what this means for the rest of the file sharing world.

Using Bittorrent On Amazon EC2

January 17, 2009 by 8 Comments

Bittorrent is a great distribution method for large files, but its heavy bandwidth usage can be disruptive to both work and home networks. [Brett O’Connor] has decided to push all of his torrenting activity into the cloud. Amazon’s EC2 service lets you run any number of Amazon Machine Images (AMI, virtual machines) on top of their hardware. You pay for processing time and data transferred. [Brett] put together a guide for building your own seedbox on the service. First, you set up the Security Group, the firewall for the machine. Next, you specify what AMI you want to use. In this example, it’s a community build of Ubuntu. Once you have your SSH keypair, you can start the instance and install Apache, PHP, and MySQL. TorrentFlux is the web frontend for bittorrent in this case. It manages all the torrents and you just need to click download when you want to grab the completed file.

Even if you don’t plan on setting up a seedbox, the post is a straightforward example of how-to get started with EC2. He’s not sure what the cost will be; the current estimate is ~$30/mo.

[via Waxy]

[photo: nrkbeta]

Should You Get A Seedbox For Your Bittorrent Needs?

July 17, 2008 by 20 Comments


Torrentfreak offers up a few reasons why you should get a seedbox if you’re a bittorrent user who likes to share a lot of files. A seedbox is a dedicated private server used exclusively for torrent transfers. [sharky] discusses a few pros and makes a few claims that we think might be a little overblown. Although the seedbox will speed up your downloads and allow you to bypass ISP limits on your bandwith, we’re a little leery of the claims that the seedbox is completely safe and secure, or that it’ll protect you from getting sued by the RIAA or MPAA. As pointed out in the comments, paying for a dedicated hosting service and paying for cable is no different. Of course, the seedbox also costs money, so you’ll have to weigh whether you’d rather have speed or risk getting throttled by your ISP. Torrentfreak does list a few hosting solutions that may be reasonably priced.

[photo: nrkbeta]