The Hidden Tracker.

It sounds promising already, right? Well, delving further into the project won’t diminish that.

With all of the pending court ordeals and corporate sales going on for The Pirate Bay, its future is quite vague at best. Will the ship sink – or get outfitted with all sorts of new weaponry through legal means? Well, it doesn’t seem people want to wait around for the answer – or at least put all their eggs in one basket.

There are already 3 sites stepping up to the plate to take over tracking for TPB. The first two that popped up are OpenBitTorrent and PublicBitTorrent. The idea behind them is that they can be used, freely, by anyone and without any sort of registration or indexing site. You just include their tracker URL in your .torrent and hand it out. Quite handy if you don’t have an index site of your own and/or just have a few .torrents you want to have tracked.

What might be better than that?

Free, open.. and anonymous!

Enter The Hidden Tracker.

“The HiddenTracker is a bittorrent tracker free for anyone to use. To protect the people who maintain it, it runs behind a Tor hidden service. If you don’t know what that means, this site will try to explain. You don’t need to register, upload or index a torrent anywhere, all you have to do is to include a HiddenTracker tracker URL in your torrent, and share it with whoever wants like to download it.” -The Hidden Tracker website

So, not only is it open and free but it keeps the people running it anonymous. Keeping them anonymous keeps the .torrents alive.

The biggest problem with all of the goings-on at TPB, is what will happen when/if they go down? Well, between The Hidden Tracker and the other open trackers popping up, you needn’t worry. These will give the .torrents the redundancy they need to stay alive. As far as the TPB site itself, well indexing sites are a dime a dozen. So, while millions stand ready to support TPB, we are also ready should they be compromised.

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The Hidden Tracker is looking for help!

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We need loads of help to get the HiddenTracker working just the way that you’d like. There are a lot of skills which we can take advantage of. We’ve included a list of specific tasks that we want to work on, and areas of expertise that may be helpful to us. If you think that you could contribute in any of these areas, or if you want to help even though this list doesn’t apply to you specifically, please drop us a line at theHiddenTracker@gmail.com with the subject line ‘Volunteer’. We can use all the help we can get!

Major Tasks

• Fixing the peerless announce issue
• A simple guide to using Tor and the HiddenTracker with major torrent clients
• A better explanation of how Tor and hidden services work
• Getting Tor2Web to handle HiddenTracker requests the way we’d like
• Upgrading the server hardware & internet connection

Minor Tasks

• Full site design
• Getting a blog up and running
• Improving OpenTracker performance under linux
• Promoting the HiddenTracker

Expertise Needed

• Sysadmins
• Tor-wranglers
• Programmers
• Hosting providers
• Mirror-offerers
• Webmasters
• Webdesigners
• Promoters
• Bloggers
• Lepidopterists
• Writers
• Donors

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If you think you can aid this project in any way and want to get in on something new and useful, don’t hesitate to drop them an e-mail. Help the torrent world!

Trent Reznor, the frontman of Nine Inch Nails has always been pro-filesharing and admitted to downloading music using BitTorrent. Unlike others in the music biz, the NIN members are no stranger to BitTorrent.

“We use torrents ourselves, and we know that most NIN fans are tech-savvy and familiar with file-sharing, so we want to experiment with ways to use that to our advantage, instead of making the mistake of trying to fight or ignore it, as so many artists and labels do.” NIN’s Art Director Rob Sheridan explained to TorrentFreak last year.

In fact, when they released the album ‘Ghosts‘ for free last year their server couldn’t handle the high traffic numbers and downloads, so the linked to the torrents they had uploaded to The Pirate Bay instead. Thanks to The Pirate Bay, many fans didn’t have to wait till the server recovered, and the torrent quickly became one of the most downloaded files on the tracker.

With the release of their tour promo NIN/JA today, NIN decided to prevent similar server troubles, and the band now offers .torrent downloads for the higher quality (and size) downloads. The tracker used for the torrents is hosted by the band itself on the tracker.nin.com subdomain. The tracker is already being used by thousands of fans just hours after it went up.

Self-hosted BitTorrent trackers may become a new hype. Two weeks ago, the government-owned Norwegian Broadcasting (NRK) had set up its very own BitTorrent tracker to distribute some of their TV-shows.

Thus far, we haven’t spotted NIN’s tour sampler on any of the public torrent sites, but it won’t take long before it spreads. The official website requires people to submit their email address in order to get the links to the DRM-free downloads. It’s well worth it though.

Post from: TorrentFreak

A little later than expected, but the second episode of TorrentFreak TV has finally arrived. The show is still in Beta, so comments and suggestions are welcome.

‘TorrentFreak TV’ is a biweekly recap of some of the best, most interesting or remarkable stories from the wonderful world of BitTorrent.

The episode can be downloaded from Mininova as well. For tips, comments or suggestions, feel free to contact the crew at tv@torrentfreak.com.

A iTunes feed is available here.

Post from: TorrentFreak