The catch is the owner is clueless. If it doesn't close due to load in a few days it will close due to liability in a few weeks.

I would've disagreed with your assessment, but then the guy came out with his (probably) own name and picture @ https://twitter.com/ufukaltinok

Looks like he's Turkish? I know the put.io team is located in Turkey, and they run a similar service (albeit paid), so copyright infringement might not be a legal issue for residents there.

Apparently they are making (or made already?) it easier to sue people in Turkey for p2p copyright infringement. However, the fact that put.io is still up tells a lot about how effectively those laws are enacted.

http://adventuresinankara.com/2012/07/30/adapt-or-die-guest-...

No catch really, This isn't new my friend ran server farms that did this same thing in china and asia. Originally they served as proxy servers for delivering censored content in China but then due to the availability of massive server farms he tested out a service that streamed torrents, even megauploads links, zip files, etc all from a single site. I think it was called PaperBus. Because the farms are in China it was cost effective and could transfer torrents relatively quickly server to server after which it would eventually have many of the files already cached and could continue to serve it up faster.

Ads.

MegaUpload (and all other "upload"/filesharing websites), Grooveshark.

Google and Facebook are not really giving you access to mostly illegal content, but are still paying their own money for the bandwidth (which is huge, in the case of Facebook).

Off-topic but does anyone here have any first hand experience with redstation.com ? Hadn't heard of them before but have just checked their prices and they're in the same ball park as Hetzner. Surprised me given they are a UK based operation (our hosting always seems to be more expensive than equivalent stuff on the continent).

Downloading movies is perfectly legal in many European countries.

Perfectly legal is way different than not pursued ...

Yes, and in many countries it is _perfectly legal_. In Poland for example its even legal to make copies of movies and music for your closest family and friends. Only commercial distribution is prohibited.

I think after few months, it'll not be free. This is the trial

I'm assuming you can extract a nice amount of personal information from 'private' torrents and links. Excellent way to harvest accounts of private torrent sites for your own personal gain.

That isn't how private torrents work. They contain a key that identifies the user who downloaded it, for bookkeeping purposes on the site (tracking bytes in and bytes out for ratio purposes), but you cannot get into the site's UI from the information in the torrent. This was a deliberate design decision in most private tracker software, notably Gazelle, because it was accepted that people would post the .torrent files in other places. Many trackers also limit the IP addresses that are permitted to join a swarm based upon the same identifier in the torrent file; all of the ones I've been in have required me to disclose the IP addresses of my seedboxes, and attempting to use another IP address would get my account flagged for a ban.

So no, your assumption is completely incorrect. Even if someone shoved a passthepopcorn torrent in there, (a) that person would likely get banned from ptp, (b) it probably wouldn't work in the first place because joker's servers couldn't join the swarm and (c) the information that the owner of joker can glean from such a torrent file would be almost entirely useless unless the goal is boosting the ratio of the user.

As much as you'd assume about something you've never used, private torrents are actually a well-oiled, quite secure machine. It's easy to think of pirates as incompetent, but Gazelle is actually decent software and the biggest problem I ever faced while involved in that scene was DDoS attacks against the trackers.

>This was a deliberate design decision in most private tracker software, notably Gazelle, because it was accepted that people would post the .torrent files in other places

Err no. Passkeys were designed so that you could track users without needing IP address -- IP tracking is fragile and doesn't work with multiple peers/ip, which happens very frequency.

> Many trackers also limit the IP addresses that are permitted to join a swarm based upon the same identifier in the torrent file

Once again, not really. Most sites don't really care what IPs you use (so long as they aren't part of blanket banned regions or similar). PTP does not require you disclose your IP, they don't care if you use multiple IPs, and doing so will not flag you for a ban. There are better ways of finding bad users, which includes sharing between trackers.

>(a) that person would likely get banned from ptp, (b) it probably wouldn't work in the first place because joker's servers couldn't join the swarm and (c) the information that the owner of joker can glean from such a torrent file would be almost entirely useless unless the goal is boosting the ratio of the user.

A) No, they wouldn't.

B) Unless joker.com is using a custom bittorrent app (highly unlikely) they can join the swarm just fine

Charming - it's been a while since I've touched a torrent, let alone a private one, things have obviously changed. Last time it was around, the equivalent of an API key was stored within the torrent file, allowing anyone in possession of the file 'access' to the website. By access, I mean access to RSS feeds and the like, allowing someone to effectively utilise the account with HTTP(S) calls.

Edit: Still appears to be the case. Get the users unique code (call it what you will) from the .torrent, and understand the RSS URL structure for said website, and you've got yourself download links for all the torrents by using someone else's account.