Court Refuses to Shutter Tracker Linked to Pirate Bay: Via Threat Level.

A Stockholm court is refusing to order a Swedish internet provider to cut off a site the studios claim is The Pirate Bay’s new torrent tracker.

The Pirate Bay, the world’s most notorious filesharing website, announced two weeks ago it was abandoning its tracker, which had been the world’s largest — and a magnet for litigation — for years. The move was prompted by the emergence of DHT and PEX technologies, which allow peers to locate one another without a tracker, the site’s operators wrote.

Hollywood lawyers, however, claim that the Pirate Bay’s tracker is alive and well and still being used under a different domain, OpenBitTorrent — which was originally registered to Fredik Neij, one of the four co-founders of The Pirate Bay. [ Read more ... ]

Pirate Bay Retires the World’s Largest BitTorrent Tracker: Via Threat Level.

Operators of the The Pirate Bay shuttered the site’s BitTorrent tracker on Tuesday, six years after it was founded.

Trackers — the servers that bootstrap each BitTorrent download – are no longer necessary with enhancements like DHT and PEX that allow peers to locate one another without accessing a central server, site operators wrote in the Bay’s blog.

“Now that the decentralized system for finding peers is so well developed, TPB has decided that there is no need to run a tracker anymore, so it will remain down!” reads the announcement. “It’s the end of an era.” [ Read more ... ]