February 2021 – Page 2 – news.buyenne.com

RuTracker Crowdfunding Drive Raises Cash To Seed Old & Rare Files

Russia-based RuTracker is not only one of the oldest torrent sites online but also one of the most popular. The site is heavily blocked in its home territory, something which contributes to a fall in seeder counts. Following a successful crowdfunding campaign, RuTracker is set to address this problem by adding 800 terabytes of storage on top of almost 2,500 terabytes already dedicated to old and rare content.

From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

Thousands of torrent sites have come and gone over the years but only a handful of large public sites have stood the test of time.

The Pirate Bay is an obvious example but in Russia and surrounding countries, RuTracker is king. This massive torrent site and tracker has endured many storms but has still managed to stay afloat for more than 16 years.

Like all torrent sites, to a great extent, RuTracker relies on its users to seed and share content, whether that’s movies and TV shows or games, music or eBooks. As long as these human parts of the ecosystem play their crucial role in distribution, content should in theory remain available forever. In reality, though, it rarely works that way for long periods of time.

To the detriment of the sites they frequent and other file-sharers, only a small number of BitTorrent users share significantly more data than they take. Fewer still seed for prolonged periods of time. This means that torrents with initially large seed and leech counts can diminish quickly and when the number of seeders on a torrent reaches zero, people hoping to obtain that content have their options severely restricted.

To mitigate this type of problem, a group on RuTracker known as ‘The Guardians / The Keepers’ have been storing huge volumes of content and seeding it to the masses, with a reported focus on older and rare content. In a community post late December, a RuTracker admin revealed that the group had been doing its work for more than 10 years, helping to distribute 1.52 million poorly-seeded torrents referencing around 2,470TB of data, to the tune of 100 to 150TB of transfers per day.

Given that court-ordered blocking is preventing the free flow of regular users into the site to replace those that inevitably leave, RuTracker said that extreme pressure is being placed on The Guardians’ resources, particularly in respect of sheer lack of hard drive space. So, in an effort to boost their output, the site launched a crowdfunding campaign hoping to buy enough new hard drives to store and seed an additional 600 and 800TB of old and rare content.

“First of all, these are distributions that are in low demand by the general public due to their age, narrow focus or volume, but are still of historical and practical value,” the admin explained.

“Specialized software, old versions of software, images of games for now redundant consoles, alternative distributions of media files, etc. If you watch movies, listen to music, download games or software that were released more than a year ago, then each of you may be faced with a situation where there is no way to download the desired distribution due to the lack of distributors. This fundraiser is intended to minimize such incidents.”

After being launched early January, the crowdfunding campaign has now reached its target. According to a report from Meduza, two million rubles (around US$26,870) was raised in just a few weeks, meaning that The Guardians will now get the hard drives they need to ensure that older, rare and historically significant torrents are kept alive.

While the site and its users will be no doubt pleased that their target has been reached quite quickly, it still took weeks to raise a fairly modest amount, something which reflects the general nature of the BitTorrent ecosystem when sharing quotas aren’t enforced.

According to SimilarWeb stats, RuTracker.org receives around 40 million visits per month, yet only a relatively small number of visitors in January contributed to the fundraiser. In the same way, millions of people regularly jump on torrents offered by dozens of trackers, yet only a tiny proportion go the extra mile to make sure content remains available.

BitTorrent is an extremely powerful protocol but without high-levels of human altruism, interventions like this will always be required if niche content isn’t to fall by the wayside.

From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

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Clubhouse’s security and privacy lag behind its explosive growth

The platform has promised to do better after a string of incidents.

Clubhouse has a long way to go to assure its users that its privacy and security policies are fully baked.

In recent months, the audio-based social media app Clubhouse has emerged as Silicon Valley's latest disruptive darling. The format feels familiar: part Twitter, part Facebook Live, part talking on the phone. But as Clubhouse continues to expand, its security and privacy failings have come under increased scrutiny—and left the company scrambling to correct problems and manage expectations.

Clubhouse, still in beta and available only on iOS, offers its users “rooms” that are essentially group audio chats. They can also be set as public addresses or panel discussions where some users are “speakers” and the rest are audience members. The platform reportedly has over 10 million users and is valued at $1 billion. Since last year it has been an invite-only haven for Silicon Valley elite and celebrities, including an Elon Musk appearance earlier this month. But the company has struggled both with concrete security issues and more ephemeral questions around how much privacy its users should expect.

“With smaller, newer social media platforms we should be on our guard about our data, especially when they go through huge growth it tests a lot of the controls,” says security researcher Robert Potter. “Things you might have gotten away with with only 100,000 people on the platform—you increase those numbers tenfold and the level of exposure goes up, the threat goes up, the number of people probing your platform goes up.”

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