When the news came down a few days ago about The Pirate Bay being sold, the community reacted strongly. Despite pleas on the official blog for users to not abandon the site, it was inevitable that the 'betrayal' many users felt would lead to a flood of account deletions.
To a number of P2P users, TPB is dead. After all, once GGF goes to work the site will likely be a hollow shell of its former self. So what will become of the massive number of torrents in their tracker?
TorrentFreak has discovered and interesting development with OpenBitTorrent, a clever open tracker project. Haven't heard of it? Here's how the site summarizes itself:
OpenBitTorrent is a bittorrent tracker free for anyone to use. You don't need to register, upload or index a torrent anywhere, all you have to do is to include the OpenBitTorrent tracker URL in your torrent.
Clear enough. So what's the big deal? For starters, it appears as though every torrent in TPB's index is now also tracked by OBT. Here's the TorrentFreak test.
Copy a torrent URL from TPB and paste it into the blank at TorrentEditor.com. Check the details on the next page, and then replace the Tracker URL from TPB with http://tracker.openbittorrent.com:80/announce and click update.
Did you get the exact same details? Me too. I tried several torrents, both poorly seeded, obscure files and incredibly popular ones and had the same result every time. Several Mininova torrents yielded similar results, but those with identical seeds/peers all had open.tracker.thepiratebay.org as a tracker.
It looks an awful lot like the exact scenario TorrentFreak's Jamie King put forth in a recent post. So Is OpenBitTorrent TPB 2.0? Is it The Pirate Bay's phoenix rising from the ashes?
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