Shanti’s Dispatches

I alluded in a previous post about developing a BitTorrent tracker in Ruby on Rails. Surprisingly, there were only a few gotchas that I had to deal with in the BitTorrent protocol on the server side. (writing a BitTorrent client is much more difficult)

With some recent publicity on TorrentFreak and Digg (985+ diggs as of this writing), I might as well spill the beans here on
The Hydra Project.

You can checkout the coverage on TorrentFreak and see what Digg users have to say about it here.

In short, The Hydra Project is a distributed, private BitTorrent tracker framework with goals of user privacy, anonymity, survivability & distributed ratio maintainability.

For more on THP, see my post on Hydra Project over at OnWebApps.com, or checkout the project page on Google Code.

Four Types of Feedback from Commenters

The types of comments received are all to be expected, and generally fell into one of the following camps:

1) Good idea, let’s hope some private torrent site admins use this.

2) This’ll never work because private torrent site admins won’t use this.

3) This doesn’t work or is vulnerable to MPAA because of X.

4) (my favorite) You secretly work for the RIAA / MPAA and will be funneling user information back to the Deathstar.

My Answer to Each

1) Thanks, mate.

2) Perhaps. I’m just a guy who developed some code and an open API.

3) Trackers must share peer IPs with fellow requesting peers. (this is how P2P works) There’s no way around this. Most other complaints didn’t quite understand how THP works.

4) LOL. =) Not that this warrants a response — but for the truly paranoid, the code is released uner MIT License (same as rails) and available for perusal here. You don’t even need a packet sniffer to detect if it’s tracking you — just look at the code!

You can bookmark this, digg this or check the cosmos