By taklamakan | March 4, 2011

There is some fuzz about our tracker in the recent days. Some people claim that the Chaos Computer Club started a tracker which, in their terms, is the successor of denis.stalker.h3q.com.

And they all got it so wrong.

First of all, the Chaos Computer Club is running their own BitTorrent trackers for a really long time. Sometimes they call it torrent.ccc.de, sometimes bittorrent.ccc.de. They use them to distribute their congress recordings, the recordings of their Radioshows or Podcasts and maybe even for some Open Source stuff. Why they created to many? Because its so easy with opentracker!

Now they created another one which is called tracker.ccc.de and somehow someone jumped to conclusion that this is the real deal and the official successor of denis.stalker.h3q.com! Well its not.

Second of all, denis.stalker.h3q.com started as our tracker to develop the opentracker software, it wasn’t intended to become one of the largest trackers in the world. But it did and both the tracker and the software became a huge success, also because we could test the software with a huge amount of hashes and peers!

Some people got in really bad trouble for that, even if they didn’t have to do anything with this.

Partly because of that, but also because we don’t have the resources and time to operate one of the largest trackers in the world anymore, denis.stalker.h3q.com is dead.

If you liked denis.stalker and want it back, feel free to register your own domain and/or create a denis.stalker.your.domain record in your domain and point it to tracker.openbittorrent.com!

Nevertheless, we like the fact that the CCC is using opentracker as their tracker software of choice and if you have any CC-licenced or open source stuff, feel free to use their tracker!

Topics: community, free speech, history | 2 Comments »

By erdgeist | August 5, 2010

The beerware license – most famously used by Poul-Henning Kamp – originally was less about beer and more about politics. It basically meant surrendering copyrights on your software to “the kids”, helping them to understand, learn and pirate good parts of your source (in order not to reinvent it badly). In exchange, if you were one of those kids and felt like some piece of software really inspired you, or if you could save some time and work by using this software, the license encourages you to grab the developer in question, invite h** for a beer or two and talk. Give feedback, discuss ideas, point out rooms for improvement and reiterate the fact that the software actually is in good use. IOW: flatter the developer by dedicating a short amount of your time.

While the beerware license was better known in the BSD scene only, the opentracker project can claim to have introduced it to the pirate scene. There the basic concept shifted away from dedicating the user’s time to dedicating a certain amount of beer to show appreciation. Although we were not exactly sad about this development, it led to incidents where people sent us beer from overseas without ever intending to drink that beer with us. Now – beer from the U.S. is an experience from the beginning and won’t turn out better once it arrived in europe (:

So, until now there was no appropriate way to show your support remotely. Wiring money to pay for a beer means to waste a crate worth of beer just for the fees. With the advent of the flattr service there is now hope on the horizon to be part of a crowd that shows up at a party with a keg of beer. That doesn’t mean that you should not try to engage in giving verbal feedback whenever possible, but it means that you can now actually fill up your favourite bittorrent tracker team from your couch.

Depending on the amount of money that accumulates on the opentracker flattr-thing, we will engage in a variety of drinking games ranging from silently getting a booze sharing one very cheap bottle of Sternburg er to throwing a barbecue party with several kegs of our favourite bavarian brew. There will – of course – be video documentation of how we bring your flattrs to good use.

Find opentracker as a flattr thing here.

Topics: community | 4 Comments »

By taklamakan | March 8, 2009

We are proud to announce that the Norwegian State TV Launches its own BitTorrent Tracker and they are using the opentracker software!

Maybe we will get a barrel of norwegian beer some day?

Seems like the Norwegian State TV has understood what their viewers want, to quote Torrentfreak: “NRK understands that the traditional distribution methods are changing, and that their viewers want to consume television shows wherever and whenever they want. The way people consume music and video has changed, and NRK doesn’t want to fall behind.”

Hurray for Norwegian State TV!

Topics: free speech, history | 8 Comments »

By erdgeist | January 1, 2009

The opentracker team wants to thank Berlin’s pirate party (Piratenpartei Berlin) for their encouragement in the development of opentracker which they showed in form of a 50 Liter barrel of delicious bavarian beer.

With the heroic and sacrificially help of many Congress Angels we finally managed to spend all the beer and have – to our best knowledge – not introduced any bugs due to the consumption.

So hohoho to the pirates and a happy 2009 to everyone.

Topics: Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

By erdgeist | December 28, 2008

For those wondering what all the silence in this blog means.

Yes, we’re still alive and kicking. Currently discussing all our proposals with client developers, which is consuming more time and energy as we thought it would. You can usually find us at IRC channel #transmission on freenode and join discussions.

We’re also preparing to introduce some real crypto into our udp protocol and trying to enforce good behaviour towards trackers. Also opentracker has been heavily refactored and will enjoy some more changes towards multi threading capabilities due in january 2009.

So stay tuned. And to all opentracker users: a happy 2009!

Topics: Uncategorized | Comments Off

By supergrobi | June 11, 2008

In our last post we made the advise to use some sort of auto-UDP because it would also help to lower the trackertraffic for EVERY torrent even if they have an HTTP announce URL.

We can now (a little late, but not without a little pride…) announce that Azureus has support for auto-UDP since version 3.0.5.0 (they revised it a little in 3.0.5.2). So it seems to work and we would like to suggest others to follow their steps. Every big tracker admin loves that and will be grateful.

supergrobi

Topics: Uncategorized | 3 Comments »