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posted by n1 on Thursday November 13 2014, @07:11PM   Printer-friendly
from the freedom-of-information dept.

I have a pretty solid connection that has been sitting unused most of the time I'm not home. So I started thinking it would be a good deed to keep seeding torrent files of interesting projects. I already have a Raspberry Pi that's always on (since its my local DNS/DHCP server) so it was just a matter of installing a torrent daemon with a web interface.

My question is, what torrents would the SN community advise me to seed? Of course, I'm talking about content which does not infringe copyright terms. So far I am seeding ISO images for Linux Mint (Cinnamon and Mate), Xubuntu 14.04 and NOOBs (for the RaspberryPi) but I'm thinking there is a lot of other cool stuff that deserves more seeding. Do you know any?

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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by Blackmoore on Thursday November 13 2014, @07:24PM

    by Blackmoore (57) on Thursday November 13 2014, @07:24PM (#115633) Journal

    I'd like a seed to a GNU or BSD variant of a mesh network. like http://project-byzantium.org/ [project-byzantium.org]
    something that includes more security and redundancy features would be good.

    • (Score: 2) by DECbot on Thursday November 13 2014, @10:37PM

      by DECbot (832) on Thursday November 13 2014, @10:37PM (#115685) Journal

      The obvious choices for distros that get mentioned often here as an alternative for systemd: BSD, Slackware, Gentoo, etc.

      --
      cats~$ sudo chown -R us /home/base
      • (Score: 3, Insightful) by frojack on Friday November 14 2014, @12:35AM

        by frojack (1554) on Friday November 14 2014, @12:35AM (#115719) Journal

        Seed what you use.

        If you have a connection so some linux distro, seed that if you downloaded it.
        If you didn't think enough about it to download it yourself, then don't seed it either.

        I never go out to get a torrent just to seed it, but I always seed what I download, if its any good, but If I find it crapware, I don't seed it either.
        Found a cool little Slackware based distro called Salix. Tried it out, found it pretty nice, so I seed it.

        I never seed music or movies. I have a static IP and my reverse is set by my upstream so anyone with time to make trouble would have no problem finding me.

        --
        No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 14 2014, @06:07PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 14 2014, @06:07PM (#115981)

          I never seed music or movies. I have a static IP and my reverse is set by my upstream so anyone with time to make trouble would have no problem finding me.

          A fair number of movies and an absolutely huge mass of music is not all rights reserved so you can perfectly legally share it, be it via torrents or otherwise. Some of it is of pretty nice quality as well.

  • (Score: 1) by KilroySmith on Thursday November 13 2014, @07:30PM

    by KilroySmith (2113) on Thursday November 13 2014, @07:30PM (#115636)

    What I would dearly love to do would be to be able to seed "updateable" torrents - to seed the latest version of LibreOffice, for example, without having to update the torrent every update. I want to set it one day ("Seed LibreOffice, latest Stable release, forever"), and not have to touch it for two or three years with it updating the actual torrent file each time LibreOffice released a new one. I don't believe this is a current capability of bitTorrent, but wouldn't it be nice?

    As far as your original question, no.

    • (Score: 2, Informative) by Valkor on Thursday November 13 2014, @07:44PM

      by Valkor (4253) on Thursday November 13 2014, @07:44PM (#115639)

      It isn't a feature of bittorrent itself, but many clients will support grabbing torrents from RSS feeds. At first glance LibreOffice doesn't seem to offer RSS feeds of its downloads, though, so that won't work with that particular bit of software. The one thing that I haven't seen in BT software is "delete this torrent & data after getting a newer one", so that part will still be a manual process.

    • (Score: 2) by Blackmoore on Thursday November 13 2014, @08:24PM

      by Blackmoore (57) on Thursday November 13 2014, @08:24PM (#115646) Journal

      On the same note a torrent for Wikipedia would be a cool resource. (why yes I am working on a bug out system why do you ask?)

    • (Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Friday November 14 2014, @03:15AM

      by hendrikboom (1125) Subscriber Badge on Friday November 14 2014, @03:15AM (#115772) Homepage Journal

      Sounds like you want a distributed revision control system, such as monotone. Integrating that with bittorrent's mechanisms for finding repositories would be great.

      git wouldn't work as well. monotone has branch names that are the same everywhere. git has local names instead.

  • (Score: 2) by JNCF on Thursday November 13 2014, @08:22PM

    by JNCF (4317) on Thursday November 13 2014, @08:22PM (#115642) Journal

    Another thing you might consider donating your processing power towards is a distributed computing project like SETI@home, [wikipedia.org] or running a Tor relay. [torproject.org] Just a thought, torrents are great too.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 13 2014, @10:12PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 13 2014, @10:12PM (#115681)

      SETI and some of the distributed computing projects are neat. Tor? I'd rather not help people download child porn, thanks.

    • (Score: 3, Informative) by frojack on Friday November 14 2014, @12:44AM

      by frojack (1554) on Friday November 14 2014, @12:44AM (#115721) Journal

      How does that go over with your average ISP?

      Even Tor doesn't recommend [torproject.org] Joe Sixpack run an Exit Node, but its less clear if there is a risk running a relay.

      --
      No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
  • (Score: 2) by SlimmPickens on Thursday November 13 2014, @08:24PM

    by SlimmPickens (1056) on Thursday November 13 2014, @08:24PM (#115645)

    The finfisher source

  • (Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 13 2014, @08:30PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 13 2014, @08:30PM (#115649)

    The archive team [archiveteam.org] could always use another connection. As a plus, most of the code is written in Python (with the big exception being a custom wget) and many people use it on the Pi.

  • (Score: 5, Interesting) by CRCulver on Thursday November 13 2014, @10:58PM

    by CRCulver (4390) on Thursday November 13 2014, @10:58PM (#115689) Homepage

    Most of the open source stuff already has so many seeders that it's not worth going out of one's way to seed. Even for somewhat obscure Linux distributions, one's torrent program reports dozens or hundred of seeders and you get the whole ISO in two minutes.

    I'd recommend instead trying to seed obscure films and music, even if they are technically under copyright. There are a lot of obscure albums from the past that are no longer in print, virtually impossible to buy used, and only because of an enthusiast's vinyl rip can music fans today discover them. Imagine developing an obsession with a 1970s bluegrass act or a Romanian avant-garde composer, and then finding that the one torrent for some of their material has only a single seeder, or worse still, had a seeder until just yesterday and then he disappeared forever. If you have tastes outside the mainstream, and the material that you've torrented has an unclear rights situation (everyone involved is dead, no company today cares), then you are doing a lot of good to keep it available for other fans like yourself.

    • (Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 13 2014, @11:09PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 13 2014, @11:09PM (#115692)

      Better to have a second seed box or VM that is proxied out to a VPN if you want to do this.

      It'd be a pity to fined xx,xxx for a 50 year old movie, song...whatever. If the Jacksons and MLK's family have taught us anything.. it's that later generations still want to get paid.

    • (Score: 2) by frojack on Friday November 14 2014, @12:50AM

      by frojack (1554) on Friday November 14 2014, @12:50AM (#115723) Journal

      Most of the open source stuff already has so many seeders that it's not worth going out of one's way to seed. Even for somewhat obscure Linux distributions, one's torrent program reports dozens or hundred of seeders and you get the whole ISO in two minutes.

      Except to places where governments don't like you having free stuff.

      --
      No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
      • (Score: 2) by frojack on Friday November 14 2014, @01:08AM

        by frojack (1554) on Friday November 14 2014, @01:08AM (#115728) Journal

        Most of the open source stuff already has so many seeders that it's not worth going out of one's way to seed.

        And another thing about this is if you do seed open source stuff, AND you see a bunch of peers arrive, you can pretty much assume that there ISN'T necessarily too many or even enough seeds. After all, if there were enough, all of your upload slots wouldn't fill immediately.

        But you have to be careful seeding the obscure music, because if its that obscure, seeds are easy to track down if someone wanted to do so. And if you rip it yourself, and seed it, nobody else is going to have exactly that same image, so you will be the only one seeding it, and your best bet is to find a way to organize a bunch of other seeds.

        You might also review the Jammie Thomas-Rasset case before you make "obscure" stuff available.

        --
        No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
        • (Score: 4, Interesting) by CRCulver on Friday November 14 2014, @01:35AM

          by CRCulver (4390) on Friday November 14 2014, @01:35AM (#115734) Homepage

          And another thing about this is if you do seed open source stuff, AND you see a bunch of peers arrive, you can pretty much assume that there ISN'T necessarily too many or even enough seeds. After all, if there were enough, all of your upload slots wouldn't fill immediately.

          I'm not talking of peers arriving to download. I'm talking about dozens or hundreds of seeders sitting there for weeks with little demand on any individual one. That's what one finds from Linux distribution ISOs (as well as a lot of popular TV shows). While seeding an ISO you downloaded is helpful, I'm not sure it's really necessary for you to go out of your way to seed ISOs that you don't actually need yourself.

          You might also review the Jammie Thomas-Rasset case before you make "obscure" stuff available.

          You mean the case where someone was sharing major-label recordings from a number of high-selling rock and pop acts, and then was sued by those major labels? That's hardly an argument against sharing obscure stuff. I strongly suspect that someone has a much higher risk of, say, being killed in a car accident than being sued for sharing a vinyl rip from a forgotten, possibly foreign musician.

          Furthermore, let's not assume that the OP is in the United States; I'm in Romania, where piracy is utterly normal (ISPs used to even offer you a login to a server where you could quickly download pirated films and music from people in the same town), and there have been virtually no lawsuits even for major stuff, let alone obscure stuff.

      • (Score: 1) by Nuke on Friday November 14 2014, @01:21PM

        by Nuke (3162) on Friday November 14 2014, @01:21PM (#115886)

        How does an extra person seeding stuff that is already heavily seeded help in cases where "governments don't like you having free stuff"?

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 15 2014, @09:02AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 15 2014, @09:02AM (#116160)

    Some of these distribute via torrents and probably could use some bandwidth:

    https://www.gnu.org/distros/free-distros [gnu.org]