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Strike is a new BitTorrent search engine with a clean, no-ads interface and an "AI bot" presenting the results, which combines public torrent indexing with DHT scraping. As explained to TorrentFreak by the developer Andrew Sampson himself:
"DHT basically is a second P2P protocol aiming to replace trackers. It stores pairs of info hashes and updates the swarm if it receives announce messages. When it comes to DHT every [torrent] client is announcing themselves as being present. Because of this I'm able to scrape millions of torrents in a decentralized manner; not having to rely on trackers themselves," the dev told TF.
Unfortunately, the search engine has come under attack from multiple vectors, including a flood of DMCA notices and a DDoS attack. The situation went downhill from there, forcing the site to change hosting providers at least three times.
The developer says that the majority of complaints against his site were filed by anti-piracy company Entura International. Sampson says he tried to explain that his site carries no content and no torrents but simply extracts these from DHT upon user request but the company wasn't particularly interested.
In response to the DMCA issues, Sampson says he has now taken things a step further. During the past few days the dev took the decision to stop storing any data whatsoever on Strike's servers "except for search phrases for learning purposes."
This presents an intriguing situation. Aside from some disk caching, Sampson says that Strike now operates purely on demand. When a user types in a search the site pulls the results from its usual sources and presents them in the browser window. When that browser is closed the data effectively disappears, meaning that there is nothing for anti-piracy companies to take down because it's already gone.
I haven't used the site myself yet, but it sounds like a great project and I'd hate to see it disappear.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by esperto123 on Sunday April 05 2015, @01:34PM
and we've circle back to gnutella, eDonkey and the like. I've stopped using those because finding files was hard and the amount of fakes had became unbareble, bittorrent was more reliable, usually had many more sources and fakes were pruned quicklily.
I wonder if now we can improve those completly distributed protocols in such a way that a listing server is no longer required at all.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Arik on Sunday April 05 2015, @02:10PM
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by cafebabe on Sunday April 05 2015, @10:10PM
You are asking for completely anonymous sources of information which are trustworthy. This is hard and may be impossible. If they are completely anonymous then any party can create any number of them and/or be as anti-social as they like. (See the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory for further details.) Meanwhile, trust is significantly easier to establish if both parties are known to each other.
In summary, it may be the case that complete trust and complete anonymity are mutually exclusive.
1702845791×2
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 06 2015, @06:20AM
So after a while, more people could choose to trust you despite not knowing or caring what your "real world" name is.
In the P2P scene there are a fair number of famous names/brands that aren't their real world names, and people flock to their torrents/seeds.
So create a way for message senders/submitters to sign stuff, a way to group senders by the messages they are sending and a way to whitelist and blacklist. Then after a while the **AA bunch might have to actually seed real stuff from time to time if they want to build a good enough rep ;).
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Monday April 06 2015, @02:04PM
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 3, Informative) by urza9814 on Monday April 06 2015, @04:25PM
Web of Trust or something along those lines. Freenet managed to solve this problem many years ago.