BitSnoop

» see bitsnoop.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

BitSnoop described itself in two sentences: "Bitsnoop.com is a torrent indexer. Our robots roam the internets and get you torrents you want." It ran no tracker and had no uploaders of its own. The crawlers visited other torrent sites, 369 of them by the homepage's count in May 2012, and merged what they found into one search box under the tagline "Leveraging synergetical innovations".

The site dated itself to 2008 and its operators never gave their names. They did say their background was in telecom billing systems, the kind of software that processes call records in bulk, and that they had written the whole engine from scratch. The name came from snooping for bits. The FAQ admitted they had considered Bytesnoop and did not like the sound of it.

On 31 March 2017 the index stopped. Earlier that week it had listed 23,862,834 torrents. The homepage was replaced by a short note, "It's been a nice ride, but all things eventually come to an end", signed by "your friendly robots and oppressed meatbags of Bitsnoop". After thirty seconds the page forwarded to Zooqle, a newer search engine that had been given the database. The operator declined to say anything more to TorrentFreak.

~ the chronicle ~

~ trackermatch ~

The one piece of technology BitSnoop put a name on was TrackerMatch. A torrent carries a list of trackers, and by the site's estimate about 15 percent of torrents in the wild had junk in that list, mostly typos and dead hosts. BitSnoop cleaned the list and then added every working tracker it knew to be carrying the same torrent, so the magnet link you got had more sources in it than the original upload. A torrent found there tended to start faster than the same torrent found elsewhere, and that was the pitch.

~ the riaa wants a name ~

In July 2011 the RIAA went to the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia and obtained a subpoena against Whoisguard, the privacy service hiding the owner of bitsnoop.com. Two other torrent sites were named in the same filing. It demanded an IP address and an email address for each owner. BitSnoop's operator told TorrentFreak: "The RIAA has sent us several DMCA requests in the past and we always honored these. Apparently that wasn't enough, so now they pull this stunt."

Nothing public came of it, and six months later TorrentFreak noted that no action had followed against any of the owners. The attention was a side effect of growth. TorrentFreak's annual list of the most visited torrent sites had BitSnoop ninth at the start of 2012 and eighth a year later, with an Alexa rank of 1,159 and 19 million torrents indexed.

~ the blocklists ~

What ended it was slower than a lawsuit. On 30 October 2013 the major British ISPs began blocking BitSnoop under a High Court order won by the BPI, which covered 21 sites in one go. Italian ISPs blocked it too, and in early 2017 an Australian application was pending. A search engine paid for by advertising needs visitors who can reach it, and each blocklist removed a country's worth. The about page had once asked readers not to use an ad blocker, because the ads were how the bills got paid.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »