OpenBitTorrent

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

~ the goodbye ~

A torrent file is mostly a long list of hashes plus one line saying where to go and ask who else has them. That line is the tracker. OpenBitTorrent was a tracker and nothing else: no index, no search box, no accounts, no files on any disk it controlled. Its own front page explained the entire product in two sentences and then stopped, because there was nothing further to say. "You don't need to register, upload or index a torrent anywhere, all you have to do is to include the OpenBitTorrent tracker URL in your torrent."

It appeared in February 2009, in the window when The Pirate Bay was being sold and had announced it was closing its own tracker. For the first six months OpenBitTorrent and The Pirate Bay answered out of the same cluster of machines, which is why people assumed for years that it was a Pirate Bay side project. OpenBitTorrent's position was that the arrangement was temporary and finished in August 2009. Nobody behind it ever attached a name to it.

The software was opentracker, written by Dirk Engling, the same thing The Pirate Bay had switched to at the end of 2007 when it dropped its own Hypercube code. It is built to answer an enormous number of announces on very little hardware and to keep almost nothing, which is both why a tracker of that size could be run quietly by a few people and why there is so little left to look at now.

~ the chronicle ~

~ how it landed ~

By the time broadband reached my house in Turkey this was already plumbing. You did not choose OpenBitTorrent and you never visited it. It was a line somebody else had written into a file, and if your client was working at all it was talking to a hostname you had never typed. I could not tell you which trackers my downloads went through in 2010, and neither could most of the people downloading.

The only hard numbers that exist came out of the outages. When it went dark in December 2014, TorrentFreak's headline described it as the world's largest BitTorrent tracker. That is the sort of figure that only gets printed on the day a thing stops.

~ the outages that were not the end ~

There were four, and every one of them looked terminal at the time. On 22 May 2010 the tracker was shut down as a consequence of the case the major Hollywood studios brought against The Pirate Bay, and it was back inside two weeks. From 16 July to 2 August 2012 it took itself offline on purpose, protesting that uTorrent's makers had not adopted a protocol improvement proposed by Fredrik Neij. From 5 December to 30 December 2014 both the site and the tracker were unreachable, around the period Neij was arrested.

July 2017 is where most registers stop, because it went down again and stayed down long enough to read as permanent. ArchiveTeam's death register still files it under that year, one line, no date. It came back in late 2018, went unresponsive in late 2019, spent part of 2020 redirecting to Opentracker, and was answering again in January 2021. Anything that calls this tracker dead before 2024 is wrong, and that includes whatever I would have written about it in 2019.

~ the real one ~

What finally dates it is a stranger who was checking every night. The trackerslist repository on GitHub publishes a fresh set of working public trackers once a day, built by actually announcing to each one and sorting the answers from the silences. Its build from 3 February 2024 at 23:11 UTC carries both OpenBitTorrent endpoints, UDP on 6969 and HTTP on 80, and carries them in the working list rather than the dead one. The build from 4 February 2024 at 23:10 UTC carries neither. They were never added back.

The website outlived the tracker by two months. The last capture of the real front page is 4 February 2024 at 12:50 UTC, the same twelve hundred bytes it had been serving for years, logo and all. From 9 April the address answers 403. By December 2025 it is a parked domain that loads five hundred bytes of script whose only job is to send you to a lander.

The delegation is gone now too. openbittorrent.com's nameservers do not respond at all, and tracker.openbittorrent.com resolves only because a public resolver is still handing out a stale cached address with a dead TTL. Send a connect request to that address on either port and nothing comes back, while a working tracker answers the same request in under a second. Fifteen years as the hostname in other people's files, and what is left is one cache entry nobody has flushed.

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