Resurrecting a dead torrent tracker and finding 3M peers

IANAL, but my understanding is that running a content-neutral tracker is legal in the US.

In other jurisdictions it most certainly is not, and the VPS maybe in a different jurisdiction and the .si TLD definitely is.

VPS is from https://cockbox.org/ (as referenced in the article), which says it is based in Moldova?

Googling, there's been at least one tracker shut down by US law enforcement, EliteTorrents [2005] https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2005-may-26-fi-torre...

I think there have probably been more. There are definitely more that had civil suits with MPAA etc suing for damages.

It may be somewhat harder to make the case in the US, but a tracker where a great majority of what's listed is copyrighted, I'm pretty sure it can be shut down in the US.

I remember the day they shut down ET. It was because they released some major blockbuster movie before its premiere.

Was that the actual tracker and tracker only, or was there a web front end that hosted all the torrent files and forums and so forth? Because the latter will make you a big target.

God I miss rarbg. And KAT.

There used to be a large public tracker running on .si, used widely in Slovenia where .si is from. Almost everyone who's been online in the last 20 years in Slovenia knows of or has used it. It also didn't disappear because of legal notices.

I'm curious the nature of the US laws that would make the web front end illegal (or subject to civil penalties?) but not the tracker?

> God I miss rarbg. And KAT.

I miss shit being worth torrenting. Maybe things have changed, maybe I grew up, but:

1. Most utility software you need is free, save for a few programs you can easily find on Russian torrents.

2. Most games and other media are slop.

Torrents didn't die because US law enforcement made them die. Torrents died because most companies realized that providing slop with ads and lootboxes for free is a much better business model than trying to get people to pay for something of quality.

Imagine trying to tell someone in year 2000 that Windows will natively display ads, EA will lose lawsuits related to FIFA being actual old-fashioned gambling, and music industry will push for AI-generated content. Yet somehow we accept this as completely normal in 2025. No wonder nobody ain't torrenting shit.

A lot of the best torrents are now on private trackers in my experience. I'm not clear why, but observing the communities involved, members seem to take great pride in e.g. well formatted e-books, well organized audiobook files, creating different resolutions and compression rate variations of a movie or tv show, and I suppose want to keep those in the community?

Torrents died because you can basically just download anything off file hosting sites now, or bootleg OneDrives/Google Drives.

There is still plenty of quality stuff in 2025, and a lot of slop, just how it was 40 years ago.

A tracker is ostensibly a content-neutral middleman. Your ISP isn't illegal (and until recently was not thought to be subject to civil penalties; now there is at least one ongoing case) either.

A lot of these websites were "come here and pirate lots of shit," often had tools to make it easier to specifically search for infringing content, and would remove torrents that were not tagged correctly. In many cases some of the people running the sites were also seeding.

That makes it hard to argue "we're just passing packets"

Well, I myself consider many of today's TV shows slop and not worth the need to watch them through a torrent source. Low quality content en mass for streaming services is a thing now. But that's a personal view.