Comment by armitron | Hacker News Reader

Comment by armitron | Hacker News Reader

There are 3 (and only three) solutions here, for whomever thinks of doing something similar again:

+ Hidden service in TOR

+ Tracker/forums hosted in .ru (Nobody took down libgen or sci-hub yet and you can bet many have tried)

+ Decentralized software solution that can serve metadata and forums over the swarm in addition to torrents.

The first solution forces TOR on everyone, not ideal.

The third solution is not quite there yet, but should be the future.

So, at the moment, I would say that if you're not hosting your shit in Russia, don't even bother ...

The only reason other private trackers that are hosted in western countries have not been taken down is that most of them are too niche for any special interests to bother. If/when that threshold gets crossed, as it was for what.cd, they will all be destroyed. This should provide a powerful disincentive for people to contribute their time and resources to such communities, unless of course they implement any of the solutions I mentioned. Alas, most private tracker operators are clueless idiots on a power trip and lack the vision (nevermind the technical expertise) to deal with or implement proper solutions to well-known issues.

Look to the russians for inspiration.

I'm sorry but that's just incorrect. I'm not going to provide my background info but I can say for sure that Russia is a very bad place to host now. Pre-2012 it was good but now they enforce copyright laws and pro-actively censor the internet.

For domain extensions, always go directly to the nic site if they sell directly (tonic.to, nic.is, nic.cr, vunic.vu etc) as then you don't have to rely on multiple companies - eg, if you remember, ThePirateBay had a 'hydra' of domain extensions but used the exact same registrar rather than using the direct nics so they all were suspended. As for hosting, you need both a safe country and a safe datacenter. Switzerland (Private Layer) hosts many warez sites. Looking at the hosting providers of popular torrent/warez/file host sites is always the best way to find a reliable datacenter.

libgen/sci-hub are ebooks, What.CD was for music. Russia has been clamping down on music piracy significantly.

(Not OP)

I like how rutorrent nuked their artist blacklist in response recently. It's a consumer's market again :P

Thanks for the NIC suggestion, that's very cool.

Apparently libgen are using Novogara, but sci-hub are hiding behind CloudFlare. I wonder who they're using.

If you notice this reply, for a while I've been curious about a hosting provider that's reasonably resilient to security-testing type traffic, run-of-the-mill P2P, and moderate poking around the less-than-white areas of the web (which I've never done and am curious yet reserved about; FWIW I have zero interest in the darker things I know are on there).

I'm not just looking for just-VPN service because that market is IMO hugely inflated, and for ~$10/mo I can run OpenVPN exactly how I want and do compute tasks on a machine with a nice disk and PHY.

A little while ago I was sharing space with a friend on Contabo; performance was so-so (QEMU) but nobody seemed to notice me compiling Chromium, playing with OpenVAS, or torrenting all over the place (via VPN), so that's my base.

I was thinking of going with Online.net next (dedicated Atoms for <$10/mo? I realize what I'm getting, but sure!) since their T&C approach seems interesting (Redstation have a "no nmap" policy!), but I'm unlikely to go exploring since I value my account.

Interested in any ideas you may have. My email address is in my profile FWIW.

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