Show HN: Privacy-focused, ad-free, non-tracking torrent search engine
skytorrents.in
skytorrents.in
Love the site especially the speed. But disappointed that the search indexes the name of the container of the torrent only and not the name of the files within the torrent.
To date the only site I know that does this is "filelisting dot com" but their website is very slow.
Do you have any plans to extend your product to add this feature. Maybe as a premium option?
Super useful to find single documents contained within archived bundles of files.
Yes please, implement this feature.
- You know what your users want most
- People feel like their voice is heard
- It builds a community around your product
Try it out!
Indexing file names is the search quality improvement you need most. For example, I tried searching for "Pretty Polly", by the Poison Girls; moderately popular niche music. There are 0 results for "pretty polly" and 2 results for "poison girls", one of which is a complete discography collection containing that song. Imagine the results for more popular and prolific authors.
Check out http://torrentproject.se/
That would make it impossible to copy the magnet link from the search results page, which I believe is a really nice usability perk. For users that are less technically inclined, clickable links could be crucial (even if it gives you the theoretical possibility to track the click).
I guess it depends on if you are prepared to be a search engine only for the 1337 crowd, or if you want casual users to have access to a decent search engine too. The Hacker News crowd could still just right click and copy the magnet link, so essentially you're just removing features for those who don't understand how technology works but are still dependant on it.
Perhaps the best idea would be to keep the link and have a text area for selecting and copying like requested above.
Consider this.
I don't get this. It's a magnet link with magnet protocol. It will be handled by your torrent client, no additional request to the server whatsoever if you click on them. It's the same as plain text copying, but more convenient.
To keep the technical details short: the events are logged with JS and sent over either ajax or a websocket in the background as you navigate the site.
Or if you just block scripts.
For example, to get information about torrents that are on life support (e.g. have a couple seeds that show up for a few minutes a day), having the torrent file downloadable is invaluable, as it includes info like the size and the file names, etc. In many cases it's even possible to bring a torrent /back to life/ if you have the torrent file and got the content that was in it out of band.
If you just have the magnet link you cannot do any of this.
I use this all the time for downloading very long tail content, and the move to have indexing sites be magnet-only is very frustrating.
I prefer using torrent files, because I can just wget/curl them down into a directory being watched by my server which downloads torrents.
Is the current world we live in.
A magnet as a link would be more useful. I'm sure the people worried about letting others know what they download can copy the link without clicking anyway.
http://dcarlbom.com/google-tag-manager/event-tracking-gtm-wh...
Selecting the text will trigger no such request, the developer will still know who opened the site and searched for what, but he cannot know the exact torrent that was copied.
It's really refreshing to see a fast, small efficient site that gets rid of all the bullshit. Congrats!
At first I literally couldn't believe what I was seeing - ZERO third-party bullshit in uMatrix. Not just none to unblock to make the site work - none at all!
(Apparently you can make a website without downloading Bootstrap from someone's external CDN...)
And then... oh my God, how fast the site is. I can actually feel I have a somewhat modern, powerful computer. Usual day-to-day browsing makes me forget that.
So yeah, for this reason alone I'll be using and recommending this site. Great job!
but we usually end up in a couple of years great service, before they figure out that they could be earning money with serving ads or selling data.
The cycle is usually completed by another free service starting and being usable for the next few years, and in this case there's no pain in switching (no content you uploaded and spread URLs to), so I wouldn't worry.
On the other hand, in the age of HTML "hello world" including an Angular installation, downloading Bootstrap from external CDN, and at least three different kind of tracking scripts, I think sites like this one need to be praised loudly.
What Extratorrents and The Pirate Bay do tho seems to be something akin to clickjacking. I click on a link to a torrent search result (or a download link), a tab opens, and it immediately closes. Rest assured this generates them money.
Not only would it enable offline searching, but when the inevitable take down shows up, folks can still continue to search the database.
Since you aren't monetizing the site, how are you planning on keeping the site running? Donations?
Currently they're NOT accepting donations.
It's easy to build a crawler, the hard part is spending time on bullshit like DMCA takedowns and such. Even if you say: "I just crawl, I don't provide download links, I don't even know what is indexed", you have to deal with legal issues.
So, host your own locally or for your community. No big deal.
Even Google has to deal with DMCA!
Aside: the MPAA can do this, of course, because they give lots of money to politicians. If Trump really wants to "drain the swamp" he could be more pro-freedom on file sharing and copyright. Many Trump supporters feel Holywood supports the Democrats, so it's not like he will lose much support over this. A Republican staffer suggested something similar a while ago ( https://politics.slashdot.org/story/12/11/16/2354259/gop-bri... ) but was shot down.
So I avoid it like the plague. Even if the majority don't have anything it only takes the one and then, depending on its level of sophistication, you're screwed.
The keys they sell are those bulk keys large companies get, their IT dep guy wants to make some extra coin on the side. But they work.
- if you bought a laptop with preinstalled Windows, you can activate a fresh install with the key that's stored in the laptop (in ACPI tables IIRC). Just make sure it's the same edition and language.
- if you're a student, check if you have DreamSpark (er, Imagine) Premium. Apparently Windows Server is available even in the non-Premium program (for all students).
What is the legality of that? The IT-guy is probably violating his corporation's license with Microsoft, but does that affect you as buyer? I suspect that you may run afoul of anti-fencing laws in a lot of jurisdictions (where buying goods you can reasonably suspect are fenced is illegal as well).
> The keys they sell are those bulk keys large companies get, their IT dep guy wants to make some extra coin on the side
Which make these keys as illegal as pirating Windows. Obviously it is a more secure solution though.
i'd personally argue with the backdoors hidden by the pirates are significantly more likely to be used for nefarious things than the 'official' ones, as whitehats are responsible for the former, while blackhats created the latter.
I know that the usual rule of thumb is that "normals don't understand or care about complicated technical issues" such as privacy. But Windows 10 telemetry was so widely discussed in media, that I noticed even the non-tech people around me were refusing to upgrade from Win8 to Win10 on the basis of "I heard it spies on you".
There are iso hashes on MSDN. You can read them with a free account.
To make a analogy, imagine a world where there existed no government food inspectors. I would expect that visiting restaurants would become more dangerous, but my behavior would also change. I would only visit established places where people before me have eaten and proven that the food aren't poisonous.
1. Enable whois privacy via Gandi
2. Hide your server IPs behind Cloudflare
3. Ensure the site is written such that it is trivial for yourself and others to use alternate domain names
Only able to login if coming from specific ip address, like a private vpn server.
[0]: http://wiki.gandi.net/en/domains/private-registration/gandi-...
Not everyone has got the memo on that.
As a side note, maybe someone like archive.org should keep time series whois data...
Yes, there are some services which offer this, e.g.:
What kind of dark magic is this? What's your stack?
Compare with interpreted languages for the frontend and Java monsters as backends (PHP and Lucene anyone?)
People forget what modern computers are really capable of, when used properly.
> Contact information: Registrants must provide true, accurate contact information. The following contact types are required: Registrant, Administrative, Technical, Billing. As per standing policy, the contact data will displayed in the .IN WHOIS, except for the Billing contact data, which is not displayed.
[1]: https://registry.in/Policies
[2]: https://registry.in/whois/skytorrents.in / http://whois.domaintools.com/skytorrents.in
What software powers the site?
I did some looking and discovered it uses Bulma [1] instead of Bootstrap, and it's absolutely amazing. Another commenter pointed out that the site also uses Caddy for HTTP/2 and HTTPS.
Excellent work, keep it up!
[1] - http://bulma.io/
Secondly Its amazingly fast, I believe its more than just C language. I tried different combinations of searches on your search engine to check whether results are being served from cache or so. And it looks all searches(don't know your cache/uncache db design) are several times faster comparable to many. + +1 for speed. Also i feel i found a minor bug.
Even though it looks passion project but don't know how long will you survive fighting DMCA ,others, costs without monetizing plans or accepting donations. Won't mind donation if you accept.
Till you survive, i am glad for your engine.
Similar search engines have a warning that you should use a VPN when downloading that I think would benefit users.
Hah! I know that all too well. Great work!
https://www.skytorrents.in/dmca
Genius.
Here's what the DMCA requires[1]:
(i) A physical or electronic signature of a person authorized to act on behalf of the owner of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed.
(ii) Identification of the copyrighted work claimed to have been infringed, or, if multiple copyrighted works at a single online site are covered by a single notification, a representative list of such works at that site.
(iii) Identification of the material that is claimed to be infringing or to be the subject of infringing activity and that is to be removed or access to which is to be disabled, and information reasonably sufficient to permit the service provider to locate the material.
(iv) Information reasonably sufficient to permit the service provider to contact the complaining party, such as an address, telephone number, and, if available, an electronic mail address at which the complaining party may be contacted.
(v) A statement that the complaining party has a good faith belief that use of the material in the manner complained of is not authorized by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law.
(vi) A statement that the information in the notification is accurate, and under penalty of perjury, that the complaining party is authorized to act on behalf of the owner of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed.
Where are you hosting it and do you plan to monetize?
So my next question is - any plans on open sourcing? :)
"donot" should be "do not" (separate words)
"atleast" should be "at least" (separate words)
I realize English is probably not your first language, so no big deal, but it would be nice to fix.
(Pragmatic reason: I worry that you may go offline someday due to misguided legal action, lack of time, etc., and I'd like to have your database offline so I can continue using it even if you're gone.)
i'd like to tweak the question, and ask if you intend to make money with this site, or is it a passion project/labour of love?
+WORD1 +WORD2 returns WORD1 OR WORD2 instead of empty set if there is no match.
Here in India, cyber law enforcement is a joke, and if some legal issue comes up with this site, I'd be curious to see how it works out.
And, just a hypothetical follow up question: how would it work out if the site was not even DMCA compliant?
https://www.reddit.com/r/india/comments/5mj3vz/setting_up_ne...
Domain is from Gandi (France) and IP address (hosting?) seems to be from Netherlands
Also, are you allowed to publish the takedown requests?
Instructions here: https://github.com/qbittorrent/qBittorrent/wiki/How-to-write...
Really interested in what your tech stack looks like.
The takedown requests are a waste of the complainant's time, anyway. The site does not host any files, and a listing of facts, such as the contents of a telephone book, is not eligible for copyright protections.
Such a request is equivalent to a demand to remove someone's telephone number from the telephone book, because if you call it, the voice mail system plays Lionel Ritchie's recording of "Hello". It's ridiculous on its face.
If there is nothing to take down, you can make the DMCA request process as burdensome as you like, because your response will always be a brush-off.
Maintaining, and abiding by, a DMCA policy is the price of doing business online in the US and WIPO treaty countries.
My goal is not to fix the US legal system. I personally believe that having enough money is a greater factor in achieving a court victory than being technically correct or ethically sound. Therefore, I also believe it is pointless to speculate upon what the courts might decide as a guide for ethical behavior.
The only way to always win in court is to never be sued (or arrested).
Torrent protocol is a brilliant system for information sharing, and with fragmentation of services like Netflix we need to start considering other solutions again, until the industry can give us what we need.
https://www.skytorrents.in/search/all/ed/1/?q=ubuntu+iso&for...
I don't know if there's a better way, like including all that data in the RSS feed somehow. Otherwise one would have to scrape the HTML to get that data, which would be less reliable.
Something like this would work great (there may be better ones still): https://www.datatables.net/examples/styling/bootstrap4.html
You could have:
<th>
<a href="/search?sort=name&direction=asc">
Name
<a>
The server side code would interpret the sort and direction parameters and sort results as instructed.
Also, it's FAST!
Does it by chance use Elixir/Erlang?
Kudos, good sir.
Payment would need to be in bitcoin to avoid handing over payment details.
Maybe consider supporting an alternate way to access your website as a Tor onion service too?
The PGP-only mail policy is very interesting, I wonder if it will actually work even for DMC-related emails.
Interested to know the tech stack. I saw Caddy as the frontend server with https. and you use "C" below.
It will be offline and versioned. If the index is too large, than some splitting will be required but I think this is totally doable.
:) so cool.
For many people this isn't really a problem, seedbox or not.
For others it's not exactly their problem but yea someone upstream may get a "letter".
How recent are the search results and how frequently do they get updated?
Great speed!
But where is the list of torrents retrieved from in the end?
kill me plz