Short Bytes: Peter Sunde, co-founder of The Pirate Bay, talked about the decentralization of the torrent ecosystem on TorrentFreak’s audio podcast series Steal The Show. Sunde said that relying on a limited number of torrent websites is not a good idea. These bigger websites lack innovation and thus, become vulnerable.
Lately, the alleged founder of KickassTorrents was invited for a stay in the US prisons after the Homeland security Department tracked him with the help ofApple and Facebook. KAT’s removal from the torrent world sparked the existence of many imposters intending to take the place of the popular torrent website.
Sunde wants decentralization of torrent ecosystem!
All of the takedown and arrest events have made the torrent world pioneers to rethink the way the whole ecosystem works. Peter Sunde — who calls himself an artist — talked about the need for decentralization in the torrent ecosystem.
“I think maybe people now understand that we shouldn’t just have a few sites. Because everything depends on these sites. That’s the thing I always wanted, a large hybrid of lots of smaller sites instead of one big target like KickassTorrents or Pirate Bay,” — he said.
His point is legitimate to a great extent. Most of the internet users rely on a handful of popular torrent websites to satisfy their hunger for pirated tv shows and movies. The moment when the security agencies make a successful attempt to shut down these big sites, the whole ecosystem reaches the verge of collapsing. This is because many of the other small torrent websites count on the data of these bigger ones.
It’s just like training hundreds of dogs instead of an elephant. When the danger comes, it becomes easy to disperse the dogs than hiding a giant elephant.
One major reason because of which Sunde has emphasised on the need of scattering the torrent ecosystem is the scarcity of innovation among the top players like TPB and KAT.
“If you look at the big sites, name one of them that has an up-to-date user experience or uses new technology at all. It’s the same shit that’s been around for 10, 15 years. There is no innovation whatsoever that’s visible on these sites.”
Many good alternatives to the BitTorrent network are available now. For example, ZeroNet on which a torrent website Play was introduced a few months ago. The torrent biggies resisting the technology change would make them more prone to takedowns and raids by the security officials.
“I’ve been saying for years that I want The Pirate Bay to shut down, and now with KickassTorrents being shut down I hope this will actually inspire people to do something fresh, innovative and something new,” — said Sunde. “To be honest, it’s not really hard to run a torrent site, or set one up.”
And it’s not about the torrent world that should focus on decentralisation. The whole internet shouldn’t depend on a limited number of services. We can quote an example, for an average user, Google going down for a single day would be the end of the internet. They provide YouTube, Gmail, Drive, Android, and above all, the mighty Google Search. If we have to kick Google out of the internet picture than we would have to forget our smartphones, Play Store, and Chrome.
This is not the first time Sunde talked about this centralization thing. He did in the past, but from a different perspective, talking about money-minded capitalists who want to popularize their own services and the state of the internet.
Source:https://fossbytes.com/
Working as a cyber security solutions architect, Alisa focuses on application and network security. Before joining us she held a cyber security researcher positions within a variety of cyber security start-ups. She also experience in different industry domains like finance, healthcare and consumer products.
