The big news this morning is that the Pirate Bay is closing down their torrent tracker for good. After launching the torrent tracker back in 2003 it quickly became one of the worlds largest Bittorrent trackers on the Internet, with some 25 million peers using the service. The Pirate Bay was launched by a few friends in Sweden and was never supposed to turn into a business, and never really did (probably the ultimate open source project).
Despite this success, The Pirate Bay operators today decided to pull the plug and close down the tracker permanently. The evolution of the BitTorrent protocol has made trackers redundant they say, as BitTorrent downloads work well with trackerless solutions such as DHT and PEX.
“Now that the decentralized system for finding peers is so well developed, TPB has decided that there is no need to run a tracker anymore, so it will remain down! It’s the end of an era, but the era is no longer up2date. We have put a server in a museum already, and now the tracking can be put there as well,” the Pirate Bay crew write on their blog.
Additionally, Torrentfreak has learned that The Pirate Bay operators are talking to other Bittorrent site ownwers to encourage them to follow suit and completely ditch torrents in the future. BitTorrent has reached a point where trackers and torrents are no longer needed to download files successfully. Supported by all of the major BitTorrent clients, DHT and PEX can handle the transfers and Magnet links can easily replace traditional torrent files.
There are still other services for users who dont want to go trackerless just yet, which include OpenBitTorrent and PublicBitTorrent.
Its really sad to see the end of this famous tracker, however times change and technology moves on, and all credit to The Pirate Bay team for trying to push the move even quicker.
Geocities was created fifteen years ago when the internet was barely getting onto its feet. People went mad using basic HTML creating what are now viewed as utterly horrific websites such as this one. Now, after fifteen years of offering free hosting services Yahoo! have finally decided that it is time to close it down once and for all.
October 26th will be the day all geocities websites will be deleted from the servers. Yahoo! sent out an e-mail advising all geocities members to back up all geocities files onto their computer or move their website to another hosting facility.
“We know your files are important to you, and we want to make moving to Web Hosting as easy and affordable as we can. For a limited time, you can move your files automatically, take advantage of terrific features like a personalized domain name and email, even redirect your GeoCities web address to your new site — all for only $4.99 a month for a full year.” Read an e-mail sent out to all GeoCities subscribers today.
In true business fashion, Yahoo! are using this closure to pedal their own hosting services from $4.99 per month for small businesses and personal users.
It seems like the last remaining bits of the old internet are dying away. Personally, I see it as a good and bad thing. Bad because I’ll have to recover my website and transfer it elsewhere but good because the internet is prevailing even during a recession.
There have been a lot of huge companies here in the UK shut down of late because of the economic crisis, such as Woolworths, MFI and others. In the technology world there havent been too many casualties so far. However that being said, it has been reported this morning that Lycos Europe will be closing its doors. A date still hasnt been confirmed but it is rumoured to be before the end of the year.
Lycos Europe, the portal and Web hosting service, said on Wednesday that it has concluded a strategic review process and will shut down operations and seek a sale of remaining assets. The company is separate from Lycos in the U.S., and was launched as a joint venture between Telefonica’s Terra and Bertelsmann.
“As a result of this strategic review process the Management Board and the Supervisory Board of Lycos came to the conclusion that the best available option of the company is to (i) strive for a sale of its domains, Danish portal and shopping activities and (ii) to discontinue the portal and webhosting activities,” the company said.
Lycos Europe will also return about $60 million to its shareholders.
What other technology companies are going to follow in the footsteps of Lycos? It tends to be old brands that are struggling to actually build a strong brand in this ever growing environment. My tip has to be on Napster being of the big boys to close its doors very soon!
