Posted 11/18/09 at 12:00:00 PM by David Murphy

Half the internet says The Pirate Bay is dead; The other half says the first half has no idea what it's talking about. Popular BitTorrent index The Pirate Bay is never without controversy, it seems. But is the site's latest move to kill its BitTorrent tracker for good really that much of a white flag? I don't think so, because decentralized BitTorrent tracking has already been here for quite some time now. If anything, The Pirate Bay is just trying to cover its poop deck from additional legal threats.

Here's the deal. For the last many years, anyone could head on over to The Pirate Bay site, do a quick search for a piece of content, download the associated .torrent file, and connect up to The Pirate Bay's tracker. The tracker would, in turn, find you a number of peers to connect to and your BitTorrent client of choice would commence the download of bits and pieces of your file from these multiple sources. Easy.

When a tracker fails to work--or gets forcibly removed from the Internet--you can keep on transferring bits and pieces of a file to those you're already connected to. If you want to start a new download, however, you'll be unable to find any peers seeding the file for you. The same holds true in reverse: Without a tracker, others on the Internet won't be able to connect to you either.

To solve these problems, BitTorrent has embraced two technologies that, together, transform the art of downloading files into a truly peer-to-peer solution: DHT and Mirror Links.

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Posted 07/09/08 at 03:08:41 PM by Paul Lilly

Paring down an extraordinarily long web address into a manageable hyperlink makes it possible to share line-breaking URLs via email, text messages, Twitters, or any other medium without overwhelming the recipient, and therein lies the beauty of TinyURL. Unfortunately, the ugly truth is that while TinyURL makes short work of long URLs, they're also exceedingly difficult to recall for anyone not fluent in Nerglish. Or at least they were.

At long last, TinyURL has finally given users the ability to denote a custom alias to shortened links instead of a random list of characters. That means you can focus on remembering http://tinyurl.com/YouTubeAds instead of trying to recall http://tinyurl.com/688o7d.

Of course, standard safe practices still applies. Don't click on hyperlinks from untrusted sources no matter what they're labeled as. And you know that buddy that still finds it amusing to send you a Rick Roll for the umpteenth time? Don't click on his custom TinyURLs either.

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