Strike Becomes Totally Dynamic With No Torrents to Takedown

[Ernesto]

There are dozens of torrent site engines online today but to attract our attention new entrants have to stand out from the crowd by doing things somewhat differently.

Strike has only been online for a few days but it certainly fits that billing in a number of ways, despite its plain appearance.

Indexing

Firstly, and in common with many other sites, Strike indexes public torrents. Creator Andrew Sampson informs TorrentFreak that his engine indexes all available public trackers, which is clearly a good start for a site of this type. However, Strike boosts its indexes by also scraping BitTorrent’s Distributed Hash Table. DHT search engines have appeared in the past but as far as we know, Strike is the first site to utilize both sets of resources.

We have covered DHT in detail in the past, but Sampson offers a quick refresher.

“DHT basically is a second P2P protocol aiming to replace trackers. It stores pairs of info hashes and updates the swarm if it receives announce messages. When it comes to DHT every [torrent] client is announcing themselves as being present. Because of this I’m able to scrape millions of torrents in a decentralized manner; not having to rely on trackers themselves,” the dev told TF.



“My scraper can query DHT with the respect to an info hash and doesn’t have to use a tracker or know a peer that is part of the swarm before. If one of the peers it contacts supports the sharing of metadata it only needs the info to retrieve the .torrent file from the swarm. This is what effectively puts this search engine ahead of everything else.”

In order to get information on torrents, Strike’s DHT “scraper” behaves like a regular torrent client, connecting to swarms and exchanging a few bytes with other peers. This enables it to gain access to all the peers in the swarm and the data they have.

“It bounces around from infohash to infohash scraping up meta data, writing it to disk where it’s queued up to be stored in the database. It’s highly bandwidth and hardware intensive, (I have 5 servers constantly working on it) But the end results are millions of torrents for end users to search through quickly,” Sampson says.

Search

The project also has an interesting approach to search and related results which grew out of QTBot, an AI tool originally written for Skype.

“Her job was to not only learn to be your personal assistant or friends, but to do sentiment analysis to determine the best course for keeping a group conversation lively,” Sampson explains.

“I saw this technology as going to waste, for a while I thought about a better way to apply it and the obvious thing was always to build a search engine of some sort. Well, after one too many fake download button clicks with malware were forced down my pipe it was obvious what kind it was going to be.”

Within Strike, QTBot caches common terms and phrases to see which results it should present first. ‘She’ recognizes that high seeder counts are important but also considers other factors, including whether to present the latest version of a release if users search for them enough.

Presentation

No doubt about it, Strike is one of the cleanest, most tidy torrent sites around. There is no clutter in the interface and strictly no ads.

“From the start I knew this would be a completely non-profit project, so sorry to all users, but there won’t be any hot singles in your area or fake download buttons filled with malware. I wanted to offer the cleanest experience I could for users while also keeping them safe,” Sampson notes.

Clicking on search results brings up a details page which reveals all content inside each torrent, useful in the unlikely event a user is presented with a suspect file. Files can then be accessed via a torrent or magnet link, with RSS and Twitter announcing options for those that way inclined.



Overall

In a sea of advertising, pop ups and irrelevant results, Strike certainly stands out as one of the cleanest torrent sites around. Those looking for the most comprehensive sets of results on the rarest of content might be a little disappointed, but most things even moderately mainstream are well catered for.

Having both DHT and public tracker indexing makes this site unique while its no logging policy and dev-friendly API add icing to the cake.

Originally Published: Sat, 21 Mar 2015 10:32:44 +0000
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[Hary1946]

True story:

When I read "From the start I knew this would be a completely non-profit project," after having read, "It’s highly bandwidth and hardware intensive," I thought to myself, "self", I thought, "that is an implausible situation, certain to be short lived".

Headed over to the site to take a look and what pops up on my screen: "For the next 48 hours we're raising money in honour of our good friend who passed away to start a scholarship in his name, every penny counts." Call me cynical but the coincidental passing of unnamed friends so close to the advertising of a new FREE website strikes me as...lets just say unlikely.

[Killua]

It's Truly Awesome, I just hope it last forever, with them and TPB we are just Invincible!

[Hary1946]

O RLY? So when TPB was down, before Strike was available, you weren't able to share files?

Poor you. You need to widen your horizons because nobody else suffered so.

They're tools, useful tools certainly, but nothing more than tools. Neither make us invincible, and neither are required for invincibility.

[Moe]

Not to mention, it is an aggregator, not an index the public can add to. So there still needs to be a site to first host the torrent.

Without knowing how it determines what hashes to scrape DHT for, I suppose it is possible you could create a torrent, never upload it anywhere, seed it and just wait...


In short, something of a marriage of torrentz.eu and btdigg.org.


Nothing wrong with any of this. Just not blazing any new frontiers either. At the very least, it will be yet another site those cash starved bringers of content will have to demand be blocked.

[Ernesto]

Last month we published an article on Strike, a new torrent site with a fresh approach.

In addition to a less-is-more philosophy when displaying results, Strike obtains torrent data not only from all public trackers but also BitTorrent’s Distributed Hash Table (DHT), a first in the torrent world as far as we’re aware.

But since that piece a couple of weeks ago, Strike has been under attack from multiple directions.

“The first major one was a DDOS attack, I’m still not sure who or why did it, but at 300gb/s they took half of my servers offline; some are still off and will probably never come back on because of my hosting provider not wanting to deal with it,” site operator Andrew Sampson informs TF.

But that was just the beginning. Rightsholders quickly began contacting not only Sampson, but also Cloudflare and the site’s host, complaining that Strike was infringing their copyrights. Additionally, “tons of morons” threatened to sue Strike if it didn’t stop “hosting their content”, the bemused dev explains.

Eventually German host Hetzner said it didn’t want to deal with any more DMCA notices. Sampson said the provider null-routed the non-commercial Strike which took down another of Sampson’s projects, NetflixRoulette, at the same time.

“I can’t begin to tell you how badly that hurt my revenue stream. A company in Germany adhering to a US law and not even taking the time to investigate. Note to public: Avoid Hetzner,” Sampson says.

The developer says that the majority of complaints against his site were filed by anti-piracy company Entura International. Sampson says he tried to explain that his site carries no content and no torrents but simply extracts these from DHT upon user request but the company wasn’t particularly interested.

“I have a technical background and implement many of Strike’s technologies within the toolset of my organization, so I believe that I have a good understanding of how Strike operates,” an Entura contact told Sampson.

“Our copyright infringement notifications are not requesting the removal of a hash from the BitTorrent/DHT network, we know this is not possible. We are simply requesting the de-indexing or de-listing of results from your site that allow for the downloading of copyrighted content via the magnet link that you provide or .torrent files via your API/RSS.”

In response to the DMCA issues, Sampson says he has now taken things a step further. During the past few days the dev took the decision to stop storing any data whatsoever on Strike’s servers “except for search phrases for learning purposes.”

This presents an intriguing situation. Aside from some disk caching, Sampson says that Strike now operates purely on demand. When a user types in a search the site pulls the results from its usual sources and presents them in the browser window. When that browser is closed the data effectively disappears, meaning that there is nothing for anti-piracy companies to take down because it’s already gone.

Whether that will be enough for Entura remains to be seen. An email shared with TF suggests that the company feels that Sampson’s responsibilities go beyond compliance with the law.

“I understand that the listing pages might not be served via local storage on your infrastructure, that does not detract from the matter that you are providing the platform or portal for which these remote browser requests are made,” Entura told the dev.

“Your compliance in this matter should not be reliant on me creating a compelling case, it should instead be reliant on your good will, desire to support creative industries and comply with the law.”

Nevertheless, the following message now appears on the front page on Strike.

“If you are visiting this site for anti piracy means, just know a few things. Any content you see is because you requested it. We do not provide or offer any files. You cannot download from us. We do not store any data, all content is dynamic and on demand requested via YOUR browser. So leave us alone,” the notice reads.

After moving to yet another new host, Sampson thought that things might improve but during our email exchange he received more bad news. His hosting had been terminated once again.

“Dumb media companies, bad hosting, lack of funding, lots of development. Take your pick, Strike has been a big undertaking, one I’m not sure I really want to continue, but I know I have to for the greater good,” Sampson concludes.

At the time of publication Entura had not responded to TF’s requests for comment.

Originally Published: Sat, 04 Apr 2015 09:31:29 +0000
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