Have you been torrenting recently? If so, then how?
Andrew Sampson could have been a new name in technology. He had recently developed something that was intended to improve your (or our) “torrent experience”, if we could call it that. His search engine, named Strike, was traceless, faster, better than magnets, and distributed for free.
Andrew identifies his technology as
allowing the end user to quickly get their desired torrent on any device, while offering the best one can get in terms of privacy, because any information that is logged is discarded within 24 hours, logged information is simply for engine learning reasons, nothing more, a local cache of common terms to help with the directing of results. Similar to stopwords.
Torrentfreak called Strike
the first to index not only all public trackers but also BitTorrent’s ‘trackerless’ Distributed Hash Table.
So, he offered Home Theater to the public and the API to developers.
Too bad that when trying to access the search tool, we are redirected to one Lonzi’s Facebook account, which is great, especially if you like all kinds of costumes and anime, but it doesn’t reveal anything about this intriguing torrent search engine.
Yes, a few days after PayPal limited Andrew’s account due to some copyright infringement claim issued by the MPAA, Andrew stopped providing access to this search engine, leaving us with just a bunch of words instead of pure innovative facts.
I am not upset with Andrew, the news about him reminded me about these so-called “legal” and “clean” interests that PayPal has been asserting over the last years and perhaps you didn’t forget how PayPal stopped processing donations to WikiLeaks in 2010.
And in the spirit of remembering things, I see the MPAA logo with different eyes and correct me of I am wrong, but the central element of the logo is nothing but a replicated mouse shape, isn’t it? Mickey Mouse, the symbol of the unforgiving Disney, placed in center of a distorted copyright system, when laws are created to protect them and not the majority, when today’s interests are denied because some of “them” want to take control of creativity.
You can understand more about Strike here.
And you can find out more about PayPal seizing Andrew’s money, here.