What.CD

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Globe icon of the infobox
What.CD
Website logo
move along
Bit torrent tracker
languages English
user approx. 150,000
(2016)
Registration Yes
On-line October 27, 2007 (currently closed)
https://what.cd

What.CD was a private Bit torrent tracker founded in 2007 . The website , through which mainly music was illegally available free of charge via file sharing , was closed in November 2016 after it was accessed by French police forces. What.CD was the largest website of its kind in the world at the time.

history

The establishment of What.CD in October 2007 directly followed the closure of the BitTorrent website Oink's Pink Palace (OiNK), which operated from 2004 to 2007, after a joint crackdown by Dutch and British investigative authorities. In 2008, the then web host Moxie Colo resisted the request of the Canadian music industry advocacy group, the Canadian Recording Industry Association , to take What.CD and various other BitTorrent trackers offline.

At the end of 2008 What.CD entered into a partnership with the indie label Open Your Eyes Records . The music label preferred to publish its albums via the tracker in the future. The aim was to increase the number of fans by spreading it over the peer-to-peer network.

On August 12, 2009, the previously unreleased Radiohead song These Are My Twisted Words was uploaded to What.CD. It has been speculated that the piece was made available by the band themselves after the pay-what-you-want album In Rainbows . An ASCII art attached to the torrent file indicated August 17th; from that day the song could be downloaded for free from the band's website.

That same year, produced by Microsoft was forensics tool COFEE on What.CD leaked . After assessing the possible consequences for the website and its users, the administrators decided to delete COFEE and not distribute it further.

In 2010, CNET reported about a teenage boy who was active on What.CD who, under the false identity of an Australian music critic, gained access to a website through which the music industry made new music available to radio stations. This resulted in a number of uploads of unreleased studio albums, including The Black Keys , Macy Gray , The Gaslight Anthem and Hole .

Towards the end of 2010, What.CD reached the mark of one million uploaded torrents - four times what was available on OiNK - a record for a private BitTorrent tracker.

In August 2013 What.CD called active artists, so-called Vanity House artists , to a competition on the website . Submitted pieces of music had to be placed under a free Creative Commons license and after the best songs had been selected, they were published almost a year later as part of a compilation called This CD, The First , via the company's own web shop.

On November 28, 2013, a user called Three Stories uploaded scans of three unpublished stories by JD Salinger . Princeton University and the University of Texas at Austin are the places of origin . In this case, too, the decision-makers at What.CD decided to delete the upload due to the large amount of unwanted media coverage. Salinger, who died in 2010, left the stories to the universities on the condition that they could only be made available to the public 50 years after his death.

From the beginning of 2014 What.CD was the target of a serious DDoS attack for a long time , which led to recurring downtime and functional restrictions on the site.

Message on the homepage of What.CD after the official access on November 17, 2016: … So long, and thanks for all the fish.

On November 17, 2016, after a two-year investigation initiated by the French collecting society SACEM against the operators of What.CD, at least a dozen servers were confiscated by a cybercrime unit in northern France. What.CD announced its end through various channels and, as before, closed OiNK with the words So long, and thanks for all the fish from Douglas Adams ' novel The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy . What.CD listed more than 2.5 million available torrents at that time, including almost 900,000 so-called "perfect" copies in lossless FLAC format. Shortly afterwards, it was reported via the website's Twitter channel that reports that databases and thus user data had been secured during the raid were not true. The systems were switched off before the authorities had access. The main operator of What.CD is under investigation, he is suspected in the United Kingdom .

Offer and reception

Access to What.CD was only granted upon personal invitation by an already active user or after completing an interview . In order to successfully pass the entrance test, there was a dedicated www.whatinterviewprep.comwebsite under the domain with the necessary information on, for example, audio formats , so-called transcoding and the ripping of CDs.

Audio books , eBooks , comics and application software were available via What.CD. However, the focus of the site was on music pensions. In addition to the majority of illegal content, a large number of independent artists were also active on What.CD in order to spread their music.

VICE wrote about What.CD as a “mythical place”, which was praised for its huge range and its strictly enforced set of rules. The extensive database was sometimes maintained with obsessive meticulousness by the dedicated users. It was never the primary goal of What.CD to promote music piracy , but rather to create an all-encompassing archive. In particular, publications far from the mainstream set What.CD apart from similar websites. Hundreds of out-of-print titles - as well as titles that were published in-house or in very small editions - were only digitized for the first time at What.CD was operated on. According to the Neue Zürcher Zeitung , What.CD was considered to be "one of the best stocked offers [of its kind]", Gizmodo described it as possibly the most important and extensive archive of music recordings in human history.

The SACEM comes from one of the music industry by What.CD damage incurred in the amount of 41 million €.

technology

From August 2008 What.CD ran on the self-programmed web framework Gazelle as a front-end , which was significantly faster and more flexible than other popular software in the field of BitTorrent trackers. The software code based on PHP , JavaScript and MySQL was placed under a modified GPL license, which led to Gazelle being used in particular on other BitTorrent websites.

In September 2010, after three years of development work with the back-end Ocelot, the company switched to completely newly programmed and highly efficient tracker software in order to be able to handle the up to 5 million peers at the time. The mass of inquiries had pushed the previously used and widespread XBTT to its limits and the attempt to optimize the existing code had failed. Ocelot , written in C ++ , was also made available free of charge as open source .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e f g The Verge : Music torrent site What.cd has been shut down , November 17, 2016.
  2. ↑ a b c Ars Technica : World's largest music torrent site goes dark, disputes report about server seizure , November 18, 2016.
  3. ↑ TorrentFreak : What Waffles? The Hydra Lives On , October 30, 2007.
  4. ^ A b Spin : RIP What.cd, the Last Harbor of Online Music Piracy , November 17, 2016.
  5. ↑ a b c d e f The standard : After raid: Torrent tracker "What.CD" gives up , November 18, 2016.
  6. ↑ Crunchgear: What.cd, other BitTorrent trackers ordered shut by the Canadian Recording Industry Association , September 24, 2010.
  7. ↑ What.CD: Partnership with Open Your Eyes Records is supposed to prove the benefits of P2P ( Memento from November 20, 2016 in the web archive archive.today ).
  8. ↑ The Guardian : Was the new Radiohead song leaked by the band? , August 14, 2009.
  9. ^ Pitchfork Media : Radiohead Rumor Mill Steaming Ahead, Threatening to Devour Entire Internet , August 14, 2009.
  10. ↑ Techdirt : Microsoft's COFEE Computer Forensic Tools Leaked , November 9, 2009.
  11. ↑ SFGate : Microsoft's COFEE spilled on the Internet by Torrent pirates , November 10, 2009.
  12. ↑ Spiegel Online : Microsoft's sniffer stick for everyone , November 13, 2009.
  13. ↑ CNET : Report: Music insider site source of leaked songs , April 23, 2010.
  14. ↑ a b TorrentFreak : What.CD BitTorrent Tracker Breaks A Million Torrents , December 22, 2010.
  15. ↑ Discogs : Various - This CD, The First , June 2014.
  16. ↑ TorrentFreak : Unpublished Salinger Books Leaked to Private File-Sharing Site , November 28, 2013.
  17. ^ The Guardian : JD Salinger's unpublished stories leaked online , December 23, 2013.
  18. ↑ BBC : JD Salinger stories leaked online , November 29, 2013.
  19. ↑ a b c d VICE : Remembering what.cd, the Internet's Greatest Music Archive , November 22, 2016.
  20. ↑ TorrentFreak : DDOS ATTACKS TAKE DOWN WHAT.CD, BTN AND PTP BITTORRENT TRACKERS , January 6, 2014.
  21. ↑ a b Golem.de : Leading music torrent tracker What.CD closed , November 18, 2016.
  22. ↑ Zataz: Opération What.CD: 12 serveurs saisis chez OVH et Free , November 17, 2016.
  23. ↑ What.CD: Tweet , November 17, 2016.
  24. ↑ a b c Neue Zürcher Zeitung : What.cd at the end of November 18, 2016
  25. ↑ Memento in the Internet Archive ( Memento from February 20, 2016 in the Internet Archive )
  26. ↑ TorrentFreak : NIN Confirms Uploads to Public and Private Torrent Sites , March 5, 2008.
  27. ↑ a b Gizmodo : Authorities Just Shut Down What, CD, the Best Music Torrenting Community , November 17, 2016.
  28. ↑ TorrentFreak : Gazelle Rejuvenates the BitTorrent Tracker Community , August 28, 2008.
  29. ↑ GitHub : What.CD: Gazelle
  30. ↑ TorrentFreak : What.cd Debuts Lightweight Tracker For Its 5 Million Peers , October 14, 2010.