Just Snarf-It
p2pnet.net News:-
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Posted by Suprnova forums admin FD, the above translates into, “”and the ball is back in play!!!!!”
At least, that’s what Century X’s post says.
The ball under discussion is on a new BT dump-site called Snarf-it, which is coming soon.
We’ve had three emails on the subject and Joseph Farthing has a post.
Read on >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
New Bittorrent Site Rises from the Ashes of Suprnova Community
By Joseph Farthing – Methlabs
SNARF-IT, in the vein of the original Suprnova.org today. The original website, which purported to have been shut down as a victim of Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) lawsuits, got involved with the spyware company Cydoor, when it released eXeem, a new peer-to-peer application based upon Bittorrent.
This move angered many within the p2p community, and lead to a number of “flamewars” among members of the Suprnova Forums. The original Bittorrent application was released as Open Source software, meaning that it was a non-commercial product and could be freely distributed and modified. For many users, eXeem was against the “spirit” of p2p networks.
Some, such as myself, ranted on forums and news websites. Others cracked eXeem to remove the spyware. The Suprnova community, however, simply decided that enough was enough, and less than a month ago broke off relations with Suprnova’s founder, Andrej Preston.
In a very democratic official announcement, the owner of the forums, who goes by the pseudonym “FD” said that the eXeem application would allow the community to be “be destroyed by infighting.”
“This forum is no longer affiliated with eXeem in any way shape or form,” he continued “forget that and move on.”
Although FD and fellow administrators denied adamantly that they would try to rebuild Suprnova, the minute eXeem was removed from the forums work on a new Bittorrent site was started in private by community leaders. Many members of the website were once maintainers of the original Suprnova website, and also managed back ups, so we can see much of what made Suprnova popular in this new website.
The website is a simple Bittorrent “dump” site, a website of links to torrents that can be found across the web. The idea is that only “good” torrents are kept on these sites, and the website can be come a “trusted” resource for torrent downloads. This helps to prevent the distribution of fake or low quality files.
Yes, what about the website? It could be described as “Suprnova Reborn”, but is it any good?
We decided to tak a look at what was in store for SNARF-IT users. The website is currently incomplete …
SNARF-IT homepage
First impressions are quite positive: the website is very simple and easy to use, and the HTML is far lighter and faster-loading than that of Suprnova, which could often be pretty heavy.
No adverts currently appear on the website, but some are likely to appear to cover costs. Nevertheless, it is unlikely that this website shall ever reach the same level of adverts as Suprnova.org.
Torrent searching
As we look at the torrent browsing section, we see the familiar Suprnova layout to display search and download torrents. A new “details” screen, in the style of some other torrent sites, provides additional details about the torrent file, while a direct download icon is available.
However, the wealth of categories that could be found at Suprnova (including sub-categories for many popular TV shows) are not currently present at SNARF-IT, and the current list of torrent links is rather small.
Much of this can be attributed to the age of the website – it took Suprnova more than a year to gain that comprehensive database of torrent links. Hopefully this website shall improve rather quickly, and there is still the possibility of scraping remaining Suprnova mirrors for torrents.
If this happens, then it will not be as if Suprnova has been shut down, but rather has been offline for a couple of months. Same community, same idea, just a slightly different site.
This website will hopefully mark a return to the “good old days” of 2004, but I think we still need an open source distributed bittorrent.
Clues
It seems that the Suprnova Forums administrators couldn’t help but leave clues as to what “Snarf-It” was.
The webpage (http://www.snarf-it.org/) currently contains nothing more than the furry mascot and message saying that Snarf-It will be coming soon. However, embedded in the page is a MP3 file: http://www.snarf-it.org/noecho.mp3
This file appears to just be random squeaking, but if we reverse the file and reduce the pitch we now get this: http://www.methlabs.org/JFM/noecho.ogg
This file says “Hello everyone, I’m Snarf, and I’ll be seeing you all very soon!”. Odd.
Weirder still is the file http://snarf-it.org/clue.rss which contains the following:
rss version=”2.0″
channel
title – Snarfy’s Clue to you alllink – http://snarf-it.org
description – Snarfy left a clue to the very perceptivelanguage -en-us
copyright
Copyright 2005 by Snarfy Poo and all the little Snarfies
webMaster -The All Powerful Snarf!
title
Snarf tells you all what he is best at. That is, if you can figure out what he is saying!
description
Roses are red
Snarf is blue
Bees do this
And fruit has these too
All of these things make up
What snarf holds for you!
The “clue to the very perceptive” is quite easy to decipher: bees swarm, and fruit contains seeds. Thus, Snarf is a torrent website.
Strange…
Conclusion
Things appear to have come full circle. Suprnova begat the Suprnova Forums community, and now, when Suprnova deserted them, they have created their own Suprnova.
I must admit I’m pleased to hear this, Suprnova was an excellent website and I’m happy to see it back, albeit in a slightly different guise. It’s not perfect yet, and more changes have been made even since I started this article, but I’m pretty confident the admins know what they are doing here.
Welcome back, guys!
When Snarf-It is complete, you will be able to visit it at http://www.snarf-it.org/
Methlabs.org will post the latest news about Snarf-It as things develop.
(Sorry guys, I could only hold back on publishing this for so long…)
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Stay tuned.
Something you think we should know? tips[at]p2pnet.net
February 4th, 2005 at 12:47 am
bah, you people jump to conclusions. This also shows me how bad the people over at methlabs want attention. “oh noes!!! lets post some rumor we’ve heard and get all the attention for it!!!! w00000tz!!!”
bah again. and even better here is some proof for you:
http://www.suprnovaforums.net/index.php?act=announce&f=13&id=11
February 4th, 2005 at 3:35 pm
Looks like someone already Snarfed snarf-it.tk for some extra traffic.
February 8th, 2005 at 5:54 am
omg. What is your problem? JFM did what anybody reporting the news would do, report what he knew, it just sometime happens that some facts may be wrong. It seems like you just posted that to draw your own attension. he isnt tryin to draw attenstion to Methlabs with news that just there for the benifit of the memebers/users that are there. It seems to me that you have a probalem with Methlbas.org. imo its a great place. So bah bah bah all you want. Bah sounds stupid ne ways. Srry thats just my opinion.