Torrentfreak reports that two weeks ago, public Bittorrent trackers OpenBitTorrent and PublicBitTorrent went offline to protest against Bittorent Incorporated, the company that develops uTorrent and which manages the Bittorent protocol. According to both trackers the company didn't listen to suggested changes to the Bittorrent protocol that should reduce data traffic and server load on the trackers. The changes were suggested by Piratebay co-founder Frederik Neij and were recently placed on the forum of uTorrent.
The protocol extensions should give public trackers the ability to give information on what traffic they accept (e.g. UDP or TCP) by adding additional DNS entries. OpenBitTorrent and PublicBitTorrent were very enthusiastic about the proposed extensions as their high traffic requires as much optimization as possible. Bittorrent Inc. ignored the proposed changes which resulted in both trackers going offline and TorrentFreak writing about it.It seems it worked, the extension to the protocol is now part of a protocol enhancement draf and the upcoming 3.3 Alpha-version of uTorrent will also include the proposed functionality and has it enabled by default. Developers of other Bittorrent clients also announced that they implement the protocol extensions.
Both trackers have announced that the change will save them a considerable amount of money and will resume their services next week.
