ISOHunt Shuts down their trackers for American Users

In another blow to American Bittorrent Users, American IP addresses are now being blocked from using ISOHunt trackers. Torrent Spy cut off American users back in august, and now September brings a shutdown of just the trackers only for ISO Hunt.
We previously commented on Torrent Spy here. ITToolbox has an interesting article on Torrent Spy here, and of course Torrent freak has their article here.

As of earlier today, we have disabled access from users in the US to our trackers, until further notice. This goes for ALL trackers (torrentbox, podtropolis) we run. This is due to the US’s hostility towards P2P technologies, and we feel with our current lawsuit brought by the MPAA, we can no longer ensure your security and privacy in the US. So, if you’re outside the US, you may notice less peers. We encourage you to add other public, unhampered trackers to torrents you post, in addition to Torrentbox and Podtropolis’s trackers. THIS IS ONLY REGARDING TRACKERS OWNED BY ISOHUNT.COM NOT 3RD PARTY TRACKERS — DO NOT CONTACT ME PRIVATELY ABOUT THE CHANGE IN POLICY. Source: ISO Hunt

While most of the search remains, if you are providing torrents and using the ISO hunt trackers, you can’t do that if you are in America. While the MPAA drives this, there are going to be a lot of accidental side effects like problems with downloading Unix Distros and creative commons works that are also on those trackers.

It is a loss, and American choices for building torrents is becoming more closed off. As resources disappear, people will have to find alternative means of getting their legal material out there. There are almost no USA based trackers left, meaning all the trackers are going to be in Europe and Asia, if they keep on cutting off American IP addresses, proxy, TOR, and other channels will become more important in the distribution of free works.

Unfortunate that the end result is going to be more use of trackers that might not be able to carry the load, or hidden trackers that are difficult to find, shutdown, and otherwise get hold of. There has usually be a tendency that when someone cuts off one channel of communication, that others replace it. Bittorrent is an amazingly good system to use to distribute large files. The issue in the longer run is making it bullet proof.