Revoltingfilesharers Blog

Interview with Team R Dogs May 28, 2010

I secured an interview with Mr White via IRC last night (the conversation has been tidied up a bit).

DS: How are you Mr White? May I call you Caesium/Freaky/Kalante now?

W: You can, but I think they might be a bit upset & I’d get confused, but I like the Bond reference 😉 Srsly, we are not the Newzbin guys, I mean, the old Newzbin guys. But I guess you’ll never believe me till you get my phone number?

DS: which is?

W: (202) 456-1414

DS: yea, right. So how did you get the code?

W: We liberated it. Code just wants to be free. Specifics don’t matter.

DS: So you’ll opensource it?

W: No. That said, if we have to shut down at any stage we’ll try to opensource it.

DS: Why did you steal the code?

W: I nicked it initially just because I could, that was a while back. There was no real ‘plan’, I just kinda did it, but I didn’t want to copy the site and didn’t even really plan to use it. Then when I saw the legal news I thought Newzbin was looking like it really might fold. Since they didn’t say they would opensource the code I chatted to a couple of mates and we talked about running a site ourselves. We didn’t do anything for ages but when Newzbin suddenly closed without any warning at all we decided to make a move.

DS: So when are you going open this site? What’s the url going to be?

W: We’ll let you know the domain name later. The site is gonna open really really soon.

DS: Are you planning to change the way Newzbin works or is it going to be a straight clone?

W: We’ll be running a straight clone to start with but we want to change it eventually. Unfortunately the site backend is mega mega complicated so we’re concentrating on just getting the systems running with a minimum of falling over in the beginning. Plus, we also greatly underestimated the number & power of the servers needed to run this stuff so we’ve been trying to raise a metric fuckload of cash to buy gear.

DS: Doesn’t sound promising…

W: no it’ll be fine but I’m just saying that for a while it may all be a bit wobbly 🙂

DS: what are the longer term plans for the site?

W: we want to raise retention time. 240 days is a bit crap. We want to get it to at least 400 days soon and then up to 600+ days within the next 9 months. Kinda pulling figures outta my ass but something like that. Plus I want to do a redesign of the site. I reckon some people wanted the old site to have lots of features so it’s become complicated as thy added them in, but others want it simple & less confusing. It’s a tough design issue and we need to think how we can do this. We’ll probably do A/B testing on the site and maybe do polls, start a design/features discussion with users. We’ve also discussed adding non-Usenet search results to the site like torrent or Rapidshare results, but we’ve just kinda floated that idea and we don’t know how we’d incorporate it. Should all be fun.

DS: The MPA are gonna come after you. You got a plan?

W: 😦 yea, it’s inevitable, we’ll just do a Piratebay on them. We can run faster than them and shapeshift.

DS: Do you reckon users will return?

W: we hope to hell they do or we’re in a money hole. I reckon we’ll lose a few users of Newzbin1 but I’m hoping over time many will join us and if we can get increased retention and more services I think we may even improve over the old site in time. I’m certainly appealing to the editors and editor admins to  join us, purty purty please!

DS: Good luck. I’m rooting for you. Make it come back soon.

W: a lot sooner than you think I expect 😉

Mr White will try to answer polite questions below.