9 ms·
Resurrecting a dead torrent tracker and finding 3M peers
- avidiax 1y agoWhy not forward to another open tracker? Then you host nothing, and any legal letter you receive you can just tell them to talk to the open tracker.
- sneak 1y agoFrom the outside it's indistinguishable, and you get sued anyway.
- diggan 1y ago> Is this legal? Why wouldn't it be? You're not actually hosting a tracker in this case, only looking at incoming connections. And even if you do run a tracker, hard to make the case that the tracker itself is illega. Hosting something like opentrackr is like hosting a search engine, how they respond to legal takedown requests is where the crux is at, and whatever infra sits around the tracker, so police and courts can see/assume the intent. But trackers are pretty stupid coordination server software, would be crazy if they became illegal.
- jekwoooooe 1y agoIs this legal isn’t a useful question. The better question is how likely are you to get sued? With civil lawsuits it doesn’t matter if it’s legal you can be sued and harassed by lawyers if you get on their radar.
- legohead 1y agoNo need to sue. Send a cease and desist and your average hacker like OP will take it down in a hurry...
- daneel_w 1y agoIn this case not even a cease-and-desist was needed. Just seeing 1.7M peers crying out in the void for company was enough. Living in a country overly friendly with Hollywood and its money, I do understand him.
- account42 1y agoYes, prime example of a chilling effect where the fear of a lawsuit stops people from engaging in perfectly legal activities. It's unfortunate that copyright law does not concern itself with collateral damage like this.
- Suzuran 1y agoThis is not collateral damage, this is the intended effect - decreasing their competition, legal or otherwise.
- account42 1y agoI think the point is that you can't count on that and need to assume that you are going to attract actual lawsuits. DMCA provides easier take down options for copyright owners but AFAIK does not compel them to make use of those options before going to court.
- GTP 1y agoI think companies will try with a strongly worded letter first, as this would save them money over straight going to court. But I get that the risk may not be worth it for many people, I myself would be very scared if I received a letter threatening a lawsuit for a ridiculous amount of money, even knowing that they are exaggerating the scale of damages just to scare me.
- driverdan 1y agoUnfortunately what they will do is file a DMCA with the hosting provider. Most will immediately shut you down, none of them defend their customers.
- bilekas 1y agoI’m not sure if that’s true actually, you might get a takedown notice, but to sue, and maybe I’m wrong but you have to claim damages, all op has to do is not announce out? IE he can see the peer pool but they don’t announce the peer list.
- dymk 1y agoThe RIAA doesn't have to sue to make OP's life miserable. They have enough lawyers on the payroll to drown him in perfectly legal demand letters. Go one step further and assume the demand letters are harassment - what's OP going to do, sue the RIAA?
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- Retric 1y agoNahh, for a bunch of annoying letters take them to small claims court. Cheap for you, expensive for them, and you win if they don’t show up.
- dymk 1y agohaha, no, this is not their first rodeo
- Retric 1y agoSure, but that’s why they avoid this kind of harassment in the first place. You made a hypothetical assuming they would do something they wouldn’t because it puts them at risk.
- account42 1y agoThis is a cool feel good theory but can you show an example of this working?
- 1y ago
- ranger_danger 1y ago> Is this legal isn’t a useful question Why do you say that? I think even seemingly "useless" questions can lead to valuable discussions and insights... and it might also be possible that your perspective is not the only valid one. What's useful (or not) to one person is not always the same for others.
- diffeomorphism 1y agoYou may want to adjust your LLM settings. Your post seemingly dropped everything but the first sentence from the context window and then wrote vapid fluff that makes no sense in context.
- ranger_danger 1y agoI do not use any LLM, thanks
- chaboud 1y agoThis is definitely the right pragmatic take. A lawyer friend of mine once laid it out for me: "in litigation, if you go to court, even if you win, you lose". The reality is that court sucks, and getting sued sucks for all but the ultra-wealthy (who can absorb the cost). For those of us with less than $100MM, court is a universe to be avoided.
- FirmwareBurner 1y ago>A lawyer friend of mine once laid it out for me: "in litigation, if you go to court, even if you win, you lose" In my country we have a phrase for this exact scenario: "the punishment is the process". When the government or a powerful person wants to fuck with you, all they have to do is drag you endlessly through the court system, even knowing they'll loose. Because the experience will be 100x more painful for you to win than it is for them to loose. It's what the UK government did to the postal workers in the Fujitsu scandal.
- koakuma-chan 1y agoIs there a limit how many concurrent lawsuits can be thrown at one person?
- tristor 1y agoNo, not technically, however in the US there are the SLAPP statutes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_lawsuit_against_public_participation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_lawsuit_against_publ...
- busterarm 1y agoDon't underestimate this. My family members sued each other over a small inheritance. 5 kids fighting over a couple million dollars. Case has dragged out across almost 4 decades. Lawyer fees dwarfed the size of what was being fought over several times over. Some family spent time in jail for contempt of court... Family members then put up all their personal assets to keep fighting. Then they lost and were faced with a judgment that left them destitute well into their retirement years with no way to earn new money. Some family members are still appealing and fighting adjacent court battles (property seizure, etc). This process has consumed the last decades of their lives and everything they worked their whole lives for. Not only would I say never end up in court, I'll extend you one further. Never get the government involved in your personal relationships.
- jedberg 1y agoDo you think the police understand this nuance? Especially since most of the traffic that will go through there is probably copyright infringement? They'll just see tracker and assume it's illegal.
- hungryhobbit 1y agoDo you think the police are actually policing the internet? Even if you didn't mean your local police, and meant a national body like the FBI, the truth is they focus on other crimes (eg. child abuse), and even then they are woefully unable to handle even most of those crimes. The vast, vast majority of copyright enforcement comes from copyright holders ... not the internet copyright police.
- SXX 1y ago> Especially since most of the traffic that will go through there is probably copyright infringement? Copyright infinging materials dont go "though" trackers. Trackers only keep torrent hashes and lists of peers.
- jeroenhd 1y agoSo do torrent websites like the pirate bay. That doesn't protect pirates from getting sued to hell and back or even receiving prison sentences from the court.
- gpm 1y agoBecause knowingly helping people commit crimes generally counts the same as committing the crime yourself. I.e. federally in the U.S. under 18 USC 2a https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2 The software you're running being "simple" isn't a defence for doing illegal things with it - like aiding others commit crimes. There are a few internet/copyright safe harbor provisions (in the US) that might maybe (probably not) make it not a crime, I don't know, I'm not a lawyer. But your general thought when you hear "helping someone else commit a crime" ought to be "that's probably a crime itself".
- rockskon 1y agoWouldn't particular knowledge be required? I'm sure Google devs know in the abstract that Google search is used by criminals to help them in committing crimes, but that clearly is not illegal in and of itself.
- rvnx 1y agoWell Google has knowledge about it, but once you reach a certain scale you become safe (e.g. OpenAI with copyright infringment)
- justinclift 1y agoAnd Facebook/Meta, for the same.
- gpm 1y agoThere's definitely a mens rea requirement here, that you know that a crime is being committed and that you intend to facilitate it. I doubt it requires particularized knowledge that "this specific request" is for a crime... I'm still not a lawyer. Running a service primarily for legal purposes that some criminals can take advantage of is pretty different with regards to intent than reviving an old domain name that you know is primarily used by old illegal torrents as a tracker. I spent a few minutes googling, and it seems like that at least as of a decade ago the exact bounds here weren't well defined: https://www.scotusblog.com/2014/03/opinion-analysis-justice-kagan-writes-a-primer-on-aiding-and-abetting-law/ https://www.scotusblog.com/2014/03/opinion-analysis-justice-... > Finally, the possible liability for an “incidental facilitator” – such as a firearms dealer who knows that some customers will use their purchases for crime – is noted but not resolved. Thus, thankfully, there is still some fertile ground for hypotheticals with which we practicing law professors can bedevil our students.
- leijurv 1y agoOP did actually host a tracker. "I then started the tracker. After about an hour, it peaked at about 1.7 million distinct torrents across 3.1 million peers!"
- numpad0 1y agoBecause music & movie industries hate P2P in general? That basically killed P2P dead in 2000s as it was becoming the next generation of decentralized Web. Maybe it's about time to revisit it? It's just the matter of how to enforce DRM. They shouldn't care in this day and age with plenty ways to get licensing sorted out.
- geon 1y agoDead? It is as alive as ever.
- KomoD 1y ago(IANAL) It can be both legal and illegal If you don't respond to takedowns, that's probably leaning towards being illegal* If you respond to takedowns and blacklist the hashes, you're most likely fine* *obviously depends on the jurisdiction and on whether matching hashes to IP:PORT is considered distribution/facilitation/whatever (take TPB's case as an example) I know someone who ran a pretty large tracker for years, when he received a takedown he just blacklisted the hashes and he's been fine so far.
- anilakar 1y agoYeah. There are trackers (hosts used for coordination between bittorrent peers) and there are "trackers" (sites used for hosting .torrent files and magnet: URIs). Takedowns have been targeted exclusively at the latter.
- eli 1y agoThe Anti-Circumvention Clause in the DMCA says "No person shall manufacture, import, offer to the public, provide, or otherwise traffic in any technology [...] is primarily designed or produced for the purpose of circumventing a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title [or] has only limited commercially significant purpose or use other than to circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title"
- myrmidon 1y agoIt seems difficult to argue that this would apply, because what would the "technological measure to control access" be that a bittorrent client (or tracker) is circumventing? I also don't know of any precedent where bittorrent software/client itself was ruled illegal (but am not a lawyer).
- lacoolj 1y agoThe technological measure to control access is probably a crawler looking for standard download links for lawyers to send out C/D letters. Good question though, would love to know what specific tech is in use (or if it's just "finding it on search engines organically")
- eli 1y agohttps://www.oyez.org/cases/2004/04-480 https://www.oyez.org/cases/2004/04-480
- jedberg 1y agoThis is like when cloudflare picked up the IP address 1.1.1.1. They saw a ton of traffic to it as soon as it went hot, because a bunch of people had scripts pointing at it.
- waymon 1y agoHow did they get that address?
- jedberg 1y ago“ APNIC's research group held the IP addresses 1.1.1.1 and 1.0.0.1. While the addresses were valid, so many people had entered them into various random systems that they were continuously overwhelmed by a flood of garbage traffic. APNIC wanted to study this garbage traffic but any time they'd tried to announce the IPs, the flood would overwhelm any conventional network.” https://blog.cloudflare.com/announcing-1111/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/announcing-1111/
- udev4096 1y agoOn a separate note, why was cloudflare given the ownership of 1.1.1.1?
- rs_rs_rs_rs_rs 1y agoIt is explained in that blogpost from Cloudflare 'We offered Cloudflare's network to receive and study the garbage traffic in exchange for being able to offer a DNS resolver on the memorable IPs'
- fine_tune 1y agoYou bought a house that had a murder X years ago and are wondering if your guilty for the murder, probably not - aslong as you don't do more murder in it. I suppose real life is more interesting though, the guy who picked up the domain to stop the global ransomware crisis was picked up after Defcon if memory serves. Ironically your probably at more risk from the GDPR for leaking those IP addresses that connected to the box via your blog post. I'm not a lawyer/solicitor though, don't take my advise.
- zht 1y agoI think it's more like you buy an abandoned house where people used to go buy drugs you buy the house and people are still coming knocking on your door asking you if you have any drugs to sell you're not doing anything wrong, but if the police notice people constantly coming to your house to buy drugs they may do something about it
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- rvnx 1y agoOther perspective: It's more like you reopen a public place where people were known to publicly harm copyright owners and you provide technical help so they can do it again.
- gpm 1y agoThis guy didn't just buy the haunted house that previously had signs directing serial killers to where the victims are, he also reinstalled the signs and opened it back up to the public knowing that the serial killers were still around and reading the signs. I mean, it's a bit absurd to compare copyright infringement to murder, but that's where your analogy started. He didn't just by the domain and do something innocent, he actually started running the software that helps people pirate things strongly suspecting that pirates would use it to help them pirate things... and then when he observed that was reality he (smartly IMO) shut it down.
- markasoftware 1y ago
- lucascacho 1y agoSeems like the perfect opportunity for a FBI honeypot
- jasonjayr 1y agoIsn't that one of the first things they do when they identify + take down a site hosting CSAM?
- aidenn0 1y agoIANAL, but my understanding is that running a content-neutral tracker is legal in the US. In other jurisdictions it most certainly is not, and the VPS maybe in a different jurisdiction and the .si TLD definitely is.
- ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 1y agoVPS is from https://cockbox.org/ https://cockbox.org/ (as referenced in the article), which says it is based in Moldova?
- jrochkind1 1y agoGoogling, there's been at least one tracker shut down by US law enforcement, EliteTorrents [2005] https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2005-may-26-fi-torrent26-story.html https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2005-may-26-fi-torre... I think there have probably been more. There are definitely more that had civil suits with MPAA etc suing for damages. It may be somewhat harder to make the case in the US, but a tracker where a great majority of what's listed is copyrighted, I'm pretty sure it can be shut down in the US.
- lossolo 1y agoI remember the day they shut down ET. It was because they released some major blockbuster movie before its premiere.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 1y agoWas that the actual tracker and tracker only, or was there a web front end that hosted all the torrent files and forums and so forth? Because the latter will make you a big target. God I miss rarbg. And KAT.
- jrochkind1 1y agoI'm curious the nature of the US laws that would make the web front end illegal (or subject to civil penalties?) but not the tracker?
- xyst 1y agoNot illegal. But most people without resources to fight off the thinly veiled, strongly worded legal letters would probably fold under this light pressure. Interesting, but I suppose it’s not surprising to see clients still holding references to old/defunct trackers. Those peers this person discovered once the tracker was resurrected are more than likely to be seed boxes. Maybe a few real clients if they found an old .torrent link and have left it open. Thanks to DHT (trackerless peering), trackers have become mostly defunct.
- WithinReason 1y agoCan you do this to create a database of torrents for a torrent search engine?
- thunderfork 1y agoEasier to just trawl the DHT, like btdigg
- sweeter 1y agoYou don't even have to go that far, you can just use torsniff. But be aware there is a lot of nsfw material and potentially illegal material for all I know.
- DaSHacka 1y agoThere are existing services like btdig that do this via DHT, I believe.
- zaik 1y agoI wonder how many anti-torrent groups are doing this covertly.
- sweeter 1y agoDefinitely a few. Media companies often send out infringement notices to ISPs to be forwarded to the user and I would guess this is how they get those IPs
- mdaniel 1y agoMy understanding is that mere swarm membership is sufficient, no need to host anything That's my understanding of why private trackers ban folks who upload private .torrent files to public trackers because the infohash is a rendezvous point of private and public consumers via DHT
- accrual 1y agoIt's kind of like walking into a room of people with full or partial copies of a copyrighted pie, but there's one person in the corner (the copyright holder or someone on their behalf) taking notes of everyone who comes and asks for a slice.
- neckro23 1y agoNo tracker necessary, you can just use DHT: https://iknowwhatyoudownload.com/ https://iknowwhatyoudownload.com/
- ivanjermakov 1y agoI think some commenters here missed the point. Of course hosting a tracker is legal, but what about "hijacking" inactive resource?
- ascendantlogic 1y agoThe word "hijacking" in this scenario would only be applicable if the domain was still registered and active and he forcefully took the domain away. That is not the case. The fact OP was able to register it quickly and easily indicates it was unused and to call this "hijhacking" would imply permanent ownership of domains even after previous owners knowingly let the registration lapse. The legality of hosting a tracker isn't obvious, and as pointed out elsewhere the nuance is less about concrete legality and more about having the resources to deal with lawyers harassing you with lawsuits.
- Nemo_bis 1y agoI would at least mask those IP addresses from the blog post...
- jauntywundrkind 1y agoI actually ran a very-short-lived private use tracker briefly, for some exploration doing p2p watch partying. But it was a toy, never got serious enough to look deeper at how the tracker worked (was using the rust Aquatic tracker, which kindly added webtorrent support on request! https://github.com/greatest-ape/aquatic https://github.com/greatest-ape/aquatic ) Does the tracker know what it's tracking? Is there any attempt to make the tracker unaware of what peer rendezvous it's doing? My gut is that it seems some kind of hash/magnet that folks are asking to peers on. And that the magnet itself is sufficient, and doesn't have to include anything identifying (although I believe many magnet links included some human readable description). The tracker could likely try to download this hash from the peer itself, to get the torrent info, but wouldn't really know what the torrent is or what's in it without doing the download itself. Does that check out? How much of the magnet link is key to rendezvous? Could a tracker ignore human friendly fields, block them at ingress, to shield it's eyes?
- qingcharles 1y agoThe tracker knows what it is tracking. I used to run a TV show tracker. It would keep track of all the users upload/download ratios.
- aeyes 1y agoThe blog post is about a public tracker. What you describe is a private tracker which embeds a client identifier into the announce URL of the torrent. On a public tracker the only way to identify a user is the IP address and that's not reliable.
- daneel_w 1y agoThe trackers only deal with torrents' info hash. No names, no descriptions, no list of contents, no nothing. opentracker, to use OP's chosen software as example, can run in both white- and blacklist mode (or whatever equivalent terminology it uses today). The former is self-explanatory, and the latter allows all hashes except the blacklisted ones. All open trackers, such as torrent.eu and opentrackr.org to name a couple, always operate in a blacklist fashion in order to openly accommodate any users to congregate for (almost) any content.
- prettyblocks 1y agoNot a lawyer, but I think intent is a big part of legality and I hope that doing something like this for research purposes should be relatively safe.
- 1970-01-01 1y agoIf done in good faith[1], this is allowed. [1]https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/press-release/file/1507126/dl?inline https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/press-release/file/1507...
- nneonneo 1y agoNow I'm wondering: with the wide range of bittorrent clients out there, and the fact that many are written in unsafe languages, could it be possible for some of them to be exploited through a malicious tracker? It would not surprise me if some of these clients misbehave if fed malformed data from a tracker.
- asa400 1y agoI've written hobby-quality clients and I think the answer is yes. First, you're dealing with input from a server you don't control, and second, you're doing quite a bit of interaction with the filesystem. It's hard enough to write a functional client in a memory safe language, getting it correct in C or C++ is bound to be pretty tough.
- fshafique 1y agoThat's what I was hoping the author would explore.
- treyd 1y agoMost torrent clients that people use (though not all) are actually wrappers around libtorrent, which is very well tested and has even been audited.
- dafugg 1y agoLibtorrent even has fuzzers specifically for communications with trackers and DHT peers. Obviously this isn’t perfect but it gives me much more confidence than other implementations do.
- delusional 1y agoIt's worth noting that there are at least 3 variants calling themselves "libtorrent" and to my knowledge they don't have a lot in common implementation wise.
- boramalper 1y ago1. libtorrent-rasterbar — https://packages.debian.org/sid/libtorrent-rasterbar-dev https://packages.debian.org/sid/libtorrent-rasterbar-dev 2. libtorrent-rakshasa (rTorrent) — https://packages.debian.org/sid/libtorrent-dev https://packages.debian.org/sid/libtorrent-dev What’s the third one?
- haunter 1y agoThere is a tracker masterlist here updated daily so you can find another dead ones probably https://github.com/ngosang/trackerslist https://github.com/ngosang/trackerslist
- 8982143448 1y ago[flagged]
- ck45 1y agoMy first thought is, how many BitTorrent clients have vulnerable parsing code? Could a malicious actor register the domain and infect clients?
- SSLy 1y agoutorrent v2.1 is still widely used by too many people, and it certainly is exploitable.
- EvanAnderson 1y agoI'm thinking of the Jon Evans novel "Invisible Armies" and the "bug" / backdoor in the P2P software that it's author users to pwm machines.
- CactusRocket 1y agoI don't really think so. The tracker is just a tiny part of the whole Bittorrent setup, and it's only really used by clients to get a list of peers. It's basically just an HTTP call to the tracker, returning a response. The only thing that I can quickly think of is returning some malformed bencode which could cause a memory exhaustion a client written by a novice. The peer protocol (and variants, like uTP) are much more interesting to attack, and you don't need to host a tracker for that, you can just get peer IPs from trackers or DHT, connect, and do your magic.
- ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 1y agoSome history on the original tracker: https://torrentfreak.com/demonii-torrent-tracker-shuts-down-for-good-151116/ https://torrentfreak.com/demonii-torrent-tracker-shuts-down-... https://torrentfreak.com/mpaa-we-shut-down-ytsyify-and-popcorn-time-151103/ https://torrentfreak.com/mpaa-we-shut-down-ytsyify-and-popco...
- waynesonfire 1y agowow, brilliant.
- jmyeet 1y agoI have a theory that BitTorrent is used as a command and control mechanism for botnets. We've seen various methods of botnet and malware control like rotating domain names that were successfully reverse engineered and used to trigger a kill switch for WannaCry, famously [1]. BitTorrent is known to be resilient, particularly if you use multiple trackers, proxies, etc that are all built into the infrastructure. [1]: https://www.wired.com/2017/05/accidental-kill-switch-slowed-fridays-massive-ransomware-attack/ https://www.wired.com/2017/05/accidental-kill-switch-slowed-...
- jldugger 1y agoIn other words, you can DDoS any ip for the cost of registering a domain and publishing a specific DNS record.
- 57473m3n7Fur7h3 1y agoIs it really going to be all that bad? The BitTorrent clients I’ve used all seemed pretty polite, backing off for like 60s at least for each tracker they can’t connect to. If you buy one of the dead tracker domains and point it at an IP of someone else, but their services aren’t even listening on the port client wants to connect to (and don’t speak BitTorrent even if the port happened to coincide), I can’t imagine that even with a million BitTorrent clients wanting to connect it would really be all that much of a problem.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- jldugger 1y agoIt can be: https://www.jwz.org/blog/2015/01/chinese-bittorrent-the-gift-that-keeps-on-giving/ https://www.jwz.org/blog/2015/01/chinese-bittorrent-the-gift...
- globular-toast 1y agoCareful. This guy doesn't like HN and you'll get a picture of a testicle if you click.
- jensenbox 1y agoAs far as I am aware, there are legitimate uses for this technology.
- layer8 1y ago> So… the domain is available now. Not really? OP seems to want to sell it for $10000: https://www.dynadot.com/market/user-listings/demonii.si https://www.dynadot.com/market/user-listings/demonii.si
- k-ian 1y agoyeah turns out Dynadot enforces a 7 day wait on deleting the domain and it's only been 6 days. should be free for registration on June 18 (i assume in 3 hrs if they mean UTC)
- iaaan 1y agoI wonder if there are any known vulnerabilities in various torrent clients' handling of tracker responses, e.g. buffer overflows. One could potentially amass a pretty large botnet.
- sergiotapia 1y agoBittorrent is such a beautiful technology, solves a real problem easily, and helps many many people. It's a shame it's been stifled so much by lawyers.
- udev4096 1y agoIt doesn't matter. Bittorent will live on as long as humans exist. It definitely helped a lot in creating extremely important p2p and decentralized software such as ipfs, bitcoin, etc
- rickcarlino 1y agoWhy didn’t they use a protocol like Gnutella to serve as a non-centralized tracker? Or did they?
- mystraline 1y agoThat's easy. Register the domain in Russia, China, Iran, or similar country. Run the website in Alibaba. Let them attempt to send legal toilet paper to Russia or China. I'm sure that will end well.
- graealex 1y agoYes - the solution to run any illegal activity on the internet: just register the domain in "Russia, China, Iran, or similar country". You should tell the TOR folks about your findings, they can finally shutdown the darknet and just move their stuff to China.
- mystraline 1y agoThere's always one of you types around. https://thenib.com/mister-gotcha/ https://thenib.com/mister-gotcha/ Dont feel too special. Gotcha!
- nektro 1y agowhy did you shut it down?
- almosthere 1y agoDead Internet theory
- abigail95 1y agointeresting choice of hosting provider...
- aaron695 1y ago[dead]
- Scoundreller 1y agoIs there a chance if someone bought suprnova’s domain (if available), which closed in 2004, someone could finish their download if a seed were still active? Does it matter if this was pre-DHT, or does DHT go historical to cover old stuff?
- parliament32 1y agoYes DHT is "historical", in the sense that it doesn't care about when your torrent was created, just the infohash. However, most torrents created for private trackers have the "private" flag enabled, which excludes them from DHT and PEX and a few other things. You can remove this flag yourself, but you're depending on a seeder doing the same for DHT to work.
- nneonneo 1y agoDHT works as long as the client is configured to use it, so if that old seed upgraded their client they might end up automatically sharing the metadata over DHT.
- qingcharles 1y agoYes, this should work, in theory.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- yieldcrv 1y agoYou can pay for seed boxes with Monero Lawsuits are civil and wont have all the power to find you in all way, compared to a criminal suit or intelligence agency So the privacy vectors necessary are more limited
- whalesalad 1y agoReplace that Dynadot link with your referral code! I interface with a lot of domain registrars and they are one of the good ones.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- be87581d 1y ago[dead]
- udev4096 1y agoCould this be used to exploit peers if they connect to an intentional malicious tracker?
- Noelia- 1y agoI used to think those old trackers were long dead, but it’s wild to see them still pulling in millions of peers. P2P may have faded from the spotlight, but the infrastructure never really went away.
- noobermin 1y agoI guess...the question is...who? Surely people have to pay to keep these peers just running. 3.1 million is how many millions of dollars in infra per month? I guess it's distributed amongst millions or thousands of people, sure, or may be most of them are bots.
- Nemo_bis 1y agoIt only takes 17000 bittorrent users with 100-200 old torrents each in their clients to get here: > it peaked at about 1.7 million distinct torrents across 3.1 million peers Most people don't regularly prune their torrent library.
- ByteDrifter 1y agoKind of amazing how many clients kept pinging a tracker that had been offline for years. It shows how some parts of the internet just keep going in the background long after we stop noticing. There's something oddly persistent about that.
- Cthulhu_ 1y agoYeah, I can imagine there's loads of people that set up a seedbox somewhere and just... forgot about it, or never bothered to tidy it up.
- dspillett 1y agoMany torrents are on multiple trackers and, via the almost ubiquitously supported announce-list extension, have multiple trackers listed in the torrent file itself. So those 3M clients are unlikely to have been sat doing nothing because this tracker had vanished, they would be participating in the swarms around the other trackers listed in the metadata for each torrent.
- everyone 1y agoImo one the tragedies of filesharing is though the legal bullshit from MAFIAA didnt make a dent in big public trackers like TPB serving Marvel movies and other popular shit, it did manage to kill off many of the smaller specialised trackers serving exquisitely collected and curated torrents of stuff you cannot buy anywhere anymore.
- schlauerfox 1y agoOr maybe those just got better at hiding?
- __alexs 1y agoCould you point the DNS at a different tracker?
- NelsonMinar 1y agoThis reminds me of the time I ran an NTP pool server, then withdrew it. The IP address kept getting NTP requests for months. It was no big deal, NTP is a lightweight protocol, but it was a reminder that IP addresses keep reputations for a very long time. Same thing with domain names, I guess.
- BrandoElFollito 1y agoThis reminds me of Cloudflare taking over 1.1.1.1 This was a typical fake entry in captive portals, or a temporary gateway. They described (cannot find the blog post right now) the various traffic they were getting, across many services (default ports)
- joanneil305 1y ago[dead]