Ask HN: I've Built a DHT Torrent Sniffer and Search Engine. Should I Release?

I adapted my local “torrent roulette” application to an electron app that can be shared. My local version downloads the files, but the one I share only fetches the torrents metadata (easy to adapt it back to my roulette approach). I call it Taboo: https://github.com/retrohacker/taboo

The amount of “evil” on the DHT is pretty low. I’ve run mine for a long time, and very rarely get anything evil. I suspect it’s because of how poorly BitTorrent plays with privacy tools like VPN and Tor, IIUC it’s easy to leak identifying information with BT and its high bandwidth.

Nearly every “evil” file I’ve found is either: a honeypot with not-evil content or password encrypted (maybe to remove the plausible deniability of a random download?). I don’t know if the encrypted files actually contain evil content, I don’t bother trying to crack them and promptly gshred them.

What you will find:

* a lot of content illegal under US copyright law

* a lot of porn (also illegal under US copyright law)

* a metric tonne of fascinating content from other cultures you’d otherwise not be exposed to (also probably illegal under US copyright law)

There is very little “legal” content on the DHT, but most of it is falling on the wrong side of intellectual property law. Sometimes password/credit card dumps. I once found some very sketchy schematics of Eastern European military equipment. But that stuff is also really rare in my experience.

If you do play with these systems, I’ll leave the same warning I left on the Taboo repo:

> Note: I AM NOT A LAWYER! To my knowledge, there aren't any other systems doing this that you can run on your laptop. I suspect the nuance of how Taboo works isn't going to be appreciated by your local law enforcement. If you don't want to test the legality of Taboo in court, I'd strongly recommend either: running a VPN (less safe) or not using Taboo (most safe). If you want to use Taboo with a VPN, may I suggest putting some money in an envelope and sending it to Mullvad?

Adding this on after reading your comments elsewhere in the threads:

If you're worried about Intellectual Property enforcers using this for evil, I wouldn't worry too much about it. BTDigg already exists. Not that what you're doing isn't novel or exciting (great work on this BTW) - but DHT indexing is an art thats already being practiced. Cat is out of the bag.