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Alleged founder of world’s largest BitTorrent distribution site arrested

arstechnica.com

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Re: Alleged founder of world’s largest BitTorrent distribution site arrested

#21

Post by toomuchtodo »

derefr wrote: post #19

It seems like a lot of the most well-known pseudo-legal BitTorrent "groups" (PopcornTime, YIFY, ISOHunt, now Kat) turn out to be one-man shops, and as such, just completely dissolve as soon as their owner crosses paths with law enforcement. In some cases, these services are integral enough to the "scene" to be brought back by others. But other times, everything just stops for a while. This seems like a bus-factor pro…

> This seems like a bus-factor problem. Why does it keep happening? Why aren't these sites being run by multi-national teams that can survive a loss like this?

Trust. You have to be sure the people you're working with are diligent, careful, and won't turn you in (and likewise for them).

Re: Alleged founder of world’s largest BitTorrent distribution site arrested

#24

Post by scrollaway »

msie wrote: post #22

So Bittorrent is decentralized but you need a centralized index of the available torrents? Is this correct? Can you find anything without a site like KAT? TIA.

Distributed discovery is possible, but you quickly run into spam/noise problems. Centralized communities generally have features such as curation and deduplication (duplication is bad for torrents, as it causes peers to be spread across multiple slightly-different packages of files, reducing the available peers for both).

It's not a technical problem, it's a social one.

Re: Alleged founder of world’s largest BitTorrent distribution site arrested

#25

Post by drcross »

akavel wrote: post #14

ArsTechnica seems to have the most detailed and best linked (PDF + DoJ press release) article as of now: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/07/kickasstorrents-a... Somewhat more/complementary details seem to be available on: https://torrentfreak.com/feds-seize-kickasstorrents-domains-... — e.g. regarding methods: [...] The complaint further reveals that the feds posed as an advertiser, which revealed a bank acco…

Should have used bitcoin :(

Re: Alleged founder of world’s largest BitTorrent distribution site arrested

#26

Post by josho »

derefr wrote: post #19

It seems like a lot of the most well-known pseudo-legal BitTorrent "groups" (PopcornTime, YIFY, ISOHunt, now Kat) turn out to be one-man shops, and as such, just completely dissolve as soon as their owner crosses paths with law enforcement. In some cases, these services are integral enough to the "scene" to be brought back by others. But other times, everything just stops for a while. This seems like a bus-factor pro…

I'm interested in the problem of how you would solve a distributed system that is moderated yet guards against bad actors.

To answer your question I think these are one man shops because they get shut down before reaching the size that you could have a larger team involved. Maybe if someone without a profit motive started something up they'd build a system that solved the problem above and could therefore last longer than a lone individual's contribution.

Re: Alleged founder of world’s largest BitTorrent distribution site arrested

#27

Post by [deleted] »

derefr wrote: post #19

It seems like a lot of the most well-known pseudo-legal BitTorrent "groups" (PopcornTime, YIFY, ISOHunt, now Kat) turn out to be one-man shops, and as such, just completely dissolve as soon as their owner crosses paths with law enforcement. In some cases, these services are integral enough to the "scene" to be brought back by others. But other times, everything just stops for a while. This seems like a bus-factor pro…

[deleted]

Re: Alleged founder of world’s largest BitTorrent distribution site arrested

#28

Post by drawnwren »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #21
derefr wrote: post #19

It seems like a lot of the most well-known pseudo-legal BitTorrent "groups" (PopcornTime, YIFY, ISOHunt, now Kat) turn out to be one-man shops, and as such, just completely dissolve as soon as their owner crosses paths with law enforcement. In some cases, these services are integral enough to the "scene" to be brought back by others. But other times, everything just stops for a while. This seems like a bus-factor pro…

> This seems like a bus-factor problem. Why does it keep happening? Why aren't these sites being run by multi-national teams that can survive a loss like this? Trust. You have to be sure the people you're working with are diligent, careful, and won't turn you in (and likewise for them).

I'd also wager more communication makes more vulnerabilities. Thinking back to lulzsec and dread pirate Roberts, both were caught thanks to communication.

Re: Alleged founder of world’s largest BitTorrent distribution site arrested

#29

Post by na85 »

josho wrote: post #20
bathory wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i don't remember robin hood lining his pockets with truckloads of money he made off of the dodgy ads that all these torrent sites serve. and if its not ads, then it's the donations.

I suspect robin hood would have had the support of the people that he helped, so donations is appropriate. I'd say where the analog breaks down is the media companies aren't exactly extorting the people, nor price gouging.

>media companies aren't exactly extorting the people, nor price gouging.

In your opinion.

Re: Alleged founder of world’s largest BitTorrent distribution site arrested

#30

Post by derefr »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #21
derefr wrote: post #19

It seems like a lot of the most well-known pseudo-legal BitTorrent "groups" (PopcornTime, YIFY, ISOHunt, now Kat) turn out to be one-man shops, and as such, just completely dissolve as soon as their owner crosses paths with law enforcement. In some cases, these services are integral enough to the "scene" to be brought back by others. But other times, everything just stops for a while. This seems like a bus-factor pro…

> This seems like a bus-factor problem. Why does it keep happening? Why aren't these sites being run by multi-national teams that can survive a loss like this? Trust. You have to be sure the people you're working with are diligent, careful, and won't turn you in (and likewise for them).

It feels like you could factor off the trust requirements into a much smaller kernel, though.

For example, you could operate (your instance of) your pseudo-legal service yourself, but open-source the codebase (sticking it on GitHub even) and accept patches from anyone.

You could also implement a simple replication architecture for your service, where at any time one node (yours) is considered to be the 'canonical master', and then other nodes can join the network as slaves, receive replicated state, and run as mirrors. Sort of like Linux package repository mirrors.

With such a setup, arresting the original maintainer just means 1. a codebase fork by a new maintainer, and 2. a (probably manual) network master-node election.

And that's just a setup that lets you stay in complete control without having to trust anybody (since you still "own" the codebase, and the master node, until you disappear.) If you are willing to relinquish control to the system itself, you could just build your service on a DHT or a signed store-and-forward hierarchy or a blockchain or whatever. There's no reason that things that are essentially "a BitTorrent tracker exposed through a website" need to have their canonical state anywhere at all.

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