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

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

#32

Quoted post unavailable.

OP said they already have a working system. How well it works remains to be seen, until it's publicly available. On what basis do you assume he/she has not succeeded without even having seen their work?

We tried too. Several people have made DHT sniffers, including our lab. You see lots of spam and get stuck. Filtering out the noise is weirdly hard.

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

#33
post #19
post #8

Just AGPL it, I hear it's an effective ward against Alphabet.

Very good suggestion, considering the sniffer could be used by copyright claims lawyers.

Can't see how AGPL would stop anyone using it. Doesn't it just prevent them from modifying the source code without sharing their changes. ?

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

#34
I had been working on this successfully for a couple years in the past before I got tired of it and moved on. I still think it's a magnificent idea, to be able to host your own torrent site and to decentralise the last centralised bit of BitTorrent.

https://github.com/boramalper/magnetico

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

#35

I mean, it already exists. [1] Always fun to see what my neighbors behind the same NAT download. [1]: https://iknowwhatyoudownload.com/

Ah, haven’t checked that one for a while. Surprised to find a tech-minded neighbor who has downloaded kali-linux-2022.3-live-everything-amd64.iso. And no pr0n this time round.

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

#36
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

copyright holder bots

DHT has existed for 17 years - the cat's out of the bag. The anti-piracy companies have built their own crawlers.

They match swarm IP's and then notify ISP's who voluntarily hassle you on their behalf. An IP doesn't equal a person in USA.

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

#37

Quoted post unavailable.

Who is funding it and why?

If you follow through to the site linked in the Github:

> Tribler is a research project of Delft University of Technology

> Work on Tribler has been supported by multiple Internet research European grants. In total we received 3,538,609 Euro in funding for our open source self-organising systems research. Roughly 10 to 15 scientists and engineers work on it full-time. Our ambition is to make darknet technology, security and privacy the default for all Internet users.

> Vision & Mission ... "Push the boundaries of self-organising systems, robust reputation systems and craft collaborative systems with millions of active participants under continuous attack from spammers and other adversarial entities."

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

#39
I wrote a similar solution 8 years ago. I repurposed the system to identify IPs owned by the government, and notified them if a malicious copy of Windows (but not limited to) was seeded by them. Meaning there was a chance that an unknown actor had a backdoor in my government's network. If you wanna discuss, I'm happy to talk and even contribute towards a commercial solution majestic.hn@fastmail.com. I didn't pursue this opportunity for money at that time, but I had my fair share of "shoutz". Won't be bad to pick this up again
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