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For a brief moment, the title sounded like TPB was going to blackout for "stop SOPA day". Wouldn't that be funny.
What I’m wondering is whether it’s not yet possible to have a distributed, decentralised torrent database. You could already put up a copy of the database as a torrent and distribute the magnet link, but you’d need some method for efficiently keeping it up to date.
DHTs/Torrents are great for static data (like a movie) but bad for dynamic data, like a website with a list of movies, their ratings, user comments, etc. There are, however, other systems that are designed to combat this, like freenet. They tend to be overwhelmingly slow, because you need to pass lots of data around to make it consistent. Then again, magnet links, titles, and a little html are probably not a lot of i…
Can someone fill me in on the first step a client (BT) would take to find its first peers? That part is a bit magic to me right now. What would be the first IP it would query and how would it know?
1. Use a cached list from a previous run. This is ideal in terms of load balancing, and also helps with bootstrap time if your IP hasn't changed, so all major torrent clients have such a cache.
2. Ask peers you're connected to via a traditional tracker and .torrent file. This is the next best thing, but can only be used if the first torrent you download is via a traditional tracker.
3. Use some bootstrap peers hardcoded into the torrent client. Has a single point of failure, but it works.
Each torrent client can use a different set of bootstrap peers, note - they're nothing special, just a DHT peer that has the bandwidth and CPU power to deal with bootstrap requests (which isn't a very high hurdle - you only get hit once, on the initial install, or if the client's been shut down for so long it no longer has any valid peers). Or the user might even supply their own, if need be.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Only slightly as I understand it, since from a legal perspective the intent of someone providing providing links instead of files doesn't change, and that's what counts. From a technical perspective, and as someone who doesn't understand how magnet works under the hood, I'm slightly concerned that DHTs might be easier to attack in an underhanded manner than an HTTP server would have been.
"I'm slightly concerned that DHTs might be easier to attack..." The key is in the D. Since it is distributed, there's not a single server that can be attacked.
Here are a couple examples of attacks that DHT is vulnerable to:
http://www.cs.rice.edu/Conferences/IPTPS02/101.pdf http://www.cs.rice.edu/~twngan/doc/infocom06.pdf
Great to see it still evolving and spreading, based simply on its loosey-goosey merits.
What I’m wondering is whether it’s not yet possible to have a distributed, decentralised torrent database. You could already put up a copy of the database as a torrent and distribute the magnet link, but you’d need some method for efficiently keeping it up to date.
DHTs/Torrents are great for static data (like a movie) but bad for dynamic data, like a website with a list of movies, their ratings, user comments, etc. There are, however, other systems that are designed to combat this, like freenet. They tend to be overwhelmingly slow, because you need to pass lots of data around to make it consistent. Then again, magnet links, titles, and a little html are probably not a lot of i…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sadly, that hasn't prevented censorship of "neutral" keywords before. See: https://torrentfreak.com/googles-anti-piracy-filter-110712
Wow, I didn't see this before. I can understand filtering certain terms for court requests, but voluntarily? It looks like Google is attacking distribution methods of content with such broad filtering. Probably to make compromises with the anti-Internet activists. Now judges can interpret it to mean that Google can happily censor any results for certain words as it has been done in other anti-Internet regimes. What s…
If you actually type "lord of the rings torrent" and hit return, Google will still do that search and return relevant results.
They are doing this because for many pieces of popular media, the torrent search was fairly high in the list of most popular searches, and they don't want to be seen as suggesting that you download the torrent. Likewise, they won't autocomplete obscene or porn related terms, but will still do searches for them.
There is a difference between banning a term entirely from their search engine, and deciding that it's not something that you want to suggest to people who haven't requested it, to avoid suggesting illegal acts, avoid legal trouble, avoid offending people, or the like.