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Magnet-hashes for all torrents on The Pirate Bay: 164 MB

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Re: Magnet-hashes for all torrents on The Pirate Bay: 164 MB

#61

Post by robot_cowboy »

katovatzschyn wrote: post #29
Cushman wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's what this is already, eh? A description of copyrighted data would be the torrent file, which content producers would probably like to argue are infringing. A magnet link is a hash of the torrent file, so it's already two steps removed. Of course, the Pirate Bay magnet dump is itself a torrent, so it's a hash of a hash of a hash of copyrighted data. And that torrent itself has a magnet link: 938802790a385c49307…

And, continuing back from hexadecimal, we have the splendid: 842254760070427756125843951997302119090555319708 in base 10 for the magnet link of the torrent containing the list of magnet links for the pirate bay's torrents. Shall we add to the list of illegal numbers? Perhaps its prime factorization also belongs on that list. 2^2×3^2×23×89×24733×462111028392156064869667382167578133253 Best to include the Roman numeral…

So, going back to hex and turning it into a flag just like the Free Speech flag in the wiki link, would that make this image:

http://i.imgur.com/OHg3l.png

the most copyright-infringing flag of all time?

Re: Magnet-hashes for all torrents on The Pirate Bay: 164 MB

#63

Post by mahannay »

Maybe I'm being a bit black-and-white on this, but while the meta and the philosophy is interesting to talk about, no one is mentioning the morality. Stealing is wrong. You're taking someone else's work and not compensating them for it. I think it's sad that we're all so worried about the law when, in reality, you shouldn't pirate music for the same reason you don't steal a candy bar from the grocery store or snag 5 dollars out of your coworker's wallet or hack into Dropbox to get extra storage for free. It's wrong.

Re: Magnet-hashes for all torrents on The Pirate Bay: 164 MB

#64

Post by william42 »

gmaslov wrote: post #15
kinghajj wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The more one studies computer science, the less one believes that information can be owned in any meaningful way. I remember reading a paper on a "lightnet" that basically XORed arbitrary blocks of data together, then produced a recipe on how to recover some original data by XORing the appropriate blocks. With just this recipe you could ask other nodes for the random blocks, then recover the original data locally. Th…

I'm sure most everyone on HN has read it already, but "What Colour are your bits?" http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23 is always a good reference in this sort of discussion. The system you mention sounds like what the Colour essay is railing against; trying to create a mathematical solution to a problem which is rooted in the law, and cannot be resolved by mathematical manipulations, but only by legal manipulations. Do…

The followup "Colour, social beings, and undecidability" http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/24 is also pretty good.

Re: Magnet-hashes for all torrents on The Pirate Bay: 164 MB

#65

Post by kristianp »

SquareWheel wrote: post #49
Lazare wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It breaks the page on Chrome 16.0.912.77m on Windows 7 x64.

The stable build is on 17.0.963.46 m. Been a while since you've restart your browser?

The page is still "broken" on Chrome 17.0.963.46 m Win7 x64.

Re: Magnet-hashes for all torrents on The Pirate Bay: 164 MB

#66

Post by redthrowaway »

mahannay wrote: post #63

Maybe I'm being a bit black-and-white on this, but while the meta and the philosophy is interesting to talk about, no one is mentioning the morality. Stealing is wrong. You're taking someone else's work and not compensating them for it. I think it's sad that we're all so worried about the law when, in reality, you shouldn't pirate music for the same reason you don't steal a candy bar from the grocery store or snag 5…

I'm getting a bit sick of the 'piracy is theft' nonsense. It isn't. Nobody is deprived of their possession. Me copying your song doesn't result in you no longer having a song.

Piracy is far closer to plagiarism, but even then only to a point. In plagiarism, one attempts to pass off the work of another as one's own. In piracy, one simply copies another's work for one's own use. They are fundamentally different.

This is why piracy is as prevalent as it is: it simply is not as bad as plagiarism, let alone theft. Most people have an intuitive understanding of this, and those who pirate do so without the cognitive dissonance that comes with acting against their moral code. It might be "wrong" in an abstract sense, sort of like lying on your resume is "wrong", but it's not wrong in the absolute sense of harming another person's body or property.

Re: Magnet-hashes for all torrents on The Pirate Bay: 164 MB

#67

Post by redthrowaway »

allisfine wrote: post #33

Hello, I am an author of the scrape. I did it more to try it, but who knows, maybe it will be useful to someone. I went trough the description pages like http://thepiratebay.se/torrent/$i by increasing the $i and saving the magnet if pirate bay didn't return 404 error. I went trough the pages as unlogged user, though, so that might be the reason why I got only 1.5m torrents. I didn't know pirate bay has hidden porn t…

I think it's a great idea, and a nifty hack.

It might be an to release a diff against this once a week, and write a quick script to grab it, keeping the list up-to-date.

Re: Magnet-hashes for all torrents on The Pirate Bay: 164 MB

#68

Post by wisty »

chimeracoder wrote: post #4

This gets very meta very quickly. If linking to copyrighted data 'should' be illegal (SOPA), then what about descriptions of that data that are sufficient to identify the original, but not reconstruct it (magnet links)? And if those were made illegal, then what about descriptions of those descriptions? You can recurse infinitely on this. Beyond mere amusement, after just one or two recursions, you get to the point wh…

Someone could suggest a system, whereby spelling mistakes are used to encode partial information about a magnet link.

One switched pair could give you the position in the magnet-link key, the other switched pair could give you the value. That way, you could never pin down exactly who gave you what information.

Or maybe I shouldn't suggest it?

Re: Magnet-hashes for all torrents on The Pirate Bay: 164 MB

#70

Post by allisfine »

redthrowaway wrote: post #67
allisfine wrote: post #33

Hello, I am an author of the scrape. I did it more to try it, but who knows, maybe it will be useful to someone. I went trough the description pages like http://thepiratebay.se/torrent/$i by increasing the $i and saving the magnet if pirate bay didn't return 404 error. I went trough the pages as unlogged user, though, so that might be the reason why I got only 1.5m torrents. I didn't know pirate bay has hidden porn t…

I think it's a great idea, and a nifty hack. It might be an to release a diff against this once a week, and write a quick script to grab it, keeping the list up-to-date.

I am thinking of releasing new versions once a week and putting the hash of the torrent of the newest version on some public site. (Say, some twitter account.)

But it would still be more proof of concept than really anything useful - the comments and descriptions ARE important.

edit: More I am thinking about it, the less useful it sounds.

First, the information about seeders vary constantly, especially with the new torrents.

Also, it STILL depends on single point of failure - the Pirate Bay itself. If TPB will be down for any reason, I will have no place to scrape this from and it will all fall apart anyway.

Plus, I think Pirate Bay itself should make dumps like this. It would probably be much better for their database anyway :)

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