Bitmagnet: A self-hosted BitTorrent indexer, DHT crawler, and torrent search

Post by fluoridation » Thu, Oct 05, 2023, 3:18 PM UTC

grepfru_it wrote: post #14

hypertele-Xii wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While you're technically correct, the protocol is resilient to such attack, as the number of people participating in a particular torrent is a good indicator of its validity. After all, everyone who was fooled will delete and stop sharing such items. New releases of something that just came out tend to suffer from this, though. Sometimes the counterfeits reach escape velocity - the rate of people joining in downloadi…

(btw my comment was/is about the DHT crawler) You are describing a pay-to-play model. The validator is if the seeder/leech count is high. Well does DHT provide aggregate bandwidth of each torrent? If not, you can easily spin up 1000+ nodes and connect to your torrent. Tada fake popularity. If bandwidth is known, then you simply raise your costs a bit by running fake clients. There are anti-piracy groups who's entire…

Post by Retr0id » Thu, Oct 05, 2023, 3:20 PM UTC

danpalmer wrote: post #16

grepfru_it wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It works well in practice. Hi, I worked on gnutella and lots of P2P systems in the early 00s. This will devolve into noise and spam as the number of users who adopt this feature pass a critical mass. With a fully decentralized system, there are no gatekeepers, and as such, there is no way to filter counterfiet items. While your client will present with you the data you are searching for, you will find out (usually h…

I don't think this project changes any of this? Torrents have been around for decades and this hasn't been a problem yet. We can't rule it out entirely but it does seem unlikely at this point to be worthwhile doing otherwise we'd see more exploitation. If the criticism is that a DHT crawler is going to be more subject to this than a website where people submit upload torrents, that may be the case, but I think the au…

Post by danpalmer » Thu, Oct 05, 2023, 3:25 PM UTC

Retr0id wrote: post #24

danpalmer wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think this project changes any of this? Torrents have been around for decades and this hasn't been a problem yet. We can't rule it out entirely but it does seem unlikely at this point to be worthwhile doing otherwise we'd see more exploitation. If the criticism is that a DHT crawler is going to be more subject to this than a website where people submit upload torrents, that may be the case, but I think the au…

The "problem" is that most users aren't crawling the DHT to find torrents, right now. The more people start using DHT crawlers as their primary way of finding new torrents, the more incentive there is to spam the DHT with junk, malware, etc. (because there will be more eyeballs on it) That is, the usefulness of DHT crawling is inversely proportional to how many people are doing it.

Post by e12e » Thu, Oct 05, 2023, 3:32 PM UTC

the8472 wrote: post #25

It seems like every single of these things always cut corners and don't implement proper, spec-compliant nodes that provide the same services as they use. You know, the "peer" in p2p. BEP51 was designed to make it easier to not trample on the commons, and yet...

Post by thomastjeffery » Thu, Oct 05, 2023, 3:42 PM UTC

grepfru_it wrote: post #6

lobsterslive wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It works well in practice. The DHT protocol includes announce messages that broadcast when new files are shared on BitTorrent. It then includes a "geometric" way to find people who are sharing those files. It doesn't include the files themselves, just the torrents which include a file list and location hashes. If you listen to BitTorrent's DHT network, you'll build an index of everything shared on BitTorrent (over ti…

>It works well in practice. Hi, I worked on gnutella and lots of P2P systems in the early 00s. This will devolve into noise and spam as the number of users who adopt this feature pass a critical mass. With a fully decentralized system, there are no gatekeepers, and as such, there is no way to filter counterfiet items. While your client will present with you the data you are searching for, you will find out (usually h…