The really interesting part for me is what this technology might lead towards in the end, which is decentralized community based curation. An index with white listed curation would be indistinguishable from a website, but it would not need a domain name nor a ip address to function.
Bitmagnet Allows People to Run Their Own Decentralized Torrent Indexer Locally
21–30 of 103 posts
Re: Bitmagnet Allows People to Run Their Own Decentralized Torrent Indexer Locally
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well for your use case of distributing your own music, Bitmagnet wouldn't be necessary. What a DHT crawler like Bitmagnet does is the following: 1. Take a few initial "bootstrap" torrents and ping them to see which IP addresses are seeding that file 2. Ping those IP addresses and ask what other files/torrents they're seeding 3. Ping those torrents to see which IP addresses are seeding that torrent Rinse repeat. So to…
That's not correct. Torrent swarms and the DHT are separate. Each torrent basically forms its own small network of TCP connections to exchange data specific to that one torrent. While the DHT is a network shared by all clients that speak the protocol and it's carried over short-lived UDP query-response exchanges.
You have to be participating in a torrent swarm in order to bootstrap yourself into DHT at all. Bittorrent's DHT is not a network independent of torrent swarms. You need the address of a peer who is already part of the network in order to join it, and you have to get a list those addresses from somewhere.
Re: Bitmagnet Allows People to Run Their Own Decentralized Torrent Indexer Locally
#23Who remembers Skytorrents ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13423629 )? Posted as a "Show HN" here, it was a DHT-sourced index and stack written in C with no JavaScript, no cookies, no ads, no tracking. Skytorrents was unbelievably fast, friendly, and complete, and this translated into rapid adoption and traffic growth that caused the site to shut down due to server costs after just a year ( https://torrentfreak…
I guess the takeaway is that a public torrent site can (probably) never be sustainable while acting in users' best interests?
Re: Bitmagnet Allows People to Run Their Own Decentralized Torrent Indexer Locally
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
An indexer doesn't download content. The only information you'll have is the name of a torrent, potentially its files, and who is interested in those files. But that's the technical view, what happens in court might be totally different.
In order to get the information such as the name of the torrent and its files from the hash you do need to connect to someone in the swarm to download that metadata. You won't know what it is until after you've already connected.
Connecting to an unknown machine and asking what they have, is like knocking on a stranger's door and asking what they're selling. Them mentioning something nefarious and you leaving in response, is very obviously not a crime.
Re: Bitmagnet Allows People to Run Their Own Decentralized Torrent Indexer Locally
#25Nice! I made my own DHT crawler in C for a science project in high school.
Re: Bitmagnet Allows People to Run Their Own Decentralized Torrent Indexer Locally
#26Implementing sample_infohashes opens your torrent client to abuse. UDP responses are much larger than queries and this protocol (BEP51) allows attackers that can spoof source IP addresses to use a large number of clients as mules for amplified distributed denial of service attacks.
Re: Bitmagnet Allows People to Run Their Own Decentralized Torrent Indexer Locally
#27Nice! I made my own DHT crawler in C for a science project in high school. git: http://ni.4a.si./sijanec/travnik/tree/src/dht.c
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Re: Bitmagnet Allows People to Run Their Own Decentralized Torrent Indexer Locally
#28Implementing sample_infohashes opens your torrent client to abuse. UDP responses are much larger than queries and this protocol (BEP51) allows attackers that can spoof source IP addresses to use a large number of clients as mules for amplified distributed denial of service attacks.
Bitmagnet has rate limiting on incoming UDP requests (both overall and per-IP) so I don't know that it would be vulnerable; if there's anything else that should be done to mitigate any risk I'd like to know.
Re: Bitmagnet Allows People to Run Their Own Decentralized Torrent Indexer Locally
#29Who remembers Skytorrents ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13423629 )? Posted as a "Show HN" here, it was a DHT-sourced index and stack written in C with no JavaScript, no cookies, no ads, no tracking. Skytorrents was unbelievably fast, friendly, and complete, and this translated into rapid adoption and traffic growth that caused the site to shut down due to server costs after just a year ( https://torrentfreak…
Skytorrentz was great, but I never knew it had been coded in C nor presented here. Thanks for the background info.
Re: Bitmagnet Allows People to Run Their Own Decentralized Torrent Indexer Locally
#30Implementing sample_infohashes opens your torrent client to abuse. UDP responses are much larger than queries and this protocol (BEP51) allows attackers that can spoof source IP addresses to use a large number of clients as mules for amplified distributed denial of service attacks.
Bitmagnet has rate limiting on incoming UDP requests (both overall and per-IP) so I don't know that it would be vulnerable; if there's anything else that should be done to mitigate any risk I'd like to know.
outgoing rate limits, and also it could exhaust the overall rate with useless traffic.