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Bitmagnet Allows People to Run Their Own Decentralized Torrent Indexer Locally

torrentfreak.com

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Re: Bitmagnet Allows People to Run Their Own Decentralized Torrent Indexer Locally

#41

Post by imtringued »

belorn wrote: post #21

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.

The problem with decentralised software is that you don't want to host other people's illegal content. I once tried out zeronet, which downloads the entire decentralised website and anyone can post things to it. Although I have not found CSAM directly on their Reddit equivalent, there are people posting advertisements to zeronet CSAM sites. The idea that I am downloading and automatically redistributing content like that is disturbing and zeronet is dead for a good reason. It's a pool that is asking to be peed in, even if the abusers themselves are a tiny minority.

Re: Bitmagnet Allows People to Run Their Own Decentralized Torrent Indexer Locally

#42

Post by mgdigital »

imtringued wrote: post #41
belorn wrote: post #21

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.

The problem with decentralised software is that you don't want to host other people's illegal content. I once tried out zeronet, which downloads the entire decentralised website and anyone can post things to it. Although I have not found CSAM directly on their Reddit equivalent, there are people posting advertisements to zeronet CSAM sites. The idea that I am downloading and automatically redistributing content like…

Bitmagnet may download metadata about CSAM content, which is automatically deleted with fairly high accuracy. You would never be redistributing it. No outgoing peer protocol is currently implemented. This is planned but it will give users control of what they're sharing rather than indiscriminately sharing everything.

Re: Bitmagnet Allows People to Run Their Own Decentralized Torrent Indexer Locally

#43

Post by the8472 »

pessimizer wrote: post #22
the8472 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> You have to be participating in a torrent swarm in order to bootstrap yourself into DHT at all.

This is not correct.

> Bittorrent's DHT is not a network independent of torrent swarms.

This is also wrong. People have used the DHT for non-torrent-related purposes.

> 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.

And nothing dictates that that has to be obtained via the bittorrent peer protocol. https://stackoverflow.com/a/11089702/1362755

Re: Bitmagnet Allows People to Run Their Own Decentralized Torrent Indexer Locally

#44

Post by the8472 »

pluto_modadic wrote: post #31
the8472 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

they're saying they jump between one and the other. ask DHT, then ask swarm, then ask DHT, then ask swarm.

That doesn't make sense because those are concurrent processes, not serial ones.

Re: Bitmagnet Allows People to Run Their Own Decentralized Torrent Indexer Locally

#45

Post by nkohari »

taminka wrote: post #27
jesprenj wrote: post #25

Nice! 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

[flagged]

I have no personal opinion on the code, but it was a high school project. Relax.

Re: Bitmagnet Allows People to Run Their Own Decentralized Torrent Indexer Locally

#46

Post by MomoXenosaga »

rakoo wrote: post #19
chopsuey5540 wrote: post #18

This looks interesting but I’m a bit worried about the CSAM / illegal stuff part, could a user get in trouble because he has traces of that in his crawled index? Also, how large is the index after indexing for a few months?

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.

Considering many countries block torrent sites I wouldn't chance it.

Re: Bitmagnet Allows People to Run Their Own Decentralized Torrent Indexer Locally

#47

Post by jesprenj »

mgdigital wrote: post #28
jesprenj wrote: post #26

Implementing 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.

I do not mean bitmagnet here, I mean other bittorrent clients that respond to sample_infohashes.

Re: Bitmagnet Allows People to Run Their Own Decentralized Torrent Indexer Locally

#48

Post by jMyles »

CharlesW wrote: post #9
jMyles wrote: post #2

Interesting. I want to seamlessly distribute my music through bittorrent, but since I have a small fan base (and thus, a very small potential seeding pool), I found it difficult to connect all the moving parts. I'll give Bitmagnet a try for an Indexer. I did find that IPFS, with a pinning service (I won't shill the one I used in particular), was a bit easier and just worked for everyone who tried to use it. But I'd l…

> I want to seamlessly distribute my music through bittorrent, but since I have a small fan base (and thus, a very small potential seeding pool), I found it difficult to connect all the moving parts. Out of curiosity, why not just distribute via R2 or similar, or archive.org if you don't need AuthN/AuthZ? What's the complexity (to you and listeners) of BitTorrent buy you?

Well, I do distribute via some centralized platforms (including some odious ones like Spotify).

But I'd like to put forward a practice that demonstrates that the tools that have been smeared as anti-artist (chiefly but not only bittorrent) are actually compelling tools for independent distribution.

Re: Bitmagnet Allows People to Run Their Own Decentralized Torrent Indexer Locally

#49

Post by UberFly »

"Unlike well-moderated torrent sites, Bitmagnet adds almost any torrent it finds to its database. This includes mislabeled files, malware-ridden releases, and potentially illegal content. The software tries to limit abuse by filtering metadata for CSAM content, however."

This is by far the biggest hurdle to something like this. You'll eventually have to end up again with a centralized curator.

Re: Bitmagnet Allows People to Run Their Own Decentralized Torrent Indexer Locally

#50

Post by mgdigital »

UberFly wrote: post #49

"Unlike well-moderated torrent sites, Bitmagnet adds almost any torrent it finds to its database. This includes mislabeled files, malware-ridden releases, and potentially illegal content. The software tries to limit abuse by filtering metadata for CSAM content, however." This is by far the biggest hurdle to something like this. You'll eventually have to end up again with a centralized curator.

Or connect with trusted curators over a decentralized network, similar to the fediverse?
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