Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Bitmagnet Allows People to Run Their Own Decentralized Torrent Indexer Locally

torrentfreak.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 103 posts

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

#51

Post by yieldcrv »

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.

they shouldn’t do anything aside from a disclaimer

just opt out of being an arbiter, like public utilities do

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

#52

Post by p1mrx »

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.

Has anyone tried to fix this by making queries bigger, and limiting the response to the size of the query?

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

#53

Post by UberFly »

mgdigital wrote: post #50
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?

Or a baked-in a use-based rating system. That would be cool if it could be protected from abuse.

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

#54

Post by UberFly »

yieldcrv wrote: post #51
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.

they shouldn’t do anything aside from a disclaimer just opt out of being an arbiter, like public utilities do

Unfortunately the majority of it will be malware or illegal porn in the blink of an eye without a good way to separate it.

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

#55

Post by ZoomZoomZoom »

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?

The real question is: metadata is data, so are there any limitations on how much data can be transferred through DHT using well-behaving clients/servers so that you can be reasonably sure what you download on your machine isn't poisoned enough to possibly get you into trouble with the law enforcement?

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

#56

Post by pessimizer »

the8472 wrote: post #43
pessimizer wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 not…

Which of these methods is not obtaining the address of a node in a swarm, or hitting a tracker for a list of nodes in a swarm?

> People have used the DHT for non-torrent-related purposes.

This is simply non-responsive. People have used a DHT overlaid on the collection of torrent swarms for non-torrent related purposes.

> And nothing dictates that that has to be obtained via the bittorrent peer protocol.

This is a silly distinction. You also don't need to join a swarm to get on the DHT if I join a swarm to get on the DHT, write down the addresses I get on a piece of paper, then email you those addresses, which you plug into your handwritten specialized client that only knows how to join the DHT.

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

#57

Post by lupusreal »

The web UI is super slow. It's slow with the default view of 10 results per page and unbearably slower at 100. These aren't big numbers and my computer isn't old, something was poorly done here and setting the default number of results per page to 10 clearly is not the correct fix.

(For the record it only has a mere thousand results so far..)

Also, the content classification is so bad it might as well not exist. How does a torrent with "Playboy" in the title get classified as 'Unknown' instead of 'XXX'? Even torrents with "Porn" or "XXX" in the title get classified as Unknown. A simple Bayesian classifier should have this covered, it's not a task that needs heavy duty AI to solve.

This whole thing seems way too half-baked for me.

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

#58

Post by yieldcrv »

UberFly wrote: post #54
yieldcrv wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

they shouldn’t do anything aside from a disclaimer just opt out of being an arbiter, like public utilities do

Unfortunately the majority of it will be malware or illegal porn in the blink of an eye without a good way to separate it.

street smarts

community indexer

why download anything from a list of torrents, okay use the same set of rules

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

#59

Post by CharlesW »

jMyles wrote: post #48
CharlesW wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Thanks, I love it!

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

#60

Post by throwing_away »

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…

You can also encourage people to host your content with IPFS, removing the need for a pinning service if there's enough of them.
Post reply on HN