Live data from Hacker News

Bitmagnet Allows People to Run Their Own Decentralized Torrent Indexer Locally

torrentfreak.com

81–90 of 103 posts

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

#81

I'm the author of https://github.com/anacrolix/torrent (started in 2013) and https://github.com/anacrolix/dht (started in 2015). I have a DHT indexer implementation I developed in 2021. It's currently closed source but available for use as part of https://www.coveapp.info/ . I have found that after several hours the search is excellent and stays up to date with ease.

Some of the features in your screenshots look interesting, but why is Cove closed source?

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

#82
post #36
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't need an indexer for that. All you need is a static list with all your music, and people can click on links to download your music. Give them qbittorrent and it'll be running smoothly.

Sure, but I'd like to go beyond magnet links and make it properly decentralized, with the discovery happening in the DHT and torrent swarm.

There is no point in running your own indexer if it's only for your own music though. If your goal is to run a more "communal" indexing point, it also makes sense to build it cooperatively with other artists, listing only content you all care about and want to distribute (rather than doing a filtering after the fact with a general indexer)

I like your idea of giving its name back to a technology that just works better, and I think it pairs really well with giving back a humane touch to how we use the internet, computers, and putting people back at the center rather than thinking about tools first !

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

#83
post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then you have a user reputation problem instead… me and my 5 million alts say this is the REAL korn_blind.mp3.exe. Nothing is new under the sun since the internet was created, these are the same problems that email has tried and failed to solve for 50 years.

Its going to be an unpopular take, but crypto solves this. As in currency. Make people attest to things with locking a very small amount of money.

> Its going to be an unpopular take, but crypto solves this. As in currency. Make people attest to things with locking a very small amount of money.

So claims Elon on Twitter, a platform that is very obviously to anyone who uses it completely overrun with bots who have found it very profitable to validate their spam accounts and get preferential listings for a mere eight dollars, while scaring off legitimate users who (fairly) do not trust a service with no functioning security department with their payment information.

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

#84

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…

This project only started a few months ago. It's just young and being worked on - no need to dis this as half-baked.

It takes several seconds to load 100 results from a list of 1000, with no search term used. I don't know how that's even possible. I think half-baked is a mild way of putting it, particularly if the excuse is that it hasn't been in the oven very long.

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

#85
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.

All the CSAM torrents are fed honeypots. Just don't accidentally download them and you should be fine.

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

#86
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.

Ad blockers seems to imply that we can do curator without the centralized aspect. Ublock has a couple hundred of lists, each with thousands or more filters. A user choose to enable or disable what they want with no central control.

Further more, the filter itself can be made to limit disclosure of the original data while still providing a binary decision regarding filtering a content or not. Hashing, bloom filters, ai models and so on are common tools for filtering data like emails and link reputation.

Is it possible to use bots or use a riaa enforcement group equivalent to get ad blockers to green lights specific ads? Personally I trust easylist as long the community does so, and would discard it the moment it lost the community trust. That makes it a kind of centralized curator, but also very much not.

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

#87

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…

Can I take a wild guess that you're using Firefox? I have noticed Firefox performance is much worse than any other browser. I think this is due to issues in the Angular and Material components being used.

As stated in the big red notice in the website, the software is currently in alpha preview. Given time, Bitmagnet will be trying to mitigate the Firefox performance issues (the <5% market share means it's prioritised accordingly), but it's important that users of all browsers can have acceptable experience in the app.

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

#88

Who 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…

Never heard of it, what an interesting read

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

#89
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 sil…

> 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?

The "find bootstrap nodes via a bunch of DNS records, then persist long-lived contacts locally" approach is quite common.

> People have used a DHT overlaid on the collection of torrent swarms for non-torrent related purposes.

No, the software does not involve joining any bittorrent swarms at all.

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

#90

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.

Individual DHT nodes should only see a trickle of packets. A few kilobytes per second. Even less per remote IP. So they can set fairly strict rate limits.

And ISPs are in a much better position to solve this problem anyway. They should ask for higher peering fees from peers that don't do source-filtering.

Post reply on HN