This is like when cloudflare picked up the IP address 1.1.1.1. They saw a ton of traffic to it as soon as it went hot, because a bunch of people had scripts pointing at it.
How did they get that address?
Resurrecting a dead torrent tracker and finding 3M peers
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Re: Resurrecting a dead torrent tracker and finding 3M peers
#102This is like when cloudflare picked up the IP address 1.1.1.1. They saw a ton of traffic to it as soon as it went hot, because a bunch of people had scripts pointing at it.
How did they get that address?
“ APNIC's research group held the IP addresses 1.1.1.1 and 1.0.0.1. While the addresses were valid, so many people had entered them into various random systems that they were continuously overwhelmed by a flood of garbage traffic. APNIC wanted to study this garbage traffic but any time they'd tried to announce the IPs, the flood would overwhelm any conventional network.”
Re: Resurrecting a dead torrent tracker and finding 3M peers
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is this legal isn’t a useful question. The better question is how likely are you to get sued? With civil lawsuits it doesn’t matter if it’s legal you can be sued and harassed by lawyers if you get on their radar.
No need to sue. Send a cease and desist and your average hacker like OP will take it down in a hurry...
In this case not even a cease-and-desist was needed. Just seeing 1.7M peers crying out in the void for company was enough. Living in a country overly friendly with Hollywood and its money, I do understand him.
Re: Resurrecting a dead torrent tracker and finding 3M peers
#104In other words, you can DDoS any ip for the cost of registering a domain and publishing a specific DNS record.
Common clients' announce interval is pretty long (usually 30 minutes). Then again, 3M peers makes for some volume...
Re: Resurrecting a dead torrent tracker and finding 3M peers
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
Googling, there's been at least one tracker shut down by US law enforcement, EliteTorrents [2005] https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2005-may-26-fi-torre... I think there have probably been more. There are definitely more that had civil suits with MPAA etc suing for damages. It may be somewhat harder to make the case in the US, but a tracker where a great majority of what's listed is copyrighted, I'm pretty sure…
Was that the actual tracker and tracker only, or was there a web front end that hosted all the torrent files and forums and so forth? Because the latter will make you a big target. God I miss rarbg. And KAT.
I'm curious the nature of the US laws that would make the web front end illegal (or subject to civil penalties?) but not the tracker?
Re: Resurrecting a dead torrent tracker and finding 3M peers
#106I actually ran a very-short-lived private use tracker briefly, for some exploration doing p2p watch partying. But it was a toy, never got serious enough to look deeper at how the tracker worked (was using the rust Aquatic tracker, which kindly added webtorrent support on request! https://github.com/greatest-ape/aquatic ) Does the tracker know what it's tracking? Is there any attempt to make the tracker unaware of wha…
The trackers only deal with torrents' info hash. No names, no descriptions, no list of contents, no nothing. opentracker, to use OP's chosen software as example, can run in both white- and blacklist mode (or whatever equivalent terminology it uses today). The former is self-explanatory, and the latter allows all hashes except the blacklisted ones. All open trackers, such as torrent.eu and opentrackr.org to name a couple, always operate in a blacklist fashion in order to openly accommodate any users to congregate for (almost) any content.
Re: Resurrecting a dead torrent tracker and finding 3M peers
#107You can pay for seed boxes with Monero
Lawsuits are civil and wont have all the power to find you in all way, compared to a criminal suit or intelligence agency
So the privacy vectors necessary are more limited
Re: Resurrecting a dead torrent tracker and finding 3M peers
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
huh, weirdly it has stuff I did download and stuff I didn't download within minutes of each other ... should I be worried?
Stop using DHT and/or public trackers and you will be safe. They scan public trackers and the DHT network.
Sorry, should have been more specific - I don't care if people know what I downloaded - I just wonder how stuff I definitely didn't download is attributed to my IP address. Can't be that my dynamic IP address changed, because of the small time between stuff I did download and stuff I didn't. So then, is the scanner wrong, or do I have rouge device(s) on my network?
Re: Resurrecting a dead torrent tracker and finding 3M peers
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Stop using DHT and/or public trackers a Public trackers are the only trackers most of us can reasonably use. He should get a VPN.
private trackers and warez groups are the plentiful (IPTorrents, Speed, etc) if you are a good seeder and can maintain good ratios. anyone using a public tracker in 2025 deserves anything their ISP catches them doing imo. public trackers and torrent sites are also just 90% malware and RATs.
> anyone using a public tracker in 2025 deserves anything their ISP catches them doing imo.
Or you could just use a VPN, which you probably should for private trackers too anyway.
Re: Resurrecting a dead torrent tracker and finding 3M peers
#110Can you do this to create a database of torrents for a torrent search engine?
There are existing services like btdig that do this via DHT, I believe.