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Resurrecting a dead torrent tracker and finding 3M peers

kianbradley.com

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Re: Resurrecting a dead torrent tracker and finding 3M peers

#111

Post by NoMoreNicksLeft »

edm0nd wrote: post #97
NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #85

Earlier 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.

>private trackers and warez groups are the plentiful (

Sure. It combines all the fun of pledge week with a fraternity with the wrong-headed attitudes that became part of the culture when ftp servers were the height of technology. And you just have to schedule an interview and learn the secret knock/handshake. Don't ever invite anyone, because if they're the wrong type, you get banned for their behavior too.

>public trackers and torrent sites are also just 90% malware and RATs.

It's an mkv file. Don't double click exes.

Re: Resurrecting a dead torrent tracker and finding 3M peers

#112

Post by anilakar »

diggan wrote: post #2

> Is this legal? Why wouldn't it be? You're not actually hosting a tracker in this case, only looking at incoming connections. And even if you do run a tracker, hard to make the case that the tracker itself is illega. Hosting something like opentrackr is like hosting a search engine, how they respond to legal takedown requests is where the crux is at, and whatever infra sits around the tracker, so police and courts c…

Yeah. There are trackers (hosts used for coordination between bittorrent peers) and there are "trackers" (sites used for hosting .torrent files and magnet: URIs). Takedowns have been targeted exclusively at the latter.

Re: Resurrecting a dead torrent tracker and finding 3M peers

#113

Post by AzzyHN »

nneonneo wrote: post #31

Now I'm wondering: with the wide range of bittorrent clients out there, and the fact that many are written in unsafe languages, could it be possible for some of them to be exploited through a malicious tracker? It would not surprise me if some of these clients misbehave if fed malformed data from a tracker.

Think about how many other programs are written in not-rust. You're worrying over nothing (or, alternatively, you should be worried about just about everything)

Re: Resurrecting a dead torrent tracker and finding 3M peers

#114

Post by [deleted] »

dymk wrote: post #68
bilekas wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not sure if that’s true actually, you might get a takedown notice, but to sue, and maybe I’m wrong but you have to claim damages, all op has to do is not announce out? IE he can see the peer pool but they don’t announce the peer list.

The RIAA doesn't have to sue to make OP's life miserable. They have enough lawyers on the payroll to drown him in perfectly legal demand letters. Go one step further and assume the demand letters are harassment - what's OP going to do, sue the RIAA?

[deleted]

Re: Resurrecting a dead torrent tracker and finding 3M peers

#116

Post by anal_reactor »

NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #84
jrochkind1 wrote: post #60

Earlier 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.

> God I miss rarbg. And KAT.

I miss shit being worth torrenting. Maybe things have changed, maybe I grew up, but:

1. Most utility software you need is free, save for a few programs you can easily find on Russian torrents.

2. Most games and other media are slop.

Torrents didn't die because US law enforcement made them die. Torrents died because most companies realized that providing slop with ads and lootboxes for free is a much better business model than trying to get people to pay for something of quality.

Imagine trying to tell someone in year 2000 that Windows will natively display ads, EA will lose lawsuits related to FIFA being actual old-fashioned gambling, and music industry will push for AI-generated content. Yet somehow we accept this as completely normal in 2025. No wonder nobody ain't torrenting shit.

Re: Resurrecting a dead torrent tracker and finding 3M peers

#117

Post by ethan_smith »

nneonneo wrote: post #31

Now I'm wondering: with the wide range of bittorrent clients out there, and the fact that many are written in unsafe languages, could it be possible for some of them to be exploited through a malicious tracker? It would not surprise me if some of these clients misbehave if fed malformed data from a tracker.

Transmission had a remote code execution vulnerability (CVE-2018-5702) through DNS rebinding that allowed attackers to execute arbitrary commands - tracker exploitation is definitely a real attack vector.

Re: Resurrecting a dead torrent tracker and finding 3M peers

#118

Post by _factor »

edude03 wrote: post #66
neckro23 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No tracker necessary, you can just use DHT: https://iknowwhatyoudownload.com/

huh, weirdly it has stuff I did download and stuff I didn't download within minutes of each other ... should I be worried?

Many trackers will add dummy data to prevent profiling. There is no validation to claims. It’s nice to look at, but not reliable.

Re: Resurrecting a dead torrent tracker and finding 3M peers

#119

Post by aeyes »

qingcharles wrote: post #100
jauntywundrkind wrote: post #26

I 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 tracker knows what it is tracking. I used to run a TV show tracker. It would keep track of all the users upload/download ratios.

The blog post is about a public tracker. What you describe is a private tracker which embeds a client identifier into the announce URL of the torrent.

On a public tracker the only way to identify a user is the IP address and that's not reliable.

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