I think some commenters here missed the point. Of course hosting a tracker is legal, but what about "hijacking" inactive resource?
I would at least mask those IP addresses from the blog post...
Resurrecting a dead torrent tracker and finding 3M peers
171–180 of 217 posts
Re: Resurrecting a dead torrent tracker and finding 3M peers
#172Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you think the police understand this nuance? Especially since most of the traffic that will go through there is probably copyright infringement? They'll just see tracker and assume it's illegal.
Tell them it's for training a corporate AI model, then.
It's okay to watch pirated movies if you sell fanart based on them later
Re: Resurrecting a dead torrent tracker and finding 3M peers
#173Kind of amazing how many clients kept pinging a tracker that had been offline for years. It shows how some parts of the internet just keep going in the background long after we stop noticing. There's something oddly persistent about that.
Yeah, I can imagine there's loads of people that set up a seedbox somewhere and just... forgot about it, or never bothered to tidy it up.
Re: Resurrecting a dead torrent tracker and finding 3M peers
#174Earlier 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?
Many trackers will add dummy data to prevent profiling. There is no validation to claims. It’s nice to look at, but not reliable.
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Re: Resurrecting a dead torrent tracker and finding 3M peers
#175Kind of amazing how many clients kept pinging a tracker that had been offline for years. It shows how some parts of the internet just keep going in the background long after we stop noticing. There's something oddly persistent about that.
Many torrents are on multiple trackers and, via the almost ubiquitously supported announce-list extension, have multiple trackers listed in the torrent file itself. So those 3M clients are unlikely to have been sat doing nothing because this tracker had vanished, they would be participating in the swarms around the other trackers listed in the metadata for each torrent.
Re: Resurrecting a dead torrent tracker and finding 3M peers
#176Why not forward to another open tracker? Then you host nothing, and any legal letter you receive you can just tell them to talk to the open tracker.
From the outside it's indistinguishable, and you get sued anyway.
Re: Resurrecting a dead torrent tracker and finding 3M peers
#177Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nahh, for a bunch of annoying letters take them to small claims court. Cheap for you, expensive for them, and you win if they don’t show up.
This is a cool feel good theory but can you show an example of this working?
It’s not the kind of thing that generally makes the news. One example that was is a guy who was making good money doing this to spam callers. His case was bolstered by asking to be put on their no call list and then them ignoring that, but the point is the vast majority of people don’t do it even if in theory they could.
However the important bit isn’t winning in a harassment case but having documentation to get them to stop in the future.
Re: Resurrecting a dead torrent tracker and finding 3M peers
#178Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nahh, for a bunch of annoying letters take them to small claims court. Cheap for you, expensive for them, and you win if they don’t show up.
haha, no, this is not their first rodeo
Sure, but that’s why they avoid this kind of harassment in the first place.
You made a hypothetical assuming they would do something they wouldn’t because it puts them at risk.
Re: Resurrecting a dead torrent tracker and finding 3M peers
#179Earlier 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.
This is definitely the right pragmatic take. A lawyer friend of mine once laid it out for me: "in litigation, if you go to court, even if you win, you lose". The reality is that court sucks, and getting sued sucks for all but the ultra-wealthy (who can absorb the cost). For those of us with less than $100MM, court is a universe to be avoided.
>A lawyer friend of mine once laid it out for me: "in litigation, if you go to court, even if you win, you lose"
In my country we have a phrase for this exact scenario: "the punishment is the process".
When the government or a powerful person wants to fuck with you, all they have to do is drag you endlessly through the court system, even knowing they'll loose. Because the experience will be 100x more painful for you to win than it is for them to loose.
It's what the UK government did to the postal workers in the Fujitsu scandal.
Re: Resurrecting a dead torrent tracker and finding 3M peers
#180Imo one the tragedies of filesharing is though the legal bullshit from MAFIAA didnt make a dent in big public trackers like TPB serving Marvel movies and other popular shit, it did manage to kill off many of the smaller specialised trackers serving exquisitely collected and curated torrents of stuff you cannot buy anywhere anymore.