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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

#181

Post by koakuma-chan »

FirmwareBurner wrote: post #179
chaboud wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Is there a limit how many concurrent lawsuits can be thrown at one person?

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

#182

Post by justinclift »

rvnx wrote: post #23
rockskon wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wouldn't particular knowledge be required? I'm sure Google devs know in the abstract that Google search is used by criminals to help them in committing crimes, but that clearly is not illegal in and of itself.

Well Google has knowledge about it, but once you reach a certain scale you become safe (e.g. OpenAI with copyright infringment)

And Facebook/Meta, for the same.

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

#184

Post by mouse_ »

globular-toast wrote: post #153
jldugger wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It can be: https://www.jwz.org/blog/2015/01/chinese-bittorrent-the-gift...

Careful. This guy doesn't like HN and you'll get a picture of a testicle if you click.

what a guy

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

#185

Post by swat535 »

jedberg wrote: post #11
hungryhobbit wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you think the police are actually policing the internet? Even if you didn't mean your local police, and meant a national body like the FBI, the truth is they focus on other crimes (eg. child abuse), and even then they are woefully unable to handle even most of those crimes. The vast, vast majority of copyright enforcement comes from copyright holders ... not the internet copyright police.

Of course not. But first a copyright holder tells the police, and then the police enforce it. The police rarely find crimes on their own -- they are almost always acting on a request from someone else.

Nitpick but police follow the courts, not the copyright holders.

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

#186

Post by Suzuran »

account42 wrote: post #159
daneel_w wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, prime example of a chilling effect where the fear of a lawsuit stops people from engaging in perfectly legal activities. It's unfortunate that copyright law does not concern itself with collateral damage like this.

This is not collateral damage, this is the intended effect - decreasing their competition, legal or otherwise.

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

#187

Post by geon »

numpad0 wrote: post #50
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…

Because music & movie industries hate P2P in general? That basically killed P2P dead in 2000s as it was becoming the next generation of decentralized Web. Maybe it's about time to revisit it? It's just the matter of how to enforce DRM. They shouldn't care in this day and age with plenty ways to get licensing sorted out.

Dead? It is as alive as ever.

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

#188

Post by geon »

jeroenhd wrote: post #83
SXX wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Especially since most of the traffic that will go through there is probably copyright infringement? Copyright infinging materials dont go "though" trackers. Trackers only keep torrent hashes and lists of peers.

So do torrent websites like the pirate bay. That doesn't protect pirates from getting sued to hell and back or even receiving prison sentences from the court.

Torrent sites also keep metadata. Often detailed, telling exactly what media is getting its copyright infringed.

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

#189

Post by ChoGGi »

globular-toast wrote: post #153
jldugger wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It can be: https://www.jwz.org/blog/2015/01/chinese-bittorrent-the-gift...

Careful. This guy doesn't like HN and you'll get a picture of a testicle if you click.

Better than goatse

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

#190

Post by CactusRocket »

ck45 wrote: post #38

My first thought is, how many BitTorrent clients have vulnerable parsing code? Could a malicious actor register the domain and infect clients?

I don't really think so. The tracker is just a tiny part of the whole Bittorrent setup, and it's only really used by clients to get a list of peers. It's basically just an HTTP call to the tracker, returning a response. The only thing that I can quickly think of is returning some malformed bencode which could cause a memory exhaustion a client written by a novice.

The peer protocol (and variants, like uTP) are much more interesting to attack, and you don't need to host a tracker for that, you can just get peer IPs from trackers or DHT, connect, and do your magic.

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