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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

#21

Post by rockskon »

gpm wrote: post #14
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 knowingly helping people commit crimes generally counts the same as committing the crime yourself. I.e. federally in the U.S. under 18 USC 2a https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2 The software you're running being "simple" isn't a defence for doing illegal things with it - like aiding others commit crimes. There are a few internet/copyright safe harbor provisions (in the US) that might maybe (probably…

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.

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

#22

Post by [deleted] »

gpm wrote: post #14
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 knowingly helping people commit crimes generally counts the same as committing the crime yourself. I.e. federally in the U.S. under 18 USC 2a https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2 The software you're running being "simple" isn't a defence for doing illegal things with it - like aiding others commit crimes. There are a few internet/copyright safe harbor provisions (in the US) that might maybe (probably…

[deleted]

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

#23

Post by rvnx »

rockskon wrote: post #21
gpm wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because knowingly helping people commit crimes generally counts the same as committing the crime yourself. I.e. federally in the U.S. under 18 USC 2a https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2 The software you're running being "simple" isn't a defence for doing illegal things with it - like aiding others commit crimes. There are a few internet/copyright safe harbor provisions (in the US) that might maybe (probably…

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)

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

#24

Post by leijurv »

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…

OP did actually host a tracker.

"I then started the tracker. After about an hour, it peaked at about 1.7 million distinct torrents across 3.1 million peers!"

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

#25

Post by rvnx »

zht wrote: post #12
fine_tune wrote: post #7

You bought a house that had a murder X years ago and are wondering if your guilty for the murder, probably not - aslong as you don't do more murder in it. I suppose real life is more interesting though, the guy who picked up the domain to stop the global ransomware crisis was picked up after Defcon if memory serves. Ironically your probably at more risk from the GDPR for leaking those IP addresses that connected to t…

I think it's more like you buy an abandoned house where people used to go buy drugs you buy the house and people are still coming knocking on your door asking you if you have any drugs to sell you're not doing anything wrong, but if the police notice people constantly coming to your house to buy drugs they may do something about it

Other perspective: It's more like you reopen a public place where people were known to publicly harm copyright owners and you provide technical help so they can do it again.

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

#26

Post by jauntywundrkind »

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 what peer rendezvous it's doing?

My gut is that it seems some kind of hash/magnet that folks are asking to peers on. And that the magnet itself is sufficient, and doesn't have to include anything identifying (although I believe many magnet links included some human readable description). The tracker could likely try to download this hash from the peer itself, to get the torrent info, but wouldn't really know what the torrent is or what's in it without doing the download itself.

Does that check out? How much of the magnet link is key to rendezvous? Could a tracker ignore human friendly fields, block them at ingress, to shield it's eyes?

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

#27

Post by SXX »

jedberg wrote: post #4
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…

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.

> 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.

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

#29

Post by markasoftware »

fine_tune wrote: post #7

You bought a house that had a murder X years ago and are wondering if your guilty for the murder, probably not - aslong as you don't do more murder in it. I suppose real life is more interesting though, the guy who picked up the domain to stop the global ransomware crisis was picked up after Defcon if memory serves. Ironically your probably at more risk from the GDPR for leaking those IP addresses that connected to t…

the guy (marcus hutchins) wasn't arrested for registering that domain, he was arrested for allegedly creating an unrelated piece of malware.
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