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Internet Archive breached again through stolen access tokens

bleepingcomputer.com

251–260 of 376 posts

Re: Internet Archive breached again through stolen access tokens

#251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That 0 knowledge tracker is interesting, Most actual trackers are zero knowledge. A tracker (bit of central software that handles 100+ thousand connections/second) is not a "torrent site" such as TPB, EZTV, etc. A tracker handshakes torrent clients and introduces peers to each other, it has no idea nor needs an idea that "SomeName 1080p DSPN" maps to D23F5C5AAE3D5C361476108C97557F200327718A All it needs is to store…

Oh ok, it seems to be a misconception of mine then. Mathematically a tracker would offer a function that given a hash, it returns you a list of peers with that file. While a "torrent site" like TPB or SH, would offer a search mechanism, whereby they would host an index, content hashes and english descriptors, along with a search engine. A user would then need to first use the "torrent site" to enter their search term…

> A user would then need to first use the "torrent site" to enter their search terms, and find the hash, then they would need to give the hash to a tracker, which would return the list of peers?

> Is that right?

More or less.

> In any case, each party in the transaction shares liability.

That's exactly right Bob. Just as a telephone exchange shares liability for connecting drug sellers to drug buyers when given a phone number.

Clearly the telephone exchange should know by the number that the parties intend to discuss sharing child pornography rather than public access to free to air documentaries.

How do you propose that a telephone exchange vet phone numbers to ensure drugs are not discussed?

Bear in mind that in the case of a tracker the 'call' is NOT routed through the exchange.

With a proper telephone exchange the call data (voices) pass through the exchange equipment, with a tracker no actual file content passes through the trackers hardware.

The tracker, given a number, tells interested parties about each other .. they then talk directly to each other; be it about The Sky at Night -s2024e07- 2024-10-07 Question Time or about Debbie Does Donkeys.

Also keep in mind that trackers juggle a vast volume of connections of which a very small amount would be (say) child abuse related.

Re: Internet Archive breached again through stolen access tokens

#252
post #21

We need archives built on decentralized storage. Don't get me wrong, I really like and support the work Internet Archive is doing, but preserving history is too important to entrust it solely to singular entities, which means singular points of failure.

This seems to get brought at least once in the comments for every one of these articles that pops up. The IA has tried distributing their stores, but nowhere near enough people actually put their storage where their mouths are.

Nearly every entry in the library has a torrent file (which is a distributed storage system), but with the index pages down, they're not accessible.

Re: Internet Archive breached again through stolen access tokens

#253
post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not subscribe to a seedbox? They’re about $5/2TB/mo. It protects your IP, you can buy for only the month, and since seedboxes are hosted in DMCA-resistant data centers you can download riskier torrents lightning fast, meaning you’re not just spending money for others, you can get something out of it too.

2TB of bandwidth or storage?

Bandwidth, though some provide multi-TB storage (I assume you pay out the nose however).

Re: Internet Archive breached again through stolen access tokens

#254

We need archives built on decentralized storage. Don't get me wrong, I really like and support the work Internet Archive is doing, but preserving history is too important to entrust it solely to singular entities, which means singular points of failure.

I designed a system where you could say "donate this spare 2 TB of my disk space to the Internet Archive" and the IA would push 2 TB of data to you. This system also has the property that it can be reconstructed if the IA (or whatever provider) goes away. Unfortunately, when I talked to a few archival teams (including the IA) about whether they'd be interested in using it, I either got no response or a negative one.

Why reinvent the wheel ?

There are so many proven distributed archiving systems, a lot of which are mentioned in these comments.

Re: Internet Archive breached again through stolen access tokens

#255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not subscribe to a seedbox? They’re about $5/2TB/mo. It protects your IP, you can buy for only the month, and since seedboxes are hosted in DMCA-resistant data centers you can download riskier torrents lightning fast, meaning you’re not just spending money for others, you can get something out of it too.

Any hints or recommendations on how to find a decent seedbox vendor? (working email in profile if you'd rather not name any in public)

I’ve only used r/Seedboxes on Reddit, and that’s yet to fail me. The specific one I mentioned is EvoSeedBox’s $5/mo tier with 130GB HDD + 2TB bandwidth which is all I’ve needed so far.

Re: Internet Archive breached again through stolen access tokens

#256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aren't torrents terrible at handling updates in general? If you want to make a change to the data, or even just add our remove data, you have to create a new torrent and somehow get people to update their torrent and data as well.

There's a mutable torrent extension (BEP-46) but unfortunately I don't think it's widely supported. I think IPFS/IPNS is the more likely direction.

Which IA has moved into and hasn’t found much luck in, unfortunately.

Re: Internet Archive breached again through stolen access tokens

#258
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems to get brought at least once in the comments for every one of these articles that pops up. The IA has tried distributing their stores, but nowhere near enough people actually put their storage where their mouths are.

Nearly every entry in the library has a torrent file (which is a distributed storage system), but with the index pages down, they're not accessible.

They're not using DHT?

Re: Internet Archive breached again through stolen access tokens

#259

We need archives built on decentralized storage. Don't get me wrong, I really like and support the work Internet Archive is doing, but preserving history is too important to entrust it solely to singular entities, which means singular points of failure.

I watched a hbo series about this once, I think it was called Pied Piper.

Re: Internet Archive breached again through stolen access tokens

#260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd agree with you if you live in a country where you can walk into your local library and read these for "free." For people who live where there may not even be a library, your argument makes no sense except to make the publishers richer. They typically price some of these books at "library prices" so normal people won't be able to afford them, but libraries will.

Copyright is copyright. If you don't like the idea of a publisher owning the rights to content they published doesn't mean you have a right to their content. Let alone worldwide distribution of that content. What makes you feel entitled to the content of the publisher before the copyright expires? Do you feel that you deserve access to everything because you've deemed the concept of ownership around book publishing i…

I don’t like the idea of infinite ownership, which is the current problem of copyright. The public may never be able to own these ideas and build off of them. Further, just because you own something in one country doesn’t mean you can own it in another country. For a physical example, you can’t own a gun in the US and take it to Australia.

If publishers didn’t engage in tactics like “library pricing” and preventing people from actually purchasing the books, I might feel differently. Right now, I see this archiving stuff as a Robin Hood story (which fwiw, every version of this story you may have seen/heard is probably still copyrighted) and I hope the publishers die or are replaced.

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