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Static torrent website with peer-to-peer queries over BitTorrent on 2M records

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Re: Static torrent website with peer-to-peer queries over BitTorrent on 2M records

#61

Post by alex_duf »

akomtu wrote: post #36
singron wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately this is still killable. Someone needs to periodically publish up to date databases using some outside protocol. Also if you participate in the public DHT, then your participation is public and can have consequences on your real-life legal entity. If you want to use TOR and onion sites, I don't think this really adds anything to those. I think this just helps you optionaly crowdsource bandwidth.

With a simple protocol on top it can be quite resilient. The database is updated only by a group of 3 admins, who perform the update once a week. When one admin initiates an update, the other two ask him the passphrase. If the answer is "tomato" (means "I'm compromised"), the update is rejected and they find another admin. Regular users are generally safe: the laws dont punish downloaders, only uploaders. You can exp…

Make it 10 and it's still not unlikely to have law enforcement simultaneously break 10 doors at the same time.

The distribution technology is really interesting but certainly not censorship proof.

Re: Static torrent website with peer-to-peer queries over BitTorrent on 2M records

#62

Post by octoberfranklin »

reggieband wrote: post #53
pizza wrote: post #2

Yup. Calling it. This is the future, may not seem like it to everyone but this is a part of actually new and extremely useful, passively scalable technology. Imagine (good) unkillable zombie databases- so long as the name of a piece of data is known (its hash).. someone, somewhere, might make it possible for you to answer your query, without even needing to setup a server setup.. that’s _it_! Not to mention it might…

This idea touches on (or rather, even expands on) an idea I've had brewing for a while. For those unfamiliar, there is a programming language called Unison [1] that has a nice feature where each function is identified by a hash of its AST. I often thought a cluster environment, maybe something BEAM-ish, would be an interesting idea where functions are retrievable based on a pair of (`func-name`, `hash`). You could ha…

This approach to mobile code in functional languages has been tried repeatedly since the 1990s.

> each function is identified by a hash of its AST.

That encoding for mobile code only works if the expression has no free variables (i.e. is closed).

It turns out that it is surprisingly difficult to write code which you can be sure has no free variables at particular points (the "send this code to another machine for execution" points). Especially in functional languages. If you write a higher-order functional, you know nothing about the closedness of its argument. If you require that all function arguments be closed it breaks all the useful functional programming techniques. The only way to make it workable is to check closedness only on those values which need to be mobile.

If you do the closedness-check at runtime, toy examples will work fine and the technique looks quite powerful, but once your codebase gets to a meaningful level of complexity it turns into a game of whack-a-mole with closedness heisenbugs. You quickly discover that closedness is data-dependent.

In order to check closedness statically you need quite a sophisticated system of modal types. MetaOCaml was the most usable result of all this research:

https://okmij.org/ftp/ML/MetaOCaml.html

The important upshot here is that this isn't just some check you can slap onto the compiler. The programmer has to think about these types, and craft them carefully, as an integral part of the programming process. Basically you aren't just writing a program, you're writing a program plus a proof that it won't try to mobilize open code. Writing formal machine-checked proofs is not something that most programmers are good at.

Re: Static torrent website with peer-to-peer queries over BitTorrent on 2M records

#64

Post by MaxikCZ »

anamax wrote: post #57
akomtu wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With a simple protocol on top it can be quite resilient. The database is updated only by a group of 3 admins, who perform the update once a week. When one admin initiates an update, the other two ask him the passphrase. If the answer is "tomato" (means "I'm compromised"), the update is rejected and they find another admin. Regular users are generally safe: the laws dont punish downloaders, only uploaders. You can exp…

> Regular users are generally safe: the laws dont punish downloaders, only uploaders. Are you sure about that. The downloader is the one making the copy. The uploader is merely inducing the creation of said copy. Yes, it's easier/more efficient to go after the uploader, but that doesn't immunize the downloader. > Don't forget that the admins can be in different countries, making their legal pursuit a nightmare. The U…

At least in Czech republic, there is no penalty for downloading copyrighted content. You are, by law, entitled to it, as you might get yourself a copy of what you already own. Bought a film on DVD? You can legaly download it from wherever.

This all ends once you start uploading it, tho. You cant upload it, period. Problem with torrents is theres no checkbox to signal "stricly no upload", you can only set limit to few kb/s to minimize this issue, but technically even few bits can still get you prosecuted.

(edit: following is wrong, perhaps germany is same as Czech, see child comment) In Germany, its a different story. You cant even donwload, not by torrent or even from sites. I know of people receiving fines in their mailboxes with IP/Date/Site/Material list and finig each piece by ~200€.

Re: Static torrent website with peer-to-peer queries over BitTorrent on 2M records

#65

Post by TimJRobinson »

encryptluks2 wrote: post #49
RF_Savage wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep. This very well could be the future for sites with static content that does not change often.

This isn't a static site. It is dynamic requiring a lot of frameworks. I can think of a lot of better ways to accomplish something similar, especially with IPFS.

By static they mean no server side processing / can be hosted on a CDN.

If you know better ways of doing this you should describe them.

Re: Static torrent website with peer-to-peer queries over BitTorrent on 2M records

#67

Post by Timwi »

MaxikCZ wrote: post #64
anamax wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Regular users are generally safe: the laws dont punish downloaders, only uploaders. Are you sure about that. The downloader is the one making the copy. The uploader is merely inducing the creation of said copy. Yes, it's easier/more efficient to go after the uploader, but that doesn't immunize the downloader. > Don't forget that the admins can be in different countries, making their legal pursuit a nightmare. The U…

At least in Czech republic, there is no penalty for downloading copyrighted content. You are, by law, entitled to it, as you might get yourself a copy of what you already own. Bought a film on DVD? You can legaly download it from wherever. This all ends once you start uploading it, tho. You cant upload it, period. Problem with torrents is theres no checkbox to signal "stricly no upload", you can only set limit to few…

Your information about Germany is incorrect. The legal situation here is the same as what you described for the Czech Republic. You can download anything anywhere. What's illegal is making stuff publicly available, and BitTorrent uploading falls under that.

Source: was caught and got council from a copyright lawyer.

Re: Static torrent website with peer-to-peer queries over BitTorrent on 2M records

#68

Post by MaxikCZ »

Timwi wrote: post #67
MaxikCZ wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least in Czech republic, there is no penalty for downloading copyrighted content. You are, by law, entitled to it, as you might get yourself a copy of what you already own. Bought a film on DVD? You can legaly download it from wherever. This all ends once you start uploading it, tho. You cant upload it, period. Problem with torrents is theres no checkbox to signal "stricly no upload", you can only set limit to few…

Your information about Germany is incorrect. The legal situation here is the same as what you described for the Czech Republic. You can download anything anywhere. What's illegal is making stuff publicly available, and BitTorrent uploading falls under that. Source: was caught and got council from a copyright lawyer.

Thanks for correction! Looks like the letters sent were torrent regarded, then. I also knew of most sites to download from were being blocked at every possible level (ISPs, landlord...), so I connected those two in a wrong way

Re: Static torrent website with peer-to-peer queries over BitTorrent on 2M records

#69

Post by Semaphor »

Timwi wrote: post #67
MaxikCZ wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least in Czech republic, there is no penalty for downloading copyrighted content. You are, by law, entitled to it, as you might get yourself a copy of what you already own. Bought a film on DVD? You can legaly download it from wherever. This all ends once you start uploading it, tho. You cant upload it, period. Problem with torrents is theres no checkbox to signal "stricly no upload", you can only set limit to few…

Your information about Germany is incorrect. The legal situation here is the same as what you described for the Czech Republic. You can download anything anywhere. What's illegal is making stuff publicly available, and BitTorrent uploading falls under that. Source: was caught and got council from a copyright lawyer.

Pretty sure you can’t download either. But the fines would be very low, so instead they go after uploaders, convince the court it’s "commercial distribution", values skyrocket and for a small 1000€ fee you can make the problem go away.

Re: Static torrent website with peer-to-peer queries over BitTorrent on 2M records

#70

Post by bscphil »

khimaros wrote: post #22
bscphil wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> so long as the name of a piece of data is known (its hash) But that's also the fatal flaw. It's pretty definitionally true of stuff on the web that the person who owns / controls it wants to be able to change / update it. That isn't really supported at all at present for this distribution method, and it's hard to see how it could be in the future without introducing a single choke point. Case in point: the vast maj…

despite the downvotes, there is some substance to this. mutability is useful. however, as implemented, all that is needed is for the user of p2psearch to refresh and the browser to pick up the latest database. i imagine most users are not keeping torrent search open 24/7, so this doesn't seem onerous. it's probably a bit of a process for the host of the frontend to update the database, prepare a new torrent, update t…

> it's probably a bit of a process for the host of the frontend to update the database

Right, I suppose I didn't put my point very well, but as I see it there are only two options:

* Everyone gets their code (with the built-in torrent for the database) from the same source, presumably the source that created / seeds the database. In this case the host is arguably just as vulnerable to the authorities as The Pirate Bay. If p2psearch doesn't make torrenting more resilient than TPB, what purpose does it serve?

* One brave citizen creates and hosts a single copy of the database, and it goes viral. Lots of people host it. It never gets updated, because the whole point of using IPFS / torrents is that everything can be addressed statically. In this case the advantage of p2psearch is obvious - it functions as a DHT with a built-in search that is more or less impossible to take down! On the other hand, the lack of mutability greatly reduces the value, since as I said in my OP most torrenting is focused on new releases.

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