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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

#71

Post by lossolo »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #60
aidenn0 wrote: post #13

IANAL, but my understanding is that running a content-neutral tracker is legal in the US. In other jurisdictions it most certainly is not, and the VPS maybe in a different jurisdiction and the .si TLD definitely is.

Googling, there's been at least one tracker shut down by US law enforcement, EliteTorrents [2005] https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2005-may-26-fi-torre... I think there have probably been more. There are definitely more that had civil suits with MPAA etc suing for damages. It may be somewhat harder to make the case in the US, but a tracker where a great majority of what's listed is copyrighted, I'm pretty sure…

I remember the day they shut down ET. It was because they released some major blockbuster movie before its premiere.

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

#72

Post by drob518 »

KomoD wrote: post #63
gpm wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not saying it's illegal to "run a torrent tracker". When Blizzard use to (pre 2015) update Starcraft via torrent I assume they ran their own tracker for that, and that was totally legal. Even if there was some way for a pirate to take advantage of the Blizzard tracker. Here it's not the "mere fact that somebody could use your tracker for piracy". It's that you're literally observing that a bunch of old mostly-pir…

> It's that you're literally observing that a bunch of old mostly-piracy torrents are pointing at this domain, and then deciding to turn this domain back into a service which assists in that piracy. He doesn't know if they're mostly piracy or not, all he sees is a hash and the peers.

Exactly.

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

#73

Post by k-ian »

layer8 wrote: post #65

> So… the domain is available now. Not really? OP seems to want to sell it for $10000: https://www.dynadot.com/market/user-listings/demonii.si

yeah turns out Dynadot enforces a 7 day wait on deleting the domain and it's only been 6 days. should be free for registration on June 18 (i assume in 3 hrs if they mean UTC)

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

#74

Post by EvanAnderson »

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'm thinking of the Jon Evans novel "Invisible Armies" and the "bug" / backdoor in the P2P software that it's author users to pwm machines.

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

#77

Post by asa400 »

nneonneo wrote: post #31

Now I'm wondering: with the wide range of bittorrent clients out there, and the fact that many are written in unsafe languages, could it be possible for some of them to be exploited through a malicious tracker? It would not surprise me if some of these clients misbehave if fed malformed data from a tracker.

I've written hobby-quality clients and I think the answer is yes. First, you're dealing with input from a server you don't control, and second, you're doing quite a bit of interaction with the filesystem. It's hard enough to write a functional client in a memory safe language, getting it correct in C or C++ is bound to be pretty tough.

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

#78

Post by fshafique »

nneonneo wrote: post #31

Now I'm wondering: with the wide range of bittorrent clients out there, and the fact that many are written in unsafe languages, could it be possible for some of them to be exploited through a malicious tracker? It would not surprise me if some of these clients misbehave if fed malformed data from a tracker.

That's what I was hoping the author would explore.
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