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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

#91
post #63
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.

He did not choose the domain name by chance. He chose it because he observed it was previously in use as a tracker for copyright infringing torrents.

The police/courts/jury is not obliged to put blinders on just because you would prefer if they did.

The mere fact that the domain name was previously used for this is almost certainly probable cause to get search warrants that will almost certainly provide the requisite proof beyond a reasonable doubt that he has in fact intentionally both committed himself, and aided others in committing (because he knew what the domain name was, or at least recognized it as similar to demonoid and could guess), copyright infringement. And that's without the blog post... (which I assume in the hypothetical where he chose to keep running this he would not have posted).

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

#92
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.

There used to be a large public tracker running on .si, used widely in Slovenia where .si is from. Almost everyone who's been online in the last 20 years in Slovenia knows of or has used it. It also didn't disappear because of legal notices.

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

#93

Is there a chance if someone bought suprnova’s domain (if available), which closed in 2004, someone could finish their download if a seed were still active? Does it matter if this was pre-DHT, or does DHT go historical to cover old stuff?

Yes DHT is "historical", in the sense that it doesn't care about when your torrent was created, just the infohash.

However, most torrents created for private trackers have the "private" flag enabled, which excludes them from DHT and PEX and a few other things. You can remove this flag yourself, but you're depending on a seeder doing the same for DHT to work.

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

#94

Is there a chance if someone bought suprnova’s domain (if available), which closed in 2004, someone could finish their download if a seed were still active? Does it matter if this was pre-DHT, or does DHT go historical to cover old stuff?

DHT works as long as the client is configured to use it, so if that old seed upgraded their client they might end up automatically sharing the metadata over DHT.

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

#97
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stop using DHT and/or public trackers and you will be safe. They scan public trackers and the DHT network.

>Stop using DHT and/or public trackers a Public trackers are the only trackers most of us can reasonably use. He should get a VPN.

private trackers and warez groups are the plentiful (IPTorrents, Speed, etc) if you are a good seeder and can maintain good ratios. anyone using a public tracker in 2025 deserves anything their ISP catches them doing imo.

public trackers and torrent sites are also just 90% malware and RATs.

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

#99

Is there a chance if someone bought suprnova’s domain (if available), which closed in 2004, someone could finish their download if a seed were still active? Does it matter if this was pre-DHT, or does DHT go historical to cover old stuff?

Yes, this should work, in theory.

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

#100

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 wha…

The tracker knows what it is tracking. I used to run a TV show tracker. It would keep track of all the users upload/download ratios.
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