Would YOU donate your idle CPU cycles to TankieTube?
I was just setting up remote runners for TankieTube when I had an epiphany:
I could ask comrades to volunteer their own computers!
That way those who can't or don't care to donate monetarily could still contribute.
How would it work?
Conceptually, you can think of it like a crypto mining botnet. Except it transcodes videos for the community instead of producing heat for individual profit. And it's voluntary ofc.
It can run on any operating system with an internet connection. I'm going to use my gaming desktop and at least one VPS.
Tech level required: comfortable copy-and-pasting things into a CLI.
OpSec considerations: negligable as far as I can tell. There is no P2P involved. Your computer talks directly to the TankieTube server using sicko-to-HTTPS communication. The server would see your IP address, but that's always the case on every website.
Thoughts?
Edit: Email TankieTanuki@pm.me if you want to help beta test a machine. I could use help creating a docker image too because I'm not experienced with that (I still prefer to do everything with Bash scripts).
Video decoders are all written in C and almost certainly full of exploitable bugs, thus people participating in this are making their personal computers vulnerable to attack via manipulated video files. You'd at least want this sandboxed as much as possible, and have it run as it's own user.
Yes. Video decoders are complex software and ffmpeg has a long history of security patches. If those are the bugs we caught, what's left?
Is this any more dangerous than BitTorrenting anime?
Not really except that tankietube is probably more of a target than random anime pirates. But comrades, if you have a need for decent opsec, don't be sailing the high seas.
This seems more like the sort of thing to run on something you can periodically nuke, and maybe put behind an external firewall that only allows communication with the tankietube servers. Maybe some comrades have spare credit on a cloud provider that would be suited for this.
This is a great idea but unfortunately security is always a concern.
edit: sorry if you got hit with a bunch of notifications, the reply was silently failing and I didn't know what was going on so I retried oops
Ffmpeg is used by everybody so you'd hope people are looking at it, but I'm sure there's security bugs in there, and probably plenty of them, since it's C parser/decoder code, probably the most dangerous kind of code. I think web browsers do some kind of sandboxing around ffmpeg, plus web browser restrict the kinds of formats they support, but ffmpeg (and peertube?) supports a lot more, many of which will not be audited/fuzzed to the same degree.
Ideally this would be sandboxed so much it can't call anything but read(2) and write(2). I have no idea if any of this software does any sandboxing at all.
Is this any more dangerous than BitTorrenting anime?
Maybe, depends on the what exactly you're worried about. There's potentially political actors that might be interested in fucking with tankie.tube, whereas you can't really target anyone specifically with bittorrent. Also the attacker knows exactly what software will be used to decode the videos, which makes this easier to exploit. I assume that videos can get uploaded to tankie.tube by basically anybody, and those videos would be sent out to be transcoded on random people's machines?
If you assume tankie.tube (maybe peertube in general) is just too small to be on anyone's radar, then that's probably fine.
Ffmpeg is used by everybody so you'd hope people are looking at it, but I'm sure there's security bugs in there, and probably plenty of them, since it's C parser/decoder code, probably the most dangerous kind of code. I think web browsers do some kind of sandboxing around ffmpeg, plus web browser restrict the kinds of formats they support, but ffmpeg (and peertube?) supports a lot more, many of which will not be audited/fuzzed to the same degree.
Ideally this would be sandboxed so much it can't call anything but read(2) and write(2). I have no idea if any of this software does any sandboxing at all.
Is this any more dangerous than BitTorrenting anime?
Maybe, depends on the what exactly you're worried about. There's potentially political actors that might be interested in fucking with tankie.tube, whereas you can't really target anyone specifically with bittorrent. Also the attacker knows exactly what software will be used to decode the videos, which makes this easier to exploit. I assume that videos can get uploaded to tankie.tube by basically anybody, and those videos would be sent out to be transcoded on random people's machines?
If you assume tankie.tube (maybe peertube in general) is just too small to be on anyone's radar, then that's probably fine.
Yes. Video decoders are complex software and ffmpeg has a long history of security patches. If those are the bugs we caught, what's left?
Is this any more dangerous than BitTorrenting anime?
Not really except that tankietube is probably more of a target than random anime pirates. But comrades, if you have a need for decent opsec, don't be sailing the high seas.
This seems more like the sort of thing to run on something you can nuke when you're done with it, and maybe put behind an external firewall that only allows communication with the tankietube servers. Maybe some comrades have spare credit on a cloud provider that would be suited for this.
Yes. Video decoders are complex software and ffmpeg has a long history of security patches. If those are the bugs we caught, what's left?
Is this any more dangerous than BitTorrenting anime?
Not really except that tankietube is probably more of a target than random anime pirates. But comrades, if you have a need for decent opsec, don't be sailing the high seas.
This seems more like the sort of thing to run on something you can nuke when you're done with it, and maybe put behind an external firewall that only allows communication with the tankietube servers. Maybe some comrades have spare credit on a cloud provider that would be suited for this.
Yes. Video decoders are complex software and ffmpeg has a long history of security patches. If those are the bugs we caught, what's left?
Is this any more dangerous than BitTorrenting anime?
Not really except that tankietube is probably more of a target than random anime pirates. But comrades, if you have a need for decent opsec, don't be sailing the high seas.
This seems more like the sort of thing to run on something you can nuke when you're done with it, and maybe put behind an external firewall that only allows communication with the tankietube servers. Maybe some comrades have spare credit on a cloud provider that would be suited for this.
I've got a couple machines lying around, and due to set up a server some point soon, so I'd be all down to contribute with that. Even if there are possible sec concerns (which I don't know if there are without looking harder), I'd personally sandbox it all anyway.
I think this would best work by writing up a simple Dockerfile for Docker or Podman (one may already exist out there) and at minimum containerizing the work. That level of constraint is likely all that's needed and the end user can also control how much CPU is used, the networking interface to possibly proxy the connection if desired, and what directories are accessible.
Alternatively, a VM could accomplish the same in terms of safety. Of course a VM requires a pre-allocated block of RAM and a full guest OS installation.