Resurrecting a dead torrent tracker and finding 3 million peers
Resurrecting a dead torrent tracker and finding 3 million peers
kianbradley.com
Resurrecting a dead torrent tracker and finding 3 million peers
63 comments
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That's terrifying.
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Why?
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Because necromancy is a forbidden art
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From a security standpoint, it means tons of people are requesting unencrypted info from random domains that are possibly no longer controlled by the original owners.
This is just random speculation on possibilities, but somebody could maybe figure out the IP of a suspected pirate for example, setup a dummy tracker, wait for that IP to show up, and then compare any requested hashes against a database of known torrents. How legal and useful in court this could be would depend on the country, but it is a weak point.
At the other end of the spectrum, somebody might find some kind of security vulnerability in a popular client's tracker interface, and exploit that for malware purposes by setting up a fake tracker, but that's a bit more of a stretch.
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I'm a developer but have utterly no experience with torrent architecture, or for that matter anything outside of standard web services and the kinds of things companies do. But I've been wondering if BitTorrent technology would be usable for federating content for things such as Lemmy. After reading that somebody was begging for money to offset the $5k/month they were spending to run an instance (I mean, that shows true dedicaton but holy crap dude), it seems like a distributed architecture would make a lot more sense than somebody having to foot the bill for a big-ass server. I just personally wouldn't know where to begin on a project like that, but maybe if somebody with the right combo of skills and experience gave it some thought...
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2 years ago I talked about the core problem with federated services was the abismal scale ability.
I essentially got ridiculed.
And here we are, with incredibly predictable scaling problems.
If we refuse to acknowledge problems till they become critical, we will never grow past a blip on the corner of the internet. Protocol development is HARD and expensive.
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Yeah, volunteer moderation is also an issue, any decent ppl doing it get burnt out if they get an influx of ppl and quit also like lemm.ee
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That's the kind of thing that would be cool to do actually, but I'm not server savy enough to make a server that won't die easily under attacks
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paying in crypto is nice partly for this reason
But a lot of uneducated people will spam "crypto is a scam"
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Crypto is a scam.
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Too bad the rich control it now.
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If you mean through regulation, yes, partly
If you mean they hold most of it and thus have a total decision power, then I must disagree
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Crypto is not a scam, it's just plain stupid.
The entire idea behind it is what a third grader might come up with and think it's a great idea. It's not.
It literally requires every connected wallet to process the same transactions as everyone else. Can you imagine doing billions of transactions per day this way? It is extremely inefficient and yes, this is one of the reasons why even the relatively low amount of transactions that Bitcoin processes costs more electricity than a small modern country.
It's in a way comparable to a cpu doing 6+7 in a single CPU cycle whilst AI needs to burn down a forest to answer the same question
Crypto is stupid.
I get what its trying to replace and i agree that the current system sucks as well for a long list of reasons, but crypto is NOT the solution. A fundamentally different system must be designed to be able to solve the issues that crypto is trying to solve
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It literally requires every connected wallet to process the same transactions as everyone else.
wat?
wallets don't process any transactions other than yours. and even then, wallets do the easy work.
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You don’t understand how crypto works it seems
It literally requires every connected wallet to process the same transactions as everyone else
That’s misleading. Your wallet scans blocks for transactions that goes to your wallet, but this is super fast for many cryptocurrencies. Wallets usually sync in seconds.
this is one of the reasons why even the relatively low amount of transactions that Bitcoin processes costs more electricity than a small modern country.
No. The main reason is block size and block emission period. Also, you’re completely forgetting the fact that non Proof Of Work cryptocurrencies exist, and have close to 0 electricity cost
The entire idea behind it is what a third grader might come up with and think it's a great idea. It's not.
If they do they’re pretty much a fucking genius for their age
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Yes, doing illegal things secretly is a valid use case for crypto. So far, it's also the only one
63 comments
Funny how the author immediately decided to shut everything down when he realized the number of peer/torrents still sending requests to the domain.
Orphaned domains like this are interesting, there was a defcon talk, I think, where the presenter bought a bunch of blacklisted orphaned domains just to see if anything would try and connect to them. They got hit with so many botnet clients trying to phone home.
Orphaned IPs as well. If you have an IPv4 from your cloud provider and you want to retire it, you should thoroughly scrub your DNS and all other configs before doing so. Otherwise it's trivial for someone else to spin up a machine on that IP address and abuse your domain.
Yeah those orphaned domains are a goldmine for security researchers, there was a similar talk at blackhat where they showed how expired domains from major companies still recieved auth tokens and sensitive data for months after expiry.
Please post a link if you're able, that sounds like a very interesting watch.