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Posted by dgellow 4 days ago

Crawling BitTorrent DHTs for Fun and Profit [pdf](www.usenix.org)
109 points | 42 comments
hdgr 22 hours ago|
Bitmagnet -https://bitmagnet.io/ - does exactly that. I left it running for a few weeks and then stopped the crawler. Didn't expect much, but still somewhat disappointed by the garbage it reeled in.
NegativeLatency 21 hours ago||
I've had one running for over a year now, it's replaced my usage of regular torrent sites completely, there is a lot of junk, and it gets stale, but it's still a better experience than most of the public trackers out there IMO
qingcharles 21 hours ago|||
Are you running it at home?

I built one with a nice TUI to run on a VPS so I can try and find rare magazine torrents, but Hetzner were upset about it. I need to find it a new home. It was a very good citizen, but it still raised too many flags.

NegativeLatency 14 hours ago|||
yes but with a VPN to my seedbox, all the egress from the docker containers its running in goes through this: https://github.com/passteque/gluetun

the seedbox is through https://www.feralhosting.com used them for over 10 years now and they've been great (shared hosting so I have linuxbrew setup there, but no docker sadly)

fc417fc802 19 hours ago||||
I think generally you have to be very conservative about how you use ultra cheap hosts like hetzner simply due to the economics. Either find a more expensive service that will exert more effort towards discretion or alternatively spend $5 per month on a VPN that's friendly to torrents.
farnsworthfusor 18 hours ago||
I heard the more money you're paying them the more lenient they are.

For cheap hosts look for ones that allow tor exit nodes if you're looking for ones that allow funny stuff. There are some that allow it for ideological reasons. Look through the hundreds on lowendtalk. On that forum you can even ask the providers directly if they allow it.

k4rli 21 hours ago||||
Runs fine at home. I've indexed 20M+ torrents in last few months running it during the day. With Prowlarr (or similar) it could easily replace other indexers.
NoMoreNicksLeft 21 hours ago|||
Which magazines?
qingcharles 20 hours ago||
Anything I don't have! Sometimes I'll find a torrent and no seeds/peers and I'll wonder if there is another torrent out there that has the same files in it somewhere that I can find.

The other day it was trying to track down some older High Times issues that were torrented but the torrent is dead. Last night it was a mag titled Films & Filming which I know is scanned, but I can't find anywhere.

toomuchtodo 20 hours ago|||
Can I get a copy for the Internet Archive? Will take as much of the corpus as you’re willing to provide.

(no affiliation with them)

qingcharles 14 hours ago||
I'm starting to upload everything very soon. I have >4million magazines here so far I think. Feel free to email me on my profile :)
HugoTea 6 hours ago||
Do you have old 2000s era Argos catalogues? Argos is a shop in the UK, I've been tracking down old catalogues to see if my childhood CD player is in there, can't find evidence of it anywhere and so many were made. The catalogues are sort of rare but were given away for free, now people sell old ones on ebay
NoMoreNicksLeft 18 hours ago|||
High Times is mostly on archive.org, if you need that one. I'd sort of like the film-making one, I'll put some time into that. On my list of periodicals, I think the count's up to 500 that I consider important enough to archive and I'm nowhere near done with it.
qingcharles 14 hours ago||
Yeah, I have the High Times from archive.org, but it's missing a lot of issues which were torrented at some point. If there's anything you need send me an email on my profile.
plusfour 19 hours ago||||
Same here, for over a year. how many torrents has yours indexed?
NegativeLatency 14 hours ago||
28M
plusfour 46 minutes ago||
27. it's creating about 20k a day.
gonzalohm 17 hours ago||||
How much space do you need to store the index?
knowaveragejoe 4 hours ago|||
The factor that determines this most is how much of the files metadata for each torrent you choose to keep, which is configurable.
plusfour 15 hours ago|||
160gb for 27m torrents
drdexebtjl 21 hours ago|||
I disabled mine because it was constantly writing to my SSD.
Modified3019 12 hours ago|||
In case you haven’t considered, HDDs work great for this, since write wear out isn’t really a factor for those. ZFS can also help batch together TXG’s until they hit time or size limits before commit it at once to the disk.
felooboolooomba 21 hours ago|||
I solved it by storing the data on /dev/null
futune 13 hours ago|||
If /dev/null is fast and web scale, I will use it.
Daviey 20 hours ago||||
The writes are insanely fast.
spwa4 4 hours ago||
The reads are even faster.
permalac 20 hours ago|||
Pretty big space.
muyuu 18 hours ago|||
probably worth adding some ML filter to it because yeah, most of the bulky stuff in bittorrent is always going to be garbage - a lot like the internet generally, the value is in filtering the good stuff out
infinite_spin 16 hours ago||
out of curiosity, what kind of junk/garbage is typical?
yeeeloit 14 hours ago||
ungodly amounts of porn.
qingcharles 20 hours ago|||
This is a good tip, thanks. I'll probably replace my home-grown scanner for this one.
naikrovek 7 hours ago||
why the hell does that require a postgres database instance? has no one heard of sqlite?

"It's just `docker compose up` dude." that's not excuse for unnecessary complexity. software for a single person should be a single binary that anyone can run how they choose. If they want to use Docker, great. If they want to run it in a terminal, great. If they want to run it on a server, great. If they want to run it on their phone, great.

developers: avoid limiting people artificially like this. There is no way that Sqlite is insufficient for this.

knowaveragejoe 4 hours ago||
The database gets quite large and the developers put in a lot of effort for tuning it for searchability.
gritzko 21 hours ago||
2010. I remember those times. I was doing these things for science in 2008. Performance-wise, PEX was much faster than DHT. At least, in my setting.

This year, I was giving it as an assignment to students. Does not take much time with LLMs.

the8472 18 hours ago||
Crawling has been somewhat simplified with BEP 51

https://bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0051.html

hackingonempty 22 hours ago||
(2010)
CommanderData 10 hours ago||
I saw mention of Sybil's, hasn't this been patched effectively making techniques of quick discovery though many DHT nodes much more expensive and slower.

You would need a unique IP to overcome this per n nodes. That could be tens of thousands of IPs.

Boss0565 20 hours ago||
old paper
MoonWalk 20 hours ago|
The article neglects to define "DHT" before using it.
ivanjermakov 20 hours ago||
Distributed hash table - ButTorrent extension for discovering torrent's seeders by advertising its hash across known peer pool, think of it as a distributed tracker. Contrary to traditional way of asking a known tracker for peers of that torrent.

Its algorithm is very elegant, using binary search on peers' and torrents' hashes, narrowing down to peers that are more likely to be seeders (or at least know some).

https://www.bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0005.html

loeg 20 hours ago||
Not a P2P innovation with Bittorrent, FWIW. Kademlia DHT (used in eMule/LimeWire/Gnutella P2P networks) long predates Bittorrent.
drbscl 2 hours ago|||
> The BitTorrent community has responded to these trends by deploying decentralizing tracking systems based on distributed hash tables (DHTs).

No it doesn't. Before you try to correct me, the abstract never counts ;)