5 ms·

why don't these kinds of sites distribute their database in the same way they distribute their content? At least that way if shit goes south the information is

why don't these kinds of sites distribute their database in the same way they distribute their content? At least that way if shit goes south the information is still out there even if the curation and "updates" to it will no longer happen.

optionalparens 10y ago
There are peer-to-peer sharing options that have tried to do this (now and previously), but aren't widely adopted in the face of bit torrent. Most private trackers are using the same pretty dismal PHP bit torrent tracker libraries/servers that work with mysql or sqlite. It would of course be possible to replicate these or do something as simple as cron jobs, rsync, etc., but that's not often the real issue. The larger issue is the legal aspect. Most of the time a big tracker is taken down, the owners are known to authorities or don't want to risk being known, even by association. As such, continuing the same site, even under different management would put them at risk. If I remember in the case of what.cd and a few others, they put out notices saying they intentionally nuked their databases for this among other reasons. If for example a big site shuts down and one of the members spins up a new instance, the fear is that the original owners would be liable. It doesn't matter if this holds up or not in court or is even a real thing, merely the threat of it is not worth the trouble to many people. Not many people want to sign up to go to jail or deal with financial threats because of sharing movies or music. Distributing the database doesn't solve the legal aspect. In fact, distributing the database might be seen as more ammunition to threaten the original site admins as being "enablers." So in theory what you are saying makes sense and would be a good idea, but in the face of reality and human behavior, it is much harder and more than a technical issue.
- cryptarch 10y ago
  Why not: one crew builds great P2P software, another uses it? I mean, I do feel like we're ready to start jailing/extrajudicially punishing people just for writing software that the copyright lobby/intelligence community doesn't like, because it makes piracy/privacy more accessible, but it'd be a first for someone not involved in actually commiting piracy to wind up in the sights of the copyright lobby. In the Netherlands everyone has to pay a premium on CD's and DVD's, "for rightsholders", which goes to some shady copyright organization which distributes part of the money to top-40 artists. I don't think "copyright tax" on all storage media is a much larger step, nor do I think government-mandated DRM is. Not having "the right to tinker" like we do now already comes pretty close.
  - optionalparens 10y ago
    Probably not, but IANAL. In the world of big companies and even governments coming after you, it becomes hard to claim innocence when conspiracy charges are levied. Using things that enable further proliferation tend to add to the charges and make the case. Chinese walls/firewalls don't quite hold up in court as well as one might think. Obviously it can depend on the country and circumstances, but anytime people feel there is a criminal conspiracy at work, they come up you hard. It is also hard to keep such a wall "clean" as all it takes is one person being stupid to establish a link. Again, it's also about fear and human nature, not reality. I'm sure there are people with great opsec and planning who don't have this problem, but they also don't necessarily attract enough attention to get shut down. Factor in that many admins start a site because of ego, and that doesn't lead to great opsec. Nor do most people want to use software they know nothing about. I should probably add FWIW, married to a prosecutor who goes after international criminal conspiracies among other things. Not the computer stuff thankfully, but I've seen and heard about what happens when the words criminal conspiracy get thrown about and people with money are involved. Doubly dangerous when extradition treaties exist or the country handling the case is a bigger power like the US.
    - cryptarch 10y ago
      I do feel like it'd be prudent to wait until everyone I love has died, before I even publicly speak about these issues. Power is not something we as a race have learned to tame, and we currently have a bunch of very powerful actors who hate piracy (and free-spirited citizens in general). You can call my fear paranoia, but is it that if you really are constantly being watched by the invisible eyes of powerful and ruthless interest groups and government agencies? I do wonder how much cooperation there is between the copyright lobby and intelligence agencies. Their interests and arenas are very much alligned. Chilling effects matter a lot, and that is part of the reason I do choose to speak up, though it gives me more anxiety than I'd like to have. I can't imagine what a hell it must be to run an actual illegal pirate network.
      - optionalparens 10y ago
cryptarch 10y ago
I'm not sure, I've never run such a site myself. Maybe someone behind 7 proxies could explain? I do think this could be solved, with for instance public-key addressed content (e.g., a DHT where the content is references to files, addressed by pubkey and muteable only to the owner of the corresponding private key). I've been trying to figure out why this isn't done in practice for a while now. Maybe it's a selection bias, where all dark file distribution networks run that well/securely drop off the map completely?
pervycreeper 10y ago
I think it boils down to the culture of those kinds of sites, which reportedly encourage an elitist secret club type of mindset over one which encourages preservation or dissemination of information.
- 1337biz 10y ago
  Interesting topic! People are ptobably also feeling more motivate to contribute in an isolated community than to some greater good perspective.
- orik 10y ago
  You can try to critique the culture of What.CD but the truth is that WCD did a better job at preserving music than a community with the express purpose of 'preserving or disseminating information' would have done. The mindset cultivated seeders with the fear of getting kicked out if one was a bad peer / leech; ratios, bounties and freeleech items created a gamification for uploading material and seeding otherwise unpopular items for other users.
  - xg15 10y ago
    ...until it all was gone.
  - pervycreeper 10y ago
    Why can't both those goals be combined?
  - joeberon 10y ago
    Yeah but now that is all for nothing. They could release the torrent database but they're not gonna are they? There's just too much pride attached to it to let it go.
    - legatus 10y ago
      Well, the database contains data about users too... doing so would put users at risk. An interesting concept is ZeroNet [1], which allows entire websites to be shared in a peer to peer way. [1] https://zeronet.io/ https://zeronet.io/
biggerfisch 10y ago
Some of the current sites still up are likely to be exploring their options in that regard. The core problem comes down to the fact that a (potential) compromise (as in w.cd) results in the admins hitting the Big Red Button and nuking everything from orbit. Additionally, while much metadata was lost in w.cd's demise, a large amount of the files have already been recovered through various replacements.
- voltagex_ 10y ago
  Where did w.cd disperse to?
  - cryptarch 10y ago
    Here's a good article on that: https://torrentfreak.com/what-cd-is-dead-but-the-torrent-hydra-lives-on-161202/ https://torrentfreak.com/what-cd-is-dead-but-the-torrent-hyd...
- ue_ 10y ago
  Do you have any idea where to? I was going to do the WCD interview a few days before it closed for good, not knowing this would happen.
  - cryptarch 10y ago
    https://torrentfreak.com/what-cd-is-dead-but-the-torrent-hydra-lives-on-161202/ https://torrentfreak.com/what-cd-is-dead-but-the-torrent-hyd...

optionalparens 10y ago

There are peer-to-peer sharing options that have tried to do this (now and previously), but aren't widely adopted in the face of bit torrent. Most private trackers are using the same pretty dismal PHP bit torrent tracker libraries/servers that work with mysql or sqlite. It would of course be possible to replicate these or do something as simple as cron jobs, rsync, etc., but that's not often the real issue. The larger issue is the legal aspect. Most of the time a big tracker is taken down, the owners are known to authorities or don't want to risk being known, even by association. As such, continuing the same site, even under different management would put them at risk. If I remember in the case of what.cd and a few others, they put out notices saying they intentionally nuked their databases for this among other reasons. If for example a big site shuts down and one of the members spins up a new instance, the fear is that the original owners would be liable. It doesn't matter if this holds up or not in court or is even a real thing, merely the threat of it is not worth the trouble to many people. Not many people want to sign up to go to jail or deal with financial threats because of sharing movies or music. Distributing the database doesn't solve the legal aspect. In fact, distributing the database might be seen as more ammunition to threaten the original site admins as being "enablers." So in theory what you are saying makes sense and would be a good idea, but in the face of reality and human behavior, it is much harder and more than a technical issue.

cryptarch 10y ago
Why not: one crew builds great P2P software, another uses it? I mean, I do feel like we're ready to start jailing/extrajudicially punishing people just for writing software that the copyright lobby/intelligence community doesn't like, because it makes piracy/privacy more accessible, but it'd be a first for someone not involved in actually commiting piracy to wind up in the sights of the copyright lobby. In the Netherlands everyone has to pay a premium on CD's and DVD's, "for rightsholders", which goes to some shady copyright organization which distributes part of the money to top-40 artists. I don't think "copyright tax" on all storage media is a much larger step, nor do I think government-mandated DRM is. Not having "the right to tinker" like we do now already comes pretty close.
- optionalparens 10y ago
  Probably not, but IANAL. In the world of big companies and even governments coming after you, it becomes hard to claim innocence when conspiracy charges are levied. Using things that enable further proliferation tend to add to the charges and make the case. Chinese walls/firewalls don't quite hold up in court as well as one might think. Obviously it can depend on the country and circumstances, but anytime people feel there is a criminal conspiracy at work, they come up you hard. It is also hard to keep such a wall "clean" as all it takes is one person being stupid to establish a link. Again, it's also about fear and human nature, not reality. I'm sure there are people with great opsec and planning who don't have this problem, but they also don't necessarily attract enough attention to get shut down. Factor in that many admins start a site because of ego, and that doesn't lead to great opsec. Nor do most people want to use software they know nothing about. I should probably add FWIW, married to a prosecutor who goes after international criminal conspiracies among other things. Not the computer stuff thankfully, but I've seen and heard about what happens when the words criminal conspiracy get thrown about and people with money are involved. Doubly dangerous when extradition treaties exist or the country handling the case is a bigger power like the US.
  - cryptarch 10y ago
    I do feel like it'd be prudent to wait until everyone I love has died, before I even publicly speak about these issues. Power is not something we as a race have learned to tame, and we currently have a bunch of very powerful actors who hate piracy (and free-spirited citizens in general). You can call my fear paranoia, but is it that if you really are constantly being watched by the invisible eyes of powerful and ruthless interest groups and government agencies? I do wonder how much cooperation there is between the copyright lobby and intelligence agencies. Their interests and arenas are very much alligned. Chilling effects matter a lot, and that is part of the reason I do choose to speak up, though it gives me more anxiety than I'd like to have. I can't imagine what a hell it must be to run an actual illegal pirate network.
    - optionalparens 10y ago

cryptarch 10y ago

I'm not sure, I've never run such a site myself. Maybe someone behind 7 proxies could explain? I do think this could be solved, with for instance public-key addressed content (e.g., a DHT where the content is references to files, addressed by pubkey and muteable only to the owner of the corresponding private key). I've been trying to figure out why this isn't done in practice for a while now. Maybe it's a selection bias, where all dark file distribution networks run that well/securely drop off the map completely?

pervycreeper 10y ago

I think it boils down to the culture of those kinds of sites, which reportedly encourage an elitist secret club type of mindset over one which encourages preservation or dissemination of information.

1337biz 10y ago
Interesting topic! People are ptobably also feeling more motivate to contribute in an isolated community than to some greater good perspective.
orik 10y ago
You can try to critique the culture of What.CD but the truth is that WCD did a better job at preserving music than a community with the express purpose of 'preserving or disseminating information' would have done. The mindset cultivated seeders with the fear of getting kicked out if one was a bad peer / leech; ratios, bounties and freeleech items created a gamification for uploading material and seeding otherwise unpopular items for other users.
- xg15 10y ago
  ...until it all was gone.
- pervycreeper 10y ago
  Why can't both those goals be combined?
- joeberon 10y ago
  Yeah but now that is all for nothing. They could release the torrent database but they're not gonna are they? There's just too much pride attached to it to let it go.
  - legatus 10y ago
    Well, the database contains data about users too... doing so would put users at risk. An interesting concept is ZeroNet [1], which allows entire websites to be shared in a peer to peer way. [1] https://zeronet.io/ https://zeronet.io/

biggerfisch 10y ago

Some of the current sites still up are likely to be exploring their options in that regard. The core problem comes down to the fact that a (potential) compromise (as in w.cd) results in the admins hitting the Big Red Button and nuking everything from orbit. Additionally, while much metadata was lost in w.cd's demise, a large amount of the files have already been recovered through various replacements.

voltagex_ 10y ago
Where did w.cd disperse to?
- cryptarch 10y ago
  Here's a good article on that: https://torrentfreak.com/what-cd-is-dead-but-the-torrent-hydra-lives-on-161202/ https://torrentfreak.com/what-cd-is-dead-but-the-torrent-hyd...
ue_ 10y ago
Do you have any idea where to? I was going to do the WCD interview a few days before it closed for good, not knowing this would happen.
- cryptarch 10y ago
  https://torrentfreak.com/what-cd-is-dead-but-the-torrent-hydra-lives-on-161202/ https://torrentfreak.com/what-cd-is-dead-but-the-torrent-hyd...