5 ms·

That already exists. It's called torrent trackers. There used to be one called what.cd [0] that, to me, was like the Library of Alexandria, but for music. It w

That already exists. It's called torrent trackers. There used to be one called what.cd [0] that, to me, was like the Library of Alexandria, but for music. It was burned down in the name of commercial interest. It might not be legal, but that's because the industry's interest is diametrically opposed to ours. If it's moral and worthy of support, I'll leave for you to decide. [0] https://www.vice.com/en/article/3de7vj/remembering-whatcd-the-internets-greatest-music-archive https://www.vice.com/en/article/3de7vj/remembering-whatcd-th...

DeathArrow 4y ago
Torrent trackers are useless on long term because no one will seed for infinity.
- felixg3 4y ago
  Well, then you haven't witnessed the beauty of What.cd or PTP. A bunch of data hoarders with webseeds. Find that rare promo release from 1978 on Vinyl? Check. Get a lossless copy of a professionally digitized Laserdisc release of a film? Check.
  - sam_lowry_ 4y ago
    rutracker is still good at archiving, albeit naturally biased towards Russian language. This is probably how it survives.
  - bombcar 4y ago
    For now. But to survive generations you need a continual supply of new people interested in becoming data hoarders and seeding stuff they have absolutely never watched. Which may happen for awhile, even a century. But it won't last thousands of years, unless storage space becomes infinitely big and cheap.
- malermeister 4y ago
  The beauty about it's distributed nature is that you don't need anyone seeding for infinity. You just need somebody seeding at all times and if you ever use a private tracker, you'll see that that's not an issue at all.
  - DeathArrow 4y ago
    I saw many torrents with 0 seeders. Someone will be seeding only if the interest in that content is great. Rare content won't get any seeders. Old movies don't tempt many people. I liked DC++ approach on file sharing more. If someone in the network has the file, you can get it, no matter how rare. It can be an obscure film made in 1930 or an mp3 only few people know or care about.
    - malermeister 4y ago
      Was that on a private tracker? Those usually have strict rules around sharing ratios to prevent that scenario and in my experience, it works pretty well!
      - DeathArrow 4y ago
        DC++ is a client for DC/ADC protocol. 20 and 25 years ago, before torrents, it was king and it provided what us, poor kids, didn't have the money to pay for. I guess today it isn't used that much as it used to be. It requires a client for discovery. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DC%2B%2B https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DC%2B%2B
- yamtaddle 4y ago
  I would—or, at least, I'd seed a whole lot longer—if there were a way to let me keep seeding after I normalize the file naming and structure. As it is, I have to render most downloads un-seedable in order to actually use them.
  - malermeister 4y ago
    I use symlinks for that!
YurgenJurgensen 4y ago
The current way torrents are designed is poor for archiving, because if you change the structure of the torrent even a little bit, the whole torrent has to effectively be recreated. Which is a problem if you didn't like the naming conventions used by the original seeder, or want to reorganise somehow. I believe there are already implementations that fix this, but they're not really being used.
Technotroll 4y ago
I bid thee The Interplanetary File System (IPFS): https://ipfs.tech/ https://ipfs.tech/
- pierat 4y ago
  If you do use IPFS, then be aware that it has loads of traps you wouldn't expect. 1. A unique computer key identity is created on startup. 2. It announces every network adapter you have to the dHT, including localhost, docker virtual network adapters, everything. 3. If someone is sharing a specific hash content, you can query the network for their machine key and all their network interfaces, and everything else they're sharing. 4. I have early IRC communications that the ipfs.io gateway also quietly watches for 'bad hashes' and reports them to authorities. This was initially the decision they made to hunt down child porn predators, but this can be easily pivoted to copyright violators. 5. I also caught early on (in the 0.34 version) that google was already crawling computers, and all their shared hashes'. I had a few files I created that were very unique, and a curious search showed them to me, along with my machine's key. For completely legal bulk data, IPFS is a terrific solution. But for anything that is illegal or might be illegal in the future, well, I have to question that usage for those aforementioned reasons.
  - nextaccountic 4y ago
    > 1. A unique computer key identity is created on startup. > 2. It announces every network adapter you have to the dHT, including localhost, docker virtual network adapters, everything. This is totally insane, is there any client that don't enable those misfeatures? (like, generate a new key identity on startup, and don't publish any network adapter)
    - yamtaddle 4y ago
      Guessing #1 has something to do with speeding up the notoriously-slow network. Probably allows more long-term route caching or something. #2 does seem silly. On a semi-related note, it's not that hard to set up a private IPFS. You just need a publicly-reachable "lighthouse" node (and it's extremely low-resource, the cheapest hosted VM you can find can likely handle the task without trouble) and some light config edits. IPFS isn't (and isn't trying to be) anonymous, but you can avoid sharing with the entire IPFS network and share only with trusted peers instead. The ordinary IPFS network won't even know you're there, because you won't be connecting to it.
nextaccountic 4y ago
> There used to be one called what.cd [0] that, to me, was like the Library of Alexandria, but for music. It was burned down in the name of commercial interest. Some data hoarder must have saved all this stuff, right? So why isn't it in a torrent?
- malermeister 4y ago
  https://archive.org/details/whatcdcrawl&tab=about https://archive.org/details/whatcdcrawl&tab=about I think archive.org might be that data hoarder :). They might release stuff slowly as the copyright expires. It also looks like https://redacted.ch/ https://redacted.ch/ might be the spiritual successor - https://interviewfor.red/en/prepare.html https://interviewfor.red/en/prepare.html this process sounds very familiar ;)

DeathArrow 4y ago

Torrent trackers are useless on long term because no one will seed for infinity.

felixg3 4y ago
Well, then you haven't witnessed the beauty of What.cd or PTP. A bunch of data hoarders with webseeds. Find that rare promo release from 1978 on Vinyl? Check. Get a lossless copy of a professionally digitized Laserdisc release of a film? Check.
- sam_lowry_ 4y ago
  rutracker is still good at archiving, albeit naturally biased towards Russian language. This is probably how it survives.
- bombcar 4y ago
  For now. But to survive generations you need a continual supply of new people interested in becoming data hoarders and seeding stuff they have absolutely never watched. Which may happen for awhile, even a century. But it won't last thousands of years, unless storage space becomes infinitely big and cheap.
malermeister 4y ago
The beauty about it's distributed nature is that you don't need anyone seeding for infinity. You just need somebody seeding at all times and if you ever use a private tracker, you'll see that that's not an issue at all.
- DeathArrow 4y ago
  I saw many torrents with 0 seeders. Someone will be seeding only if the interest in that content is great. Rare content won't get any seeders. Old movies don't tempt many people. I liked DC++ approach on file sharing more. If someone in the network has the file, you can get it, no matter how rare. It can be an obscure film made in 1930 or an mp3 only few people know or care about.
  - malermeister 4y ago
    Was that on a private tracker? Those usually have strict rules around sharing ratios to prevent that scenario and in my experience, it works pretty well!
    - DeathArrow 4y ago
      DC++ is a client for DC/ADC protocol. 20 and 25 years ago, before torrents, it was king and it provided what us, poor kids, didn't have the money to pay for. I guess today it isn't used that much as it used to be. It requires a client for discovery. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DC%2B%2B https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DC%2B%2B
yamtaddle 4y ago
I would—or, at least, I'd seed a whole lot longer—if there were a way to let me keep seeding after I normalize the file naming and structure. As it is, I have to render most downloads un-seedable in order to actually use them.
- malermeister 4y ago
  I use symlinks for that!

YurgenJurgensen 4y ago

The current way torrents are designed is poor for archiving, because if you change the structure of the torrent even a little bit, the whole torrent has to effectively be recreated. Which is a problem if you didn't like the naming conventions used by the original seeder, or want to reorganise somehow. I believe there are already implementations that fix this, but they're not really being used.

Technotroll 4y ago

I bid thee The Interplanetary File System (IPFS): https://ipfs.tech/ https://ipfs.tech/

pierat 4y ago
If you do use IPFS, then be aware that it has loads of traps you wouldn't expect. 1. A unique computer key identity is created on startup. 2. It announces every network adapter you have to the dHT, including localhost, docker virtual network adapters, everything. 3. If someone is sharing a specific hash content, you can query the network for their machine key and all their network interfaces, and everything else they're sharing. 4. I have early IRC communications that the ipfs.io gateway also quietly watches for 'bad hashes' and reports them to authorities. This was initially the decision they made to hunt down child porn predators, but this can be easily pivoted to copyright violators. 5. I also caught early on (in the 0.34 version) that google was already crawling computers, and all their shared hashes'. I had a few files I created that were very unique, and a curious search showed them to me, along with my machine's key. For completely legal bulk data, IPFS is a terrific solution. But for anything that is illegal or might be illegal in the future, well, I have to question that usage for those aforementioned reasons.
- nextaccountic 4y ago
  > 1. A unique computer key identity is created on startup. > 2. It announces every network adapter you have to the dHT, including localhost, docker virtual network adapters, everything. This is totally insane, is there any client that don't enable those misfeatures? (like, generate a new key identity on startup, and don't publish any network adapter)
  - yamtaddle 4y ago
    Guessing #1 has something to do with speeding up the notoriously-slow network. Probably allows more long-term route caching or something. #2 does seem silly. On a semi-related note, it's not that hard to set up a private IPFS. You just need a publicly-reachable "lighthouse" node (and it's extremely low-resource, the cheapest hosted VM you can find can likely handle the task without trouble) and some light config edits. IPFS isn't (and isn't trying to be) anonymous, but you can avoid sharing with the entire IPFS network and share only with trusted peers instead. The ordinary IPFS network won't even know you're there, because you won't be connecting to it.

nextaccountic 4y ago

> There used to be one called what.cd [0] that, to me, was like the Library of Alexandria, but for music. It was burned down in the name of commercial interest. Some data hoarder must have saved all this stuff, right? So why isn't it in a torrent?

malermeister 4y ago
https://archive.org/details/whatcdcrawl&tab=about https://archive.org/details/whatcdcrawl&tab=about I think archive.org might be that data hoarder :). They might release stuff slowly as the copyright expires. It also looks like https://redacted.ch/ https://redacted.ch/ might be the spiritual successor - https://interviewfor.red/en/prepare.html https://interviewfor.red/en/prepare.html this process sounds very familiar ;)