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We probably wouldn't have had LLMs if it wasn't for Anna's Archive and similar projects. That's why I thought I'd use LLMs to build Levin - a seeder for Anna's

• Maakuth 8mo ago
  How is the anti-P2P enforcement these days? I think there are companies gathering bittorrent swarm data and selling it to lawyers interested in this sort of bullying. In Finland at least you can expect a mail from one of them if your IP address turns up in this data. However I think it is mostly focused on video and music piracy.
  • birdsongs 8mo ago
    I've heard Finland sends out letters, same with Japan. Are there actual consequences, or can they just be ignored? Norway I haven't heard of anyone getting anything in the past decade. The ISPs supposedly get letters from lawyers but just toss them, since the intersection of the burden of proof and our privacy laws make it such that nothing can really be done. I think there was some ISP that gave out names and IP addresses to one of the firms years ago, but nothing happened and the police said "we have better things to do".
    • yoavm 8mo ago
      Living in Sweden and in the Netherlands, I have never heard about any such case. Not sure I'm just lucky or if it's really non-existent.
    • Maakuth 8mo ago
      Yes, I think it's the same in here, you have been able to ignore the letters without any consequence. Also from what I hear, the letters have been very inaccurate. I doubt the IP based proof would hold in the court of law.
    • outime 8mo ago
      AFAIK you can completely ignore the letters, because taking you to court would be very costly and might not end well for them. However, they keep doing it because some people get scared and pay up right away.
      • Brybry 8mo ago
        In the US it can be a pretty big deal, even if rights holders don't take you to court. You can basically get banned by your ISP and it's not like there are a lot of ISP options. ISPs in the US that are lax about it have been sued for millions[1] (and even in one case a billion, pending supreme court decision). [2] [1] https://www.reuters.com/legal/transactional/cox-settles-dispute-with-bmg-rightscorp-over-copyright-notices-2021-07-27/ https://www.reuters.com/legal/transactional/cox-settles-disp... [2] https://www.dentons.com/en/insights/alerts/2026/february/4/supreme-court-review https://www.dentons.com/en/insights/alerts/2026/february/4/s...
  • sva_ 8mo ago
    In Germany you can expect to get a letter from some law firm, confirmed by some judge that orders you to pay 100s or 1000s of euros if you don't use a vpn They will attempt to download DMCA files from you as often as possible and then calculate the amount of times times price of the product to come up with a fictional damages amount
    • nicbou 8mo ago
      https://allaboutberlin.com/guides/pirating-streaming-movies-in-germany https://allaboutberlin.com/guides/pirating-streaming-movies-... A little intro intended for recent immigrants
    • dahrkael 8mo ago
      at least they confirm you are indeed sharing them and not just matchibg your IP in some swarm list which may not even be real
  • hamdingers 8mo ago
    US colocated seedbox with ~10k film and tv torrents seeding at any given time, the last letter I got was ~2014 IIRC, before that it was several a year. I never responded to any of them. I don't think I'm especially good at covering my tracks, so either they've abandoned individual enforcement in favor of going after distributors or they no longer bother with non-residential IPs.
    • ghostly_s 8mo ago
      edit: curious, how were these notices served to you when you were receiving them? Were they sent to the colo who forwarded them to you? Anecdotally it seems the only enforcement in the US these days is via ISPs who have made some agreement to "self-enforce" against their residential customers, sending emails threatening to cancel service after three strikes. They seem to only monitor for select "blockbuster" level movies. A friend got one of these as recently as two years ago from CenturyLink iirc. Meanwhile I lived in an apartment building that had a shared (commercial) connection for all the tenants and eventually stopped using a VPN at all, never heard anything.
      • hamdingers 8mo ago
        > curious, how were these notices served to you when you were receiving them? Were they sent to the colo who forwarded them to you? Yup, they would send their spam to `abuse@provider.tld` regarding an IP address, my provider would look up the IP address and forward it to me. Presumably if they ever cared to escalate they could file a lawsuit and subpoena the provider for my identity, but they never did. They're looking for easy settlements and that would cost time and money.
      • sp332 8mo ago
        Well, they did sue Cox Communications for a billion dollars because they weren't self-policing. ISPs can lose their safe harbor status and effectively become accomplices in all the piracy of their customers.
    • Sohcahtoa82 8mo ago
      I don't even use a seedbox and I've been torrenting for years. The last time I got a letter from my ISP was I think 2012. I use an invite-only tracker. I wonder if that's made the difference.
  • reddalo 8mo ago
    I'm in Italy. Most people I know have been pirating movies, series and games [1] for 20+ years, via torrents and eMule (yes, eMule is still big in Italy), and nobody ever received any letters. But there's a big exception: as soon as you start pirating soccer, they're going to come after you. [1] I've personally stopped pirating games a long time ago, because it's just easier and safer to buy them on Steam or GOG. Gaben was 100% right when he said "Piracy is almost always a service problem".
    • Sohcahtoa82 8mo ago
      Yup, Gaben was 100% right. I haven't pirated a game or music album in ages. Having games that just work is great. An update came out? It's auto-installed. Don't have to wait for the cracker group to put out a new patched executable. For music, Spotify means I don't need to curate a collection and buy individual songs. Yes, I acknowledge that it means I don't own any of it, but that's fine. I'm still coming out ahead compared to paying for $1 for every individual song. But movies and TV shows? All the studios fucked it up by all wanting a piece of the pie. It became a horribly fragmented market. I'd need, what, 8+ subscriptions to have access to it all? Netflix, Hulu, HBO, Disney+, Peacock, Paramount+, AppleTV, Amazon Prime Video... Other than sports-centric streaming that I don't care about, what am I missing? It's utterly ridiculous. My pirating plummeted when Netflix streaming became a thing. It returned when studios revoked the licenses so they could put it on their own platform.
      • reddalo 8mo ago
        I agree with you. I even forgot I used to pirate music as a teenager! Nowadays, Spotify makes it so easy that most people would never bother pirating. Netflix, on the other hand, was good when you could watch most of the things there. Now it's just Netflix Originals, and it's not worth the price.
  • LelouBil 8mo ago
    In France, for movies/music you get 2 warning letters, then a scary one that says you can now get to court possibly. Didn't really hear about people getting fines for this, but the law exists.
  • autoexec 8mo ago
    Happens every day in the US. Mostly video and music (MPA/RIAA). There's also been some effort put into extorting ISPs for the activities of their customers, but the effectiveness of that is still being determined as cases work their way through the court system. We should have a better idea this summer after the supreme court decides on the $1 billion in damages one ISP was ordered to pay to a bunch of RIAA labels. It will be a lot more profitable to sue ISPs than it is to try to sue poor parents and grandparents for what children do online.
  • joquarky 8mo ago
    I find it absurd that with all of the dhit going on in the world right now that any legal resources are being spent on copyright enforcement.
• cedws 8mo ago
  Nice project. I think it would be worth mentioning the legal implications, it’s illegally sharing content right? Best to run behind a VPN or on a VPS in a country that won’t come after you.
  • yoavm 8mo ago
    I haven't heard about someone ever getting a letter for seeding books, but maybe I'm lucky. In any case, I'll add a notice to the README, thank you for the suggestion.
    • nicbou 8mo ago
      It would likely happen in Germany, unless you have a VPN. This has been a problem for years when torrenting films. Chasing people with fines has been a lucrative, automated business for years.
      • jtbayly 8mo ago
        films are not books, though.
        • bigfishrunning 8mo ago
          They are, you just have to turn the pages really fast
        • nicbou 8mo ago
          They are copyrighted material just the same
          • bethekidyouwant 8mo ago
            Assumes the copyright holder is looking at the peer list for these torrent. (Books) Which I doubt.
            • 8mo ago
• Myzel394 8mo ago
  Definitely a unique way to get a DMCA letter
  • ozim 8mo ago
    DMCA letter sounds like small potatoes when we talk about letting random people write stuff to your disk space and using your bandwidth.
    • yoavm 8mo ago
      Can you elaborate on what big potatoes you're seeing? Genuinely asking. The Android app, for example, writes everything to the app's storage, and runs only when your phone is plugged-in and is connected to wifi. To me that generally means "when I'm sleeping". What's the big potato in this scenario?
      • pavel_lishin 8mo ago
        Would you be willing to let me mail a package to your house, to hold for me? It would be placed in your house at night, while you're sleeping.
        • yoavm 8mo ago
          These are beautiful analogies, but I'd appreciate an answer my original question. Your package can explode, these torrents cannot (as far as I am aware). If you want to send me a CD to store at my house, feel free to email me.
          • SecretDreams 8mo ago
            If you end up torrenting very illegal or malicious content, who is responsible? Will it be you, the app creator?
            • yoavm 8mo ago
• squigz 8mo ago
  > We probably wouldn't have had LLMs if it wasn't for Anna's Archive and similar projects AA and similar projects might make it easier for them, but I'm quite certain the LLM companies could have figured out how to assemble such datasets if they had to.
  • woctordho 8mo ago
    If there was no AA, there would still be another random guy who assembles such datasets and distributes them before LLM companies.
• streetfighter64 8mo ago
  Hmm, seeding torrents with the added excitement that you don't know what torrent's you're seeding, and the client is written using LLMs. What could possibly go wrong?
  • yoavm 8mo ago
    You can check the content of the torrents, just like any torrent. The client isn't a "one shot" LLM produce, I've been spending quite some time on it. What actual concerns do you have?
    • yoz-y 8mo ago
      Not parent but: The first thing that pops to mind is inadvertently downloading and hosting CSAM.
      • yoavm 8mo ago
        If you suspect AA for spreading CSAM, please don't support the project. And please do share your reasons for suspicion.
      • Tepix 8mo ago
        Yes, your copy of your operating system could also contain CSAM, I hope you checked every single byte just to make sure.
        • xpe 8mo ago
          Please, let's be sensible and think about probabilities in the real world.
          • margalabargala 8mo ago
            I think they were just meeting the original commenter where they already were.
      • RankingMember 8mo ago
• potatoman22 8mo ago
  Great name haha. Is Anna a reference to who I think it is?
  • canadiantim 8mo ago
    Who do you think Anna is
    • potatoman22 8mo ago
      This project is called Levin, so Anna Kareninina. However, I learned Anna (as in the archive) is a pseudonym, so this is probably not the case.
• creaturemachine 8mo ago
  Did you just create Pied Piper IRL?
  • hinkley 8mo ago
    I wonder if he uses spaces or tabs in his source code.
• toomuchtodo 8mo ago
  Are you accepting feature requests?
  • yoavm 8mo ago
    What do you have in mind?
    • toomuchtodo 8mo ago
      Threads with context: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45491679 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45491679 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46637992 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46637992 Elephant system design - https://gist.github.com/skorokithakis/68984ef699437c5129660d12d576e09e https://gist.github.com/skorokithakis/68984ef699437c5129660d... (A distributed, voluntary backup system (high-level design document)) You're most of the way there with the distributed storage workers scheme u/stavros proposed ("Elephant") to increase Internet Archive item durability through a distributed volunteer seeder network. Feature request would be the ability to specify RSS feeds serving torrent files or magnet links to consume for seeding operations. This would also enable providing this data over ATProto for consumption, although I'm unsure at the moment if a lexicon would be needed. If there is a tip jar, happy to tip, please consider adding to your repo or GitHub profile somewhere.
      • yoavm 8mo ago
        I thought about offering alternative "torrents list", but didn't find any. Internet Archive would be a great one. I'm not sure about how ATProto works, but I made sure to enable WebTorrents so that it would be quite easy to download from Levin seeders using a browser only. As for tipping - I really appreciate it, but there are really many people/projects that would need it much more than me.
• flancian 8mo ago
  I'd like to buck the apparent trend of reacting to your project with shock and horror and instead say I believe it's a great idea, and I appreciate what you are doing! People have been trained to believe (very long) copyright terms are almost a natural law that can't be broken or challenged (if you are an individual; other rules might apply to corporations...) but I think we are better off continuing to challenge this assumption. I could imagine adding support for further rules that determine when Levin actively runs -- i.e. only run if the country or connection you are in makes this 'safe' according to some crowdsourced criteria? This would also serve to communicate the relative dangers of running this tool in different jurisdictions.
  • yoavm 8mo ago
    Thank you! I think that's a great idea, and will definitely look into implementing this.
    • mikkupikku 8mo ago
      Maybe also a config option to not seed when on battery power (laptop or UPS), although SystemD configuration is arguably a better way to achieve the same.
      • spider-mario 8mo ago
        https://brand.systemd.io/ https://brand.systemd.io/ > Yes, it is written systemd, not system D or System D, or even SystemD. And it isn't system d either. Why? Because it's a system daemon, and under Unix/Linux those are in lower case, and get suffixed with a lower case d. And since systemd manages the system, it's called systemd. It's that simple.
        • mikkupikku 8mo ago
          Huh, my browser's spellcheck did that too. Good to know.
        • salawat 8mo ago
• throw10920 8mo ago
  How does Levin "use the diskspace you don't use"? That sounds like a neat feature but I'm not aware of any APIs for that on desktop platforms.
  • yoavm 8mo ago
    You configure Levin to "always leave 2GB available". Levin checks the available diskspace using a simple statvfs call, deducts 2GB, and sees that as its budget. It then checks your diskspace every minute (more or less, depending on the device) to see if anything changes. If more free space is suddenly available, it will download more content. If there's less than 2GB available, it will immediately start deleting its own files until 2GB are free.
    • throw10920 8mo ago
      That's a neat hack, thank you for sharing.
    • filleduchaos 8mo ago
      Out of curiosity, how much RAM do you have and have you tested this on a computer that does not have as much? Asking because this sounds like a mini-disaster in the making with e.g. macOS' swap and a device with 16GB or even 8GB of RAM.
      • yoavm 8mo ago
        I'm not sure why you're concerned about RAM; the numbers I mentioned are all relating to diskspace. It doesn't take much RAM at all to run a torrent client daemon. FWIW it runs without any noticeable effects on my OnePlus 6 from 2018.
        • kortilla 8mo ago
          swap consumes disk. Commenter was talking about a scenario where swap dynamically filling and emptying space on the disk would make your software thrash
• twgafd100 8mo ago
  > I'm thinking about it like a modern day SETI@home Of course. Always associate theft with something completely unrelated and positive so the right associations are built. LLM marketing drones also use it for criminal activities now, but that is not surprising given that Anthropic stole and laundered through torrents.
  • yoavm 8mo ago
    It's related in the sense that it works in the background, using the spare resources you have. Whether you see the thing it does as a good thing or theft is really up to you. I guess some people had their own reasons for not supporting the SETI@home objectives either. In any case, I'm perfectly happy with an analogy like "it's like going to the library, making a copy of all the books and making the copies available for everyone for free".
  • joquarky 8mo ago
    What did they steal?
  • woctordho 8mo ago
    "We work by three virtues: rage, paranoia, and kleptomania."
• zlandx 8mo ago
  1999: Napster was created so regular people could download a couple of movies. Napster was shut down. 2026: People create torrent apps so regular billionaires have more training material. Hint: These billionaires do not care about you. They laugh at you, use you and will discard you once your utility is gone.
  • joquarky 8mo ago
    I don't recall there being movies on Napster.
• barbazoo 8mo ago
  > resources you already have and aren't using The electricity used here isn't something you already have and just aren't using, a lot of people will pull that electricity from a coal power plant. Negligible considering the big picture of course.
• motbus3 8mo ago
  They are eliminating competition as they are doing elsewhere
• arnavpraneet 8mo ago
  great project, was thinking of something like this a while ago - will definitely be seeding using this!
• flexagoon 8mo ago
  Do you know Anna's Archive already has a feature that lets you automatically download a subset of the torrents that fit under your available storage space and contain the most important (least preserved) data? How is your project different from that?
  • sghitbyabazooka 8mo ago
    that feature has a "max terabytes" field. phones typically do not have terabytes of storage, and even if they did, people may not want to seed that much
    • flexagoon 8mo ago
      It says "max terabytes", but nothing's stopping you from putting less than 1 there. If you want 10 gigabytes, you can just put 0.01 in there.
      • sghitbyabazooka 8mo ago
        which means you will get torrents whose total size is smaller or equal to 10gb, which mostly contain metadata, instead of partially seeding actual books, which come in much larger torrents
  • yoavm 8mo ago
    Levin uses that feature exactly! It is not unique in finding what torrents to seed; It's unique in that it dynamically uses the available diskspace (removing / adding data when needed / possible), and automatically turning off when not plugged-in / on wifi connection.
    • flexagoon 8mo ago
      That makes sense, nice!
• shablulman 8mo ago
  [flagged]
• alldeeply 8mo ago
  Levin? Why not Vronsky? XD