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Crawling BitTorrent DHTs for Fun and Profit [pdf]
- hackingonempty 5mo ago(2010)
- hdgr 5mo agoBitmagnet -https://bitmagnet.io/ 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 5mo agoI'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
- drdexebtjl 5mo agoI disabled mine because it was constantly writing to my SSD.
- felooboolooomba 5mo agoI solved it by storing the data on /dev/null
- Modified3019 5mo agoIn 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.
- qingcharles 5mo agoAre 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.
- k4rli 5mo agoRuns 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 5mo agoWhich magazines?
- qingcharles 5mo agoAnything 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 5mo agoCan 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 5mo agoI'm starting to upload everything very soon. I have >4million magazines here so far I think. Feel free to email me on my profile :)
- 5mo ago
- plusfour 5mo agoSame here, for over a year. how many torrents has yours indexed?
- NegativeLatency 5mo ago28M
- plusfour 5mo ago27. it's creating about 20k a day.
- gonzalohm 5mo agoHow much space do you need to store the index?
- plusfour 5mo ago160gb for 27m torrents
- knowaveragejoe 5mo agoThe factor that determines this most is how much of the files metadata for each torrent you choose to keep, which is configurable.
- qingcharles 5mo agoThis is a good tip, thanks. I'll probably replace my home-grown scanner for this one.
- muyuu 5mo agoprobably 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 5mo agoout of curiosity, what kind of junk/garbage is typical?
- yeeeloit 5mo agoungodly amounts of porn.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- muyuu 4mo agothere's certainly massive amounts of porn, esp. if you look at active traffic, but perhaps even worse than that is random crap collected for no good reason and "backyard genius" trash content pooled together by the gigabyte quality and traffic are grossly uncorrelated, so finding stuff is a huge challenge
- naikrovek 5mo agowhy 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 5mo agoThe database gets quite large and the developers put in a lot of effort for tuning it for searchability.
- naikrovek 4mo agoPeople don't understand how fast SQLite is, it seems. You have to know what you're doing, but that's the same requirement that Postgres has if you want to get the most out of it.
- gritzko 5mo ago2010. 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.
- Boss0565 5mo agoold paper
- MoonWalk 5mo agoThe article neglects to define "DHT" before using it.
- MoonWalk 5mo agoDownvote all you want, but a fact is a fact: The article doesn't define the abbreviation before using it.
- dgellow 5mo agoI'm not sure why you're saying that in the HN comments. As far as I know the authors aren't there, and the paper is from 2010. It's not like it will get updated now. One search tells you what DHT in the context of wikipedia is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mainline_DHT https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mainline_DHT
- MoonWalk 4mo agoBecause someone saw fit to downvote it. For some reason it's fashionable on HN to promote douchily obscure posts, and condemn those who call for better.
- ivanjermakov 5mo agoDistributed 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 https://www.bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0005.html
- the8472 5mo agoCrawling has been somewhat simplified with BEP 51 https://bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0051.html https://bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0051.html
- CommanderData 5mo agoI 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.