Resurrecting a dead torrent tracker and finding 3M peers

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

Legality vs. Risk of Running / Reviving a Tracker

  • Many argue a bare tracker is “content‑neutral” and likely legal in some jurisdictions, especially if it honors takedowns and blacklists hashes.
  • Others stress that the real issue isn’t strict legality but lawsuit risk: cease‑and‑desist letters, DMCA notices, and expensive civil litigation can be ruinous even if you ultimately win (“the punishment is the process”).
  • Several see a strong chilling effect: fear of copyright lawsuits discourages technically legal experimentation.
  • There’s disagreement on how “aiding and abetting” applies:
    • One side notes that knowingly facilitating piracy via a well‑known piracy domain could be seen as intent.
    • Another side emphasizes high criminal burden of proof and the general legality of dual‑use infrastructure (like ISPs, search engines).

Trackers vs. Torrent Indexes and Intent

  • Distinction is made between:
    • Trackers: simple peer coordination by infohash.
    • “Trackers” as websites: indexes, metadata, search, communities.
  • Enforcement historically focused on the latter, where inducement and clear knowledge of infringement are easier to show.
  • Some argue reviving a known piracy tracker domain after observing legacy traffic signals intent; others counter that the tracker only sees hashes and IPs, not the underlying content.

Jurisdiction, Enforcement, and Honeypot Concerns

  • Copyright enforcement is said to be driven mainly by rights holders, not police, via DMCA and ISP complaints.
  • Examples are mentioned of US tracker shutdowns and the role of domain/TLD/VPS jurisdiction (US vs. Moldova vs. “run it in Russia/China/Iran”).
  • A few suggest an FBI or rights‑holder honeypot is an obvious use case; others note such tactics are already used via DHT and swarm monitoring.

Technical Behavior: Persistence, DHT, and Hijacking

  • Commenters are struck by how many clients still pinged a long‑dead tracker, analogous to stale NTP or 1.1.1.1 traffic.
  • DHT and multi‑tracker lists mean swarms usually survive even if one tracker dies; old torrents can still be found years later.
  • Reviving dead tracker domains could:
    • Enable large‑scale DDoS by pointing DNS at arbitrary IPs.
    • Redirect DMCA complaints to innocent residential IPs.
    • Be used to map or index torrents (similar to DHT crawlers).

Security and Exploit Potential

  • Multiple people wonder if malformed tracker responses could exploit buggy clients; some note prior remote‑code‑execution issues in clients.
  • Libtorrent and fuzzing are cited as partial reassurance, but older/unsafe clients are seen as plausible targets.

Broader Reflections on BitTorrent

  • Several lament that legal pressure wiped out small, high‑quality, niche trackers more than mass‑piracy sites.
  • Others note P2P never truly died (private trackers, seedboxes, file lockers, DHT), and praise BitTorrent as foundational tech that influenced later decentralized systems.