Month: April 2017

With BitTorrent more than a decade and a half old, it’s one of the most enduring P2P protocols around. It hasn’t been developed much in recent years but there are people out there hoping to take it to the next level.

Much effort has been expended trying to completely decentralize the system. DHT and PEX, for example, were great contributions but the reliance on centralized websites (such as The Pirate Bay) persists.

That particular problem intrigues Bora, a programmer from Istanbul, Turkey, who informs TF that having a less centralized system would be beneficial to the ecosystem as a whole.

“All the legal action taken against the community has always targeted the points of centralization, as they were the weakest points in the whole mesh,” Bora says.

“In the beginning, trackers were required to facilitate the traffic between peers, but then we ditched them once more and more clients supported the distributed hash table (DHT). We eventually got rid of .torrent files as well [in favor of magnet links], which in turn allowed people to download the whole sum of The Pirate Bay in a hundred megabytes.”

In an effort to try and edge closer to the goal of complete decentralization, Bora has been working on a project called magnetico (small ‘m’), which aims to “unplug” conventional torrent sites altogether. Like the recently defunct torrent site BTDigg and the more recent AlphaReign, Bora’s software uses BitTorrent’s DHT to find content and those all-important peers.

However, where magentico differs from the two examples above is that the indexes it creates can be completely private. It effectively acts as a personal torrent search engine that a user can install on a machine under his or her control.

“magnetico is a collection of programs called magneticod (magnetico daemon) and magneticow (magnetico web),” Bora explains.

“magneticod runs in the background and ‘trawls’ the DHT network to discover info hashes and then fetches torrent metadata from the peers (most importantly, the title and the file list). magneticow is a lightweight web interface for users to search and view the discovered torrents.”

For those interested in some brief technical details, here’s how it works.

“The magneticod module [accesses the DHT] and creates a dummy BitTorrent peer to fetch the metadata from the announced peer, and saves it in a database which you can later search and view,” Bora says.

“As info hashes are the SHA-1 hashes of the torrent metadata, we can be sure of the validity of the metadata we got.”

While operation is simple (Bora says that both modules work without user intervention), the software is in its early stages of development so could be affected by bugs. One known issue is that at times, magneticod can be a bit of a resource hog so may need be restarted.

“I am hoping to address all these issues in the next releases, after collecting useful feedback from the community,” Bora says.

In the meantime, Bora hopes that BEP 51 (a BitTorrent Enhancement Proposal concerning DHT) will come to fruition.

“I would consider myself as having succeeded if major client developers decided to push for BEP 51 and if we together make BitTorrent truly decentralised right in the protocol, rather than resorting back to the brute force solutions,” he concludes.

While magnetico is not for the absolute novice, Bora believes that since its strictly written in Python 3, it’s relatively easy to get going with his detailed instructions.

The magnetico project page can be found here (Github)

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.

Auf einmal wurde es laut: In der Nacht zum Samstag fingen über 100 Sirenen in Dallas zu heulen an. Erst sprachen die Behörden von einer "Fehlfunktion", jetzt soll ein Hacker schuld sein. (IoT, Internet)

Wie abhängig sind Behörden von Microsoft? Ein ehemaliger hochrangiger Beamter der Bundesregierung und andere Experten kritisieren jetzt die Beschaffungspolitik der öffentlichen Verwaltung. Der Microsoft-Lock-In koste Geld und behindere Innovation. (Open Source, Microsoft)

Well over five years have passed since Megaupload was shutdown and it’s still unclear how the criminal proceedings will unfold.

A few weeks ago the New Zealand High Court ruled that Kim Dotcom and his former colleagues can be extradited to the US. Not on copyright grounds, but for conspiracy to defraud.

Following the ruling Dotcom quickly announced that he would take the matter to the Court of Appeal, which will prolong the case for several months at least.

While all parties await the outcome of this appeal, the criminal case in the United States remains pending. The same goes for the civil cases launched by the MPAA and RIAA in 2014.

Since the civil cases may influence the criminal proceedings, Megaupload’s legal team previously managed to put these cases on hold, and this week another extension was granted.

Previously there were concerns that the long delays could result in the destruction of evidence, as some of Megaupload’s hard drives were starting to fail. However, after the parties agreed on a solution to back-up and restore the files, this is no longer an issue.

“With the preservation order now in place, Defendant Megaupload hereby moves the Court to enter the attached proposed order, continuing the stay in this case for an additional six months, subject to the terms and conditions stated in the proposed order,” the company wrote in the motion to stay.

On Thursday U.S. District Court Judge Liam O’Grady granted Megaupload’s request to stay both lawsuits until October this year, barring any new developments. The music and movie companies didn’t oppose the motion.

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The order of U.S. District Court Judge Liam O’Grady is available here (pdf). A copy of Megaupload’s request can be found here (pdf).

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.

Die Shadow Brokers haben keine Lust mehr - oder sind von Donald Trump wirklich enttäuscht. Das Passwort zum verschlüsselten Archiv ist jetzt im Netz. Die Gruppe hatte Exploits "besser als Stuxnet" angekündigt. Das ist offenbar falsch. (Shadow Broker, Server)

Der Ubuntu-Distributor Canonical beendet seinen jahrelangen Irrweg eines eigenen Desktop-Konzepts. Damit lässt sich einfach kein Geld verdienen, und den Smartphone-Markt bedienen andere. Das begreift nun auch Mäzen Mark Shuttleworth, wovon die Open-Source-Community profitiert. Eine Analyse von Sebastian Grüner (Ubuntu, Mark Shuttleworth)

From a new war on a sought after device to sought after info on a new device, read the news roundup for the week ending April 9 2017

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While the site doesn’t get a lot of press in the West, Russia’s RuTracker is one of the biggest torrent sites on the planet.

It’s easily one of the top ten most popular torrent sites online and indexes a massive range of local and international content. Those with Google translate and a modicum of patience report a treasure trove of material.

The situation with RuTracker is somewhat curious. While it is regularly visited by users from a range of countries, the majority of its user base comes from the Russian Federation. However, after drawing the ire of copyright holders, the site is blocked by all local ISPs, a situation that will persist forever.

This so-called “eternal” block was put in place last year and was expected to do the site serious damage. But according to the site’s operators, they’re doing just fine. In fact, not a great deal has changed.

Speaking with local news outlet Apparat, a RuTracker representative confirmed that while attendances have dropped a little, there has been no change at all in the numbers of files being downloaded.

“According to our statistics the number of downloaded torrents has not changed. Every day more than a million torrents are downloaded from Rutracker. We had the same number before the block,” the source reveals.

“The load on our trackers has fallen by no more than 10%. In this case, when we say tracker, we mean the service address [announce URL], where the BitTorrent client recalls the list of peers.”

While the blockades have failed to impact levels of infringement, they have managed to reduce the volumes of traffic reaching the site. Interestingly, RuTracker believes that the kind of device used to access the platform has played a role in whether a user has been able to easily bypass the blocks.

“Most of all, blocking has affected the users of mobile devices. With these it is slightly more difficult to configure a bypass than on a desktop computer,” the rep says.

“Therefore, those users who came to the forum from mobile devices just to talk – and there are so many of them – are faced with problems. For those who used the forum from ordinary computers, the block delivered a minimum of inconveniences: there, a bypass is configured in just two clicks.”

As previously reported, the court-ordered blocking of RuTracker prompted the site to break off cooperation with all copyright holders. The way the site viewed it, why take content down when the punishment for not doing so has already been issued by the court?

“For more than seven years, we had not a single problem with any major vendor, but we were blocked because of the songs of one local rapper, who at the same time put out his songs for public access on social networks. The reason was purely formal, and the decision was political,” the rep explains.

Freed from having to remove content every day, the site is now far more happy doing nothing. In fact, it says that life is now much easier, since all the time and resources spent on taking things down can now be deployed elsewhere. Not to say that the site has a small staff though.

Currently the site has five employees, including programmers and systems administrators, who reportedly earn a salary for their work. On top the site has several volunteer forum administrators and a massive team of moderators, numbering 200 in all.

But as they have done for many years, the site’s operators say they will continue to remain anonymous while earning enough from advertising to balance the books. There are no big profits to report and there will be no Pirate Bay-style posturing.

“We are not a political organization, we do not put forward any demands, we do not call or agitate anything. Deanonymization will not bring any advantages, instead we will receive increased attention from the marginalized, from scammers, and state groups too.”

The site’s operators say they are not against cooperation as long as its based on mutual understanding and a constructive approach. But they weren’t getting that in Russia, it seems, so they’ve skipped out of reach instead.

“We are both physically and legally outside the borders of this wonderful country,” they conclude.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.

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