Re:Bitmagnet: A self-hosted BitTorrent indexer, DHT crawler,...
by fluoridation on Thursday October 05, 2023 @11:18AM
(#37779714)
> If not, you can easily spin up 1000+ nodes and connect to your torrent. Tada fake popularity. If bandwidth is known, then you simply raise your costs a bit by running fake clients.
Sure, but like the other commenter said, this has been possible for years, and yet public trackers aren't swamped with fake torrents. I think in all my years of using BitTorrent I've only ever found a single fake torrent, where the content was inside an encrypted RAR with no key (obviously there was no way to know it was encrypted ahead of time).
Re:Bitmagnet: A self-hosted BitTorrent indexer, DHT crawler,...
by grepfru_it on Friday October 06, 2023 @09:01PM
(#37798125)
You are making my point. A decentralized system will be abused with spam and fraud. A centralized system allows you to moderate the results.
You are describing a pay-to-play model. The validator is if the seeder/leech count is high. Well does DHT provide aggregate bandwidth of each torrent? If not, you can easily spin up 1000+ nodes and connect to your torrent. Tada fake popularity. If bandwidth is known, then you simply raise your costs a bit by running fake clients. There are anti-piracy groups who's entire mandate is to provide noise in the piracy ecosystem. Food for thought: bandwidth costs for this would be a rounding error for e.g. MGM, Universal, or any major content creator.
DHT does not offer any sort of reputation or comment system. Back to centralized torrenting which is why I suspect DHT crawling has not been a very popular feature