Common clients' announce interval is pretty long (usually 30 minutes). Then again, 3M peers makes for some volume...

Is it really going to be all that bad?

The BitTorrent clients I’ve used all seemed pretty polite, backing off for like 60s at least for each tracker they can’t connect to.

If you buy one of the dead tracker domains and point it at an IP of someone else, but their services aren’t even listening on the port client wants to connect to (and don’t speak BitTorrent even if the port happened to coincide), I can’t imagine that even with a million BitTorrent clients wanting to connect it would really be all that much of a problem.

It can be: https://www.jwz.org/blog/2015/01/chinese-bittorrent-the-gift...

Careful. This guy doesn't like HN and you'll get a picture of a testicle if you click.

what a guy

Better than goatse

I do like the commitment of registering a whole domain for no other purpose as to be able to spam a single picture, though.

Everyone else that visits the site from other places get the actual content and not the testicle. So it’s not just that one image. That only shows up when your referrer is HN.

Whoops, i thought i tested that and it didnt do that for me anymore. must have been a cached response

So that's one request per 60 seconds - times 3,000,000 or so clients. See the problem? That's 50,000 requests per second.

You mean redirect all the traffic to any IP the author intends to theoretically DDoS? Never thought of it, definitely scary with 3M peers

More harming I think is that you can redirect all the DMCA complaints that come from aggressive intellectual property holders at a residential IP address. ISPs will just cancel your account, despite how legal running a tracker may be.