Re:Masscan: Scan the entire Internet in under 5 minutes
by pvnick on Saturday December 27, 2014 @06:51PM
(#8804450)
How likely is this to be used for anti-piracy efforts? I don't hear much about en masse copyright enforcement these days, but it seems like the ability to quickly scan large IP ranges would allow one to periodically (every couple minutes or so) obtain a list of every single seeded file in the US, at least for the people not using a VPN.
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Re:Masscan: Scan the entire Internet in under 5 minutes
by Scaevolus on Saturday December 27, 2014 @07:37PM
(#8804608)
That's not how torrents work. You can't connect to a port on a seeder and get a list of torrents it's seeding. Even for trackers, you have to request a specific URL to get a (partial) list of available seeders.
Re:Masscan: Scan the entire Internet in under 5 minutes
by sanxiyn on Saturday December 27, 2014 @08:28PM
(#8804735)
On the other hand, it is easy to crawl DHT. "Crawling BitTorrent DHTs for Fun and Profit" (2010) says "We find that we can establish a search engine with over one million torrents in under two hours using a single desktop PC".
Re:Masscan: Scan the entire Internet in under 5 minutes
by pvnick on Saturday December 27, 2014 @07:41PM
(#8804621)
Oh I see, please forgive my ignorance of the torrent protocol. I was under the (apparently mistaken) impression that, like Napster, one could enumerate a user's shared files simply by knowing their IP.