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On fake-torrents
By taklamakan | December 9, 2007
From a recent mail we received:
im sick of seeing your tracker host malicious files. im sick of seeing your
tracker on the top pages of indexing sites. you are a disgrace. seeing your
tracker on any torrent means to the non-nub BT community that it contains
malicious files. you allow your uploaders to prey on the ill-informed.
control your site, or take it down. you are the only ones who can stop
malicious files from finding their way into the community. indexing sites
dont yet have the ability to filter out torrents by trackers alone, so it is
YOUR responsibility to take control of YOUR tracker. you should be ashamed
of yourselves.
Again *sic*, for the people who don’t understand what a bittorrent tracker does (basically all the people blaming us of being fake):
A bittorrent-tracker collects hashes (a 160-bit digest, SHA1) of bittorrent-files, it starts collecting ipaddr. of peers who are interested who else is interested in the files identified by those hashes. Thats it.
Its like an agency for arranged lifts! You (peer) ask them (tracker) who (peer-list) is going from A to B (torrent) and would like to share the car and costs (files) of the drive (download). Or you tell them that you (peer) are going from A to B (torrent) and that you are interested in people (peer-list) who would like to join you on your drive (download) to share the costs (files).
The agency for arranged lifts does not know if the drive from A to B (torrent) is safe, if the roads are free or if the car (files) is in any condition for driving this distance or keeping the people inside dry in case of rain.
A bittorrent-site is something completely different. On such sites you can upload and download bittorrent-files, on most sites you can comment the bittorrent-file in a forum like system. Thats where the so called “bittorrent community” lives.
So if you download a bittorrent-file from a bittorrent-site and it is fake or malicious, tell the community, comment the torrent on the bittorrent-site, let the other people know! But please don’t blame us or other operators of bittorrent-trackers for tracking this fake-torrent! You know, it wastes our tracker resources too if morons keep on downloading fake-torrents! So maybe people should follow some simple advises on downloading torrents.
We are a bittorrent-tracker, not a bittorrent-site. The only ones who can stop fake-torrents are the users on bittorrent-sites, its in their responsibility! Don’t ask what bittorrent can do for you, ask what you can do for bittorrent!
Topics: free speech, tech | 14 Comments »
December 9th, 2007 at 7:57 pm
This is very true, don’t expect a torrent you download to be exactly what you want. LOOK FOR COMMENTS on mininova or thepiratebay or isohunt or bt-mon or google or wherever you search for torrents. And of course, USE AN ANTI-VIRUS AND A FIREWALL. It’s as necessary as wearing shoes and clothes when you go outside.
December 26th, 2007 at 8:43 pm
lol.. that’s why public sites suck. Use private sources if you want to be sure your files are what they claim to be and not some virus/trojan… *sigh*
December 29th, 2007 at 10:43 pm
> It’s as necessary as wearing shoes and clothes when you go outside.
Strictly speaking, neither is in any sense necessary. However, if you decide not to use (fw|av|shoes|clothes), you should be prepared to live with the possible consequences.
January 19th, 2008 at 5:37 pm
> “And of course, USE AN ANTI-VIRUS AND A FIREWALL. It’s as necessary as wearing shoes and clothes when you go outside.”
Only if you’re using windows.
But anyway, I do find it annoying the ignorance that people show – there’s nothing wrong with this tracker. Sure, people use it for fakes, but people also use it for real files. They can’t control what is on it.
January 23rd, 2008 at 12:41 pm
So if I set up an email host, called it an Openemailer and allowed anybody to email anyone any amount of mail, then I could claim that I was not responsible for all the spam coming through my host?
Once made aware of a problem, you cannot block hashes because…?
January 23rd, 2008 at 2:13 pm
The difference is: You don’t have to download a torrent if you don’t want to. Just don’t do it. Its your decision to do that, not ours.
We are not sending you any torrent you have to download, we don’t even have the torrent and we certainly do not send you any fake data.
Well we do.. some random ipaddr. that do not do bittorrent at all. The perfect deniability stuff, sorry for that!
Again, you will find out if a torrent is fake by reading the comments in bittorrent community sites, we are not a 24/7 on-call duty team hunting for hashes of fake torrents, instead of that, our service is free of charge.
Besides, we have better stuff to do with our time like keeping this service running, maintain the opentracker source-code, think about the protocol development etc.
What did you do today for bittorrent?
January 29th, 2008 at 11:57 am
Re: The difference is…
People do not have to download something offered. Of course it is easy to deceive people. How is this at all different from people not having to open email? It is not at all different.
Re: we are not a 24/7 on-call duty team…
Nobody implied that you were or should be. Of course, it is a common (and weak) debating tactic to take an extreme point of view and say that it is that of your opponent.
I have read postings by you that detail simple things you do to maintain the integrity of torrents as long as it suits your purposes. You do, in fact, keep and review detailed statistics of what is going on. You do, in fact, employ filtering methods on torrents that you personally disagree with, such as those that charge money for warez.
Re: What did you do today for bittorrent?
I devote significant computing resources to the community. I vigilantly bring malicious torrents to people’s attention. I provide content to places where people can benefit from it. I am thinking about ways to improve the protocol to make it more usable for people with different needs.
Why would you accuse me of doing little when you know nothing about who I am or my background?
January 29th, 2008 at 1:52 pm
@Me:
Re: How is this at all different from people not having to open email?
The problem with spam is that you already received it in your inbox, it already wasted server resources, used up disk space, made the mailserver sysad cry etc. It all ends with you opening the spam mail and wasting your time.
With torrents it starts with you downloading the torrent and only then it wastes server resources and use up disk space. It is a huge difference.
The spam problem would be gone long ago if end-users could say “Stop, I don’t want to receive spam anymore!” and they can easily do that with torrent! They just need to read the comments and make the decision to download the files or not.
Re: You do, in fact, keep and review detailed statistics of what is going on.
We do? The MRTG graphs are the only statistics we keep.
Re: You do, in fact, employ filtering methods on torrents that you personally disagree with, such as those that charge money for warez.
If you refer to the torrenty.org story, thats not filtering “a torrent”, thats filtering a “a tracker” owned by people who earn money by selling warez and who use our resources to do so.
Re: I devote significant computing resources to the community. I vigilantly bring malicious torrents to people’s attention. I provide content to places where people can benefit from it. I am thinking about ways to improve the protocol to make it more usable for people with different needs.
Well keep up the good work, maybe after all we are pulling in the same direction.
March 7th, 2008 at 5:44 pm
denis.stalker.com will be down soon, the 98.8% tracker
April 5th, 2008 at 5:53 am
Please ignore all of this uninformed criticism. People who spout ‘nub’ or ‘non-nub’ are below bothering about; wormfood.
Let them get back to their “13370dayW4R5Z” & refrain from even giving them this platform to blether their paranoiac, delusional gobshite.
I, for one, am grateful for your work on the opentracker project. Please keep it up. =]
November 15th, 2008 at 11:06 am
thank you for the open tracker, fast downloading of torrents will not be possible without public open trackers like you guys. fake torrents downloaded by idiots serves them right, its your choice to download without others commenting if its real or fake so dont blame the trackers.
January 25th, 2009 at 7:11 pm
i appreciate all of the work you guys have done for the torrent community. ignore the stupid fuck “Me”, he doesn’t know what he’s talking about.
keep up the good work, and know that you are greatly appreciated and revered.
February 25th, 2009 at 11:24 am
I found your tracker in a torrent which I am downloading at this time, as of yet I think I should be surprised that people would put the blame on a tracker, sadly I’m not.
I would be asking them if they think that a tracker hosts files and that’s where the data comes from.
Isn’t a tracker more like a post office? I haven’t looked up what a tracker is but as I understand it, they work as a backbone for torrents and the ones sharing and downloading the files are doing the hosting?
July 20th, 2009 at 11:32 am
It saddens me that somebody always has to use these debates to promote private trackers. Private trackers create half of the problem – people save all their upload for private so they can get a good ratio and increase their e-penis, and to do so they have to hit-and-run on public torrents when they can’t find what they want privately, and then they bitch about how slow the public torrent was because of all the hit-and-runs. Am I the only one who sees the pattern here?