I suppose real life is more interesting though, the guy who picked up the domain to stop the global ransomware crisis was picked up after Defcon if memory serves.
Ironically your probably at more risk from the GDPR for leaking those IP addresses that connected to the box via your blog post.
I'm not a lawyer/solicitor though, don't take my advise.
you buy the house and people are still coming knocking on your door asking you if you have any drugs to sell
you're not doing anything wrong, but if the police notice people constantly coming to your house to buy drugs they may do something about it
I mean, it's a bit absurd to compare copyright infringement to murder, but that's where your analogy started. He didn't just by the domain and do something innocent, he actually started running the software that helps people pirate things strongly suspecting that pirates would use it to help them pirate things... and then when he observed that was reality he (smartly IMO) shut it down.
That dude developed and sold banking malware, that's why he got arrested.
In other jurisdictions it most certainly is not, and the VPS maybe in a different jurisdiction and the .si TLD definitely is.
I think there have probably been more. There are definitely more that had civil suits with MPAA etc suing for damages.
It may be somewhat harder to make the case in the US, but a tracker where a great majority of what's listed is copyrighted, I'm pretty sure it can be shut down in the US.
God I miss rarbg. And KAT.
Interesting, but I suppose it’s not surprising to see clients still holding references to old/defunct trackers. Those peers this person discovered once the tracker was resurrected are more than likely to be seed boxes. Maybe a few real clients if they found an old .torrent link and have left it open.
Thanks to DHT (trackerless peering), trackers have become mostly defunct.
That's my understanding of why private trackers ban folks who upload private .torrent files to public trackers because the infohash is a rendezvous point of private and public consumers via DHT
Public trackers are the only trackers most of us can reasonably use. He should get a VPN.
Of course hosting a tracker is legal, but what about "hijacking" inactive resource?
The legality of hosting a tracker isn't obvious, and as pointed out elsewhere the nuance is less about concrete legality and more about having the resources to deal with lawyers harassing you with lawsuits.
Does the tracker know what it's tracking? Is there any attempt to make the tracker unaware of what peer rendezvous it's doing?
My gut is that it seems some kind of hash/magnet that folks are asking to peers on. And that the magnet itself is sufficient, and doesn't have to include anything identifying (although I believe many magnet links included some human readable description). The tracker could likely try to download this hash from the peer itself, to get the torrent info, but wouldn't really know what the torrent is or what's in it without doing the download itself.
Does that check out? How much of the magnet link is key to rendezvous? Could a tracker ignore human friendly fields, block them at ingress, to shield it's eyes?
[1]https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/press-release/file/1507...
https://torrentfreak.com/demonii-torrent-tracker-shuts-down-...
https://torrentfreak.com/mpaa-we-shut-down-ytsyify-and-popco...
We've seen various methods of botnet and malware control like rotating domain names that were successfully reverse engineered and used to trigger a kill switch for WannaCry, famously [1].
BitTorrent is known to be resilient, particularly if you use multiple trackers, proxies, etc that are all built into the infrastructure.
[1]: https://www.wired.com/2017/05/accidental-kill-switch-slowed-...
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.
Did OP cause millions of unfinished torrents to finally connect to a peer and complete or is it likely they were already talking to “live” tracker anyway unless they were really unlucky?
Not really? OP seems to want to sell it for $10000: https://www.dynadot.com/market/user-listings/demonii.si
Let them attempt to send legal toilet paper to Russia or China. I'm sure that will end well.
However, most torrents created for private trackers have the "private" flag enabled, which excludes them from DHT and PEX and a few other things. You can remove this flag yourself, but you're depending on a seeder doing the same for DHT to work.
diggan•4h ago
Why wouldn't it be? You're not actually hosting a tracker in this case, only looking at incoming connections. And even if you do run a tracker, hard to make the case that the tracker itself is illega. Hosting something like opentrackr is like hosting a search engine, how they respond to legal takedown requests is where the crux is at, and whatever infra sits around the tracker, so police and courts can see/assume the intent. But trackers are pretty stupid coordination server software, would be crazy if they became illegal.
jekwoooooe•4h ago
legohead•3h ago
bilekas•2h ago
IE he can see the peer pool but they don’t announce the peer list.
dymk•1h ago
jedberg•4h ago
They'll just see tracker and assume it's illegal.
hungryhobbit•3h ago
Even if you didn't mean your local police, and meant a national body like the FBI, the truth is they focus on other crimes (eg. child abuse), and even then they are woefully unable to handle even most of those crimes.
The vast, vast majority of copyright enforcement comes from copyright holders ... not the internet copyright police.
jedberg•3h ago
The police rarely find crimes on their own -- they are almost always acting on a request from someone else.
SXX•3h ago
Copyright infinging materials dont go "though" trackers. Trackers only keep torrent hashes and lists of peers.
jeroenhd•45m ago
jedberg•26m ago
Also the government and private companies have argued in the past that the hashes and lists of peers is inducement and enablement for copyright infringement.
gpm•3h ago
There are a few internet/copyright safe harbor provisions (in the US) that might maybe (probably not) make it not a crime, I don't know, I'm not a lawyer. But your general thought when you hear "helping someone else commit a crime" ought to be "that's probably a crime itself".
rockskon•3h ago
rvnx•3h ago
gpm•2h ago
Running a service primarily for legal purposes that some criminals can take advantage of is pretty different with regards to intent than reviving an old domain name that you know is primarily used by old illegal torrents as a tracker.
I spent a few minutes googling, and it seems like that at least as of a decade ago the exact bounds here weren't well defined: https://www.scotusblog.com/2014/03/opinion-analysis-justice-...
> Finally, the possible liability for an “incidental facilitator” – such as a firearms dealer who knows that some customers will use their purchases for crime – is noted but not resolved. Thus, thankfully, there is still some fertile ground for hypotheticals with which we practicing law professors can bedevil our students.
drob518•2h ago
gpm•2h ago
Here it's not the "mere fact that somebody could use your tracker for piracy". It's that you're literally observing that a bunch of old mostly-piracy torrents are pointing at this domain, and then deciding to turn this domain back into a service which assists in that piracy.
KomoD•1h ago
He doesn't know if they're mostly piracy or not, all he sees is a hash and the peers.
drob518•1h ago
gpm•14m ago
The police/courts/jury is not obliged to put blinders on just because you would prefer if they did.
The mere fact that the domain name was previously used for this is almost certainly probable cause to get search warrants that will almost certainly provide the requisite proof beyond a reasonable doubt that he has in fact intentionally both committed himself, and aided others in committing (because he knew what the domain name was, or at least recognized it as similar to demonoid and could guess), copyright infringement. And that's without the blog post... (which I assume in the hypothetical where he chose to keep running this he would not have posted).
awesome_dude•2h ago
It's kind of like Kim Dotcom's defence of his systems where he was saying that he was making attempts to remove content from his systems in compliance with DCMA requests. That is, the claim is his systems were legal because even though people were using them for illegitimate purposes, he was actively working to prevent that from happening.
diggan•2h ago
Right, that makes sense. Is running a tracker "knowingly helping people commit crimes"? I feel like that's a huge jump, there is a wide range of content coordinated by trackers and the DHT.
gpm•2h ago
senko•2h ago
> So I was, uh, downloading some linux isos, like usual.
Nothing to see here, move along.
Seriously though, the OP makes the same argument and concludes that:
> I was spooked. [...] I shut down the VPS and deleted the domain quickly after confirming it works.
IANAL but this clearly shows the OP didn't intend to facilitate crime and shut it down after seeing that was what may have been happening.
gpm•2h ago
> But the OP states he was using the tracker for lawful purposes:
That quote is a confession that he was committing copyright infringement. Courts and juries and not obliged to ignore the ", uh," part.
Probably (in the very unlikely event where he is charged) the best defence would be "this was a joke" not "I didn't literally confess to committing copyright infringement". Even then I'm pretty sure this quote would weigh against him substantially in just about any jury's mind.
senko•2h ago
I know, "linux ISOs" has always been a joke "rationale" :)
I do think we're in agreement.
leijurv•3h ago
"I then started the tracker. After about an hour, it peaked at about 1.7 million distinct torrents across 3.1 million peers!"
numpad0•2h ago
Maybe it's about time to revisit it? It's just the matter of how to enforce DRM. They shouldn't care in this day and age with plenty ways to get licensing sorted out.
KomoD•2h ago
If you don't respond to takedowns, that's probably leaning towards being illegal*
If you respond to takedowns and blacklist the hashes, you're most likely fine*
*obviously depends on the jurisdiction and on whether matching hashes to IP:PORT is considered distribution/facilitation/whatever (take TPB's case as an example)
I know someone who ran a pretty large tracker for years, when he received a takedown he just blacklisted the hashes and he's been fine so far.