Wednesday, October 31, 2007

More than a week after disconnecting the torrent is still flying

I stopped seeding immediately after the first 100% had been distributed. Until today more than 24000 people have read the story. Nevertheless there are still more than 300 peers sucking again, fed by more than 30 seeders and 55 distributed copies. That's insane! How many more terabytes of zeros must have been distributed in the meantime? I don't have the slightest clue where those ignorami are coming from.



BTW The Pirate Bay still hasn't deleted the tracker, although they know for sure that this is fake. That probably helps a lot.

Tuesday, October 23, 2007

Seed complete - fake detection: failed

As you can see in the following picture, the seed has been completed. Peers can now continue distribution without me serving.



To summarize the experiment. Fake detection failed. Over 3.5 terabytes of nonsense could be distributed using a tiny uplink of 55 Kb/s within three days and some social engineering. The latter included identifying the most wanted piece of software at the time (not hard) and then making people believe in my upload's authenticity despite its dodgy encryption.

While the community work seemed promising at identifying fakes, the technical infrastructure failed miserably. Especially the torrent's automatic and unchecked redistribution has caused much harm. While sites like The Pirate Bay can't do much about the latter, it's up to the users to pay much more attention wether their favorite torrent sources are hosting first-hand or crawled content.

While it took about an hour for The Pirate Bay to remove the torrent after a link to this site appeared in their forum, it took an eternity for TorrentBox comments for a torrentbox moderator statement, and other pages are still serving it. The Pirate Bay also failed to harm distribution by not taking the torrent's tracker offline after removing it from their webpage. Distribution could have continued anyway through DHT, but this way it was even more efficient. Users, who didn't visit TPB regularly, could furthermore get the impression that everything was still fine.

The Pirate Bay could improve its service by enforcing a zero tolerance policy for cloaked content. Bittorrent allows inspection of a package's files long before a download's completion. Any irregularities wether encryption or obscure compression schemes should be banned instantly.

At the bottom line, the project has been much more insightful and extensive than I would have expected in the beginning. Read up on the whole story in the following interesting snippets:

Monday, October 22, 2007

More than 3.25 terabytes served




As we are approaching 100% distribution interest has risen substantially again. If you do the math, current peers alone - excluding the ones having left after the fake announcement - have exchanged 702 (# of peers) * 6,1 GB * 75,8 % (average completion) = 3,25 TB of nonsense. All this could be fed through no more than a tiny 55 kB/s uplink.