Show HN: Every single torrent is on this website
(infohash.lol)134 points by tdjsnelling 4 days ago
134 points by tdjsnelling 4 days ago
The Library of Babel made me aware that choosing/finding is not super distinct from making/creating. Or discovery and invention. In math, there is distinction between "there exists" and "we can construct", but "we can construct" is similar to "we can find".
I don't think they're equivalent. I think invention and creation aren't actually real. There is no "making" or "creating" when it comes to intellectual work.
All computer files are sequences of bits. All sequences of bits are integers. All integers already exist in the infinite set of natural numbers. I can even calculate how big those numbers are given their bit count.
digits(bits) = ceil(bits * log10(2))
digits(32) = 10
digits(64) = 20
digits(128) = 39
digits(256) = 78
digits(512) = 155
digits(1024) = 309
digits(20 KiB) = 49,321
digits(2 GiB) = 5,171,655,946
Yes, I mean exactly this type of insight. Basically taking a digital photo with a camera technically also just picks out the "address" of your current environment within the space of all images. Any 4K 2-hour-length feature film in a digital format is also just an address in the space of all possible videos. The director, the actors, the whole crew did all that work in order to select that point from the space of possibilities, they didn't "create" anything. That movie already existed.
Of course this is silly, but interesting nonetheless. And we routinely speak about such high-dimensional spaces in research and engineering. Or we can imagine optimization as traversing a pre-existing search space. It may be structured as a graph or perhaps a Euclidean space. And in that space we can imagine a loss surface, that sits there in peace all along, with its global minimum somewhere. And instead of "constructing" a solution, we are simply hiking in this space and trying to spot that valley. But this is a bit fictional. We never physically "instantiate" this surface. It's an imagined abstraction. In reality we just have a vector and some rules as to how we change that vector. But we can imagine those changes to be movements in an imagined space.
It's like the idea that the sculptor doesn't create the sculpture, the sculpture was there all along, he just had to remove the superfluous matter to reveal what was already there (i.e. the atoms belonging to the final sculpture).
The most interesting thing is kind of on the border, between these absurdly large spaces and the more manageable ones that are feasible to enumerate.
Another similar mindblow thing was when I forgot the password to a file that I encrypted. It's a fascinating thing that the bit pattern on the disk is functionally random now, and cracking it would take longer than the age of the universe. But if only I knew the password, it would only take just a second. There is a definite sequence of keystrokes I can execute to bring the universe in a state where the content will appear on my screen, it's so close, yet it's so-so far if you don't remember the password. Just a little difference in your brain state and it flips from trivial to hopeless.
PS, if you like thinking about such things, I recommend Meta-Math by Gregory Chaitin, it's very fun (providing an address VS constructing the thing is basically the gist of algorithmic information theory).
How to find a nice SHA1 hash? How do keyword search in this list? Search and discovery of quality are unsolved scientific challenges. Fascinating stuff.
At our university lab we've been working on this for 25 years. Building a search engine is the easy part. Keeping a federated server with a billion users running is unsolved. Creating a fully -serverless- decentralised search engine is possible, you also need self-funding economy. Seems we're one of the few labs worldwide to still make actual operational prototypes of this stuff. More shameless self promotion:
"SwarmSearch: Decentralized Search Engine with Self-Funding Economy" [0]
Really handy to have s search engine to search this webpage with 45,671,926,166,590,716,193,865,151,022,383,844,364,247,891,968 pages and the rest of the web (no spyware, no tracking).
I admit thinking this way is tempting, but in your model the number represents some kind of language, whether human-readable or machine-readable. If we accept the number is a non-lossy encoding of some language, we reach an equivalency stating there is no creating, just discovering language "through convoluted mental and technological processes". But can we really equate language and knowledge? I believe Gödel proved that we cannot, in the sense that there is no "perfect" way to encode knowledge in a system of consistent axioms. Ergo, no matter how eloquently you describe your invention of "the wheel", it is by its nature incomplete and imperfect. Some part of the knowledge will always be tacit.
> Some part of the knowledge will always be tacit
See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_the_Tortoise_Said_to_Achi...
This conflates mathematical existence with actual instantiation. A 2gb integer might be definable, but until someone encodes a particular arrangement of bits and gives it context, it doesn’t exist in any practical sense. We don’t treat all future novels as "already written" just because their ASCII codes can be mapped to integers.
I would say that that’s a valid _model_ we can use to describe creation, much like how maths is a model we use to describe the universe. However, whether maths IS the universe or creation IS discovery are more of a philosophical question, possibly an unanswerable one, that people will have many varying opinions on.
And that’s without me asking you to define “real”, which would be another rabbit hole.
I think Library of Babel by Borges is a static manifestation of Turing complete behaviour via the fact that some L-systems are Turing complete. or put another way. Where in the Library of Babel, does the real Hamlet reside? If we consider finding and replacing names with other names, is it still a Hamlet? And if we bring the full force of edit operations and do these in a reversible manner, then where does the actual Hamlet reside? An equivalence class of Hamlet?
> If you had an oracle that could tell you how to get to the book you need, the navigation instructions to get to the book will be at least as long as the book, on average.
This isn't quite true. Natural language text compresses extremely well and you would only need length equivalent to the compressed form, not the original form. And if you wanted to go further, you could use a mapping where extremely short strings map to known popular books and only unknown works have longer encodings.
I wonder if there is some way to create a latent-space Library of Babel in which you only find incoherent gibberish with extremely long keys, with the shortest ones pointing specifically to the most common/likely strings of text, in manageable computational complexity.
In a library of all possible strings, this is just text compression (as the other comment observes). But in a finite library it gets even simpler, in a cool way! We can treat each text as a unique symbol and use an entropy encoding (eg Huffman) to assign length-optimized key to each based on likelihood (eg from an LLM). Building the library is something like O(n log n), which isn't terrible. But adding new texts would change the IDs for existing texts (which is annoying). There might be a good way to reserve space for future entries probabilistically? Out of my depth at this point!
> If you had an oracle that could tell you how to get to the book you need, the navigation instructions to get to the book will be at least as long as the book, on average.
Only if the oracle has all books that could possibly exist. If you're trying to find a book that already exists, that set is infinitely smaller.
I am reminded of this SMBC comic
> There is no validation that an infohash corresponds to a real torrent—any client can announce anything. Many crawlers and indexers continuously pick random or sequential infohashes and announce themselves so they can later detect other announcers, and malicious clients or poorly written bots can spam the network with anything they like.
There are also valid clients for completely unrelated protocols using the BitTorrent DHT to find each other.
I have the same fascination. You might find https://github.com/dmotz/trystero quite interesting - it's fun to play around with, also can use torrent DHT for discovery.
iroh does too: https://www.iroh.computer/docs/concepts/discovery
The All The Music project is something like that, but for melodies. They created all possible melodies of a 7 note diatonic scale and wrote them to disk as MIDI files, copyrighting them in the process. The melodies were dedicated to the Creative Commons Zero so that people could freely use them without worrying about being sued by someone else who had used that melody previously.
More details here: https://allthemusic.info/faqs/
Very cool, reminds me of the library of Babel (of which you also made a version! [1]).
I made something similar a while ago, the Hdd of Babel [2], which contains all possible files(*) , and wrote down some thoughts on it [3].
I really like how it makes us think about the nature of information.
[1] https://libraryofbabel.app/
[2] https://mkaandorp.github.io/hdd-of-babel/
[3] https://dev.to/mkaandorp/this-website-contains-pictures-of-y...
For a more practical version (containing only infohashes that are observed on the dht) there is bitmagnet [1]. No public instances though, you have to self-host
> csam content is filtered
Filtered how? By some keywords I don't want to know? What about encrypted zips of CSAM? There's no way to filter that in reality.
If you want to learn more about why and you can either speak German or can handle youtubes auto translate i recommend this documentation on the matter[0]. The Pedo Criminals are using scene methods to share their illegal content.
By announcing itself, the indexer makes itself more likely to be handed out as a peer to anyone else interested in that infohash. Every connection attempt it subsequently receives is evidence of another peer announcing or joining that torrent. In effect, it "baits" peers into revealing themselves
The way I understand it, these extraneous infohashes are functional honeytokens.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honeytoken
> In the field of computer security, honeytokens are honeypots that are not computer systems. Their value lies not in their use, but in their abuse.
> That's not detecting "announcers", but maybe more like detecting "indexers".
I think you’re correct, as the secondary freebooting indexers are adding their tracker(s) after the fact of the private torrent’s creation/origination to the original prefilled list of trackers, and inserting their tracker(s) to the reuploaded, usually public, torrent, and sometimes even removing the original private trackers so as to not phone home and tell on themselves.
I’m happy to be corrected, but private trackers typically bind the downloading IP of the torrent to the announcing tracker to validate legitimate clients. Private trackers don’t consider any extra trackers (announcers in this context) as valid or authorized. I have heard that modded BitTorrent clients can intentionally misreport upload stats to fudge the numbers for gaming your quota, as many private trackers/torrent sites enforce a positive >1.0 or higher minimum ratio.
I’ve heard of ways that folks with legitimate access to the private torrent tracker and torrents clone the IPs of other clients and then use a secondary torrent client to request blocks, bypassing the tracker entirely and not reporting any downloads (or uploads, for that matter), so the quota of the first legit client is not affected positively or negatively.
Love this idea of generating pages based on some strictly defined enumeration. Reminds me of https://everyuuid.com/
Me too. That's listed as an inspiration on the index page!
Or every bitcoin public and private address.
Does anybody know what they are using in the browser to perform DHT?
In theory this could be used to share torrent links by a different reference (ideally you could also add an anchor too). Somebody else could have a page that takes keywords and points you to pages hosted on the site.
The page is making a WebSocket connection to the server and getting the peer info through the WebSocket connection. I think the magic happens on the server.
This is a sample of the client-side code I found handling that: https://infohash.lol/_next/static/chunks/pages/p/%5Bpage%5D-...
https://www.npmjs.com/package/bittorrent-dht is used on the server.
DHT crawlers/indexers already exist to perform that function; they crawl and store infohashes (+ metadata when they receive it) and allow users to search that metadata to return relevant infohashes
I wonder how many times on average you'd need to click the "random" button in order to stumble on a page that contains a real torrent.
shades of my younger days on kazaa, excitedly download a file called 'hacking-tool-every-possible-ip-address.txt"
Is this legal? I’m of the impression that publishing infohashes to copyrighted content is illegal under DMCA?
Assuming the web server does not actually store and serve pages in a conventional sense, but rather acts like an application that can render the results of parsing and processing user's input, I wonder what are legal implications.
I can generate a Google link with an infohash in the same fashion: https://www.google.com/search?q=1548262051907755713575797913...
A few years ago, google stopped returning good links for strings that looked like bittorrent infohashes. Prior to that, it was actually a useful way to find information on and potentially trackers for an infohash you had
Yandex is the only search engine that's even marginal useful for that now.
I wonder how hosting a torrent is different to google showing a link to a pirated movie, both are just holding data that tells you where to find the content, not the content itself
I think Google is expected to abide DMCA takedowns in such cases, but IANAL. My understanding is that even an indirect reference (such as a link or infohash) is a DMCA violation.
They happily link to a prime number that will decrypt DVDs in blatant disregard for the DMCA, however. I don't believe they received a takedown request for this one.
https://www.theregister.com/2001/09/11/worlds_first_decss_ex...
neither "hosts" the content. they both just point to the destination with the content.
the infohash isn't copyrighted, so it's not illegal information in and of itself. serving the infohash isn't serving the torrent, and serving the torrent is also not serving copyrighted material. I believe that downloading is still illegal absent a fair use exemption but it's rarely prosecuted because you have to prove the absence of the exemption. It's uploading copyrighted content that's actually illegal and also easy to prosecute, so it's seeders that usually get bopped.
> the infohash isn't copyrighted, so it's not illegal information in and of itself. serving the infohash isn't serving the torrent, and serving the torrent is also not serving copyrighted material
I'm of the impression that serving either the infohash or the torrent is considered to violate DMCA. DMCA does not just forbid sharing copyrighted material, but also sharing links to the copyrighted material or generally anything that can help people bypass copyright protections (including software that can decrypt even trivial DRM).
if serving the infohash was a DMCA violation copyright holders would be thrilled to tear down every torrent site in existence. You can't link to the material, but the infohash isn't that either. It's conceptually a link to the torrent. You're partially right about DRM though. Software to directly circumvent copy protections is illegal under DMCA. But talking about the process is still not illegal, and that has led to some really clever workarounds like the DeCSS Haiku (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DeCSS_haiku)
The site doesn't publish any, except the two legal torrents that are on the front page. Any others you have to either request specifically, or are simply randomly generated.
it is. same as with URLs the infringement is the actual copyrighted content not the pointing to it.
I don't understand why so many people seem so fascinated by constructions like the library of Babel. Yes it contains the answers to all your questions, but there are some significant drawbacks.
* It has more wrong information than right information, with no way to tell the difference.
* If you had an oracle that could tell you how to get to the book you need, the navigation instructions to get to the book will be at least as long as the book, on average.