Wir betreiben das Gebrauchte-Hardware-NOC für die #Datenspuren eigentlich übers ganze Jahr als Interprovider für unsere Nachbarn und sagen deshalb nur *ausserhalb* der Veranstaltung "Use more bandwidth!"

Nun, dieses Jahr gibts einen #BitTorrent-Workshop: https://talks.datenspuren.de/ds25/talk/S8JQ8W/

Progress from SciOp on distributing large scientific datasets via #bittorrent and preservation via Lots of Copies Keeps Stuff Safe. This feature allows uploads and torrent modifications via a web interface, so you can participate even if your institution blocks BitTorrent. #OpenData via @jonny

https://blog.sciop.net/2025-08-29/webseeds

Does anyone know the social history of libtorrent? it now appears only sparsely maintained and still almost exclusively by arvid, really huge bugs go unresponded to, and i'm finding tons of offers to help with stuff also getting just ignored? like how did this whole protocol get built on top of this one library maintained by this one person - asking for any specifics, rather than "that just always happens"

Mastodon Isn’t Complying With Age Verification Because It Can’t

While other services are bending at the knee over age verification, Mastodon has no actual means to comply.

https://www.freezenet.ca/mastodon-isnt-complying-with-age-verification-because-it-cant/

Ok, so I'm trying to make a torrent for #Tenacity and seed it. I figure I could create the torrent on one computer, transfer it to my file server via #BitTorrent (where it'll seed there), and then distribute the torrent and magnet link.

The transfer works fine because my file server and computer are on the same networks. However, when I test with my phone or another computer on a different network, it doesn't work. My file server is behind a firewall, but ports 6881-6889 are both open on both my router and firewall on the server.

What am I doing wrong? Is this too complicated?

What if we gave an official download over #BitTorrent? The main motivation is to provide a way to help reduce server load on @Codeberg because of recent AI crawlers. It's something we can do at the moment, but we hope every little but helps nonetheless. It also gives another outlet for people to download Tenacity if Codeberg is down or, for some reason, it's blocked in your country.

Just a thought, but if you want to see that happen, let us know below!

if anyone is bored or wants to contribute to gray archive tech, i've done all the hard parts around this, but here is a set of things you could do to make "practical repack mutability for torrents" happen: https://codeberg.org/Safeguarding/-/projects/19508

so we have an indexer and a cli tool that can interact with clients. if we added one link table that allowed people to declare relationships between torrents - like e.g. if one replaces another, or is an updated version of, successor to, and so on, then one could plug in the pieces so the cli periodically checks for updated versions of torrents and swaps them out in the local client.

this could be your name in the credits: "what if bittorrent trackers weren't just static repositories of torrent files and generic peer connection machines but could facilitate socio-technological resolutions to basic problems in the protocol."

I just closed da loop on the first example of the distributed, bittorrent backed, "archiveteam-warrior except anyone can do it and not necessarily have uploading to archive org being the only means of sharing". .. thing. And it's pretty good. In a couple months we've slowly spread our octopus tentacles over the whole bittorrent/scraping stack and it's cool to start seeing the pieces connect.

We have a basic problem: someone recognizes a dataset will disappear, then we would have to have a whole convoluted forum process where we post what we're taking, blah blah heroism, volunteerism, solving hard problems on the fly, love this group. Except that sometimes only half the data would show up, or it would end up with one person needing to seed 20TB from their home connection. So uneven labor distribution

Anyway once we get the frontend and docs writ we'll have a sketch of an idea: what if not just distributing the data, we also distributed the scraping. making it possible for deduplicated, distributed crawl tasks that feed automatically back into feeds of torrents. Once we convince arvindn to make webtorrent enabled by default, we've got some cool news with the replayweb.page folks to share. Along with being able to share the work and mutually validating snapshots of the web, that's your distributed wayback machine.

Then it's time to start the federation part where it gets really interesting - making AP groups that can mutually coordinate archival work and publish it in private, overlapping torrent bubbles

Edit: here is the thing in code form, docs are the cherry on top: https://codeberg.org/Safeguarding/-/projects/18027

I wrote a new BitTorrent tracker in Elixir

https://github.com/Dahrkael/ExTracker

posted in the "why is webtorrent not implemented in libtorrent" issue and have incited generational warfare among the pirates
https://github.com/arvidn/libtorrent/issues/7283#issuecomment-2911287354

here is a sneak preview of a very simple python package for creating and handling .torrent files.

https://torrent-models.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

https://github.com/p2p-ld/torrent-models

• Full v2 and hybrid torrent support.
• model-based validation, editing, and parsing with modern python type annotations and metadata.
• Reasonable to use object when loaded with kind serdes handling (not just a wrapper around a bytestring dict)
• Fast enough to use with a tracker/web service (a surprising amount of the existing packages have O(n2) spots for no reason, this is ~dozens-thousands of times faster than torf).
• TODO: implement the rest of the BEPs, add methods for partial rehashing, more testing.

I was surprised this needed to be written since torrents are a relatively simple file format, but it did - none of the existing packages are suited for use as a library e.g. for tracker/client software and most can only do v1. I wrote this for sciop, where we want to be experimenting on the format, but also do stuff like dynamically modifying torrents to add trackers, webseeds, and other metadata. I'll do a full announcement after implementing the rest of the BEPs.

We have rebuilt our primary #bittorrent server and are reloading seeds now. In the next few days all the rainbow tables, wordlists, and cons should be available again!
https://media.defcon.org/

The #rTorrent developer on adding support for webseeds, which is necessary for people wishing to help mirror #InternetArchive items via #bittorrent:

«Unless the work is sponsored I don't think it will happen anytime soon.»

https://github.com/rakshasa/rtorrent/issues/66#issuecomment-2845609865

What's your preferred BitTorrent client and why?

TIL you can use torrents to seed+distribute s3 files. I wonder if anyone has written the reverse, an s3 frontend backed by torrents. That strikes me as useful for fedi media caching (though perhaps the deduplication of hashes/IPFS would suit better)

https://carltonbale.com/how-to-create-and-seed-a-torrent-download-on-amazon-s3/

I'm staying at a household where they play for Disney+. But we can't watch the MCU Spiderman movies, because some other company has the rights to movie adaptions of the character. So we're now expected to pay for 2 different streaming services to binge the MCU in order?

Best argument for #BitTorrent ever.

are there any bittorrent clients that support bep-052 and offer a cli?