Comment by yoavm
6 days ago
Can you elaborate on what big potatoes you're seeing? Genuinely asking. The Android app, for example, writes everything to the app's storage, and runs only when your phone is plugged-in and is connected to wifi. To me that generally means "when I'm sleeping". What's the big potato in this scenario?
That is a hell of a lot of trust that people are putting in to download and upload unknown files.
The risks that you download and start spreading malware or worse CSAM. You really don’t want that sitting on your disk.
Admittedly the risks is lower if the list is coming from Annas Archive, but this is still putting a lot of trust in an external list.
Much better off doing this manually, finding the list of what you want to seed and vetting that list yourself.
The torrents are coming directly from Anna's Archive torrents list generator, which suggests their torrents based on how rare their content is. There's currently 177TB of data that is only seeded by 4 computers around the world, which I personally find worrisome.
People seem to be very concerned, but putting aside the legal risks (which I accept - don't use this if you're in one of the ~10 countries it could get you in troubles for), I don't really get it. The idea is to support Anna's Archive. If you do not trust the project, why support it? Levin is meant for people that want to support Anna's Archive, and my assumption was that this implies some kind of trust in their torrents.
Edit: just adding that "finding the list of what you want to seed and vetting that list yourself" is extremely not practical and not won't really help anyone. Torrents work because we're all seeding the same torrents. If I'd seed a torrent of my 5 favorite books and you seed a torrent of your 5 books, our torrents will forever have 1 seeder each. And good luck manually vetting all the files in one AA torrent. I am planning to let people manually add/remove torrents from Levin, but I highly suspect it will be used by very, very few.
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CSAM is not something to scare people away. In P2P networks like Perfect Dark there are TBs of CSAM sitting in everyone's disks and we just get along with them.
Do you ever download things you didn't upload? How do you know none of them are CSAM? Aren't you scared?
I'm seeding the Epstein files right now.
They hated him because he told the truth moment.
Any iOS or Android app could in fact, download arbitrary content without you noticing, but corporations conditioned people to only raise alarms on torrents and other community efforts.
Yes. As far as I know, with WebRTC I can make your device share certain files with peers simply by you visiting my website.
Not only downloading, but also uploading. Your ISP (in America) has a policy about how many DMCA strikes you get before they disable your internet permanently.
Would you be willing to let me mail a package to your house, to hold for me? It would be placed in your house at night, while you're sleeping.
These are beautiful analogies, but I'd appreciate an answer my original question. Your package can explode, these torrents cannot (as far as I am aware). If you want to send me a CD to store at my house, feel free to email me.
If you end up torrenting very illegal or malicious content, who is responsible? Will it be you, the app creator?
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> Your package can explode, these torrents cannot (as far as I am aware).
Sure, but what if the scenario was slightly modified, with explicit 100% guarantees regarding rhe package you would receive in the maile:
1. It could only contain either an SSD/hard drive or a usb drive. The storage device has not been tampered with. It was only ever used as a regular storage device out of the box.
2. There is no malware or any malicious executables on the storage device. The only types of data that it could contain would be text/html, structured data/document files (json, csv, office suite files, pdf, etc.), and media files (audio, video, images, etc.). None of those files will exploit any vulnerabilities in the software that opens them (neither through the parser nor anything else)
This makes it nearly a perfect 1:1 analogy to the torrenting scenario, both involving the exact same set of imo the most important dangers.
Which, for me personally, is the fear of ending up with illegal content (CSAM, stolen credit card dumps, etc.) on a storage device in my possession through no fault of my own.
Even if it could be a winnable battle in the end, it would be pretty much over reputationally way before it gets to the legal resolution. Just being accused of having any illegal content of that nature is not something I would want to ever deal with at all.
You gotta realize how it would sound and how you would appear to most uninvolved average people in real life, when your legal defense isn’t even something like statement #1 below, and is way closer to the statement #2:
> “I am not guilty, the accusarions are false, those files were never present on any of my storage devices.”
> “I am not guilty, despite those files being actually present on a storage device in my possession. That’s all due to how torrents inherently work, so, let’s start from the basics…” [and now we gotta explain simplified basics of torrent technology and how it works to the DA, the judge, as well as anyone else observing the trial, and pray they will try to actually understand]
By that logic no app should allow you to store any data whatsoever on their servers. Because your data might explode.
Yes, if I know who you are and you have a list of what you might send. Anna’s Archive’s (who) content is well defined (what).