Show HN: Every single torrent is on this website

[recursive]

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.

[bonoboTP]

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".

[cryzinger]

To your first bullet, I believe this is one of the central points of the original Borges story :)

[Chinjut]

Everyone is aware of this. Sites like this aren't created to be useful. They are created to be an amusement, a joke.

[AnthonyMouse]

> 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.

[Llamamoe]

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.

[a_shovel]

Another way of looking at it is that the library of Babel would be less useful than an equivalent quantity of blank paper. For example, you could use it to print books in English instead of gibberish. Multiple copies of those books, even.

[kristianp]

> 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.

[0cf8612b2e1e]

I am reminded of this SMBC comic

https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/the-library-of-heaven

[megablast]

Thank you captain obvious.

[hackingonempty]

> 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.

[sneak]

Which? I'm always fascinated by the use of public p2p nets to serve other protocols. The first complete standalone program I wrote was a gnutella p2p client.

[gwbas1c]

I think this would be an even better joke if the site was a setup for plausible deniability for piracy.

"I didn't share that! It was on infohash.lol first!"

[redsparrow]

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/

[wongarsu]

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

1: https://github.com/bitmagnet-io/bitmagnet

[skoll43]

how to go straight to jail 101

[mk12345]

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...

[avidiax]

> Many crawlers and indexers continuously pick random or sequential infohashes and announce themselves so they can later detect other announcers

I can't follow the logic here. How does this detect other announcers?

[tdjsnelling]

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

[aspenmayer]

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.

[freetonik]

Love this idea of generating pages based on some strictly defined enumeration. Reminds me of https://everyuuid.com/

[tdjsnelling]

Me too. That's listed as an inspiration on the index page!

[bArray]

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.

[crumpled]

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-...

[tdjsnelling]

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

[mikepurvis]

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.

[ratelimitsteve]

shades of my younger days on kazaa, excitedly download a file called 'hacking-tool-every-possible-ip-address.txt"

[throwaway894345]

Is this legal? I’m of the impression that publishing infohashes to copyrighted content is illegal under DMCA?

[freetonik]

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...

[lxgr]

It's probably as illegal as any other random number generator.

[reorder9695]

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

[ratelimitsteve]

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.

[pessimizer]

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.

[akimbostrawman]

it is. same as with URLs the infringement is the actual copyrighted content not the pointing to it.

[lxe]

So there is almost zero chance that opening up a particular page is going to land on an actual torrent.

[noman-land]

All the torrents are in π.