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Caching Torrent files in DNS
bodin writes "This is a proof of concept version of BitTorrent where the torrent files are transported over DNS. This will of course bog down BIND servers all over the planet. Everyone should be thankful that the files are not sent over DNS."
Great I get to see this article posted just before the internet slows to an unacceptable crawl and names stop resolving.
Bloody hell, that guy has awful spelling!
And he's coded what is obviously the *worst idea ever!*
Do you want to shoot him or shall I?
I'm amazing. You aren't. SUCK IT
DNS was designed to work under UDP with a 512byte limit on packet size. I guess this would be ok if you are downloading software for a Timex Sinclair.
This is a proof of concept version of BitTorrent where the torrent files are transported over DNS. This will of course bog down BIND servers all over the planet. Everyone should be thankful that the files are not send over DNS.
So why is it being posted on Slashdot if it's such a bad idea? Won't posting it on a major news site just further it's progession?
When anger rises, think of the consequences.
Confucius (551 BC - 479 BC)
...to send those RIAA music files and MPAA movies to people? After I sell them for profit?
Oops. Runs and hides
-- n
I know its sort of a chicken / egg thing... but can someone explain exactly why BT itself can't be used to distribute torrents, or to share the bandwidth of tracking?
Pingular is a karma whore and a troll
Seriously. I don't pretend to understand 100% of the technology involved, but it seems pretty clear even to me that:
- DNS servers, as the name implies, are for serving DNS information.
- For information to be propagated at a good speed, we don't want DNS servers to be bogged down.
- If we start using DNS servers to send information larger than the usual DNS information, we bog them down.
That isn't to say that I think BitTorrent cacheing isn't possible. I just don't think it's a good idea to use existing DNS servers for it, although perhaps something could be built on similar technology, or dedicated Torrent users could run their own DNS servers if they're that determined to do something so bandwidth-intensive..."It is dark. You are likely to be eaten by a grue." -- Zork
there goes the root servers.. :(
moo
I don't think it is a bad idea but I think we must start making "prime directives" ala RoboCop. ....
Prime Directives
1. Get DSL/Cable Modem
2. Install Linux/BSD/OpenSource OS.
3. Do not mess with DNS
would be fun if one could download torrents from riaa, mpaa and whatever those ....... are called
Some of us have been using DNS to get through some really draconian firewalls for ages. It was just a matter of time before we saw someone distribute files this way. What is unique is that they will be cached. This in and of itself is an amazing idea. DNS is well designed to cache for well defined amounts of time.
The load on large DNS servers can grow quickly. I wouldn't be surprised if we see a set of patches coming out for DNS servers to combat this. the question is can we find a TTL that reduces the abuse and still makes it useful.
Just ensure that the DNS checks to see that the new file is actually a legal DNS zone file. I assume these things have a required format?
It's cool hack not withstanding how useless it is. I suppose if you were on a closed network that needed to propagate a lot of torrent files for some reason it would make since, but still it's a cool hack.
BitTorrent already requires fixed servers for operation (the "trackers"), and serving torrent files from the same trackers isn't a terrible burden. Why on earth would someone want to abuse DNS for this purpose?
Yesterday night when i could not sleep i thought of what fun i could do with one of the most
distributed database in the world. The DNS!
yeah its fun fucking up the DNS for everyone, haha i laugh everytime a virus wipes out half the net or your hardrive, its fun ruining other peoples stuff, its cheap like you say right ?
Freenet over DHCP;
Gnutella over BOOTP;
And last, but not least, KaZaa over WINS!!! :)
You are not the customer.
It's actually a proof of concept of DNS where its been reprogrammed to send BitTorrent files, not the other way around.
Let's use the rpc protocol for ftp transfers! This sounds like it could be fun!
DNS is being used to exchange the Torrent files, which are small, not the data itself, which is large.
The Torrent files are indexes that tell your BitTorrent program where and how to get its data.
This sounds very useful, since what was missing from the BitTorrent network was a way of distributing cached Torrent files, and this is exactly what DNS provides.
Remains to be seen whether it actually works, but it's a neat concept.
Ceci n'est pas une signature
Why don't we funnel all trucking traffic into and out of all major port cities through residential streets!
That way, a system we already have in place that seems to work ok can be scrapped, and we can bog down commuters only BLOCKS from their homes!!!!
THEN, I can get my article on Slashdot.
I am become Troll, destroyer of threads
Using DNS to cache a dozen or two kilobytes (or less, or more) where it's only meant to handle a few BYTES is likely to cause all sorts of problems.
Some Norwegian standup-comedian (Christoffer Schau) did something like that during the Quart Festival some years ago. Then again, once he placed a small-boat engine inside a pig corpse, and it floated!
That was cool. Can a fish really give you a blow job?
someone figure out how to send files over DNS.
> Everyone should be thankful that the files are not send over DNS.
All your base are belong to us.
Must-not-watch TV!
but ed2k:// URLs...? These are maybe 200 bytes long...
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
Except FTP is for Server \ Client tranfers
BitTorrent is for splitting up the load between many machines. ( aka P2P )
Browse at -1, because trolls are often the most creative part of
There are already a number of posts on Slashdot talking about how this is a really bad idea. I disagree (with a big but). It would almost certainly be a Bad Idea (TM) if this were enacted and people tried to make it the main way of distributing torrents. However, I don't think the idea was meant to do that, I think it was more just to show that it could be done. It's akin to people who get put on the mainpage of Slashdot for hacking their Apple IIe's so that they have ethernet and then writing a simple graphical operating system for them so they can browse the web. Impractical and largely useless? Probably. Interesting and fun hack? Definitely.
If people start using this extensively, and the DNS servers start getting clogged up by this, we'll just have to come up with a way to send DNS information over BitTorrent! That way, everything will balance out, right?
Mods: PUT DOWN THE PIPE and refuse to mod up pointless Pinga-less/Sir Cock's-a-not "I can read the subject line and post two lines of meaningless bullshit" trolls!
Unless, that is, you're part of the Sacred Jihad Against Slashdot, in which case you're doing a fine job of fucking up this site with your mod points.
If someone adds TXT records to their dnses and in turn to their dns slaves it's their buissnies, how the hell will this affect all dnses available in the world? You generally ask the "owner dns" but yes, if you ask your "ips's dns" or someone elses dns then they might cache the result.
.torrent file? And wouldn't linux distrobutiors enjoy this?
/me is also a typical Swedish geek =)
But how bad is that really? How large is a
$large_isp has several users who wants to download $linux_dist. The first user gets the TXT record and is off downloading. And the rest of em uses the cached record (if it is cached) in either case $linux_dist's webserver dosn't suffer as hard and they can always add more slave dnses to handle the load. Perhaps users even starts slave servers for that zone to help the dist.
(Is there really a rule that says "you have to cache and store TXT for $TTL time".)
And whats this with spelling? I mean you totally miss the point and... complain about spelling? is that the end of the world? =)
DNS is a resource locating service. For example, SRV records are a nicer way of autoconfiging your network.
With SRV records, you say service.domain = port at host. You could do a dig for ldap.slashdot.org and findout that the ldap server is on port 389 at directory.slashdot.org.
This is a slight extension of this. I don't know the exact implementation, but you could have a zone file that looks like:
'file being served'.bt.slashdot.org SRV 0 0 PORT 'seed host'
You can have multiple SRV's per resource and load balance between them.
DNS is currently used for stuff like this all over the place. We already have the technology. IXFR means we can transfer just the changes in the zones when there are updates.
Last time I checked, DNS is not over loaded and will scale to handle this. Even it 50% of the internet uses BT over DNS, 100% of the internet uses DNS for email, web and so forth. Every time an email is delivered, there are at least 6-10 DNS queries.
DNS will not be bogged down.
-- DrZaius - Minister of Sciences and Protector of the Faith
The tracker does not allocate bandwidth, it just introduces peers to each other.
You really are, you know. And you should.
Bloody well put mate, lets hope the mods get this rated up before everyone else miss's it.
moo
We can call it the UberTorrent. .....unknown host slashdot.org
I think the poster was Morris.
It's true that this would wreak havok with existing DNS servers. But others have been twisting DNS to their own purposes before this, and it's caused no harm.
DNS spam blacklists don't interfere with DNS, because they don't connect to the global DNS system. Hands up if you want to run a bittorrent DNS root server. Anyone? No one?
/. stripped out my "less than" sign.
I would guess that serving .torrent files is not a problem compared to the bandwidth and CPU used by the tracker. When downloading a file via BitTorrent, you only download the .torrent once but you check in with the tracker every few minutes.
I've been wondering about (ab)using DNS for FreeBSD Update -- the idea being that when you're updating a system which is not up to date with security fixes, you might want to be behind a draconian firewall. (The caching benefits of DNS are a non-issue; updating a year-old RELEASE takes only a couple MB.)
In the end, I decided that it would be more trouble than it's worth; but if someone else has written code I can borrow (I haven't looked in detail) then I might reconsider this.
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
This guy used DNS because it "caches" the data... Yeah, so what?
Why not use a cache that's built for large quantities of data? I don't know, oh something like, maybe SQUID?
Often, slashdotted articles are still available thru Google. That might work.
I guess you could say the guy had himself a blow fish?
I agree with this post.
From what I can tell he is merely talking about the data that says where the main download data (i.e. the iso or whatever) is. Kind of like storing a mirror list in the TXT record.
So the ftp thing would not be an accurate comparison.
My Suburban burns less gasoline than your Prius.
What a stupid definition! It's recursive without an exit criteria!
Correct defintions is:
DNS stands for Domain Name Service and it is for service to resolve names of domains.
Persiod. You can use it for host name domains, their hosts, and their services. Yes, as it is specified in the protocol RFC documents, it can be used as a service locator. Therefore, if there is a service to share files, then its index (read: the service desciptor) can be served through DNS.
Today Internet becomes more and more chaotic. Without improving directory and name services Internet will degrade in quality of serving its end-users. That's why I appreciate this idea. As well as I will apreciate further improvement of LDAP with SNMP (MIB), as well as I wish UDDI will become more mature and so on.
Good improvement in DNS!
Less is more !
From TFA: "due the nature of the DNS it *CACHES* the entries"
No, that's BIND. And a BIND zonefile is just that: a BIND zonefile. All this is about BIND, not DNS. It does not work "over" or "with" or "through" DNS.
It's not clever either. More like abusing other people's resources.
I discovered this the other day,
http://www.torrentsearch.org/
basically its a p2p program that downloads the whole database of
You can then search for torrents through the gui. You can then download the
nick
Electronic Music Made Using Linux http://soundcloud.com/polyp
I guess one could sarcastically say thanks for the proof of concept, real good job. But then again, its better they did it and let everyone know it could be done, rather than having to find out about it 'in the wild'. I just hope its easy to prevent.
Manipulate the moderator system! Mod someone as "overrated" today.
I get all my porn from bit torrent. You're such a n00b.
$ dig txt 0_1197_56633ab0d90f43c68ed1b47358eccfe7.netrogenic .com
c .com
7 .netrogenic.com. IN TXT
. netrogenic.com. 3118 IN TXT "64383a616e6e6f756e636534333a687474703a2f2f746f727 2656e742e64756c75672e64756b652e6564753a363936392f6 16e6e6f756e636531333a6372656174696f6e2064617465693 130363830353734393265343a696e666f64353a66696c65736 c64363a6c656e6774686935373565343a706174686c363a4d4 435"
; <<>> DiG 9.2.1 <<>> txt 0_1197_56633ab0d90f43c68ed1b47358eccfe7.netrogeni
;; global options: printcmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 51320
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 1, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 0
;; QUESTION SECTION:
;0_1197_56633ab0d90f43c68ed1b47358eccfe
;; ANSWER SECTION:
0_1197_56633ab0d90f43c68ed1b47358eccfe7
;; Query time: 3 msec
;; SERVER: xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx#53(xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx)
;; WHEN: Sun Nov 30 13:13:56 2003
;; MSG SIZE rcvd: 337
evank40767 kindly linked to an old picture stored on his own AOL account.
evank40767, don't the guys at AOL suggest having something like index.html rather than granting access to the whole directory?
And please stop crying now, it is too late anyway. HAHAHAHAHAHAHA.Since people are serving data over DNS...
Why not server domain name information over HTTP?
See, I told you DNS would cause problems
;-)
You should have listened to me and stuck with Host files
ITYM: >
Maybe I'm a bit conservative but I still think p2p networks are evil. They consume all aviable bandwidth, they're hard to control - limiting Kazaa for network larger than 3 computers is a nightmare - it uses all aviable ports, you have to actually filter it by IP packet contents, looking for certain strings in packets. They're also damn easy for abuse - name your trojan preetingirlsuckingdog.exe and tadam! next day it's everywhere.
I know they can be used for 'decent' purposes also, like torrents lately for sharing kernel sources. But still - what was wrong with ftp/http downloading?
That sounds like a great formula to get something never adopted. The savings from DNS come because everyone at an ISP is using the same server, so responses get cached. Please call up AT&T and ask them to set up a BT-DNS server for you. Let me know how that works out.
Then, of course, there's the fact that you've made the entire network dependent on the root servers, whose only purpose is to run this file-sharing network. Good luck protecting the poor sobs running them from RIAA. Remember a little company called "Napster"?
I'm with you 99%.
Its design supports more networking addressing schemes than TCP/IP. These Bittorrent files are just addresses one/two abstraction levels from raw ip addresses. No big deal. You all sound like a bunch of whiney old ladies. Death of DNS! News at 11! The impact this will have on the DNS system you couldn't even measure with an electron microscope so just calm down.
Lots of postings discuss the load being placed on the DNS servers as lots of mp3's and binaries are transferred through them. Perhaps I am misunderstanding this but surely it's just the .torrent files themselves that are being distributed. The torrent files are just pointers to the trackers which keep a record of the peers who have the files. Distributing the .torrent files probably wouldn't put a massive load on DNS Servers.
The Romans didn't find algebra very challenging, because X was always 10
The file is encoded with bEncode which is ugly, not human readable, pure rubbish. Why couldn't he use xml and schema like the rest of the developers in the 21st century.
For most torrent sites, the slowness comes from the webserver being used as the tracker. This is not true of SuprNova, as it has many mirrors. I personally have not had trouble with most SuprNova mirrors myself, though I imagine there are probably some poor mirrors out there hosting the files.
because what hunting rifle has a bayonet lug
Actually the only bit you need from the ed2k-URL is the MD4, the rest is only of cosmetic value (sort of). So you only need 16 bytes!
That's torrent: centralised servers that often are down (easy targets) and files most people share only a couple of days max. The only thing better from the ed2k is the speed, which of course is higher since people don't share that much. Ed2k has mldonkey, a wonderful cross-platform client which has run 24/7 on my boxes without leaking memory (compare that to e/xMule). Plus it does torrents and other networks too.
And what happens when nazi ISPs (who view P2P bandwidth with disdain) start fudging their DNS servers to stop caching BT records? "Woo Hoo! I got BT bandwidth down, kazaa, napster, etc. to go!"
... but I am gay.
Wanna fuck? Do you like top, pillow biting or versatile?
that includes the person who originally created this, the person who posted it on that website and then wrote about it, anyone who links to it and even CmdrTaco for being the dumbass of dumbasses and posting it on the largest "hey guys, look how i can take down the internet" forum called slashdot. what you retards dont realize when you said "nobody should or probably will try this because it would fuck over the internet so bad, its just cool to have proofs of concept" is that all it takes is one dumbfuck to try it and we're all fucked. and you know that about 100 dumbfucks are already out there improving this god awful code and implementing. congrats, youre all dumbfucks.
man...i laughed my ass off at that one, imagine all the broadcast traffic. You'd DDOS the entire internet.
And he's coded what is obviously the *worst idea ever!*
Does he work for Verisign?
newsgroups are by far the Biggest distributed file servers and are cached at the ISP level. Why not make a bittorrent client that will hook up to your local Newsgroup server and download the file? (sure not all ISPs have all the newsgroups but the good ones have allot)
Why not use another p2p application like kazaa to host the torrents.
rated +1: by request
...how do you get the torrent file on to the DNS? Is there some magical request that you send it in order to get your torrent chunks on to a DNS server?
.torrent files could be distributed via XDCCs and P2P programs.
Also,
Some years ago I got interested in distributing files over DNS, so I went looking for info on the subject. I found that MIT had already developed a special purpose DNS server to perform NIS like functions with DNS called HESIOD. HESIOD has now been incorporated into every copy of BIND. You setup a HESIOD zone like this:
zone "example" hs {
...
};
But if you make torrents of the torrent files it would be feasible:
ranma@melchior:~$ ls -l test.torrent
-rw-r--r-- 1 ranma users 111443 003-11-30 21:58 test.torrent
ranma@melchior:~$ ls -l test.torrent.torrent
-rw-r--r-- 1 ranma users 171 003-11-30 21:58 test.torrent.torrent
Now if it were possible to specify multiple trackers in one torrent, it would be even better, because even if one were offline the others could be used.
Tobias
This has been used to distribute the DeCSS source. Check out #9 here . I love the fact that the DVDCCA naveserver has the data.
http://security.royans.net/info/articles/dnsinfohi ding/
This is a quote from the man page for named.conf on solaris.
First off, let the guy hack :P
.torrent files.
.torrent files per second. Static content is very fast.
:)
just some constructive criticisms.
1) The real bandwidth and centralization problem is trackers and not distributing the
This hack is somewhat of a premature optimization.
Web servers can handle hundred to thousands of
2) There is great temptation to use TXT records for other things, but DNS admins generally don't appricate this kind of use. You have to remember that a lot of DNS servers are memory limited.
3) spellcheck everything! people judge you and your work by the quality of your spelling.
ispell is particularly handy.
... filesystem
Sounds like a neat program. Unfortunately, it sounds like a festering mound of virus that would singlehandedly OWN any machine it touches and any unfortunate user too impatient or stupid not to click "AGREE: Totally Hose My Machine". I'm quoting the EULA here, not making this stuff up. Gator's spyware is green with envy:
By accepting this agreement, I certify the following:
4) I understand that by accepting these terms and conditions, this program will be installed on my computer and my web browser home and search page will be changed in order to allow me access.
5) I also acknowledge that a Desktop toolbar will be installed on this system as a stand-alone module and that the Desktop toolbar will update itself from time to time in accordance with the EULA Privacy Policy.
6) I further understand that an accessory tool bar will be added to my web browser which will remain visible as long as the software is installed and agree that I wish to use your search engine for my
web browsers auto search option and default error age.
7) To insure you always have the latest version and for your convenience this software will automatically update itself from time to
time once installed in accordance with this EULA and Privacy Policy.
8) If you decide to change your homepage or search page at a later date this information ?the url? will be sent back to our servers and a pass-through toolbar will be installed at the bottom of your web
browser. This toolbar will remain active as long as this software is installed on your system.
9) I understand that, by accepting these terms and conditions, bookmarks will be added to my system, which may be removed manually or via un-installation of the software.
10) In order for us to keep this software free, from time to time promotional offers from our sponsors will be displayed to you.
11) To prevent your browser from becoming cluttered when our toolbar is installed, any other toolbars you currently have visible will
be deactivated. They can be restored manually through the IE view menu.
12) In order for this software to function properly, If incorrect host-file entries are detected for this software's related domain
names, those entries will be removed.
13) If you wish to uninstall this software you may do so at any time by going to your start menu, Control Panel, Add / Remove Programs, and then selecting this application. Additionally a separate uninstaller may be downloaded from the website the Sponsor Software installs
in your web browser, or you mail email support@lop.com for further assistance.
14) Bookmarking to a page on this server/site whereby this warning page is by-passed shall constitute an implicit acceptance of the
foregoing terms herein set forth.
And it does go on.
Umm, if the point is to reduce http traffic, I think the obvious solution should be a caching proxy server. Your ISP should already have one. I admit the story was fun, and it must have been great to hack on it, but it's not really about caching.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
Ha! I'd love to see the Australian ISPs block DNS. Suck that.
Karma: It's all a bunch of tree-huggin' hippy crap!
I love the US patent system.
Dude! You saw that vidio to? I don't know. If I was him I would be worried. From the look of her, the only way she's getting those guys to put thier members in her, is to pay them and big. Shivers
FYI, as someone who designs systems for a large-ish ISP, I would rather people get their linux distro from our mirror server. .torrent just cannot match the serving power for our customer base, and certainly not the economics.
.torrent tracker data in the DNS servers. It'll be interesting to see the result.
The fetching of linux distro ISO's is often used to justify BT, but the author's own notes point to suprnova, which has trackers to very little content that is licensed for free re/distribution.
And yes, the mirror is big and powerful, and has all major linux and *bsd's, with some minor ones too.
Nevertheless, I'll now keep an eye for
...the .torrent files are the least of anyone's worries. It's the trackers that are under the serious load, and put the hard limit on the scalability of BitTorrent.
It's a shame - it's about a good Kademlia implementation away from being a near-optimal non-anonymous distributed legal content distribution mechanism.
Of course, these days non-anonymous really isn't good enough...
I don't see what the issue is, exactly. DNS data is propagated lazily. The only issues is that you'd have maybe three machines storing the data instead of one.
.torrent files are particularly big -- I happened to have one on my hard drive, which was under 512 bytes.
.torrent files -- it seems that USENET or similar would be a better choice, given that they tend to only be useful for a short period of time, that announcements of new torrents is a useful characteristic of a .torrent propagation system, and that archiving torrents is useful -- but I also don't really see the harm in this.
.torrent file, the bandwidth will not be an issue.
Unless
I'm not sure that there's much point in using DNS to propagate
Given the kind of load that nameservers happily handle today when you hit a webpage with a number of entries (especially for those annoying little "badges") (and the nameserver potentially gets twenty or more lookup requests all at once), there can't be a huge processing hit.
There *might* be a storage hit...but suppose there are 10,000 torrent files out there, and each is 1K. That's just 10MB of data, and I doubt anyone is interested in storing all available torrents.
Finally, I suppose that bandwidth might be an issue, but I suspect that given the frequency of DNS lookups and the infrequency of someone needing a new
I have done plenty of fun things with DNS and run a small DNS server, but I will freely admit that I am not a DNS wizard, and leave it to the folks on NANOG to debate the merits of this.
For my money, though, this is cute and not harmful at all, though it might not be particularly useful.
May we never see th
Let Verisign run the TLD servers for that BT-DNS network. Then if it thinks you typed in the wrong file, it passes you several megabytes of advertising for Verisign and friends.
These beasts are different from root servers (although many of the same entities run them). Many ISPs run one or more levels of caching DNS servers to reduce load and latency. This is where most of the caching would occur.
Torrentsearch installs a LOT of spyware (more than it admits) - I recommend running it on a PTP bitch box rather than your regular machine.
How about something that would propagate and self refer via googles cache? (Or something like that) .torrent files are usually 80K, so were not talking even remotely a slashdot hit here.
It might work, assuming google mines its own cache... might be a public service or hell, don't know.
1. An ugly, ugly hack, and a wrong tool for the job (tm)
2. Wrong using others' resources in a way that is not intended (serving binary data)
My goal of using the DNS is however the same: solve the dead trackers problem. But to serve data directly from DNS, my idea to use what DNS is for: route traffic. You request the torrent's 40 byte info_hash as a subdomain of the DNS server's domain, and it returns you the optimal tracker's IP. For example:
{torrent_hash}.bthub.com
and bthub.com will be where i'll host the DNS service. It's basically a dynamic DNS server, updated frequently, of all known torrent hashes from different trackers in its database (my estimation is around 15000 - 20000 torrents, or subdomains. I know because I run a BT search engine, see my sig). This way, you don't "hack" the DNS, but you get the benefit of:
1. Dynamic routing to the tracker with the most ppl downloading your file, or the biggest "swarm", and hence the highest speed
2. Re-routing to a SINGLE new tracker when one dies
The 2nd benefit is important, as the case today is ppl just randomly pick a new tracker when the original dies, without knowing how big the swarm is on the new tracker. This splits the original torrent swarm across multiple trackers, which don't talk with each other (yet).
There are some discussion on the mail list of adding connectivity between the trackers, similar to how you link IRC servers together into a network. But that's no where near a proposal, and using DNS to act as a "hub" for the trackers would need the least effort and changes to the BT protocol and trackers.
I discussed this idea in detail on this thread "Decentralizing trackers: Use hubs", feel free to take a look.
VIVA1023.com | Political Fashion.
Am in neeed of da cheeez...
BT polls the tracker asking for peers. Compare it to the era of reverse-engineered napster: you've got lots of clients connected to one (of many) napster clones, none of them talking to each other.
If BT's one redeeming feature (swarming downloads with economic model of tit-for-tat) was put into a real P2P app you would see a massive increase in filesharing. In the end, as long as you know a valid info_hash, you know you're getting the right file.
This shouldn't be surprising to anyone. DNS can store any sort of data. It's just a system for distributing keys and values...
"he drew his sword Ringil that glittered like ice... and he wounded Morgoth with seven wounds..."