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Demonii Tracker Tops 30 Million Connected Peers

Posted by timothy on from the not-every-large-number-is-a-barrier dept.

An anonymous reader writes Demonii is the tracker behind the scenes for many BitTorrent sites serving pirated content. This week the tracker broke through the barrier of 30 million connected peers, handling no less than 2 billion connections per day. In other words, the scale of operation has become massive. TorrentFreak interviewed an operator of the site, and it was revealed that the tracker runs smoothly on just three dedicated servers, communicating at 180 Mb/s while serving 4 million torrents. Some people have argued that trackers are obsolete in the first place, as DHT and PEX allow peers to share the same information among each other, but Demonii's operator reminds that having trackers speeds up the initial peer finding significantly. In any case, Demonii is not going away anytime soon. The tracker is already on its way to another milestone. The 40 million peer milestone will probably come into view later this year, but first there are a trillion more connections to process.

36 comments

  1. DHT by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    DHT is a nice concept but has one disadvantage: YouHaveDownloaded.com

    1. Re:DHT by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I wouldn't say that is a disadvantage of DHT but one of IP.

    2. Re:DHT by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Yeah this thread is stupid on it's face. Everyone will *always* know what you are doing. Because everything on our network is location based, and even once we have named overlays, the underlying issue will exist, To get something globally, everyone must know. Period.

    3. Re:DHT by aglider · · Score: 0

      The real problem with P2P in general is that you need incoming connections. This is why you need trackers. They have incoming connections.

      --
      Sent as ripples into the electromagnetic field. No single photon has been harmed in the process.
    4. Re:DHT by jones_supa · · Score: 1

      Umm, no. The trackers do not transmit bulk data, but only metadata (file names, other client IP addresses, etc.). The peers themselves still have to provide the ability to let other clients to connect to them.

      The real problem of an uncentralized (non-BitTorrent) P2P network would be that you need to know an IP of at least one active peer to "bootstrap" you inside the network. That's why the eDonkey client back in the day shipped with a small initial peer list.

    5. Re:DHT by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      With DHT you can passively sit somewhere in the mesh and are automatically sent a list of clients interested in torrents with hashes that are more or less close to your position.

      With trackers you need to know the exact hash and server you want to observe and you need to poll the server. And then you are only told about a tiny fraction of clients.

    6. Re:DHT by Nutria · · Score: 2

      only metadata

      Famous last words...

      --
      "I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
    7. Re:DHT by Minwee · · Score: 1

      It might be a web page which was taken down three years ago?

      That's pretty scary.

    8. Re:DHT by aglider · · Score: 1

      Correct, mate, indeed. A tracker won't give you incoming traffic (unless it's also a relay).
      Provided that you have the IP pf your peers, you still need to ask them for those files. This boils down to be either able to connect to him.
      HDT has one disadvantage: if your upstream firewall bocks your incoming traffic, then you are out witouht relays. Even if you don't need trackers.

      --
      Sent as ripples into the electromagnetic field. No single photon has been harmed in the process.
  2. Commercials! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    Jeffrey Goines: There's the television. It's all right there - all right there. Look, listen, kneel, pray. Commercials! We're not productive anymore. We don't make things anymore. It's all automated. What are we *for* then? We're consumers, Jim. Yeah. Okay, okay. Buy a lot of stuff, you're a good citizen. But if you don't buy a lot of stuff, if you don't, what are you then, I ask you?

    What? Mentally *ill*.

    Fact, Jim, fact - if you don't buy things - toilet paper, new cars, computerized yo-yos, electrically-operated sexual devices, stereo systems with brain-implanted headphones, screwdrivers with miniature built-in radar devices, voice-activated computers...

  3. theres a reason they call them trackers. by nimbius · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Althought here is an efficiency increase, the reason most torrent users consider them obsolete is the ability for third parties to discern who has downloaded a specific file or torrent. Given the propensity for american media cartels to levy disproportionately heavy lawswuits for content, sometimes in the billions or trillions of US dollars, most people use magnet links.

    I would be very suspicious of a new tracker thats gained in popularity using a technology that could widely be used to dragnet its userbase into lengthy and costly court proceedings. Especially after the recent pirate bay sting site.

    --
    Good people go to bed earlier.
    1. Re:theres a reason they call them trackers. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      That makes them stupid then! Media cartels don't have to politely ask the owners of each torrent site who has downloaded every single file. DHT broadcasts this information, just like trackers would. Your client directly tells the media cartels which chunks you have and are missing.

    2. Re:theres a reason they call them trackers. by Kjella · · Score: 4, Informative

      Uh, you do realize that if you launch a magnet link the first thing it'll do is download the torrent and connect to any trackers listed in it to find more peers, unless you've really gone out of your way to disable it you still use them. Not to mention that DHT broadcasts it out loud to everybody....

      --
      Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
    3. Re:theres a reason they call them trackers. by jones_supa · · Score: 3, Informative

      Given the propensity for american media cartels to levy disproportionately heavy lawswuits for content, sometimes in the billions or trillions of US dollars, most people use magnet links.

      Take a look at a Magnet link, it has a list of trackers right in the URL.

    4. Re:theres a reason they call them trackers. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Simple solution to that.

      Crawl torrent sites that offer magnet link only, connect to the peers via DHT and PEX, download the metadata for the torrent but not a single bit of the actual file itself (if you really care), monitor every single IP that offers to connect to you.

      Only downside is that for some reason, a torrent I freshly created offered to connect me to 4 different IP's as peers. All failed, but it still skews the results somewhat.

    5. Re:theres a reason they call them trackers. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Do you guys know of a Unix command line torrent file editor? It must be capable of operating via script in non-interactive mode.
      I want to edit all the meta fields in my torrents, particularly the list of trackers, comment, created with/on.

  4. "not going away anytime soon" by Arancaytar · · Score: 4, Insightful

    That's pretty optimistic for a centralized site that seems to do exactly what the Pirate Bay got shut down for...

    1. Re:"not going away anytime soon" by jones_supa · · Score: 1

      It's a bit surprising that media cartels have attacked against the torrent indexes such as TPB, but have not tried to take down the trackers that much. Not yet, at least. 30 million connected clients, that's mindblowing.

    2. Re:"not going away anytime soon" by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You mean the Pirate Bay that's currently still up and running?

    3. Re:"not going away anytime soon" by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      It's a bit surprising that media cartels have attacked against the torrent indexes such as TPB, but have not tried to take down the trackers that much. Not yet, at least. 30 million connected clients, that's mindblowing.

      That's probably because the NSA/FBI are telling them not to.

    4. Re:"not going away anytime soon" by jones_supa · · Score: 2

      Hard to prove, but still good thinking. Just tapping the handful of big trackers would indeed give NSA quite nice eagle-eye view of what's happening in torrent traffic.

    5. Re:"not going away anytime soon" by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      I thought the Pirate bay is an online index of digital content of mostly entertainment nature, where visitors can search, download and contribute magnet links and torrent files, which facilitate peer-to-peer file sharing among users of the BitTorrent protocol.

      Demoni, on the other hand, is a server that assists in the communication between peers using the BitTorrent protocol. In peer-to-peer file sharing a software client on an end-user PC requests a file, and portions of the requested file residing on peer machines are sent to the client, and then reassembled into a full copy of the requested file. The "tracker" server keeps track of where file copies reside on peer machines, which ones are available at time of the client request, and helps coordinate efficient transmission and reassembly of the copied file. The BitTorrent tracker is also, in the absence of extensions to the original protocol, the only major critical point, as clients are required to communicate with the tracker to initiate downloads.

    6. Re:"not going away anytime soon" by tlhIngan · · Score: 1

      Demoni, on the other hand, is a server that assists in the communication between peers using the BitTorrent protocol. In peer-to-peer file sharing a software client on an end-user PC requests a file, and portions of the requested file residing on peer machines are sent to the client, and then reassembled into a full copy of the requested file. The "tracker" server keeps track of where file copies reside on peer machines, which ones are available at time of the client request, and helps coordinate efficient transmission and reassembly of the copied file. The BitTorrent tracker is also, in the absence of extensions to the original protocol, the only major critical point, as clients are required to communicate with the tracker to initiate downloads.

      Actually, a tracker does even less.

      It's just a mapping between hashes and peers.

      A tracker doesn't have to track much other than those two - your client connects to a tracker, and your client gives the torrent hash. The tracker then returns the peer list it knows about so your client can then connect to them and negotiate pieces and stuff.

      Fancy trackers may track additional features since clients return how much they upload and download, so the tracker may use that to track your ratio (usually by user-specific tracker URLs).

      But there's nothing the tracker has that says anything more than "hash - user IP". It doesn't know what the files are, or anything else.

  5. I love it. by dohzer · · Score: 5, Funny

    I love it when values equal or exceed the number 2,000,000,000, thereby allowing them to be officially recognised by the International Organisation for Large Things (IOLT) as "massive".

    1. Re:I love it. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Your life must be just dreadfully boring.

    2. Re:I love it. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      And yet here you are, reading the post, and even taking the time to respond to it. Says more about you than the (grand)parent poster.

  6. from the not-every-large-number-is-a-barrier dept. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I'd like to thank Timothy for at least acknowledging that "30 million connected peers" isn't a barrier (but perhaps a milestone) in the "department" field, but it could have been completely edited out of the submission.

  7. I'm no expert by rjejr · · Score: 1

    I'm not sure what the difference is between these trackers and Kick@ss and TPB, or clicking on the little magnet as opposed to all the other options, but I hope somebody is monitoring the before and after effect of Time Warners upcoming HBO Go Solo or whatever they'll be calling the stand alone service. Should be interesting to see if anybody decides to pay for GoT. Of course I'm sure it will be US only so the rest of the world will still be getting GoT by any means necessary. Just hope it comes online before April 12.

  8. "serving pirated content" by Red_Chaos1 · · Score: 1

    Someone doesn't know how trackers and torrent indexes work.

    1. Re:"serving pirated content" by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I agree, but then, there are the statistics... (you can google those yourself)

  9. Rule #1 When Doing Something Illegal by preaction · · Score: 1

    Pretend I wrote this in all-caps, so I don't understate it:

    Don't advertise how much illegal activity you are doing!

  10. Re:theres a reason they call them Anonymous by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    This is EXACTLY why you need to be using an anonymous overlay network to share your stuff over such as I2P or Phantom. You're completely untraceable.
    Then you can seed and share massive libraries 24x7x365 and NEVER feel any need or want to go offline in fear of MAFIAA.
    I would recommend Phantom before I2P since you can naturally use IPv6 and all your favorite apps, but it will need a little development first. You can even use Tor or CJDNS, just make sure that with whichever network you use that you are configured to be a middle relay so you can give back much more bandwidth than what you use so you can replace your impact there which is usually at least a few times what you use.
    With all of these networks you can easily share at least one uncompressed raw DVD-9 VOB rip per day no problem, so speed is not an issue.

  11. DHT by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    You might want to check that link again.

  12. Commercials of Operating a Tracker by Finn61 · · Score: 2

    Legitimate question and sorry, I didn't RTFA, but was wondering how do you fund an operation such as this? I guess you can't serve ads as no-one 'browses' your web page. Someone must pay for the 180Mb/s bandwidth, and the servers. There are clearly costs involved but I can't see how any of those costs get recovered. I've often wondered the same thing with NZB indexes (the open ones), or other services that you can use freely without ad serving.

    --
    "Looking good Vern."