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posted by takyon on Sunday April 05 2015, @01:01AM   Printer-friendly
from the centralized-decentralization dept.

Strike is a new BitTorrent search engine with a clean, no-ads interface and an "AI bot" presenting the results, which combines public torrent indexing with DHT scraping. As explained to TorrentFreak by the developer Andrew Sampson himself:

"DHT basically is a second P2P protocol aiming to replace trackers. It stores pairs of info hashes and updates the swarm if it receives announce messages. When it comes to DHT every [torrent] client is announcing themselves as being present. Because of this I'm able to scrape millions of torrents in a decentralized manner; not having to rely on trackers themselves," the dev told TF.

Unfortunately, the search engine has come under attack from multiple vectors, including a flood of DMCA notices and a DDoS attack. The situation went downhill from there, forcing the site to change hosting providers at least three times.

The developer says that the majority of complaints against his site were filed by anti-piracy company Entura International. Sampson says he tried to explain that his site carries no content and no torrents but simply extracts these from DHT upon user request but the company wasn't particularly interested.

In response to the DMCA issues, Sampson says he has now taken things a step further. During the past few days the dev took the decision to stop storing any data whatsoever on Strike's servers "except for search phrases for learning purposes."

This presents an intriguing situation. Aside from some disk caching, Sampson says that Strike now operates purely on demand. When a user types in a search the site pulls the results from its usual sources and presents them in the browser window. When that browser is closed the data effectively disappears, meaning that there is nothing for anti-piracy companies to take down because it's already gone.

I haven't used the site myself yet, but it sounds like a great project and I'd hate to see it disappear.

 
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  • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 05 2015, @08:34AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 05 2015, @08:34AM (#166591)

    How is that not illegal? I remember previously hearing about the MPAA/RIAA/some other copyright thug hiring companies in other countries to DDOS websites they don't like.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 05 2015, @11:10AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 05 2015, @11:10AM (#166628)

    Legality only matters if you get caught. See every crime ever committed.

    And while I am totally willing to blame the MAFIA. I'm also willing to blame other groups too, like some *chan doing it for the lulx or some authoritarian copyright maximalist hackers.

  • (Score: 1, Disagree) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 05 2015, @04:20PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 05 2015, @04:20PM (#166687)

    It is. And ISP's will pay a hefty reward for persons able to provide evidence resulting in a conviction. Obviously the MPAA/RIAA hasn't thought this through. The script kiddie doing the DDoS is probably foreign, and can therefore me' culpa to ISP's and get payed a SECOND time for the same DDoS. The ISP then sues the MPAA/RIAA to recoup damages, while the script kiddie stays happily outside of U.S. jurisdiction testifying by video conference. Cheers!

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 05 2015, @07:17PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 05 2015, @07:17PM (#166749)

      > And ISP's will pay a hefty reward for persons able to provide evidence resulting in a conviction.

      Citation needed. Seriously.

      A google search for isp ddos bounty [google.com] doesn't turn up an such examples in the first two pages of hits. Searching on just ddos bounty [google.com] does find hits, but not from ISPs, just specific services that have been targeted.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 06 2015, @02:53PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 06 2015, @02:53PM (#166990)

        If you have solid actionable evidence, and can reasonably determine a list of effected networks, shop the evidence around to the security or legal departments of the respective networks. The amount of damage done to ISP's by DDoS is immense. There are a number of reasons they don't advertise this. That isn't to say they aren't motivated to stop the bleeding.

  • (Score: 2) by chewbacon on Sunday April 05 2015, @11:01PM

    by chewbacon (1032) on Sunday April 05 2015, @11:01PM (#166791)

    Exactly my point. They have done it before.