Funny how the author immediately decided to shut everything down when he realized the number of peer/torrents still sending requests to the domain.
this post was submitted on 18 Jun 2025
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Orphaned domains like this are interesting, there was a defcon talk, I think, where the presenter bought a bunch of blacklisted orphaned domains just to see if anything would try and connect to them. They got hit with so many botnet clients trying to phone home.
Orphaned IPs as well. If you have an IPv4 from your cloud provider and you want to retire it, you should thoroughly scrub your DNS and all other configs before doing so. Otherwise it's trivial for someone else to spin up a machine on that IP address and abuse your domain.
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Yeah those orphaned domains are a goldmine for security researchers, there was a similar talk at blackhat where they showed how expired domains from major companies still recieved auth tokens and sensitive data for months after expiry.
Please post a link if you're able, that sounds like a very interesting watch.
That's terrifying.
Why?
Because necromancy is a forbidden art
From a security standpoint, it means tons of people are requesting unencrypted info from random domains that are possibly no longer controlled by the original owners.
This is just random speculation on possibilities, but somebody could maybe figure out the IP of a suspected pirate for example, setup a dummy tracker, wait for that IP to show up, and then compare any requested hashes against a database of known torrents. How legal and useful in court this could be would depend on the country, but it is a weak point.
At the other end of the spectrum, somebody might find some kind of security vulnerability in a popular client's tracker interface, and exploit that for malware purposes by setting up a fake tracker, but that's a bit more of a stretch.
I mean they could also just download a million torrents and record the ips of anyone who connects to them to leech, which is what they already do. This is why you use a VPN while torrenting, because you never know who you're connecting to.
I'd recommend always assuming the worst when connecting to torrent trackers. I'm not sure that most of us feel that the trackers we are connecting to are highly trusted providers.
well pls resurrect the struck by lightning torrent because its taking forever to download :(
If you have access to real debrid, sometimes they have insanely old torrents in cache. I've resurrected quite a few decades old bangers from the pirate bay that way.
And if there is. Please seed that.
I usually do, but in general they're dead for lack of demand
I'm a developer but have utterly no experience with torrent architecture, or for that matter anything outside of standard web services and the kinds of things companies do. But I've been wondering if BitTorrent technology would be usable for federating content for things such as Lemmy. After reading that somebody was begging for money to offset the $5k/month they were spending to run an instance (I mean, that shows true dedicaton but holy crap dude), it seems like a distributed architecture would make a lot more sense than somebody having to foot the bill for a big-ass server. I just personally wouldn't know where to begin on a project like that, but maybe if somebody with the right combo of skills and experience gave it some thought...
2 years ago I talked about the core problem with federated services was the abismal scale ability.
I essentially got ridiculed.
And here we are, with incredibly predictable scaling problems.
If we refuse to acknowledge problems till they become critical, we will never grow past a blip on the corner of the internet. Protocol development is HARD and expensive.
Yeah, volunteer moderation is also an issue, any decent ppl doing it get burnt out if they get an influx of ppl and quit also like lemm.ee
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paying in crypto is nice partly for this reason
But a lot of uneducated people will spam "crypto is a scam"
What reason are you referring to?
I imagine the part in the article where OPP destroyed the vps and cancelled the domain because he realized he paid for the vps with his credit card?
Crypto is not anonymous, the entire concept of how it works is to be the worlds most public and distributed transaction ledger. It is more difficult to track than credit card transactions, but that's a very big difference from being impossible to track. There have been multiple papers published at this point on how you can de-anonymize any crypto purchase.
People really need to get over this idea that using crypto to buy things makes you anonymous.
Some crypto, like Monero, is anonymous. Bitcoin/Ethereum is not.
In any case, if you use anonymous crypto, make sure to first sent it to a wallet (preferably with a subaddress in case of Monero), and then send it elsewhere.
Crypto can be anonymous, if you use the right cryptocurrency and do things correctly. "Crypto" is a very broad term. Different cryptocurrencies have different functions and purposes.
You know, except for Monero. Really sucks that real private anonymous internet money is getting pushed out of all places possible, while crap like Bitcoin freely exists.
This
No worries, we can still swap conventional coins to XMR. Many smaller countries are not interested in reguling it, and we already know a few exchanges that don't give a fuck
People really need to get over this idea that using crypto to buy things makes you anonymous.
And people should also know that there are privacy coins and mixers
I might be mistaken, but isn’t using a mixer considered money laundering in the US?
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Exactly. That's why you had to fill out all the KYC paperwork when you create your Bitcoin wallet.
Oh, you didn't?
Crypto is not hidden, but it can be anonymous. You can't hide that you got money from X account and spent it at Y account. But there's no name tied to the transaction.
Where did the coin come from? Unless you mined it yourself, you've left a trail that may eventually lead to you. Even using crypto ATMs, you're still on surveillance and hoping the tapes/drives roll over before someone comes knocking (which is a very likely bet to win), and even then, you still have a real world location to tie the wallet to because of where the transaction originated.
Anything that interacts with the real world can anchor your identity to your wallet. Travelling out of state can help obfuscate that to an extent, but a high level adversary will be able to correlate travel with that transaction as well.
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that's pseudonymous, but if you remove all links with your original identity, you can even use non-privacy coins and not be known
You can hide it using coinjoin transactions. It's like a mixer but native. It's not perfect but it's nice to have
It's not anonymous, it in fact exchanges everything else from real currencies' good properties to be hard to control.
Anonymous / private payments
The whole point of the blockchain is it for it to be traceable, though. There's only the illusion of anonymity with crypto
That's complete misinformation.
The point of blockchain is not to be traceable but not alterable or tamperable with unauthorized or false data. A distributed database that can't easily be faked.
Some cryptocurrencies, like Monero, achieve high anonymity. While not perfect, good opsec will fix its flaws. Just like anything. That's not the case with the majority of cryptocurrencies though, but saying anonymity is but an illusion is just false.
Breaking news! Criminals (but not only) use crypto, and people get scammed. This happens as well with fiat, so that must surely mean fiat is a scam!
Flawless logic, really. You people impress me with your thinking.
if you sell something for $1 at 10am your $1 still buys $1 at 10pm.
in crypto, it's easily manipulated, and that's by design. it's a scam because the only people who have that control are the wealthy.
If I sell 1BT worth of something at 10am, it could be worth 2BT at 10pm, but it could also be worth .1BT equally.
the purpose of a Fiat currency is economic supremacy that is backed by the governing body and the economy that uses it.
tell me, what governing body or economy is crypto backed by?
if you sell something for $1 at 10am your $1 still buys $1 at 10pm.
This is untrue for pretty much everything, even fiat. Everything is a market. A good example of this: stocks.
in crypto, it's easily manipulated, and that's by design.
Now this is just false. You’re just inventing fake facts here. You clearly know nothing of the history of crypto.
If I sell 1BT worth of something at 10am, it could be worth 2BT at 10pm, but it could also be worth .1BT equally.
Uhh no? 1 BTC will always be 1 BTC. Its value compared to other assets will change though. And in that case it would have less value indeed. You’re just allergic to high variations and high risks assets. Stocks is exactly the same. Some assets vary more than others. Let me assure you the value of BTC will never do a +/-10x in a day
tell me, what governing body or economy is crypto backed by?
Emission (POW, POS…) (or total stock), demand and offer and perceived value, just like everything on earth?
None of that is "by design" its just the result of an unstable system. Crypto sucks for a long list of different reasons.
it is by design for a lot of them.
The instability?
You're giving it too much credit, especially the altcoins that didn't look beyond "existing". I know, I made one like 7 years ago or so and I ain't proud of it.
The instability of the worth of these crypto coins is just inherent to the instability of it, and actually not that different from currency fluctuations. You don't think the entire world works with US dollars, no?
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Crypto is not a scam, it's just plain stupid.
The entire idea behind it is what a third grader might come up with and think it's a great idea. It's not.
It literally requires every connected wallet to process the same transactions as everyone else. Can you imagine doing billions of transactions per day this way? It is extremely inefficient and yes, this is one of the reasons why even the relatively low amount of transactions that Bitcoin processes costs more electricity than a small modern country.
It's in a way comparable to a cpu doing 6+7 in a single CPU cycle whilst AI needs to burn down a forest to answer the same question
Crypto is stupid.
I get what its trying to replace and i agree that the current system sucks as well for a long list of reasons, but crypto is NOT the solution. A fundamentally different system must be designed to be able to solve the issues that crypto is trying to solve
You don’t understand how crypto works it seems
It literally requires every connected wallet to process the same transactions as everyone else
That’s misleading. Your wallet scans blocks for transactions that goes to your wallet, but this is super fast for many cryptocurrencies. Wallets usually sync in seconds.
this is one of the reasons why even the relatively low amount of transactions that Bitcoin processes costs more electricity than a small modern country.
No. The main reason is block size and block emission period. Also, you’re completely forgetting the fact that non Proof Of Work cryptocurrencies exist, and have close to 0 electricity cost
The entire idea behind it is what a third grader might come up with and think it's a great idea. It's not.
If they do they’re pretty much a fucking genius for their age
It literally requires every connected wallet to process the same transactions as everyone else.
wat?
wallets don't process any transactions other than yours. and even then, wallets do the easy work.
Too bad the rich control it now.
If you mean through regulation, yes, partly
If you mean they hold most of it and thus have a total decision power, then I must disagree
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That's the kind of thing that would be cool to do actually, but I'm not server savy enough to make a server that won't die easily under attacks
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