TorrentTraveler: Micropayments-based anonymous BT proxy | Hacker News Reader

TorrentTraveler: Micropayments-based anonymous BT proxy

torrenttraveler.com

41 pointschoogi26 comments

This seems interesting, but I was even more interested in the payment system, minno (https://www.minno.co/). The screencast shows that they are using Facebook for authentication. I wonder if it's just for authentication or if they are planning to use Facebook Credits. I wonder what Tipjoy's Ivan Kirigin think of it.

I think this is great. I wish we had experimented more with microservices, especially on twitter.

Merchant acquisition is the hardest part of a payments startup. Tipjoy failed to get the top "merchants" on Twitter's platform to use us. That's because they didn't really want to make money. Look at what tweetdeck, twitpic, seesmic, etc. still do today with commerce: nothing.

There is a lot more to do for minno, but the micro sites are great.

Thanks for the interest! Minno is our main project, and TorrentTraveler is just a quick hack that we put together to try Minno out. We'll be working with other developers to roll out more sites over the next few months. If you have any other questions ping me at noah [at] minno.co.

If you want to appear more legitimate, put up a bunch of use cases for things like linux distros and data sets, that way you have plausible deniability... more than now anyway.

How does this affect copyright issues? The domain is registered in PA, USA, so how long before you guys get shut down by the feds?

Just tried it out and it's surprisingly fast at downloading! (700mb file in just a couple of minutes) Also, having worked with the guys who made this, I can definitely say I'm looking forward to seeing a lot more exciting stuff from them.

It would be nice if you could have the option to have them mail you a DVD. After all, if your connection is spotty, a direct download isn't much better than a torrent.

I would think the problem with that would be that it is ok to burn something like Ubuntu Live CDs, but people would start asking to burn illegal software, and since it says on the site they don't endorse piracy, it may get a little tricky.

If you could upload a public key, and they would encrypt the download with it and send you the result, that would be a pretty effective workaround for any legality issues. After all, no one but the intended recipient can then determine what's actually on the disk. And, as long as the download and encryption are done together with no human intermediary, nobody at the company can say they knew what was on the disks either. Bam: average-sized safe-harbor provision.

There are two big problems with that: one problem is that, unless the torrent itself is encrypted, they'll know what they downloaded. After all, they're the ones encrypting it.

The second problem is that judges won't look kindly upon any attempt to blind yourself to what's going on. You'd be a lot better off making a good faith effort to comply with the law, even if you're not perfect at it. Otherwise, people will see it as a wink-and-a-nudge kind of thing, which is exactly what you don't want if you're trying to run a legitimate business.

How are these not also problems with the original service, though? If a judge would say that "they know what they downloaded", then why wouldn't they "know what they're proxying"? Since both processes would be automated, knowledge of either would require explicit logging. (And before you say that the downloading step enables a point where the entire illegal product is, for however brief an instant, on-disk where logging could be much more easily applied, consider this alternative setup: the company just rents out "CPU time" to their customers to run virtual machines running with encrypted disk images, a known image of which happens, as its effect, to download a torrent, encrypt it, and dump the result to a write-only host-shared folder. They then send their customers any such "dumped logs" on disks as a courtesy service.)

One would assume that they simply block any infringing torrents once those have been identified by a copyright holder, or something like that, though I honestly don't know what they do. But I would assume that they do something, because they're likely to be talking to a lot of lawyers soon if people start using it for piracy.

That said, I'm not sure how letting people download it from their servers is any better than sending it on a DVD, and an envelope full of enough DVDs has a much higher bandwidth (and a much higher latency) than most internet connections in the USA.

If anything, the fact that a human would probably have to handle the DVD to put it into the mail would be a better copyright filter than most programs. "Oh, hey, this is that new movie. Nice try. tosses DVD into trash"

This might have even worse legal implications.

Neat idea, but funny that it suddenly removes the number one reason I use torrents: an unreliable connection.

Can you offer the download in some format that lets me resume? Perhaps a private torrent of some kind? Then you'd have a customer in me.

Here's a less well known, but better site that I use: http://www.torrific.com It's free, and signups don't require you to connect with facebook to join.

> All files and database entries are deleted after 24 hours.

If I can't download the file within 24 hours, it is gone?

Yes, all records are destroyed after 24 hours in order to protect the anonymity of our users. You don't have to pay unless you actually download the file, and our downstream bandwidth should give you ample time to complete the download. If you don't receive the download then you can always re-download it at no extra charge.

A novel approach. Couple brilliant guys here. I expect big things out of them.

This is fascinating - can we hear more about the architecture and policies?

We completely protect the anonymity of our users. We do not condone the downloading of illegal content. On the back-end, we run a separate sandboxed instance of transmission-daemon for each download request. Interestingly, although the backend is written in Python, more than half of the code is bash.

You claim to protect the user's anonymity, but your payment provider's only login mechanism is via Facebook. That doesn't feel right.

The payment provider, Minno, is our primary project--we put together TorrentTraveler mostly as a proof of concept for it. We built Minno with an emphasis on user experience and privacy.

Minno only receives information about the size of the download (1GB, 2GB, etc) so that it can charge accordingly. TorrentTraveler deletes all of of its records for each download after 24 hours.

If you have any other questions/comments about Minno, feel free to ping me at calvin [at] minno.co

Do you temporarily cache downloaded data to save bandwidth? And do you continue to seed the torrent after it's downloaded?

Although you say that you're deleting records after 24 hours, in the US (I think) there are data retention laws, at least locally depending where you are based. This, in combination with the overhanded and perverse trend of the US government to go after "pirates" of copyrighted content (this isn't the government's job), makes me ask how you will handle the inevitable demands for user records.

People will immediately use your service to download "illegal" content, aka movies and tv shows, and then download from you to themselves. How do you plan on responding when the government comes a knockin?

Beyond this, I love the entire concept. Its a novel business idea and exactly the kind that the reprehensible trend towards copyright restriction is going to snuff out.

How does this affect seeding? Do they seed the file until it's an even ratio? I think services like this have a place in the bittorent ecology as long as they are responsible to the network.

Thanks for the feedback -- the health of the torrent ecosystem is very important to us. We seed to 1.2 or we kill the seed after 24 hours, whichever comes first. We delete all records associated with each download after 24 hours in order to protect the anonymity of our users.

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