Download responsibly
blog.geofabrik.de
blog.geofabrik.de
1. BitTorrent has a bad rep. Most people still associate it with just illegal download.
2. It requires slightly more complex firewall rules, and asking the network admin to put them in place might raise some eyebrow for reason 1. On very restrictive network, they might not want to allow them at all due to the fact that it opens the door for, well, BitTorrent.
3. A BitTorrent client is more complicated than an HTTP client, and not installed on most company computer / ci pipeline (for lack of need, and again reason 1.). A lot of people just want to `curl` and be done with it.
4. A lot of people think they are required to seed, and for some reason that scare the hell of them.
Overall, I think it is mostly 1 and the fact that you can just simply `curl` stuff and have everything working. I do sadden me that people do not understand how good of a file transfer protocol BT is and how it is underused. I do remember some video game client using BT for updates under the hood, and peertube use webtorrent, but BT is sadly not very popular.
So, I'm not using BT at work anymore.
A month later an IT admin came to ask what I might be doing with port 6881. Once I remembered, we went to the tracker's website and saw "imperial.ac.uk" had the top position for seeding, by far.
The admin said to leave running.
This can be read in two wildly different ways.
"S3 quietly deprecates BitTorrent support" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27524549
Truly the last two open web titans.
Some of the reasons consists of lawyers sending put costly cease and desist letters even to "legitimate" users
DMCA demands are, as far as I'm aware, completely automated and couldn't really cost much.
You know what has a bad rep? Big companies that use and trade my personal information like they own it. I'll start caring about copyrights when governments force these big companies to care about my information.
Obviously illegal ≠ immoral, and being a free-software/libre advocate opposed to copyright, I am in favor of the free sharing of humanity's knowledge, and therefore supportive of piracy, but that doesn't change the perception in a corporate environment.
Your use of the stuff might not be at all malware like, but in a corporate environment if it isn't needed it gets flagged as something to be checked up on in case it is not there for good reason. I've been flagged for some of the tools I've played with, and this is fine: I have legitimate use for that sort of thing in my dealings with infrastructure, there are flags ticked that say “Dave has good reason to have these tools installed, don't bother us about it again unless he fails to install security updates that are released for them”, and this is fine: I want those things flagged in case people who won't be doing the things I do end up with such stuff installed without there knowledge, so it can be dealt with (and they can be given more compulsory “don't just thoughtlessly click on every link in any email you receive, and carelessly type your credentials into resulting forms” training!).
The only exception (sort of) is Switzerland. And the reason downloading copyrighted content you haven't bought for personal use is legal in Switzerland is because the government is essentially paying for it - there is a tax in Switzerland on empty media, the proceeds from which are distributed to copyright holders whose content is consumed in Switzerland, regardless of whether it is bought directly from the rights holder or otherwise.
Apparently the legal status of downloading copyrighted materials for personal use is also murky in Spain, where apparently at least one judge found that it is legal - but I don't know how solid the reasoning was or whether other judges would agree (being a civil law country, legal precedent is not binding in Spain to the same extent that it would be in the UK or USA).
Poland signed Berne convention in 1919, has "well regulated" copyright, but still downloading all media (except for software) for personal use is fully legal. Tax on "empty media" is in place as well.
Format shifting and personal copying are legal in Poland, but you as an individual still have to have legally obtained your original in the first place to exercise that right, and an illicit download certainly doesn't count. Taxing "empty media" is to compensate for those format shifting rights, but it doesn't cover renumeration for acquiring media in the first place (and indeed no EU member state could operate such a scheme - they are prohibited by EU Directive 2001/29 https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/ALL/?uri=celex%3A...).
Like everywhere else where personal copies are legal and you can download them. If both conditions are true, then the mere fact that you are downloading it, it's not a sign you are downloading pirated content.
OTOH there is also Spain where piracy with no direct monetary gain is tolerated and nobody goes after people torrenting.
That's the Polish law, both the letter and the implementation. On at least one occasion the police issued an official statement saying exactly that.
I think no one was ever fined in Poland for incidental upload while using bittorrent protocol to download. There are high profile cases for people who where publishing large amounts of media files, especially commercially. Little more than a decade ago there was one case where some company tried to go after bittorrent downloaders of 3 specific Polish movies. But I think it was ultimately thrown out or cheaply settled because no case like that has been publicized ever since and everybody who knows how to use bittorent, does.
Again, it covers everything except for software that has more restrictive laws more similar to what you think the law is.
Tax on empties was set up long time ago to support creators who's music is shared among friends directly. It's was not intended to compensate for downloads. I think only Polish artists receive any money from this (I might be wrong on that) and the organization that distributes the money is highly inefficient. They tried to extend the tax to electronic devices, but nobody likes them, companies and people both, so they didn't get too far with this proposal for now.
Poland enjoys a lot of digital freedoms and is conscious of them and ready to defend them against ACTA, Chat Control and extend them with Stop Killing Games.
No it isn't.
It's not a criminal offense, but if someone can sue you for it and win then it isn't "legal" under any technical or popular definition of the word.
Otherwise, less any examples of enforcement or successful legal action, downloading movies is illegal in the US in the same way that blasphemy is illegal in Michigan.
https://www.legislature.mi.gov/Laws/MCL?objectName=MCL-750-1...
It could be argued that if you bought a movie, say on DVD, downloading another copy of it from an online source could fall under fair use, but this is more debatable.
[0] https://legalclarity.org/is-pirating-movies-illegal-what-are...
Even the Protecting Lawful Streaming Act of 2020 explicitly does not punish consumers of copyrighted content, only its distributors.
>Tillis stated that the bill is tailored to specifically target the websites themselves, and not "those who may use the sites nor those individuals who access pirated streams or unwittingly stream unauthorized copies of copyrighted works"
There are so many paragraphs in response to my “You can’t get in trouble for downloading movies in the US” post and none of them have any examples of people getting in trouble for downloading movies in the US.
Thank you.
To answer your question with the only answer I know: Switzerland.
Making a copy of a thing does not violate copyright (eg you can photocopy a book that you possess even temporarily). Sharing a copy that you made can violate copyright.
It is like mixing up “it’s illegal to poison somebody with bleach” and “it’s illegal to own bleach”. The action you take makes a big difference
Also, as an aside, when you view a legitimately-purchased and downloaded video file that you have license to watch, the video player you use makes a copy from the disk to memory.
If I own a license to listen to Metallica - Enter Sandman.m4a that I bought on iTunes and in the download folder I screw up and I make
Metallica - Enter Sandman(1).m4a
Metallica - Enter Sandman(2).m4a
Metallica - Enter Sandman(3).m4a
How much money do I owe Lars Ulrich for doing that based on The Law of The Earth Everywhere But Switzerland?
This is a very funny thing to say given that post is entirely correct, while you are wrong.
> Making a copy of a thing does not violate copyright
Yes it does, unless it's permitted under a designated copyright exemption by local law. For instance, you mention that the video player makes a copy from disk to memory, well that is explicitly permitted by Article 5(1) of the Copyright Directive 2001 in the EU as a use that is "temporary, transient or incidental and an integral and essential part of a technological process", as otherwise it would be illegal as by default, any action to copy is a breach of copyright. That's literally where the word comes from.
> If I own a license to listen to Metallica - Enter Sandman.m4a that I bought on iTunes and in the download folder I screw up and I make
> Metallica - Enter Sandman(1).m4a
> Metallica - Enter Sandman(2).m4a
> Metallica - Enter Sandman(3).m4a
In legal terms you do indeed owe him something, yes. It would probably be covered under the private copy exemptions in some EU territories, but only on the basis that blank media is taxed to pay rightsholders a royalty for these actions under the relevant collective management associations.
Making copies of a book you legally own for personal use is an established fair use exception to copyright. However, making copies of a book that you borrowed from a library would be copyright infringement. Similarly, lending the copies you've made of a book to friends would technically void the fair use exception for your copies.
The copy that a playback device has to make of a copyrighted audio/video file for its basic functioning is typically mentioned explicitly in the license you buy, thus being an authorized copy for a specific purpose. If you make several copies of a file on your own system for personal use, then again you are likely within fair use exemptions, similar to copying a book case - though this is often a bit more complicated legally by the fact that you don't own a copy but a license to use the work in various ways, and some companies' licenses can theoretically prohibit even archival copies, which in turn may or may not be legal in various jurisdictions.
But in no jurisdiction is it legal to, for example, go with a portable photocopy machine into a bookstore and make copies of books you find in there, even if they are only for personal use: you first have to legally acquire an authorized copy from the rights holder. All other exemptions apply to what you do with that legally obtained copy.
This even means that you don't have any rights to use a fraudulent copy of a work, even if you legitimately believed you were obtaining a legal copy. For example, say a library legally bought a book from a shady bookstore that, unbeknownst to them, was selling counterfeit copies of a book. If the copyright holder finds out, they can legally force the library to pay them to continue offering this book, or to destroy it otherwise, along with any archival copies that they had made of this book. The library can of course seek to obtain reparations from the store that sold them the illegal copy, but they can't refuse to pay the legal copyright holder.
This basically handles every problem stated. There's nothing to install on computers: it's just js running on the page. There's no firewall rules or port forwarding to setup, all handled by the stun/turn in webrtc. Users wouldn't necessarily even be aware they are uploading.
The advantage is that at least it's all builtin. It's not a magic solution, but it's a pretty good solution, with fallbacks builtin for when the networking gets in the way of the magic.
Well, in many such situations data is provided for free, putting huge burden on the other side. Even it it's a little bit less convenient it makes service a lot more sustainable. I imagine torrent for free tier and direct download as a premium option would work perfectly
6. Service providers have little control over the service level of seeders and thus the user experience. And that's before you get malicious users.
but you are already uploading while you are still downloading. and that can't be turned off. if seeding scares someone, then uploading should scare them too. so they are right, because they are required to upload.
For public trackers maybe.
Almost every client let you set uploading limit, which you can set at 0. The only thing that generate upload bp usage that cannot be deactivated would be protocol stuff (but you can deactivate part of bt like using the DHT).
Now, as a seeder, you may still be interested in those clients being able to download and reach whatever information you are seeding.
In the same vein, as a seeder, you may just not serve those clients. That's kind of the beauty of it. I understand that there may be some old school/cultural "code of conduct" but really this is not a problem with a behavioral but instead with a technical solution that happens to be already built-in.
well, yes and no. legal issues aside (think about using bittorrent only for legal stuff), the whole point of bittorrent is that it works best if everyone uploads.
actually, allowing clients to disable uploading is almost an acknowledgement that illegal uses should be supported, because there are few reasons why legal uses should need to disable uploading.
and as an uploader i also don't want others not to upload. so while disabling upload is technically possible, it is also reasonable and not unlikely that connections from such clients could be rejected.
If you're using ArcGIS Pro, use this plugin: https://tech.marksblogg.com/overture-maps-esri-arcgis-pro.ht...
TomTom did a few write ups on their contribution, this one is from 2023: https://www.tomtom.com/newsroom/behind-the-map/how-tomtom-ma...
If you have QGIS running, I did a walkthrough using the GeoParquet Downloader Plugin with the 2.75B Building dataset TUM released a few weeks ago. It can take any bounding box you have your workspace centred on and download the latest transport layers for Overture. No need for a custom URL as its one of the default data sources the plugin ships with. https://tech.marksblogg.com/building-footprints-gba.html
I think it’s more a matter of how large the demand is for frequent downloads of very large files/sets, which leads to a questions of reliability and seeding volume, all versus the effort involved to develop the tooling and integrate it with various RCS and file syncing services.
Would something like Git LFS help here? I’m at the limit of my understanding for this.
It took maybe 10 seconds longer for the downloads to start, but they then ran almost as fast as the master could upload one copy.
It became disliked because of various problems and complaints, but mainly disappeared because Blozzard got the bright idea of preloading the patchset, especially to new expansions, in the weeks before. You can send down a ten gig patch a month before release, and then patch that patch a week before release, and a final small patch on the day before release, and everything is preloaded.
The great Carboniferous explosion of CDNs inspired by Netflix and friends has also greatly simplified the market, too.
https://github.com/uber/kraken exists, using a modified BT protocol, but unless you are distributing quite large images to a very large number of nodes, a centralized registry is probably faster, simpler and cheaper
If A is a copyrighted work, and B is pure noise, then C=A^B is also pure noise.
Distribute B and C. Both of these files have nothing to do with A, because they are both pure noise.
However, B^C gives you back A.
The basic idea being, can you using the digits of Pi to encode data, or rather, can you find ranges of Pi that map to data you have and use it for "compression".
A very simple example, let's take this portion of Pi:
> 3.14159265358979323846264338327950288419716939937
Then let's say we have a piece of data that, when encoded and just numbers, results in: 15926535897997169626433832
Can we encode that as: 4–15, 39–43, 21–25, 26–29 and save space? The "compression" step would take a long time (at some point you have to stop searching for overlap as Pi goes on for forever).
Anyways, a silly thought experiment that your idea reminded me of.
Is C really "pure noise" if you can get A back out of it?
It's like an encoding format or primitive encryption, where A is merely transformed into unrecognizable data, meaningful noise, which still retains the entirety of the information.
If you throw out B, then there's no possible way to get A out of C (short of blindly guessing what A is): that's one of the properties of a one-time pad.
But distributing both B and C is no different than distributing A in two parts, and I'd have a hard time imagining it would be treated any differently on a legal level.
Imagine another copyrighted work D.
E=C^D, therefore C=D^E
As you see, the same noise can be used to recover a completely different work.
Since you can do this with any D, C is really noise and not related to any D or A.
> B^C gives you back A
If both B and C are pure noise, where did the information for A come from?
In this example given ciphertext C = A ^ B you can decrypt plaintext A using key B or you can decrypt plaintext D using key E = C ^ D:
( A ^ B ) ^ B = A
( A ^ B ) ^ ( C ^ D ) = ( A ^ B ) ^ ( A ^ B ) ^ D = D
B and C are pure noise individually but they are not uncorrelated just like E and C are not uncorrellated.
> given ciphertext C = A ^ B you can decrypt plaintext A using key B
Right, C ^ B = A, to get back the original.
Already here, it seems to me that C is not pure random noise if A can be recovered from it. C contains the encoded information of A, so it's not random. Is that wrong?
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> or you can decrypt plaintext D using key E = C ^ D
In this example, isn't E the cyphertext and C is the key? E (cyphertext) = D (original) ^ C (key).
Then E ^ C = D, to get back the original.
Here, it seems to me that E contains the encoded information of D, so it's not random. And C plays the role of a key similar to B, so it's not being decoded as a ciphertext in this case, and nothing is implied whether it's random or not.
> XOR is commutative so for a one-time pad key and ciphertext can be swapped.
Maybe this is what I'm missing. In the second example, I'll swap the ciphertext and key:
C ^ E = D
Hmm, so both C and E are required to recover D the original information. Does that mean that the information was somehow distributed into C and E, so that they are both meaningful data, not random?
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But what about B in the first example, a key that was supposed to be pure random? If I swap the ciphertext and key:
B ^ C = A
The information in A is recovered from the interaction of both B and C. So the entirety of the information is not in C, the ciphertext (or key in this case).
Does that mean, B is no longer pure noise? When it was used as a key, it became meaningful in relation to A. That's information, isn't it?
I think a variant of bittorrent which may be successful in corporate and generally non-geek environments should have the following qualities:
- Work via WebSockets.
- Run in browser, no installation.
- Have no rebel reputation.
WebTorrent is ubiquitous by now and also supported by Brave and many torrent clients. There is still much room to build, though. Get in, the water is warm!
https://rwmj.wordpress.com/2013/09/09/half-baked-idea-conten...
But yes I do think Bittorrent would be ideal for OSM here.
The developers always seemed focus on making new versions of the protocols with very minor changes (no more protocol buffers, move everything to CBOR) rather than actually adding new features like encryption support or making it more suitable for hosting static sites (which seems to have been on of its main niches).
It also would have been a great too for package repositories and other open source software archives. Large distros tend to have extensive mirror lists but you need to configure them, find out which ones have good performance for you and you can still only download from one mirror at a time. Decentralizing that would be very cool. Even if the average system doesn't seed any of the content the fact that anyone can just mirror the repo and downloads automatically start pulling from them was very nice. It also makes the download resilient to any official mirror going down or changing URL. The fact that there is strong content verification built in is also great. Typically software mirrors need to use additional levels of verification (like PGP signatures) to avoid trusting the mirror.
I really like the idea, and the protocol is pretty good overall. But the implementation and evolution really didn't work well in my opinion. I tried using it for a long time, offering many of my sites over it and mirroring various data. But eventually I gave up.
And maybe controversially it provided no capabilities for network separation and statistics tracking. This isn't critical for success but on entrypoint to this market is private file sharing sites. Having the option to use these things could give it a foot in the door and get a lot more people interested in development.
Hopefully the next similar protocol will come at some point, maybe it will catch on where IPFS didn't.
I had the same thoughts for some time now. It would be really nice to distribute software and containers this way. A lot of people have the same data locally and we could just share it.
Additionally, as anyone who has tried to share an internet connection with someone heavily torrenting, the excessive number of connections means overall quality of non-torrent traffic on networks goes down.
Not to mention, of course, that BitTorrent has a significant stigma attached to it.
The answer would have been a squid cache box before, but https makes that very difficult as you would have to install mitm certs on all devices.
For container images, yes you have pull through registries etc, but not only are these non-trivial to setup (as a service and for each client) the cloud providers charge quite a lot for storage making it difficult to justify when not having a check "works just fine".
The Linux distros (and CPAN and texlive etc) have had mirror networks for years that partially addresses these problems, and there was an OpenCaching project running that could have helped, but it is not really sustainable for the wide variety of content that would be cached outside of video media or packages that only appear on caches hours after publishing.
BitTorrent might seem seductive, but it just moves the problem, it doesn't solve it.
As a consumer, I pay the same for my data transfer regardless of the location of the endpoint though, and ISPs arrange peering accordingly. If this topology is common then I expect ISPs to adjust their arrangements to cater for it, just the same as any other topology.
Two eyeball networks (consumer/business ISPs) are unlikely to have large PNIs with each other across wide geographical areas to cover sudden bursts of traffic between them. They will, however, have substantial capacity to content networks (not just CDNs, but AWS/Google etc) which is what they will have built out.
BitTorrent turns fairly predictable "North/South" traffic where capacity can be planned in advance and handed off "hot potato" as quickly as possible, into what is essentially "East/West" with no clear consistency which would cause massive amounts of congestion and/or unused capacity as they have to carry it potentially over long distances they have not been used to, with no guarantee that this large flow will exist in a few weeks time.
If BitTorrent knew network topology, it could act smarter -- CDNs accept BGP feeds from carriers and ISPs so that they can steer the traffic, this isn't practical for BitTorrent!
AFAIK this has been suggested a number of times, but has been refused out of fears of creating “islands” that carry distinct sets of chunks. It is, of course, an non-issue if you have a large number of fast seeds around the world (and if the tracker would give you those reliably instead of just a random set of peers!), but that really isn't what BT is optimized for in practice.
it could surely be made to care for topology but imho handing that problem to congestion control and routing mechanisms in lower levels works good enough and should not be a problem.
At the expense of other traffic. Do this experiment: find something large-ish to download over HTTP, perhaps an ISO or similar from Debian or FreeBSD. See what the speed is like, and try looking at a few websites.
Now have a large torrent active at the same time, and see how slow the HTTP download drops to, and how much slower the web is. Perhaps try a Twitch stream or YouTube video, and see how the quality suffers greatly and/or starts rebuffering.
Your HTTP download uses a single TCP connection, most websites will just use a single connection also (perhaps a few short-duration extra connections for js libraries on different domains etc). By comparison, BitTorrent will have dozens if not hundreds of connections open and so instead of sharing that connection in half (roughly) it is monopolising 95%+ of your connection.
The other main issue I forgot to mention is that on most cloud providers, downloading from the internet is free, uploading to the internet costs a lot... So not many on public cloud are going to want to start seeding torrents!
You can also lower how many connections it makes, but I don't know anyone that's had need to change that. Could you show us which client defaults to connecting to hundreds of peers?
For the second question, read the section on choking at https://deluge-torrent.org/userguide/bandwidthtweaking/ and Deluge appears to set the maximum number of connections per torrent of 120 with a global max of 250 (though I've seen 500+ in my brief searching, mostly for Transmission and other clients).
I'll admit a lot of my BitTorrent knowledge is dated (having last used it ~15 years ago) but the point remains: ISPs are built for "North-South" traffic, that is: To/From the customer and the networks with the content, not between customers, and certainly not between customers of differing ISPs.
I should have said they avoid TCP in favor of very different congestion control, sorry.
Thanks for the info, and sorry for jumping to a conclusion! Though my original point stands: Residential ISPs are generally not built to handle BitTorrent traffic flows (customer to customer or customer to other-ISP-customer across large geographic areas) so the bursty nature would cause congestion much easier, and BitTorrent itself isn't really made for these kinds of scenarios where content changes on a daily basis. CDNs exist for a reason, even if they're not readily available at reasonable prices for projects like OP!
With 1 HTTP connection downloading a file and 100 BitTorrent connections trying to download a file, all trying to compete, you'll find the HTTP throughput significantly reduced. It's how congestion control algorithms are designed: rough fairness per connection. That's why the first edition of BBR that Google released was unpopular, it stomped on other traffic.
Immutability of specific releases is great, but you also want a way to find new related releases/versions.
For some you want a name where the underlying resource can change, for others you want a hash of the actual resource. Which one you want depends on the application.
In the context of webpages, a domain lets you deploy new versions.
With a torrent file, a domain does not let you do that.
Please try to understand the comparison they're making instead of just saying "domains are not hashes" "domains do exist".
> For some you want a name where the underlying resource can change, for others you want a hash of the actual resource. Which one you want depends on the application.
Right.
And torrents don't give you the choice.
Not having the choice is much closer to "bug" than "feature".
Needing a new magnet link is fine. The old magnet link working indefinitely is great. Having no way to get from old magnet to new magnet is not as fine.
Everybody on HN should know how a domain works. I think most people on HN understand what a hash is and how a magnet link works. The fact that you can't easily replace the resource under a magnet link is a feature not a bug. If you think for a bit about the consequences of what would happen if you could easily replace the resources associated with a magnet link rather than just having the 'convenience of being able to update a torrent' and you'll see that this is not a simple thing at all.
Torrents are simply a different thing than 'the web' and to try to equate the one to the other is about as silly as trying to say that you can't use a screwdriver to put nails in the wall. They're different things. Analogies are supposed to be useful, not a demonstration of your complete lack of understanding of the underlying material.
I distribute some software that I wrote using a torrent with a magnet link, so I'm well aware of the limitations there, but these limitations are exactly why I picked using a torrent in the first place.
I didn't even go that far. I just said link to a new one.
You're the one that said replacing can be good! What is this.
There are many other ways torrents get used, where people aren't looking at the website or there is no website.
It's not all about how you distribute content. We must also decide which content do distribute, and that is a hard problem.
The most successful strategy so far has been moderation. Moderation requires hierarchical authority: a moderator who arbitrarily determines which data is and is not allowed to flow. Even bittorrent traffic is moderated in most cases.
For data to flow over bittorrent, two things must happen:
1. There must be one or more seeders ready to connect when the leecher starts their download.
2. There must be a way for a prospective leecher to find the torrent.
The best way to meet both of these needs is with a popular tracker. So here are the pertinent questions:
1. Is your content fit for a popular tracker? Will it get buried behind all the Disney movies and porn? Does it even belong to an explicit category?
If not, then you are probably going to end up running your own tracker. Does that just mean hosting a CDN with extra steps? Cloud storage is quite cheap, and the corporate consolidation of the internet by Cloudflare, Amazon, etc. has resulted in a network infrastructure that is optimized for that kind of traffic, not for bittorrent.
2. Is a popular tracker a good fit for your content? Will your prospective downloaders even think to look there? Will they be offended by the other content on that tracker, and leave?
Again, a no will lead to you making your own tracker. Even in the simplest case, will users even bother to click your magnet link, or will they just use the regular CDN download that they are used to?
So what about package repos? Personally, I think this would be a great fit, particularly for Nix, but it's important to be explicit about participation. Seeding is a bad default for many reasons, which means you still need a relatively reliable CDN/seed anyway.
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The internet has grown into an incredibly hierarchical network, with incredibly powerful and authoritative participants. I would love to see a revolution in decentralized computing. All of the technical needs are met, but the sociopolitical needs need serious attention. Every attempt at decentralized content distribution I have seen has met the same fate: drowned in offensive and shallow content by those who are most immediately excited to be liberated from authority. Even if it technically works, it just smells too foul to use.
I propose a new strategy to replace moderation: curation. Instead of relying on authority to block out undesirable content, we should use attested curation to filter in desirable content.
Want to give people the option to browse an internet without porn? Clearly and publicly attest which content is porn. Don't light the shit on fire, just open the windows and let it air out.
Level of irresponsibility/cluelessness you can see from developers if you're hosting any kind of an API is astonishing, so downloads are not surprising at all...If someone, a couple of years back, told me things that I've now seen, I'd absolutely dismiss them as making stuff up and grossly exaggerating...
However, on the same token, it's sometimes really surprising how API developers rarely ever think in terms of multiples of things - it's very often just endpoints to do actions on single entities, even if nature of use-case is almost never on that level - so you have no other way than to send 700 requests to do "one action".
This applies to anyone unskilled in a profession. I can assure you, we're not all out here hammering the shit out of any API we find.
With the accessibility of programming to just about anybody, and particularly now with "vibe-coding" it's going to happen.
Slap a 429 (Too Many Requests) in your response or something similar using a leaky-bucket algo and the junior dev/apprentice/vibe coder will soon learn what they're doing wrong.
- A senior backend dev
Oh how I wish this was true. We have customers sending 10-100s requests per second and they will complain if even just one gets 429. As in, they escalate to their enterprise account rep. I always tell them to buy the customer a "error handling for dummies" book but they never learn.
I don't have an answer, but I wonder, for the sake of protecting your own org, is some sort of "abuse" policy the only approach; as in, deal with the human problem, be clear with them in writing somewhere that if they're seeing response X or Y (429 etc) that they're essentially abusing the API and need to behave.
And we’ve had cases where we had “fuckoff” charges in contracts (think $1 per API call after X thousand calls a day) and the customer just gladly pays tens of thousands of dollars and thanks us for fixing their problem.
The money is nice but sometimes you just want to shake them and say “look we have notifications you don’t need to poll the endpoint ten times a second, fuck it give us the code and we’ll fix it …”
There's just no winning sometimes sigh.
Well, if this is a supported (as in $) account, sure enough, have the API rate limits published and tell them in the most polite way to RTFM
There are, of course, both very capable and professional people, and also kind people who are keen to react / learn, but we've also had situations where 429s result in complaints to their management how our API "doesn't work", "is unreliable" and then demanding refunds / threatening legal action etc...
One example was sending 1.3M update requests a day to manage state of ~60 entities, that have a total of 3 possible relevant state transitions - a humble expectation would be several requests/day to update batches of entities.
Not at all, I sympathise, we're all like minded people here!
> One example was sending 1.3M update requests a day to manage state of ~60 entities, that have a total of 3 possible relevant state transitions
> but we've also had situations where 429s result in complaints to their management how our API "doesn't work", "is unreliable" and then demanding refunds / threatening legal action etc
That's painful, and at this point, we're beyond technical solutions, this need human solutions. If they can't realise that they're rate limited because they're basically abusing the API, they need to be told in no uncertain terms.
Of course I understand that it's not that simple, as a backend dev, my "customers" are usually other devs so I can be frank, but when dealing with B2B customers we often have to act like they're not in the wrong.
If they want the service stupidly overprovisioned to deal with these nutjobs, then that’s what we’ll do. I find that they’re generally receptive to the message of $10k per month to serve nutjobs, $100 per month to serve everyone else, though.
Because many “enterprise” customers can spend literally millions doing shit the absolute wrong way, but have $0 budget for a developer to make it work right.
Major downside is that this would exclude people without access to payment networks, but maybe you could still have a rate-limited free option.
Make people sign up if they want a url they can `curl` and then either block or charge users who download too much.
> Just the other day, one user has managed to download almost 10,000 copies of the italy-latest.osm.pbf file in 24 hours!
Anybody can build a pipeline to get a task done (thousands of quick & shallow howto blog posts) but doing this efficiently so it becomes a flywheel rather than a blocker for teams is the hard part.
Not just caching but optimising job execution order and downstream dependencies too.
The faster it fails, the faster the developer feedback, and the faster a fix can be introduced.
I quite enjoy the work and always learning new techniques to squeeze extra performance or save time.
No wonder many just turn caching entirely off at some point and never turn it back on.
For example GMP blocked GitHub:
https://www.theregister.com/2023/06/28/microsofts_github_gmp...
This "emergency measure" is still in place, but there are mirrors available so it doesn't actually matter too much.
E.g. my SQLite project downloads code from the GitHub mirror rather than Fossil.
That way someone manually downloading the file is not impacted, but if you try to put the url in a script it won’t work.
Then I learned about Docker.
There are lots of cases where people end up with with an empty docker repo at every CI run or regularly empty the repo because docker doesn't have any sort of intelligence space management (like LRU).
This sounds like problem rate-limiting would easily solve. What am I missing. The page claims almost 10,000 copies of same file were downloaded by the same user
The server operator is able to count the number of downloads in a 24h period for an individual user but cannot or will not set a rate limit
Why not
Will the users mentioned above (a) read the operator's message on this web page and then (b) change their behaviour
I would be bet against (a) and therefore (b) as well
Maybe not, but I can't help but wonder if anybody on my team (I work for an Italian startup that leverages GeoFabrik quite a bit) might have been a bit too trigger happy with some containerisation experiments. I think we got banned from geofabrik a while ago, and to this day I have no clue what caused the ban; I'd love to be able to understand what it was in order to avoid it in the future.
I've tried calling and e-mailing the contacts listed on geofabrik.de, to no avail. If anybody knows of another way to talk to them and get the ban sorted out, plus ideally discover what it was from us that triggered it, please let me know.
Edit: I sent you the email, it got bounced again with a 550 Administrative Prohibition. Will try my university's account as well.
Edit2: this one seems to have gone through, please let me know if you can't see it.
Whenever I have done something like that, it's usually because I'm writing a script that goes something like:
1. Download file 2. Unzip file 3. Process file
I'm working on step 3, but I keep running the whole script because I haven't yet built a way to just do step 3.
I've never done anything quite that egregious though. And these days I tend to be better at avoiding this situation, though I still commit smaller versions of this crime.
edit: bad math, it's 1 download every 8 seconds
getfile.sh processdata.sh postresults.sh doall.sh
And doall.sh consists of: ./getfile.sh ./processdata.sh ./postresults.sh
Current title is fine.
Yes, this the the "right" solution but it is a huge pain and it would be nice if we could have nice things without needing to do all of this work.
This is tragedy of the commons in action.
You can paste it into a curl script, but now the endpoint can track it.
So not example.com/file.tgz but example.com/FCKGW-RHQQ2-YXRKT-8TG6W-2B7Q8/file.tgz
Yes, IP rate limiting is not perfect, but if they have a way of identifying which user is downloading the whole planet every single day, that same user can be throttled as well.
Appeals to responsibility aren't going to sink in to people that are clearly careless
So if you really want to do this you need to add API keys and authentication (even if it is free) to reliably track users.
Even then you will have some users that find it easier to randomly pick from 100 API keys rather than properly cache the data.
This way you can identify WHO is doing bad things and disable said API key and/or notify them.
Unfortunately, the long sessions needed for file servers do make them an easy target for DoS, and especially if supporting quality of life features like media fast-forward/seek features. Thus, a large file server normally does not share a nimble website or API server (CDNs still exist for a reason.)
Free download API keys with a set data/time Quota and IP rate limit are almost always necessary (i.e. the connection slows down to 1kB/s after a set daily limit.) Ask anyone that runs a Tile server or media platform for the connection-count costs of free resources.
It is a trade-off, but better than the email-me-a-link solution some firms deploy. Have a wonderful day =3
Trash code most likely. Rate limit their IP. No one cares about people that do this kind of thing. If they're a VPN provider...then still rate limit them.
Also, everyone go contribute/done to OSM.
Shapefiles shouldn't be what you're after, Parquet can almost always do a better job unless you need to either edit something or use really advanced geometry not yet supported in Parquet.
Also, this is your best source for bulk OSM data: https://tech.marksblogg.com/overture-dec-2024-update.html
If you're using ArcGIS Pro, use this plugin: https://tech.marksblogg.com/overture-maps-esri-arcgis-pro.ht...
It is free, yes, but there is no need to either abuse it or give as much resource for free as they can.
Although they refer to IP ranges, the same principle applies on a smaller scale to a single IP address: (1) dynamic IP addresses get reallocated, and (2) entire buildings (universities, libraries, hotels, etc.) might share a single IP address.
Aside from accidentally affecting innocent users, you also open up the possibility of a DOS attack: the attacker just has to abuse the service from an IP address that he wants to deny access to.
Then it only takes one bad user on the same subnet to ruin the experience for everyone else. That sucks, and isn't working as intended, because the intent was to only punish the one abusive user.
This is why naming matters. I never would have guessed in a million years that software named "pyosmium-up-to-date" does this function. Give it a better name and more people will use it.
However, the pratical evidence is to the contrary, AI companies are hammering every webserver out there, ignoring any kind of convention like robots.txt, re-downloading everything in pointlessly short intervals. Annoying everyone and killing services.
Just a few recent examples from HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45260793 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45226206 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45150919 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42549624 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43476337 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35701565