dht in Tenen & Foxman 2014
ing swarm (who only have partial copies). The
leecher can also take the file offline, choosing not to share at
all.^[42](#fn-2025-42){#fnref-2025-42}^
The original protocol left torrent trackers vulnerable to charges of
aiding and abetting copyright
infringement.^[43](#fn-2025-43){#fnref-2025-43}^ Early in 2008, Cohen
extended *BitTorrent* to make use of "distributed sloppy hash tables"
(DHT) for storing peer locations without resorting to a central tracker.
Under these new guidelines, each peer would maintain a small routing
table pointing to a handful of nearby peer locations. In effect, DHT
placed additional responsibility on the swarm to become a tracker of
sorts, however "sloppy" and imperfect. By November of of 2009, *Pirate
Bay* announced its transition away from tracking entirely, in favor of
DHT and the related PEX and Magnetic Links protocols. At the time they
called it, "world's most resilient
tracking."^[44](#fn-2025-44){#fnref-2025-44}^
Despite these advancements, the decentralized model of file sharing
remains susceptible to several chronic ailments. The first follows from
the fact that ad-hoc distribution networks privilege popular material. A
file needs to be actively traded to ensure its availability. If nobody
is actively sharing and downloading Nirvana's *Nevermind*, the album is
in danger of fading out of the cloud. As one member wrote succinctly on
*Gimel* forums, "unpopu
t avoid
exposing their IP address (unless these are masked behind virtual
private networks or TOR relays). A "Sybil" attack becomes possible when
a malicious peer shares bits in bad faith, with the intent to log IP
addresses.^[46](#fn-2025-46){#fnref-2025-46}^ Researchers exploring this
vector of attack were able to harvest more than 91,000 IP addresses in
less than 24 hours of sharing a popular television
show.^[47](#fn-2025-47){#fnref-2025-47}^ They report that more than 9%
of requests made to their servers indicated "modified clients", which
are likely also to be running experiments in the DHT. Legitimate
copyright holders and copyright "trolls" alike have used this
vulnerability to bring lawsuits against individual sharers in
court.^[48](#fn-2025-48){#fnref-2025-48}^
These two challenges are further exacerbated in the case of *Aleph*,
which uses *BitTorrent* to distribute large parts of its own
architecture. These parts are relatively large--around 40-50GB each.
Long-term sustainability of *Aleph* as a distributed system therefore
requires a rare participant: one interested in downloading the archive
as a whole (as opposed to downloading individual books), one who owns
the hardwar
rary for the Workers' State: the
Public Library in Petrograd and the Rumiantsev Library Under Bolshevik
Rule." *The Slavonic and East European Review* 72, no. 2 (April 1994):
233--58.
---------. "'The Ennobling Illusion': the Public Library Movement in
Late Imperial Russia." *The Slavonic and East European Review* 76, no. 3
(July 1998): 401--40.
---------. "The Evolution of Librarianship in Russia: the Librarians of
the Imperial Public Library, 1808-1868." *The Library Quarterly* 64, no.
1 (January 1994): 1--29.
Timpanaro, J.P., T. Cholez, I Chrisment, and O. Festor. "BitTorrent's
Mainline DHT Security Assessment." In *2011 4th IFIP International
Conference on New Technologies, Mobility and Security (NTMS)*, 1--5,
2011.
TPB. "Worlds most resiliant tracking." Last edited November 17, 2009 and
archived on August 4, 2014.
[thepiratebay.se/blog/175](“http://web.archive.org/web/20140804015645/http://thepiratebay.se/blog/175”)
Vik. "Gigapedia: The greatest, largest and the best website for
downloading eBooks." Emotionallyspeaking.com. Last edited on August 10,
2009 and archived on July 15, 2012.
[http://archive.is/g205"\>http://vikas-gupta.in/2009/08/10/gigapedia-the-greatest-larges
4015645/http://thepiratebay.se/blog/175”).
[[↩](#fnref-2025-44)]{.footnotereverse}]{#fn-2025-44}
45. [GIMEL/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=6999.
[[↩](#fnref-2025-45)]{.footnotereverse}]{#fn-2025-45}
46. [Thibault Cholez, Isabelle Chrisment, and Olivier Festor "Evaluation
of Sybil Attacks Protection Schemes in KAD," in *Scalability of
Networks and Services*, ed. Ramin Sadre and Aiko Pras, Lecture Notes
in Computer Science 5637 (Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 2009), 70--82.
[[↩](#fnref-2025-46)]{.footnotereverse}]{#fn-2025-46}
47. [J.P. Timpanaro et al., "BitTorrent's Mainline DHT Security
Assessment," in *2011 4th IFIP International Conference on New
Technologies, Mobility and Security (NTMS)*, 2011, 1--5.
[[↩](#fnref-2025-47)]{.footnotereverse}]{#fn-2025-47}
48. [Ernesto, "US P2P Lawsuit Shows Signs of a 'Pirate Honeypot',"
Technology, *TorrentFreak*, last edited in June 2011 and archived on
January 14, 2014,
[http://torrentfreak.com/u-s-p2p-lawsuit-shows-signs-of-a-pirate-honeypot-110601/](“https://web.archive.org/web/20140114200326/http://torrentfreak.com/u-s-p2p-lawsuit-shows-signs-of-a-pirate-honeypot-110601/”).
[[↩](#fnref-2025
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