It's funny really, I ran a substantial amount of Tor exit nodes in Germany since 2014 and everytime I got into touch with the police about stuff happening on them, they asked me to "filter" things going through it. The thing is that as per TMG §8.1.3: "Service providers are not responsible for third-party information that they transmit in a communication network or for which they provide access for use, provided that they [...] did not select or modify the transmitted information."<p>Essentially, if an operator was to "do a good thing", they'd legally become liable for all traffic. That was quite a learning experience for me.
Reminds me of an 2007 talk from CCC, sadly in German: <a href="https://media.ccc.de/v/24c3-2355-de-trecker_fahrn" rel="nofollow">https://media.ccc.de/v/24c3-2355-de-trecker_fahrn</a><p>It's how they wrote one of the first "performing trackers" as most others around the time where python or php based. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opentracker" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opentracker</a> And it seems OpenTrackr from the article is based on Opentracker software.<p>It's an really entertaining talk. They destroyer a router from hetzner when they first rented a server because of the traffic.
I've asked this before but why is this legally allowed or enforced? How is a hash of something equal to being the thing? Do copyright laws have specific sub-laws when it comes to digital media?<p>DMCA seems more like a hammer abused by corporations. It seems like laws are written solely for corporations.
The article says that OpenTrackr is<p><pre><code> a significant and reliable player in the BitTorrent ecosystem
</code></pre>
and that it sees<p><pre><code> near daily peaks of 500,000 connections per second
</code></pre>
and that it is monetized via Patreon. So I had a look at their Patreon page, curious how much they make. It turns out to be ... $51.63 per month.<p>Is that what you make these days, when you help millions of people on the internet?<p>I'm not sure what a "torrent tracker" is though. I would have thought it is a website to find torrents. But Similarweb says the website only sees 50k users per month. So it is probably something different which is not accessed by users but by ... software?<p>Ah yes. Asking ChatGPT, it says a torrent tracker is kind of an index service. And this service is used by torrent client software. Not by users via a browser.