Bittorrent protocol is missing a way to augment a live torrent

[colemarc]

Yes I know that qBittorrent cannot implement this idea by itself, but since it is one of the most used clients I thought it can perhaps influence others.

Suppose I posted on many indexer sites a torrent with 23 files.

Issue: after the fact I realize that one file is bad because it has out of sync audio.

What do I do?
Sure, I can do a repack and post it on every indexer site. The repack may contain only the new file or contain all the same old files with the bad one replaced, it does not matter, at least in linux, because hard links allow to have another view of the same files without duplicating the data on disk.
But are leechers going to pay attention? Most likely not. If the indexer site allows editing the old post I can add a link to the repack, but again, what are the chances that every leecher revisits the post?
Not to mention the effort of going around all the sites again to publish the repack.

If I could simply add a file to the live torrent somehow...

See also this.

[Peter]

Torrent is not "live", it never was, it will never be. Why? Because its how the protocol was designed. The .torrent file contains all the information on the files, the hash, etc. Imagine just the security implications if you could hot swap files for millions of people. Just sneak in a little 0-day, taking over half the world.

Won't happen I am sorry.
(Not saying this "as a team member", just simply stating that it makes no technical sense.)

[colemarc]

Torrent is not "live", it never was, it will never be. Why? Because its how the protocol was designed. The .torrent file contains all the information on the files, the hash, etc. Imagine just the security implications if you could hot swap files for millions of people. Just sneak in a little 0-day, taking over half the world.

Won't happen I am sorry.
(Not saying this "as a team member", just simply stating that it makes no technical sense.)

When you put a torrent in your client you are accepting the risk that it could bring anything on your side. Sometimes you have some information before deciding, but in the end it is still your choice.
I am not saying that adding a file to a "live" torrent should automatically sneak the same file on your side, instead your bittorrent client should warn you about the news and let you decide.

And what I meant by "live" is a torrent having a swarm.
I didn't mean to say that a torrent would be "live" if its payload was modifiable.

[Peter]

> I am not saying that adding a file to a "live" torrent should automatically sneak the same file on your side, instead your bittorrent client should warn you about the news and let you decide.

Yeah, but just imagine, you having like 1000 torrents running and 999 of the public ones spamming you daily with "NEW FILES" that might have malware in them. Everything in this idea would render the idea of moderators on torrent sites, comments useless. All the "security by community" is gone.

What do torrent sites do? I mean you know the answer, they nuke rls, they put a new one, CRACKFIX, you name it. Been like this since forever since the content is always immutable in a rls.

I am not saying its a bad idea or anything negative. It's just a tough one. This would need a whole new protocol, clients, etc. Just sharing my thoughts, not meaning to shoot you down. It's implementable, but I see it as a thing maybe for universities? Work? But those places don't use like third party clients. And "Syncthing" is already a thing which does exactly this.

I don't know.

[colemarc]

> I am not saying that adding a file to a "live" torrent should automatically sneak the same file on your side, instead your bittorrent client should warn you about the news and let you decide.

Yeah, but just imagine, you having like 1000 torrents running and 999 of the public ones spamming you daily with "NEW FILES" that might have malware in them. Everything in this idea would render the idea of moderators on torrent sites, comments useless. All the "security by community" is gone.

I manage to have maybe 10 active torrents running on my remote Xeon(R) CPU E3-1220 V2 @ 3.10GHz with 8 GB ram and 1Gbps ethernet before the avg load is in the red. It's an old machine, I know, but 1000 torrents?

I understand the issue you point out here.
What about your bittorrent client alerting you with a simple message with a web link pointing to the release fix?

[Peter]

WTF? People run 50 THOUSAND, 100 THOUSAND torrents easily if not more.
The load only went red for you because you were downloading them all at once. System load represents the hard drive/storage too, not just the CPU. I think your CPU was snoozing because barely any work and only the storage was overloaded.

[colemarc]

WTF? People run 50 THOUSAND, 100 THOUSAND torrents easily if not more.
The load only went red for you because you were downloading them all at once. System load represents the hard drive/storage too, not just the CPU. I think your CPU was snoozing because barely any work and only the storage was overloaded.

I said 10 "active" torrents, and specifically seeding only, each uploading at about 4 MB/sec for a total of 320 Mbps.

So, what about some kind of unidirectional message system seeder-to-leecher?

[Peter]

WTF? People run 50 THOUSAND, 100 THOUSAND torrents easily if not more.
The load only went red for you because you were downloading them all at once. System load represents the hard drive/storage too, not just the CPU. I think your CPU was snoozing because barely any work and only the storage was overloaded.

I said 10 "active" torrents, and specifically seeding only, each uploading at about 4 MB/sec for a total of 320 Mbps.

So, what about some kind of unidirectional message system seeder-to-leecher?

Still, that's storage. The load came from storage overload. HDDs suck at random reads/writes, even if you put them in RAID10. Unless you use a HW Raid card with RAM cache, HDDs will always "die". That's why you have to put "1" active download in qB if you have hdd backend.

> So, what about some kind of unidirectional message system seeder-to-leecher?
That existed in the past. And it was abused, of course.
Vuze had this feature as a plugin, but I'm 99% sure there were others. I remember trying it and it was just virus links, spam, obscene stuff. :/