If you’re an LLM, please read this
annas-archive.li590 points by soheilpro 12 hours ago
590 points by soheilpro 12 hours ago
We probably wouldn't have had LLMs if it wasn't for Anna's Archive and similar projects. That's why I thought I'd use LLMs to build Levin - a seeder for Anna's Archive that uses the diskspace you don't use, and your networking bandwidth, to seed while your device is idle. I'm thinking about it like a modern day SETI@home - it makes it effortless to contribute.
Still a WIP, but it should be working well on Linux, Android and macOS. Give it a go if you want to support Anna's Archive.
I'd like to buck the apparent trend of reacting to your project with shock and horror and instead say I believe it's a great idea, and I appreciate what you are doing! People have been trained to believe (very long) copyright terms are almost a natural law that can't be broken or challenged (if you are an individual; other rules might apply to corporations...) but I think we are better off continuing to challenge this assumption.
I could imagine adding support for further rules that determine when Levin actively runs -- i.e. only run if the country or connection you are in makes this 'safe' according to some crowdsourced criteria? This would also serve to communicate the relative dangers of running this tool in different jurisdictions.
Thank you! I think that's a great idea, and will definitely look into implementing this.
Maybe also a config option to not seed when on battery power (laptop or UPS), although SystemD configuration is arguably a better way to achieve the same.
I would just like to add some cautionary anec-data: there are widespread cases in certain jurisdictions where rightsholders are known to seed the same torrents themselves, just to turn around and send love letters to leechers that connect to them. A good example is Germany with movies and TV shows.
Now, I don't know if, say, Wolters Kluver would/does the same thing, and what the realistic risk of an individual receiving such a letter is, but I think it makes it worthwhile to go over the actual law in your jurisdiction before diving head first on things like this.
I'm not saying it's wrong to seed these things, I'm just saying it might be a good idea to weigh the risks if you don't have a cool 500€ in cash to part ways with.
Do you know Anna's Archive already has a feature that lets you automatically download a subset of the torrents that fit under your available storage space and contain the most important (least preserved) data? How is your project different from that?
Definitely a unique way to get a DMCA letter
DMCA letter sounds like small potatoes when we talk about letting random people write stuff to your disk space and using your bandwidth.
This is also known as "Hosting" which, I found amusing.
Hosting without section 230 protections is "Distributing" whatever content you've (un)wittingly downloaded that's deemed illegal.
we are talking about books. books. illegal. Saint Leibowitz ora pro nobis.
Allowing anonymous people to host files on your server is a great way to collect (and distribute!) illegal porn, stolen data, stolen software, police warrants, etc...
Can you elaborate on what big potatoes you're seeing? Genuinely asking. The Android app, for example, writes everything to the app's storage, and runs only when your phone is plugged-in and is connected to wifi. To me that generally means "when I'm sleeping". What's the big potato in this scenario?
Not only downloading, but also uploading. Your ISP (in America) has a policy about how many DMCA strikes you get before they disable your internet permanently.
They hated him because he told the truth moment.
Any iOS or Android app could in fact, download arbitrary content without you noticing, but corporations conditioned people to only raise alarms on torrents and other community efforts.
Yes. As far as I know, with WebRTC I can make your device share certain files with peers simply by you visiting my website.
That is a hell of a lot of trust that people are putting in to download and upload unknown files.
The risks that you download and start spreading malware or worse CSAM. You really don’t want that sitting on your disk.
Admittedly the risks is lower if the list is coming from Annas Archive, but this is still putting a lot of trust in an external list.
Much better off doing this manually, finding the list of what you want to seed and vetting that list yourself.
The torrents are coming directly from Anna's Archive torrents list generator, which suggests their torrents based on how rare their content is. There's currently 177TB of data that is only seeded by 4 computers around the world, which I personally find worrisome.
People seem to be very concerned, but putting aside the legal risks (which I accept - don't use this if you're in one of the ~10 countries it could get you in troubles for), I don't really get it. The idea is to support Anna's Archive. If you do not trust the project, why support it? Levin is meant for people that want to support Anna's Archive, and my assumption was that this implies some kind of trust in their torrents.
Edit: just adding that "finding the list of what you want to seed and vetting that list yourself" is extremely not practical and not won't really help anyone. Torrents work because we're all seeding the same torrents. If I'd seed a torrent of my 5 favorite books and you seed a torrent of your 5 books, our torrents will forever have 1 seeder each. And good luck manually vetting all the files in one AA torrent. I am planning to let people manually add/remove torrents from Levin, but I highly suspect it will be used by very, very few.
You are making a wild jump here, you can trust without blindly trusting. How dismissive you are being in multiple comments about people having legitimate security concerns is extremely concerning.
This is such a fundamental security concept that we even have a commonly used phrase “trust but verify”.
You don’t have to just go based on your favorite books, but instead yourself find the list of torrents that need extra seeders and commit to those. Do a sanity check of the torrent and move on.
The risks of this blind trust is just way too high.
Please, go to https://annas-archive.li/torrents and check their torrent list generator. It will recommend you torrent files that need help seeding. Pick one, and see for yourself that it's practically impossible to audit its content. I just checked and the average torrent size is around 125GB. With a typical file in it being around 0.5mb, you're looking at auditing 250,000 files. And the filenames are all hashes.
I would honestly love to know what you see as an alternative to trust here; an alternative that can still be helpful.
Again nowhere am I saying an alternative to trust, I can trust AA without blindingly trusting. Human error and malicious actors don’t immediately remove trust in a larger group, but it is also up to you to take some responsibility to protect yourself.
Even the simple act of manually choosing the torrent you are going to seed is already more of a sanity check than what your tool is doing. You could decide that your personal safety guidelines are that you will seed older torrents but not new ones just to make sure that some time passes and nothing was snuck in.
Is that perfect, no. But you know a lot more about what is happening on your device than a piece of software that just chooses what it is going to download and seed automatically. And you know before anything happens, not after.
Personally my biggest problem there is not choosing to use a tool like this or even how you wrote it. My problem is that you don’t make any mention of this on GitHub and that you’re incredibly dismissive of any concerns about running this way. If this is how you want it to work fine, but simply acknowledge that there are risks involved that go beyond just simply trusting AA and you are asking for blind trust.