Orpheus.network News

The COVID-19 / Equinox Update

Recovery

When Orpheus launched, we had managed to secure an old backup from the previous site. This was used through a program called Recovery, to kickstart the member base and it allowed people to pick up some of the releases they had made previously.

Seventeen months later, it is time to bring the program to a close. People who were on the previous site should have heard about us by now. Therefore the decision has been taken to close the Recovery program at the end of the month (2020-03-31 23:59:59 UTC).

We will continue to help out the considerable amount of people who applied for recovery, but made a mistake in the process (for example, by not entering the same email as with their initial registration).

Gmail

Be aware that, if you invite someone, at this point in time Gmail is not delivering any emails from Orpheus. Please instruct your invitee to use a different provider such as Protonmail instead. If this does happen, they will have to join #disabled on IRC.

Security update

We have implemented a rate-limiting measure that will limit the amount of .torrent files you are able to download, should certain conditions be met. This should not affect legitimate users, but should limit the ability of a malicious actor grabbing everything.

Many people may be aware of a group named The-Eye, who are on a crusade to render private trackers irrelevant by lifting all the content through a technique called ‘Ghost leeching’ and making the data available on their own platform for a modest fee.
Their modus operandi consisted of iterating over all IDs and downloading the .torrent files. These would be loaded into their custom client which would connect to the swarm and leech the contents without reporting anything to the tracker.

Up until now, in Gazelle, this was possible because there is no built-in code to prevent this type of crawling. The code will be open-sourced, like everything else we have written and we hope that it will allow other Gazelle-based trackers to adopt the fix.

How does it work?

Gazelle makes a distinction between files that are downloaded and whether that file has been loaded into a client and snatched. We use this differentiation to determine a “Snatch Factor”.

An example: If you download many files but snatch very few, eventually the balance becomes very lopsided. For example, 60 files downloaded and only 5 of them snatched will result in a Snatch Factor of 12.

Every user class (User, Member, Power User, …) has an allowed class factor, which becomes more lenient as you level up. If your own Snatch Factor is higher than the class factor, you move into “Overshoot mode”.

In “Overshoot mode”, you can download a limited number of additional torrent files per 24 hour window. If you download more than this then you will begin to receive a “429 Too Many Requests” rejection. This means you will need to wait for a while or ensure that the torrent files you have already downloaded, have been snatched completely (100%, no partial leeches).

The allowed number in “Overshoot mode” increases as you move up user class levels.

TL;DR

The new rate-limiting measure should not affect legitimate users. Torrents uploaded yourself are not taken into account and may be downloaded as often as needed.

With ,
Orpheus

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