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Comment by devoutsalsa | Hacker News Reader

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devoutsalsa·

Me: What is DHT?

Also Me: Distributed hash table.

Me: Thanks.

Also Me: You're welcome, but don't be too impressed. I googled it.

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DHT is a protocol that allows peers to exchange data about torrents and peers; you can download the contents of a torrent by its hash instead of having to download a .torrent file and connect to a server to find peers.

Kademlia is similar for eMule, only that it also allows search.

> you can download the contents of a torrent by its hash

How are hash collisions resolved? I'd hate to think I'm downloading my favorite TV show & find that I've downloaded something that makes ma attract the attention of law enforcement.

Aren't hash collisions supposed to be extremely unlikely in general?

Yes, but I don't want to explain to the FBI I was really trying to download a nature documentary.

It's sha1, collisions are unrealistic

Thanks, that’s the answer was looking for.

Kademlia, being a permissionless distributed search protocol, is also heavily polluted. Both by malware and people set out to make piracy harder. It's a hard problem.

Not my experience.

I love that most clients support just pasting the infohash into the 'add url' field.

Saved me a few times on shady-looking sites that demanded an account or something before showing a download link, but still listed the infohash on the page. Useful too when pasting it into a search engine actually gave results.

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