This is a tongue-in-cheek project inspired by sites like keys.lol and everyuuid.com, and to some degree by my interest in all things Library of Babel-adjacent.
BitTorrent clients have the option of participating in a distributed hash table (DHT) in which they can both look up and advertise themselves for particular "infohashes", which are SHA1 hashes of torrent information.
Since the DHT is open to all, anybody can look up any infohash they like and request metadata about the torrent at that infohash.
infohash.lol does just that—for all possible infohashes. All 1048 possible SHA1 hashes are enumerated across countless pages, just waiting to be looked up. When you load a page of infohashes, a DHT lookup is performed to see if there are any peers advertising themselves. If so, further connections are initiated to these peers to request metadata for the infohash.
Metadata contains things like the name of the torrent, the total size, and the names of the files to be transferred. If a peer responds to the request, this information is shown next to the infohash on the page.
The chance of randomly finding an active infohash is very small, but not zero...
Want to get in touch? You can email me at hello@tdjs.dev or message me via X at @tdjsnelling.
You can also check out more work over at GitHub.