
I Know What You Downloaded on BitTorrent… - llambda
http://torrentfreak.com/i-know-what-you-downloaded-on-bittorrent-111210/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter
======
acangiano
Interesting removal terms. They pretty much force you to admit that you
downloaded, whatever they say you downloaded in order to have your data
removed. Immediately after having confirmed your real identity via Facebook,
of course. They could sell this information to MPAA and RIAA for gold.

The Details:

By submitting a request to have your download activity removed from our
database, you are acknowledging that the activity was, in fact, carried out by
yourself. This means that you are only submitting a request to have the
details of your own personal activity deleted. Any unrecognized activity, such
as files you did not download or do not remember downloading, are not — I
repeat, are not to be included in your removal request. Why is this
imperative? Well, we actually don’t have to explain ourselves...sorry.

The important part is that you understand these terms and conditions before
hitting that beautiful button that will erase your criminal back ground, at
least for now. Wait, you did remember to read these terms before making the
decision to submit a removal request, right? Of course you did, everyone reads
the fine print.

Other Important Things to Consider: We make no guarantees that your
information will not appear on any other databases. We may have erased your
bad behavior but, keep in mind that your data on this site is aggregated
public domain. So, if by chance, another sadistic group of people decides to
open a similar web site, we have no control over what they do with your
information. Furthermore, if you continue to involve yourself in activity like
this, your future download history will, without a doubt, appear in our
database again and we may not be as nice about it next time.

If any part of these terms is still unclear, please visit your local
elementary school and ask to repeat grades 3 through 5.

~~~
rickmb
> They could sell this information to MPAA and RIAA for gold.

Maybe in the US, but in many other countries they would be breaking several
privacy laws. In fact, even the collecting the initial minimal information
(IP's + downloads) already breaks privacy laws in most of Europe.
Commercially, this information has no value.

~~~
lotu
The lack of seriousness on the site greatly compromises the value of the data.
As a captcha they they ask you enter the _entire_ text of the USA
Constitution, and give a mailing address in Antarctica. There is no evidence
that large portions of the data isn't made up, no sane company would want to
touch this. The agreement above sound more like an attempt to prevent people
from contacting them in the first place (probably as they have to remove data
manually), than a prelude to extortion.

~~~
ars
> The lack of seriousness on the site greatly compromises the value of the
> data.

I think that's the point. They want to make a point about privacy, but they
don't want anyone to take the specific data seriously.

------
kristofferR
It's a joke people. They claim that the scraper is real though:

"Don't take it seriously

The privacy policy, the contact us page — it’s all a joke. We came up with the
idea of building a crawler like this and keeping the maintenance price under
$300 a month. There was only one way to prove our theory worked — to implement
it in practice. So we did. Now, we find ourselves with a big crawler. We knew
what it did but we didn’t know how to use it. So we decided to make a joke out
of it. That’s the beauty of jokes — you can make them out of anything.

However, if you have a better idea — don’t hesitate to contact us."

------
jrockway
I don't use BitTorrent very often (because I have incoming connections for
that torrent in my router's state table for years after I do so), but there
were a few things I wanted to download today so I just spun up an EC2
instance, installed Transmission, and did it from there. A 38GiB Blu-Ray image
took about two hours. The next time I want to do this, I'll have a completely
new IP address.

Is this a terrible idea?

~~~
SonicSoul
any ideas why, transmission on a mac is crawling with the same torrent that's
lightning fast on vuze via windows? i've tried a few torrents using
trasmission, and they would either crawl or not DL at all.. Vuze seems to be
more and more intrusive (in fact some malware detectors continually report
malicious activity coming from vuze), but somehow they figured out how to make
torrents fly.. it's not uncommon for me to get 1mbps downloads..

~~~
DanBC
Check you haven't got the Speed Limit on; then make sure the slow torrent is
set to ignore any speed limits; then check how many peers it can share with
(default is 60); then check ports are okay.

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burgerbrain
"Hi. We have no records on you."

Just got that for the past 2 or 3 connections I've used in the past few weeks.
It might not be very good, but at least it seems inclined to falsely testify
for one's innocence.

------
stfu
I am surprised about the high quality taste other people have who share this
VPN. Csikszentmihalyi, Ebook Libraries, Stephen Merchant - proud of my fellow
anonymists.

~~~
lemming
_proud of my fellow anonymists_

Except, of course, that they didn't pay the authors for any of that high-
quality content you like so much.

~~~
jarek
You can't actually know that.

~~~
lemming
I would, however, bet a beer.

------
jpdoctor
And so the next step in the cat-and-mouse game is predictable: A whole bunch
of forged requests.

Bonus points if the forged IPs are from RIAA sites, DHS, White House, FBI etc.

~~~
Tuna-Fish
Done already. Most of the major trackers add random ips to the lists they
publish.

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ajays
This service is BS. I just went there and it gave me a random torrent,
"Jennifer Lopez Papi" (or something like that). I wouldn't get anything of
JLo's, even if they gave it to me free.

~~~
dexen
Somebody did from the IP address you seem to be using.

Either you are behind a masquerading NAT, or perhaps your ISP rotates IP
addresses and somebody else was using your address the other day, or just
maybe your WiFi router isn't as secure as you hoped, or...

The service neatly highlights the caveats of matching people to IP addresses.

~~~
jks
I have a static IP, and I'm pretty sure that no-one at my home has downloaded
the tv episode this service mentions. It's of course not entirely impossible
that someone has hacked my wifi router, but I think that is less probable than
it is for some random web service to show some made-up data.

~~~
johndoeee
Some trackers inject fake peers.

[https://torrentfreak.com/the-pirate-bay-tricks-anti-
pirates-...](https://torrentfreak.com/the-pirate-bay-tricks-anti-pirates-with-
fake-peers-081020/)

------
beloch
They claim they can track 20% of the public torrents people download, and I
suspect it's a very specific 20% corresponding to certain trackers and certain
torrent clients. I wonder what they are.

~~~
gillianseed
There's no way for any torrent client to hide itself since all this site needs
to do is to have a program join the swarm of all torrents it can find and log
all the ip's of the peers in that swarm, it doesn't matter what torrent client
you use.

However if it's a closed tracker and they do not have access they can't join
the swarm and log the ip's. I'd assume that at this point they are only
logging ip's on open trackers but there's no technical reason why they
couldn't join a private tracker (unless they don't accept more users) and log
ip's there aswell.

~~~
soult
Private trackers are a lot more difficult. I bet it would raise some eyebrows
if a user on a private tracker were to suddenly announce all torrents. On
public trackers they can just use multiple IPs, on DHT they are trackers
themselves and don't even need to ask others, but on private trackers their
crawler will have a hard time getting many accounts to hide its activity.

------
nutjob123
I download around 2-3 torrents a week normally using public trackers and this
site says "Hi. We have no records on you.". Another note, I use peerblock
while downloading not really because I believe in the protection but because
its interesting to see the names of organizations which care what i'm doing.
Perhaps its actually doing something.

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bjoernbu
Since I don't use torrents at all (unless if software uses it for updates but
I am not aware of anything I currently use that does), it might not be too
interesting.

However, the next time I share WiFi with someone, this may be quite useful.

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morazow
The last lecture of my P2P Systems and Overlay Networks class was about
Anonymity. I should probably go over the slides once again.

EDIT: This was a paper about file sharing anonymity,
[http://www.cs.cornell.edu/people/egs/papers/herbivore-
esigop...](http://www.cs.cornell.edu/people/egs/papers/herbivore-esigops.pdf)

------
notatoad
Either my roommate has very different music tastes than I thought he did, or
They've overestimated my ISPs lease time.

~~~
danneu
No kidding. I live in a one-bedroom in a college student apartment complex and
none of these listed downloads are mine. But from visiting that website, I
just learned that the Walking Dead is on it's second season.

------
Foy
Weird, I downloaded 4-5 episodes of an unlicensed series and only one of them
got tracked. I'm fairly sure all torrent were from the same source and used
the same trackers, but I could be wrong.

Not to mention I use torrents extensively but they only had one torrent on my
"file".

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GigabyteCoin
I can see this causing a lot of household problems.

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happyman
Can't we get updated definitions for peerblock which will blacklist their
crawling ip?

------
tba
Looks fake to me:

<http://www.youhavedownloaded.com/?q=0.0.0.0>

<http://www.youhavedownloaded.com/?q=255.255.255.255>

<http://www.youhavedownloaded.com/?q=192.168.1.1>

<http://www.youhavedownloaded.com/?q=192.168.2.1>

<http://www.youhavedownloaded.com/?q=192.168.5.1>

[...]

Has this correctly identified anyone's downloading?

------
there
i hope this doesn't prompt more people to start using bittorrent through tor.

~~~
seles
why?

~~~
there
because it makes it so difficult to provide exit nodes in the US for people
that actually need them. DMCA complaints will quickly take down an exit node
because of tor users sending bittorrent traffic out of it.

~~~
jrockway
Just like DMCA complaints have shut down other internet service providers,
like Comcast? Ultimately, in the US, ISPs are not responsible for their users'
activity. "Common carrier" and all that. When you open an exit node, you
become an ISP.

~~~
there
i'm aware of DMCA's safe-harbor provision and i've fought with colo providers
over it. when you're not an ISP the size of comcast (or any decent-sized
"real" ISP), you're always going to be subject to another company's AUP.

i've had an exit node shut down by a colo provider simply because they didn't
want to deal with the overhead of processing the DMCA requests. they knew what
tor was and they knew i wasn't the one downloading content, but they just
didn't want to deal with it, so it was either turn the exit node into a relay
or have my server shut off.

[https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/GoodBadISP...](https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/GoodBadISPs#Badexperience)

------
barrkel
The only thing it has for me is something called "Worms.Crazy.Golf" -
something I have never downloaded. I also have a static IP.

This site seems completely bogus.

~~~
xtal
apparently some trackers have fake peers that might use your IP address.
regardless of if that is or isn't the case, it lends you some deniability.

------
rohitarondekar
In India, most ISP's don't provide you with a static IP address. So the
addresses are shared/recycled. When I opened the website I got a list of
torrents that I have not downloaded.

Basically every couple of days this list for me will change and won't be
accurate. I'm sure many other ISP's do the same. So this list of downloads
isn't entirely accurate.

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darksaga
I knew this was a ruse when I read the bio's at the bottom of the page. I had
a good laugh at this one:

"Suren Ter (me) I’m a producer of the site. Like a movie producer, I made the
site."

Then several sentences later:

"Me? I don’t do code, I don’t do research, I don’t do design — I do sites.
Drop me a message if you’d like."

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aw3c2
They are probably not taking dynamic IPs in mind. But the idea is interesting.

------
ithought
I am guilty of downloading one episode of Pawn Stars after my DVR messed up
the recording. My DVR re-recorded it the next day. If this is illegal, then
I'll just get a VPN and cancel my satellite service.

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Zirro
And that's why I'm behind a VPN. Found one torrent which I assume someone else
who had this VPN's temporary IP-adress downloaded earlier, though.

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jyothi
For those on dynamic IP the data is so mixed up. Atleast a date or timestamp
of the download would make it more clear.

------
lucasf
Anyone have any idea how they collect the data (what IP is dowloading what
torrent)?

~~~
jrockway
An integral part of the torrenting process is getting a list of IP addresses
from the tracker so you can connect to each IP and start downloading the data.
You can log those IP addresses to a database instead of downloading that data.

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geekgawd
Also, doesn't work if your service provider provides dynamic IPs.

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jQueryIsAwesome
I have static IP and it knew exactly what i have downloaded; i guess it is
using some of the most popular trackers from 'the pirate bay'.

------
hendrix
usenet & ssl + nzbmatrix = no more problems.

~~~
jrockway
Your Usenet provider certainly knows what you're downloading. The reason you
don't care is because someone sued some Usenet provider in the early 90s, and
Usenet providers were deemed "common carriers", not liable for the content
they carry. Since _downloading_ copyrighted content is apparently not illegal,
it all works out.

~~~
angstrom
Also nice because SSL doesn't tend to get preempted by traffic shaping so you
usually get close to the max download rate the ISP says you're paying for.

------
leeoniya
for me it says, "Well, you are in the clear. But look what others
do"...AnalTeenAngels.com - Abbie (584.32 MB)

should i check it out? must be good!

[turns out to be a gay flick, FML]

