
I Know What You Download on BitTorrent - easterncalculus
http://iknowwhatyoudownload.com
======
flak48
An intern once thought it was a good idea to torrent a couple of Game of
Thrones episodes using my startup's Digital Ocean box.

We found out after Digital Ocean forwarded us an email from HBO (who
presumably tracked Digital Ocean down via the IP) that we were engaging in
piracy. We sent an email to everyone with access, saying whoever was doing it
to stop. Then we got a second email (a final warning).

Everyone denied doing it, so I had to find the offender via checking the bash
history of the box for all users.

Sure enough a couple of mkv files had been downloaded and deleted by an intern
:( Making the mistake of downloading it was forgiveable once, since we lived
in a culture where piracy was rampant / normal (this was before Netflix et al
were available in my country). But repeating the offense, failing to come
clean and making us waste our time to locate who did it was not. (This was a
small 7 person startup so trust was super important).

As for why the intern needed to ssh into a digital ocean box to run a torrent?
The college internet (where he was working from) blocked torrent connections
and he wanted to be the first one to download and release the episodes on the
college intranet. Smh.

~~~
_tbyy
The problem here is not recognizing that the piracy was actually the problem.
In what way was it forgivable? Because everybody does it, that makes it okie
dokie? Because you don't have a Netflix account? If everyone treated piracy as
theft (it is) then no one would have to waste their time investigating it
because the collective will would exist to prevent it.

~~~
Bjartr
Piracy is copyright infringement. There's no reason to call it theft. They are
both bad for society, they are both illegal, but they are distinct.

~~~
lostgame
While literally true; I have always found this argument to be petty and
pedantic.

I’ve heard every argument in the book; but even the old ads said ‘you wouldn’t
_steal_ ____’.

The fundamental principle is so similar to the point that discussing it
quickly devolves into pedantry.

I am one that has had this discussion probably a dozen times; half of those on
this forum, and I’ve just decided to stand by my educated opinion that it’s
absolutely a type of theft.

~~~
stardek
Maybe a very distorted type of theft but from my perspective the main immoral
thing about theft is that it deprives someone of what they used to have, or
takes the place of a sale. From the limited research I've seen the evidence
is, at best, mixed that corporations are losing sales due to piracy.

If it was a clear choice between buying something or pirating it, equating
piracy with theft would be more reasonable (though the owner still has their
good so not entirely identical) but that doesn't seem to be the typical
scenario. The ads only make that equivalence because it's better for the
companies if they convince people it's theft.

From a moral perspective I think whether it is theft really depends on your
motivation/what you would do in the absence of piracy.

~~~
nybble41
> the main immoral thing about theft is that it deprives someone of what they
> used to have

You should have just stopped there. That "or takes the place of a sale" rider
is a very recent invention. You know what else takes the place of a sale?
Spending your time doing anything else and ignoring the fact that the work
even exists. If I could have paid to listen to a song from artist A and
instead I listen to a song from artist B (free or paid, but we'll assume it
was with permission either way) then that "takes the place of a sale" for
artist A, but there's absolutely nothing immoral about choosing to listen to
artist B's song instead. Or reading a book, or sleeping, or whatever. You
could even write your own songs and give them away for free, directly
_competing_ with artist A and taking the place of _many_ sales, and there
still wouldn't be anything immoral about that. Artist A was never guaranteed
sales, so they haven't lost anything simply by not making a sale. They still
have their copy of the work, so they have not in fact been deprived of
anything.

Complaints about piracy always read to me as: "You aren't complying with this
monopoly which was promised to us in a rather one-sided deal with a third
party (government) which (unilaterally) claims to represent you. If you don't
shape up—or even if you do—we intend to sue you for everything you own in
courts run by our beneficiaries and otherwise do whatever we can to ruin your
life, just on general principles and not because we suffered any actual
damages." And yet _they_ have the audacity to pretend to claim the moral high
ground…

------
Santosh83
Well my ISP gives out a dynamic IP address each time my DSL modem connects to
them, so this tactic only reveals who downloaded what when they were assigned
my current IP. Nothing much can be inferred from this data unless you _are_
the ISP or govt and can tie the IP to the subscriber.

And yes, it shows my IP downloaded the movie Zombieland, which I never did, so
it is some other subscriber of the same ISP.

~~~
Tepix
Nowadays internet users on cable often keep the same IP address for weeks if
not months. Who knows, your ISP could change its configuration tomorrow and
always re-assign the same IP address to you as long as its available.

I think the point of this website is to show people that using torrents is far
from anonymous and invisible.

~~~
ivanovb
My IP hasn't changed in about a year, although it is supposed to be dynamic.

On the other hand I use extensively a torrent tracker and the site shows
nothing.

~~~
senectus1
Mine changes every few weeks.

I found it amusing to see that the OP web link stops showing what my IP has
been downloading at the same time that I got the IP only about a week ago.

------
Pxtl
This kind of thing is already done heavily by content rights-holders. If you
torrent movies or games in Canada without a VPN, you will get nastygrams in
your email from the rights-holders via your ISP. They're legally required to
do so AFAIK, because even consumer-oriented ISPs that are very privacy driven
also forward on those letters.

Apparently if you don't reply to those emails you're fine, because they can't
escalate the process unless you reply - I've heard stories of people receiving
dozens of these "we saw you downloading pirate stuff, stop doing that" emails.

~~~
carstenhag
What, you only get _emails_? In Germany you straight up get snail mails from
lawyers demanding you to pay for the damages.

But in Germany the only real bad thing is uploading, downloading by itself is
more of a grey thing.

~~~
sbarre
Canada currently uses a "notice and notice regime" [0], meaning the rights
holder notifies the ISP, who turns around and forwards the notice to the
infringing customer, but does not give the rights holder the account
information, nor do they take any punitive action towards the customer.

However, the ISP must retain historical data on these notices, so if in the
future the laws change, rights holders could in theory request information on
past notices and go after subscribers once they have their personal
information.

so yeah, don't pirate stuff...

0: [https://www.ic.gc.ca/eic/site/Oca-
bc.nsf/eng/ca02920.html](https://www.ic.gc.ca/eic/site/Oca-
bc.nsf/eng/ca02920.html)

~~~
contravariant
>if in the future the laws change

Almost no legal system works this way. You can't suddenly be found guilty of
violating a law that didn't exist.

~~~
lolc
Haha, that's a funny take along the lines of "it's not illegal if the cops
didn't see." The reality is that the sharing is the infringement one gets
prosecuted for. Copyright law already exists.

------
jermier
Luckily my router only supports IPV4 and I'm assigned a vague IPv4 CGNAT IP
every time I switch it on. I used this site to do some OSINT on my IP and you
guessed it: It looks like I'm sharing my IP with 1000s of other subscribers so
doing attribution to 'me' would be hard and also wouldn't hold up in court.
Also see:

[https://www.eff.org/de/deeplinks/2011/08/why-ip-addresses-
al...](https://www.eff.org/de/deeplinks/2011/08/why-ip-addresses-alone-dont-
identify-criminals)

[https://www.securityweek.com/eff-warns-police-courts-
about-u...](https://www.securityweek.com/eff-warns-police-courts-about-
unreliability-ip-addresses)

~~~
pathseeker
Be careful with this, your ISP can easily record the NAT translations and
going to your ISP with a connection 5-tuple would be enough to track it back
to you.

------
nickfromseattle
\- Was 26

\- Moved into company apartment

\- Torrented stuff

\- Company received a $30k lawsuit for downloading porn on company network

\- Hear CEO talking to lawyers (open office)

\- 99% sure it was me

\- Come clean to CEO

\- Was actually another c-suite who forgot they were logged into the VPN

~~~
quickthrower2
Explain the lawsuit?

~~~
jandrese
A few years ago there was a legal firm that specialized in tracking down
people from their IP on porn torrents on the assumption that they wouldn't
want their name in the public record and would settle for 5 figures. The law
firm doing it was so shady they ended up losing the suits and having a judge
tell them to knock it off.

~~~
thaumasiotes
Note that the conduct of Prenda which the judge objected to was that they were
both the legal representation and the copyright owners, but didn't admit that
before the court. There was no suggestion that their tactics posed any
problems.

~~~
chmod775
There's also the problem that if the copyright owner themselves made the
torrent available, it's not actually illegal to download it...

~~~
Batman8675309
[X] Doubt

~~~
chmod775
I don't know what's there to doubt really.

You have been provided the work for free by the entity whose prerogative it is
to choose the manners of distribution.

------
tstrimple
Laughs in Usenet. The proliferation of streaming services and restricted
content has me investing in alternative options more these days. It's not
about paying for content, it's about content becoming less accessible again.

~~~
SV_BubbleTime
Usenet has its own issues though. The past couple years there’s been a massive
jump in DMCA takedowns.

On certain things you now have download as it becomes available, in a week
it’ll be gone. For things that no one cares to pay for monitoring of, you can
go back years.

So, pros and cons to torrents that don’t get taken down specially but torrents
“die” of old age when no one seeds them.

It’s odd to me that file sharing seems to have hit a wall after torrents got
popular. Doesn’t it seem like Usenet shouldn’t be the best option considering
it’s age?

~~~
ViViDboarder
I believe it’s only really a good option for files because it’s old and there
are many obscure providers. I don’t see anything about Usenet itself that
makes it well suited for sharing files. In fact, quite the opposite. The fact
that each file needs to be split and reconstructed after download results in
an esoteric user experience.

All that said, I love (or loved) Usenet for communicating on Newsgroups. I’m
glad that they still are around. I hope Newsgroups and IRC never die.

~~~
ornornor
You can automate it all. Nzbget and sonarr, radarr makes it transparent to the
user.

------
mulmen
Off topic but this raises a question about iMesssage parsing of URLs. I copied
just the base URL (without my IP, so he would get his) and sent this to a
friend. The preview in iMessage lists _my_ IP, because iMessage actually
visited the link. Does the message he receives show his IP or mine?

e: Just tested this, it shows my IP on the receiving end. It appears iMessage
creates the preview text on the _sender’s_ side so this will leak your IP. I
tried it in Slack too and it leaked whatever IP Slack used to fetch the URL
which interestingly is not my IP.

~~~
giantrobot
The web preview in iMessage is performed by each client. So your friend should
see their IP in the preview since it's their client making the connection on
their end.

This is easy to test if you've got another device with iMessage. Take your
phone off WiFi and send yourself the link. The device on WiFi should show your
home ISP address while the device on cellular should show the cellular
provider IP.

~~~
kalium-xyz
Interesting, I didnt realize I could get people their IP by simply sending
them my website without them even ever having to visit it themselves

~~~
mulmen
Based on my limited testing you can’t. And that makes sense because I could
make your device visit a URL just by sending you a message.

~~~
kalium-xyz
Thats what I said: I can send you my website and I will see your device visit
it even if you dont want it to.

~~~
mulmen
And what I said is that's not how iMessage works. The receiver only visits
your page if they click the link.

------
sn_master
I've been using a Seedbox since December 2014.

Best 15$/month I pay. You can even pay with Bitcoin, tho I just use PayPal.

2 TB of storage, very fast speed with caching (i.e. some torrents finish
immediately if someone else has it downloaded). An uncached Blu-ray ~4 GB
movie gets finished in 15-30 mins.

They also have auto-delete feature. If they get a legal complaint they just
delete the offending torrent and keep my account the same, no "strikes" or
anything like that.

I then download the actual content either from FTP or HTTPS. If its a movie, I
just download the single .mp4 file from the portal itself (and skip the
subtitle/cover files) with HTTPS straight from Chrome, or even stream it
directly through VLC! I only use the FTP if there is a large number of files
(e.g. series or non-ISO-packaged software).

They have servers in US, Netherlands and Singapore. I always use the
Netherlands server. I doubt anyone uses the US ones.

Even better? I can use the 2 TB for whatever I want, not just for the
torrents. That's cheaper than most cloud storage plans for just dummy storage
without any torrenting features!

Only problem I have with torrents are unpopular movies/series usually have no
seeds, but there is nothing that can be done about that. Only older clients
like LimeWire/eMule didn't have that problem, but those had endless malware
issues because the content wasn't verified.

Pro-tip: Do not download the actual .torrent file. Many websites are setup to
redirect you into an endless loop of shady .exe downloads. Always, always just
copy the magnet link to your clipboard. This also makes you safe from any
network monitoring that checks for .torrent downloads. No one can prove
anything if you just copy a magnet link to your clipboard then paste it to a
seedbox since they don't/can't monitor clipboards. Just browsing the page
which has the link is perfectly file and doesn't prove intent, vs actually
downloading a .torrent file.

VPNs in comparison are quite dodgy. They have slower speeds, no torrent-
caching, its possible (and happens more than it should) that the software has
a bad config and skips the VPN and uses your actual connection.

Also, I can never trust that the VPN company won't share my details if they
get a legal request, specially when most of them are in the US.

VPNs are useful for bypassing censored networks in a university campus or
corporate network, but for torrenting they're infinitely inferior to
seedboxes.

~~~
AnonC
> Only problem I have with torrents are unpopular movies/series usually have
> no seeds, but there is nothing that can be done about that.

> Pro-tip: Do not download the actual .torrent file. Many websites are setup
> to redirect you into an endless loop of shady .exe downloads. Always, always
> just copy the magnet link to your clipboard.

A better pro-tip for these issues: if you're anyway using a seed box, figure
out and switch to private trackers and follow their rules. With the good ones
around, you won't have to worry about shady downloads. Some of the unpopular
or older content may also be available on those.

~~~
blaser-waffle
Getting access to private trackers is non-trivial. Hell, I used to be on
waffles.fm and lost my invite and getting access since then has been
impossible.

Usenet and sickbeard have been adequate replacements since then.

~~~
rapfaria
I'm sad to report that waffles.fm is no more.

Agreed, getting on private trackers - and surviving - is non-trivial, and
don't think I could do it today (uploading, contributing). But once you do on
the really big and important ones, you are set for life.

------
grawprog
Apparently Blindspot, Warrior, Hanna and the Twilight zone is pretty popular
for my ip address. I've never downloaded any of these and Twilight zone is the
only one i've even heard of. I also can't torrent things through my service
provider, they throttle them, so i've never actually used a torrent program at
all from this IP. So, that I guess...

~~~
timdorr
One of my neighboring IPs distributes child pornography according to this
site, which is just fan-fucking-tastic. Anyone know how far Comcast
distributes IPs on the same subnet geographically?

~~~
willcipriano
Drop a dime: [https://www.fbi.gov/tips](https://www.fbi.gov/tips)

~~~
unethical_ban
Not to discourage reporting (seriously).

Simply as an observation, I would be legitimately shocked if the FBI didn't
use these same techniques with automation to find suspicious torrents and get
data from ISPs.

------
Reason077
Another interesting one is to hit the "My Contributions" button on Wikipedia
when you're not logged in. This will show you anonymous edits that have come
from your IP address.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:MyContributions](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:MyContributions)

There are a lot of weird people who share my IP address editing a lot of weird
stuff!

~~~
easterncalculus
Very interesting! Thanks for sharing this, I also got some interesting
responses from a VPN.

------
noxer
It lists a bunch of crap especially porn and Bollywood movies and some chines
stuff I cant identify what it is but certainly no one in my household
torrented it. Meanwhile it does not list a single distro iso that I have been
seeding for months. The IP and torrent client is correct tho. Strange.

~~~
Pxtl
Dynamic IP? I doubt you're the first one to use that IP address.

------
stiray
I do give you credit of giving people a quick shot how accurate torrent
detection can be if you are a casual user not using VPN. Or not using private
trackers.

But.

You dont know and you are clueless that this is not my ip.

Furthermore, I have also checked my phone where I have never downloaded any
torrent and you are showing 3 movies.

This is just scaremongering.

I did a few more tests.

For multiple private trackers you didnt detect anything (except your false
positives), you have failed to detect there is more than one user of IP, you
didnt detect VPN (but you could).

Not accurate at all.

A sane advice from this example - use VPN (from other jurisdiction than you
are in and not massively well known or free), stop using public tracker.

~~~
tomxor
> Furthermore, I have also checked my phone where I have never downloaded any
> torrent and you are showing 3 movies. This is just scaremongering.

Not sure if this is the same in every country but mobile phones in UK jump
around the same IP block pretty frequently (i.e all day long) even when
standing still - i'm using this as home internet so i notice.

IP addresses are re-used all the time, this is why it's not usually
permissible as evidence in court.

The down side of such frequent IP changes is i'm pretty much permablocked by
google and captcha'd to death by them due to frequently swapping IPs with in
pool of users with malware (now i've completely given up using google.com).

~~~
stiray
Yep, typically phone companies put mobile internet behind NAT, exactly this is
why I tested it, as I knew it will be false positive. ;)

------
gonzo41
Anyone had to trawl through a daily access log list looking to establish proof
something happened? I have, it sucked and the effort in wasn't worth what we
got out of it in the end.

I'm pretty confident my ISP is doing the least amount of work possible to
fulfill its logging and archive requirements. Keeping track of this stuff is
like cleaning up industrial waste. It's not core the money stream for ISP's so
it's going to be daily logs, zipped up on glacier storage, or better just
hdd's that get thrown in a container and cycled out each year.

People gotta do something these days, there's talk covid may go for 24 months!

------
AnonC
Previously (December 2017):
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15971020](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15971020)

Previously (December 2016):
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13249578](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13249578)

~~~
jwilk
And January 2020:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22102806](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22102806)

------
CGamesPlay
Wow, people at my apartment must download a LOT. Including several items
listed as child pornography, about which the site declines to provide
additional details; as well as this listed as regular pornography, but which I
believe is actually malware-ridden audio editing software.
[https://iknowwhatyoudownload.com/en/torrent/?id=a8579ced8872...](https://iknowwhatyoudownload.com/en/torrent/?id=a8579ced887218b21b6d2cf276c057346e66a0c03e350c0abcea8f0d31480c219ed9e47e957ea76a3f96347587275da0)

------
dependenttypes
Please do not visit this site unless if you want to be tracked.

In addition it is extremely inaccurate, it used to say that 8.8.8.8 was
torrenting anime.

------
jiggunjer
Funny to see how many movies are torrented on a mobile 4g network. What a
waste of bandwidth.

~~~
goda90
I tried from my phone's 4G and saw someone had downloaded a movie bigger than
the typical data cap for my carrier. Yikes.

------
jlengrand
Interestingly, I used to download a lot of torrents years ago. When Spotify
came along, it dropped at least 80%. Add Netflix and Steam and I haven't used
torrents in a very long while actually. Simply because everything I need is
available at an affordable price.

However, seeing how many streaming services are popping up lately, each with
their own specialty and each wanting my money, (and seeing how crappy free
Youtube is becoming) I feel more and more like coming back to my old habits .
. .

~~~
Orochikaku
As Gabe Newell once said,

"We think there is a fundamental misconception about piracy. Piracy is almost
always a service problem and not a pricing problem”

~~~
ConsiderCrying
That is 100% correct. Soon as Netflix and Steam became a thing, I pretty much
stopped pirating. They are so convenient that pirating is actually a subpar
experience. If you download a game, maybe there's a miner or malware in it.
Download a movie and maybe it doesn't have subtitles or has visual artifacts
aplenty. The only cases where I do that is if it's a media property that I
particularly love. I download a copy and store it on an SSD to make sure I
never lose it in case Steam loses the rights to the game or Netflix decides
the movie isn't popular enough and takes it off streaming, etc. However, now
that everyone and their grandma is going into streaming, it's turning into
cable. So I'm really starting to eye the idea of pirating series and movies
simply because I don't want to pay extra money to Disney just to watch
Hamilton.

~~~
tracker1
It's easier to grab all the shows I watch from one spot a couple times a week
and watch from my nas via kodi on a shieldtv box. Bonus, not commercials and I
don't have to care about which network(s) are on what services.

I do pay for Hulu + TV for the fiance, and though I do use it sometimes, I'll
tend to prefer torrents.

------
pampa
You can turn it into a recomendation system! "People who downloaded this, also
downloaded this"

~~~
jeroenhd
This website used to contain all the information to generate a magnet URL for
every torrent. With a simple combination of Google and a quick browser addon
I've used this site as a nice way to find torrents for a while.

They've taken down the hashes now, which means the trick doesn't work anymore.
Using other people's interests as recommendations was pretty useful though!

------
kanox
I have a static IP and it shows a whole bunch of unfamiliar torrents. What am
I missing, how could it show false positives for a specific IP?

~~~
everfree
Good thinking to cya by posting a comment here that you can point to later.
It's quite believable, actually.

------
crazygringo
It says they scrape torrent sites and then listen to DHT.

But even assuming they scrape "all" torrents, what percentage of users use DHT
as opposed to just trackers, and how often will a DHT request hit their server
as opposed to someone else's? And are they really able to simultaneously
function as part of the DHT for _all_ torrents they've ever scraped, or is it
only some small percentage at a time?

I'm just wondering if they're managing to grab something like 90% of
torrenting activity, or more like 1%?

Legality aside, I'm just really curious about the technical accuracy here.
Also why they chose DHT instead of connecting to trackers directly.

~~~
TheRealPomax
Given that DHT means websites hosting magnet links are in the greyest possible
of legal areas, as opposed to websites that run their own tracker, which makes
them pretty much guilty of aiding and abetting by default: DHT is by far the
more used technology these days.

------
mindfulhack
Given the numerous examples of false positives / false attribution able to be
extrapolated from this website's claims, I wonder if it is giving its owner(s)
/ operator(s) considerable legal risk.

By calling itself "I know what _you_ download, dot com", it's potentially
suggesting that "you are your IP address", thus suggesting that it is usable
evidence for others to use against "you", when it actually could not be the
case at all. IANAL, but this site seems legally problematic.

------
splatcollision
Smart thing to do is to use this as a content recommendation service! Or
netflix can improve their catalog by knowing what content people are going
off-service for.... Nevermind enforcement, this is a huge data source for
marketing purposes... Wait a minute :(

~~~
glxxyz
When customers switch over to torrenting Netflix can keep their 'watched' list
updated in case they come back.

------
quickthrowman
It doesn’t know what I download on BitTorrent. I only download from a private
tracker that is 15 years old, nice try :)

~~~
ColanR
_cries in demonoid_

~~~
quickthrowman
The destruction of what.cd was similarly terrible.

------
p1necone
It correctly identifies my torrent client version and the fact that I have a
static IP, but none of the things I know I _have_ downloaded are on the list,
and a bunch of stuff I _haven 't_ is (EDIT: it correctly identified one
torrent).

Edit: Could this be due to me having a static ipv6 range, would my ipv4
address that this is looking at be shared by other people?

~~~
gcbw3
You client is politely sending items your peers are requesting, to try to find
peers for them in your peer network, without having to flood everyone with
irrelevant peer lists.

And this site (which i guess is just a couple lines of python collecting the
data) is not bothering to distinguish any of the finer details.

~~~
p1necone
Ah, this makes sense because the first seen and last seen columns are the same
for all the stuff I didn't download, but for the one thing I noticed that I do
actually recognize there's a gap between first and last seen.

Of course I imagine if two peers were looking for the same thing a few hours a
part this wouldn't work to identify stuff either.

EDIT: Is there any way to stop it from doing this? I don't want law
enforcement to mistakenly use this as evidence that I actually downloaded
anything.

------
dt3ft
I can see this being used by law enforcement in countries where IP address =
person that rents it.

~~~
dewey
This is a long term practice in Germany. Lawyers connect to the swarm, collect
peers and then send letters in an automated way to "shake down" people.

The solution is to use VPNs or private trackers and it's pretty widely known.
If you move into a flat / AirBnB one of the first things people will tell you
is to not torrent on the connection.

~~~
duxup
Heck in the US one law firm actually seeded the porn themselves ... then sued
the people who they accused of downloaded it ;)

Didn't work out for them long term though....

[https://arstechnica.com/tag/prenda-law/](https://arstechnica.com/tag/prenda-
law/)

~~~
lone-commenter
Pure Saul Goodman style.

------
rootsudo
Since everyone is taking about their experiences seeing workmates torrent, and
no one is posting how this works -

Torrents are peer to peer. Bit torrent is a type of application. Bittorrent
are not inclusive to torrents anymore.

Since everything is public, you can load several torrents, and watch for the
handshake to occur and record the time/date and ip address.

Do it on a large enough scale and there you go.

There are many ways to secure against this, usually USA IP holders use USA
cloud services or USA IP addresses. Some are public, but even if not, you can
block the entire USA , so geoblocking by a simple tool such as:
[https://www.countryipblocks.net/acl.php](https://www.countryipblocks.net/acl.php)

And you're pretty much in the clear. Not perfect, but pretty much.

~~~
angry_octet
You are very much not in the clear if you block like this. That's just
delusional.

Copyright monitoring firms have many endpoints that look like consumer
ADSL/cable... because they are consumer connections.

~~~
rootsudo
Yes, but consumer ADSL/cable..are still..within the USA IP Address list block.

By blocking the entire continent, if you are paranoid, you won't be on that
list.

I doubt they will engineer much of a solution for non-local markets e.g. UK
instance catching USA Ip address, though in the end it is _not_ that hard to
move that metadata around.

~~~
angry_octet
They have many non-American endpoints, and local front companies, and they
collaborate and pool data. They definitely had endpoints on a local ISP here,
it was in the detail of some of the submissions that the IP they used was from
the ISP.

[https://delimiter.com.au/2011/08/30/wikileaks-cable-outs-
sec...](https://delimiter.com.au/2011/08/30/wikileaks-cable-outs-secret-
iitrial-background/amp/)

------
veganbeef
Why are all the porn entries highlighted red? Is it meant to shame people?

~~~
tekstar
That's the colour of visited links.

~~~
Lammy
<tr class="danger">?

~~~
hombre_fatal
That is a Twitter Bootstrap class for "make it red".

The above poster is wrong though. It's quite obvious that porn=red and it's
easy to test. Anything with "XXX" in the category column is red.

------
dreen
I have no VPN and download stuff sporadically, stream video via torrents
daily, I get nothing on this site. I guess I'm good.

~~~
mito88
Me too

------
EastSmith
I am paying for whatever I can I pay where I live - hbo, amazon prime,
netflix, local services, spotify.

I think about stop paying and switch to torrents simply because of the
horrible UI each of these providers has. It will probably will be more of an
effort, but enough is enough.

What I want: VCL interface - start / stop / pause. What I do not want: the
rest of the crap like extra info (Amazon), bad search interface (hello all),
buffering issues (hello HBO, Netflix), dark patterns where you can not stop at
the end of the episode, but they may let you to continue watching credits (FY
everyone).

~~~
ficklepickle
Are you using custom DNS? If so, you may be bypassing the netfix appliance at
your ISP, leading to worse performance.

It is also possible, of course, that your ISP doesn't have one.

------
notRobot
Submission from six months ago:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22102806](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22102806)

~~~
easterncalculus
Yeah, I wonder who flagged this or why. It didn't come up in the search (most
recent post was 3 years ago from what I saw) so I figured it would be worth a
repost.

------
Canada
These sites are never accurate I don't know why they make the frontpage every
couple years

~~~
easterncalculus
These sites are sometimes accurate, especially for those with static IP
addresses or that are on a defined range (universities, organizations, etc).
It's far from a silver bullet, but it's an interesting way to look at what
people are torrenting in general.

------
codezero
The phishing link they have set up to get your friends IP is pretty shady,
obviously this stuff is easy to do, but pretty weak to make it easier for
folks.
[https://iknowwhatyoudownload.com/en/link/](https://iknowwhatyoudownload.com/en/link/)

There are people with abusive and stupid partners who wouldn't be able to get
this information without doing more work or paying money.

~~~
WarOnPrivacy
Not minimizing your point but I like the obvious reminder of what's possible.

Also, the what-bad-guys-might-do klaxon is a powerful tool, is too often used
to restrict everyone's abilities.

~~~
codezero
Yep - I don't mean to admonish the creator of this - it's great to surface
this information so people are more informed of how they are monitored online.
We all make mistakes, and the world has a lot of good people in it as well as
bad ones :)

I also think that without actual regulation/oversight, sometimes the best way
to deal with it is absurd overreach, it sometimes is the only thing that wakes
people up.

------
mdoms
What does it mean that I can see there are 256 comments on this article from
the comment count, but only one (from flak48) is visible to me?

~~~
easterncalculus
I also had this problem, on my end it appears to be resolved now.

------
tekstar
I wonder how long before scam extortion emails link directly to this website
in an attempt to add legitimate data to their extortion attempt

~~~
zingermc
The beautiful part is that they may have no idea which IP address corresponds
to your email until you click a unique link in the phishing email (or load a
tracking pixel?).

~~~
tekstar
The scammer doesn't need to know the IP, they just send them to the root
domain which automatically loads the ip of the viewer.

~~~
hombre_fatal
The website even has a utility to generate a URL that, when clicked, will log
the victim's peer results while forwarding them to a harmless website:

[https://iknowwhatyoudownload.com/en/link/](https://iknowwhatyoudownload.com/en/link/)

------
Lammy
Impressive! Perfect match for the few things I download from public swarms :)

------
quicklime
Not only does this highlight the non-anonymity of BitTorrent, it also
highlights what's wrong with link shorteners!

Jsut click the "Track Downloads" tab or go to
[https://ikwyd.com/r/QgHP](https://ikwyd.com/r/QgHP) to generate a short URL
that lets you get the downloads for someone's IP address.

------
throwaway_pdp09
Since we're doing Tales Of Stupidity, I knew a guy who was reasonably highly
placed in the UK side of a non-trivial multinational. At home he set up a
kodi(?) box to play stuff he torrented. At least he did it at home. If he'd
been caught he'd have lost his job and possibly got a black mark on his record
that would have prevented him getting another managerial job. I don't think he
considered the consequences, he just wanted stuff so he torrented. He could
have paid for it, but he didn't.

In another place I worked for I had a guy from a _very_ rich shipping family
ask me about torrenting stuff illegally (soz M8, not helping ya there). This
guy could have afforded to buy the media remotely, say in the US (we were in
the uk), and have each disk individually couriered to him cushioned between
the warm thighs of high-class call girls. He had the money but he preferred
to... be stupid I suppose.

------
lucb1e
How does it know whether certain IPs are static? It labels XS4ALL's
residential range correctly as static but surely the owners of this site
didn't investigate a random Dutch ISP to find out whether they rotate IP
addresses. Is there s registry for this sort of thing? It's not in the whois
info that I can see.

~~~
techstrategist
I’m also curious whether this is legal in the Netherlands. Certainly strange
that it’s encouraging me to check on my neighbors to see what they’ve
downloaded.

~~~
lucb1e
I'm not sure about the legality. Pretty sure that GDPR says you have to inform
people before you process (store, transmit, etc.) their personal data (like
IP+timestamp), but in practice it's often afterwards or not at all. The speed
camera doesn't have to tell you what data will be collected and what your
rights are before giving you a ticket and the trajectcontrole doesn't tell you
anything at all (if you didn't drive too fast) despite processing your license
plate.

I'm not sure why that is legal, so then perhaps collecting this without a
legal basis (consent, fulfillment of a contract, vital interest of the data
subject, etc.) is also legal, but that doesn't exempt the site from the right
to view your data or the right to object to having your data processed if
there is no grounds for it.

Of course, there are no repercussions if the domain is registered and hosted
in a country that doesn't tell the EU who's behind it or doesn't do
extradition and there are no European assets to cease. Worst they can do then
is block the site from Europe like they did with The Pirate Bay and similar
sites.

------
albertshin
Of course, "The Man in the High Castle" would be the most pirated series in
North Korea [1]!

[1]:
[https://iknowwhatyoudownload.com/en/stat/KP/annual/2020](https://iknowwhatyoudownload.com/en/stat/KP/annual/2020)

------
simion314
The data is garbage, i am sure my IP did not changed and it shows things that
I am sure nobody downloaded. I am wondering if the data is just randomly
generated or the algorithm is just broken/guessing. You could create some
stress for some people if such websites get credibility.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
Who has access to your WiFi though, how do you know it's secure, do you check;
perhaps an authorised person has some secrets from you.

~~~
simion314
I have a good password and I am sure my son is not able to run bittorent on
his console or phone. My parents only have phones and they are not technical
enough to install bitorrent also won't download a PC video game.

I also do not see the shit I torrented, probably because it was not the latest
movie or video game.

------
VivaCascadia
An org name search would be great. I'm sure there are plenty of gems like this
one.
[https://iknowwhatyoudownload.com/en/peer/?ip=204.68.207.14](https://iknowwhatyoudownload.com/en/peer/?ip=204.68.207.14)

------
dom96
So VPNs nowadays are meant to protect from this, but how can someone trust a
VPN not to sell the details of what you've been downloading? Is it really
worthwhile to use one when the VPN provider may actually in some cases be more
likely to sell this data?

~~~
Sebb767
I mean, it pretty much comes down to how much you trust your VPN. Depending on
your jurisdiction, trusting someone that is legally forced to keep logs vs
some who's income and reputation depends on not doing so might the best bet
(through VPNs definitely have survived giving out shady data).

Also, if your VPN is located somewhere exotic and just somewhat uncooperative,
the bureaucratic overhead of getting the logs, getting the IP, sending the
request to your VPN and then matching the result with your ISP might be long
enough for the logs to expire.

------
chemmail
This thing seems pretty inaccurate. It says i tried to download fast five and
Fast.And.Fierce.Death.Race. for under a second on july 1. fast and fierce is
720p and weighs in at only 800MB making it terrible quality so i know it
wasn't me lol.

~~~
Polylactic_acid
You probably have a dynamic IP address so someone else downloaded it on the
address you are using now. I have a static IP and its showing all kinds of
linux ISOs and other random crap that either I or someone else on the network
downloaded.

------
jchw
My IP comes up clean, which is unsurprising because I don't use Bittorrent (at
least not for piracy, anyway.) Even if you are going to torrent unscrupulously
though, you may as well use a VPN or, if you can justify it, a seedbox. Paying
to pirate stuff alone is probably a bit illogical, but OTOH having a VPN for
general usage is probably wise for any questionable P2P things. (I am not
affiliated or anything but I always feel obliged to throw a recommendation for
Mullvad in that regard. Even if you don't care about VPNs, they do some pretty
interesting stuff, like working on Coreboot for a server platform.)

------
cosmodisk
Someone commented that it almost feel impossible because of how stupid some of
these situations are. I did tell my entire department,staffed with primarily
young people, who just started their professional lives,that private mode in
browser will not stop the company ( or me personally) from finding out what
they are browsing. The horror on se of those faces!:) Then I did repeat it
again to make sure everyone got it. And then, someone asked " and what about
our mobiles connected to WiFi?". Yes,those too. Every single website.

------
loufe
It was worth the VPN investment I guess.

~~~
cerberusss
I also have a VPN but guess what, my torrents are nicely showing. I've
recently been using BiglyBT, a clone of the old Azureus torrent client. But
apparently if something is wrong with the SOCKS proxy, BiglyBT defaults simply
skipping the proxy :(

------
rekabis
Eh, this site is bullshit. It just lists random content in a scareware
fashion.

I’ve already tried it from a few different IPs, and not only did it list
_none_ of what I actually torrent, but it also listed shit I’ve never even
heard of before. Mostly porn. And identical content across different IP’s
(home static and cell LTE).

As in, I don’t torrent through my phone, and even on that (wifi turned off) I
got a list of torrents with a completely different listed IP.

------
Benjamin_Dobell
Is this supposed to be a hoax?

Just tried my home Internet, static IP, secure WiFi, in COVID lockdown, so no
visitors.

Myself and my wife only (besides a toddler and baby). Wife doesn't normally
use a computer (just mobile) and has no clue how to torrent. Site claims we
torrented some MP3 three days ago; I had to Google the name of the artist.

If it's not a hoax then my best bet is some seriously impressive JS malware on
a site my wife visited.

Does seem extraordinarily unlikely though.

~~~
gtirloni
It's based on IP addresses. If your ISP recycles yours, it could very well be
another customer that got your current IP days ago.

~~~
Benjamin_Dobell
I said static IP in my comment above, although that's not quite accurate.
They're "sticky" IP addresses so don't _normally_ change. No CGNAT either, but
there was downtime a couple of days ago. I suppose my IP could have changed,
as I've made no attempt to remember it.

I think I'll actually follow up with my ISP. Cause if there is some rogue
software/hardware on my network I'd love to know about it!

------
areactnativedev
No you don't, there might be one I dowloaded in there but most of them were
definitely not downloaded by me (and no one in my house). I guess that's a
good side of getting a very dynamic IP from my ISP...

And yes I know, that doesn't mean I'm protected from getting into trouble if I
did something wrong since my ISP could probably link an IP and timestamp to me
if asked by a lawyer.

------
janandonly
I think it is malfunctioning. I’m sure I downloaded some Linux ISO files and
all I see is a blank list. I have a static IP4 and IP6 connection

~~~
toyg
It's not malfunctioning, it's that monitoring all torrents in the world is not
as easy as it looks.

Still, using a VPN remains the safe option. My IP is as clean as a CPU
factory.

------
ravenstine
It says I "like porn", but the porn torrents it shows are not thing I've ever
downloaded. I don't download porn at all. It shows things I've torrented, but
the list is very inaccurate. I sure hope law enforcement doesn't one day
decide to use the same information source and frame me for viewing something I
didn't.

~~~
easterncalculus
I can't speak to every LEO but the gist in US law at least is that IP !=
person, unless some other outside proof corroborates it is. You could in
theory be framed but it probably wouldn't hold up court. It definitely could
throw you into court, though, and that can be damaging enough.

------
d33
This part is outright creepy:

> We cooperate with Right Holders, Law Offices, Internet Service Providers,
> Advertising Agencies and National Police. We provide information about
> sharing/downloading content via Bittorrent Network all over the world.

It's one thing to collect this as some sort of research, but another to feed
MAFIAA [1] with this data to make their job easier. The fact that they process
the data without disclosing who they actually are doesn't make it any less
fishy. Doesn't it violate GDPR or something?

1: [http://mafiaa.org/](http://mafiaa.org/)

~~~
TheRealPomax
I'm struggling to understand what's creepy about this. If seeing your entire
download history on that website was shocking, that's really more a measure of
how much you know you've been breaking the law than anything else: there is no
PII anywhere in what this service does, it just retains information about
which IP (which on its own doesn't identify anyone in the slightest) was seen
connected to which torrent payload (which on its own doesn't imply actual data
exchange happening).

~~~
d33
They flat out encourage you to spy on other people's downloaded torrents.
How's that not creepy? The argument that they only display what they collected
and everyone could do that doesn't change the fact that it's them that do that
and they're really indiscreet with this data.

~~~
TheRealPomax
Because it doesn't, it lets you look at what other IPs have been doing.

(certainly not "spy", this is literally public information that anyone
connecting to torrents over DHT gets to see. And if you didn't realise torrent
connection was public information, then this should be a moment of learning)

It doesn't become creepy until you can identify individuals, or groups of
individuals, based on _your_ knowledge of which IPs they use, so as much as
you probably don't want to hear this: if you look up not-your-own-IP, you're
engaging in creeping. Not the service.

------
metalliqaz
s/you/yourIpAddress/

IP addresses are not people

------
fsflover
This is why I am only using torrents in I2P.

~~~
jokowueu
How slow is it ?

~~~
fsflover
When you have many seeders, it can be hundreds of KB/s, but usually slower.
Anonymity and privacy are worth it anyway for me.

------
nottorp
My oh my... I seem to have downloaded a lot of torrents on my phone.

And I have such eclectic tastes.

Shared IPs are still very much a thing you know...

~~~
koheripbal
Conversely, mine doesn't show anything even though I have a static IP and
download frequently...

odd.

~~~
dijksterhuis
Yeah I found that odd as well.

~~~
koheripbal
Maybe it's because I only accept encrypted connections? Has my paranoia
finally paid off?

~~~
nottorp
I think they only track popular movies and some open source downloads
(apparently my phone has downloaded the gimp port for windows). For my fixed
IP it has nothing.

I've given up on torrenting long ago, but not the way the movie industry would
like. If it's not on Netflix they can just keep it.

~~~
dijksterhuis
Someone else commented about a White House staffer downloading cracked copies
of image editing software - so it's definitely not FOSS only!

------
ballenf
Here's your free startup idea: content owners create targeted advertising
based on real-time torrent downloads. The ad is a one-time use stream link in
the local user's currency for a reasonable fee. Not realistic for implicitly
condoning the download, but it would make me a huge fan of the company.

~~~
LeoPanthera
You want to actually kill piracy? You need two things, and probably either one
of them would work on its own, too:

1\. A streaming service with a reasonable monthly fee that has _all_ movies
and TV, not sharded between multiple different services.

2\. The ability to buy and download movies and TV shows, DRM free, for a
reasonable one-off fee. I know that the entertainment industry is allergic to
no DRM, but I promise you, if they did this, piracy would go down, not up.

------
flatiron
i picked a random PIA Montreal Node (which supports Port forwarding) for some
interesting results:
[https://iknowwhatyoudownload.com/en/peer/?ip=199.229.249.191](https://iknowwhatyoudownload.com/en/peer/?ip=199.229.249.191)

~~~
Stierlitz
“MommyBlowsBest.18.10.31.Marie.Mccray.Story.Time.XXX.SD.MP4-KLEENEX”

Haaaarrrr

------
fiatjaf
How does it work? Do you connect to every open tracker in the planet and store
all the IPs they give you?

------
alexhaber
AFAIK this site only uses DHT (Distributed Hash Table) sniffing to track IPs.

Disable DHT in the torrent client settings.

------
Groxx
Somewhat surprisingly, it finds nothing for mine (likely some rando IP from my
ISP... though that only makes it _more_ surprising).

I'm not sure what conclusion to draw from this. Am I not torrenting enough? Do
blocklists work? Did my ISP recently acquire an Amish IP block?

------
ltbarcly3
Neat, now I know what everyone using my vpn provider has downloaded!

I will happily recommend that everyone buy a router that can be flashed and
pipe all your traffic through a VPN. It doesn't give you perfect security, but
it defeats a lot of attempts to deanonimize like this.

~~~
SV_BubbleTime
For reference that is not a fool proof model.

Even if you do everything right all your traffic goes through VPN...

This create a case where the “bad thing” you do woth the PC, is also on the
same address as all your “good things”.

Let’s say with Google, your thermostat, your Wi-Fi enabled coffee maker, your
game console, your phone, every website you connect to with any other device
that runs through that router/VPN - they all know your VPN IP at that time and
your account info at that time.

Let’s say your WiFi refrigerator mfg sells IP and account detail information
as a service to a data mining company - as I’m certain some do - in order to
“get around” your home VPN, someone might need relatively cheap access to this
data.

Putting everything on a VPN gives a lot of devices and accounts to tattle on
you.

A VPN for the PC alone might be a decent idea if you are downloading things on
the PC.

~~~
larntz
Probably better to run a container or VM behind a VPN to do "VPN" things
there, and normal stuff on the host.

~~~
ki28iukgvdru
On Linux (not sure if other OSes have this) a more lightweight solution would
be to put the VPN in a network namespace; e.g.
[https://github.com/slingamn/namespaced-
openvpn](https://github.com/slingamn/namespaced-openvpn)

Also handy if you want to do work stuff on a company VPN without letting the
employer see all network access.

------
AdmiralAsshat
Since I go through a VPN, I'm more accurately seeing what other people who use
my same VPN are torrenting. Surprisingly not as much porn as I would have
guessed?

A pity that the output columns seem to be fixed, or else I could probably do
some fun analysis.

------
loeg
This appears to be scraping the distributed public peer mechanism (PEX),
distributed torrent metadata distribution system (DHT) and public tracker
announces (which, by necessity, contain peer IPs for locating other members of
a swarm).

------
Scoundreller
I always find it funny to see what shows up when I switch to mobile and see
what gets tracked via CG-NAT.

As a Canadian, I guess others have much much much better plans that I do. We
pay $5-$10/go here. Maybe telecom employees get unlimited plans?

------
balls187
We were hosting an Au Pair from sweden. One day comcast sent us an email
saying our IP address had been used to illegally download content.

I confronted her about it, and she lied denying it was her.

Needless to say, we never received another complaint.

------
dfraser992
Off topic: I was trying to see the comments for this link - there are 258 of
them apparently - but all I can see, in multiple browsers, is 1 comment from
"flak48". No other HN topics are behaving like this.

------
vmception
I switched my phone off of wifi to cellular and got some entertaining results

------
kabacha
Hilariously I hadn't even heard any of the things listed and I even went
through the whole subnet!

I think if anything this website is a good illustration of how IP =/= person
and should never be assumed it is.

------
bserge
Ouch... my town is on the same IP range, so I can see my neighbours' activity.
I could probably even tell who it is.

On the up side, static IP makes it easy to quite reliably host stuff on my own
computers, in my home.

------
j45
Great idea, Ads have to go from the top. It made using the tool with interest
turn into a negative experience.

If ads must exist, they should be at the bottom where users, after being
delighted can decide to click on it.

------
gandalfian
Interesting, for the dynamicish ip my ISP gives me nothing at all. Turn on my
cheapo vpn provider and rather a lot.... Virtually all video both clean and
dirty, tiny amount of music, no apps at all.

------
davedx
Just checked on our company vpn. Sure enough, someone has been downloading
gigabytes. The legal issues are one thing, but screwing up the speed and
stability of our shared internet is even worse!

------
AvailableMe
Opened this junk from my home ip. Site says I (or somebody from my address)
downloaded several soapy shit. It's pretty stupid to say that "you downloaded"
those movies. First of all, torrenting is hell expensive in most of Europe. In
Germany any ISP will immediately pass every bit of information they have about
you to companies like ip-eschelon (and others who talking lawyer-ish) after
first letter with mention of piracy. Next letter will land in your mailbox and
resulting summ will surprise you. If you have lawyer insurance of personal
lawyer, total pay me be decreased but not avoided. So, I will ask author of
this site to avoid this kind of provoking stressful and insulting and puzzling
wording.

------
skocznymroczny
I'm on dynamic IP, so it doesn't show me anything relevant. Only an update for
World of Tanks downloaded a week ago... I haven't played World of Tanks in
three years.

------
adolfojp
Joke's on you. I'm behind CGNAT.

Joke's on me. I'm behind CGNAT.

------
yupyup54133
This is why all torrenting should be done with a throw-away device (ie. cheap
second-hand android device) on a public internet access point (ie: the library
or a coffee shop).

------
rohan1024
Jokes on you, my ISP has double NAT and I'm pretty sure 1000s are sharing my
IP. Good luck finding what I download.

Sadly it's also the same thing that I absolutely hate about my ISP.

~~~
salusinarduis
So NAT is happening before the connection comes into your house? Typically
double NAT happens because your ISP does not allow that to be disabled on
their modem and you have your own router hooked up through lan.

~~~
rohan1024
Behind double NAT without a router. With router it's triple. Its nuts.

------
powersnail
Someone who use the same VPN as me really loves classical music.

------
microcolonel
I wonder how this API could work in terms of travel prep. If you wanted to
watch the most torrented films in a given city before coming, seems like it
could work out well.

------
swayvil
Piracy benefits us all.

It brings art and knowledge to millions that wouldn't otherwise have access to
it.

The rest of society benefits indirectly too, by having these enriched persons
in their midst.

------
qes
> I Know What You Download on BitTorrent

No, they don't. They don't know anything I've torrented.

I've been using the same _private_ tracker for about a decade. 10 TB
downloaded.

------
paulie_a
Obviously stupid to use work resources to do it. But from home there simply
are no real repurcussions. You get a letter and it goes in the trash with no
followup.

------
Exuma
I like connecting through a VPN and then refreshing the page

------
LordOfWolves
I use a VPN on my home network and do not see any records via this website.

Am I missing something, or is my impression that this tool can “see through”
tunneled traffic false?

~~~
easterncalculus
You're not missing anything, this service shouldn't be able to see it if it's
through a VPN. If you're connected to your VPN when you check, then it might
be able to see what is going through that server, which of course might not be
you (if you're using a commercial/shared VPN server).

------
RandomWorker
interesting, I have not downloaded anything from my IP address. Also, my
partner has doesn't even know the existence of the Bittorrent. Yet, we have a
list of all kinds' of interesting files that we have apparently downloaded.
Either someone is using our IP address to download things by hijacking our
wifi, or something else is going on. As far as I know we don't share our IP,
something to investigate here.

------
vxNsr
The good news is that it doesn't see any of my private tracker linux downloads
and since I only download linux on private trackers the list is empty.

------
iwasakabukiman
I just checked from my (government) building’s connection and, well...someone
has been downloading some Lovecraftian horror movies. Not what I expected.

------
Sohcahtoa82
I've got a fair number of torrents I've been seeding for who knows how long.

And this site says I don't have anything.

I don't use a VPN, but I use an invite-only tracker.

~~~
lucb1e
The site is indeed very inaccurate, and I'm not using private trackers. Seeing
as there is a previous HN thread about it 6 months ago, it should have some
historic data in which I occur... it just doesn't capture everything.

------
kinghajj
Meta-question: There are supposedly 274 comments on this article as I write
this, yet I can see only 1. Is this an error? Has the discussion been locked?

~~~
joan_kode
I also experienced this, the footer was missing as well. I tried from
different devices and there was only one comment. I'm not sure how long it
lasted but at least a few minutes, seems back to normal now.

------
shiado
Uh Oh looks like one of Trump's interns is using cracked software and pirating
movies

[https://iknowwhatyoudownload.com/en/peer/?ip=204.68.207.14](https://iknowwhatyoudownload.com/en/peer/?ip=204.68.207.14)

~~~
lasagnaphil
There's also one porn entry:

[https://iknowwhatyoudownload.com/en/peer/?ip=204.68.207.18](https://iknowwhatyoudownload.com/en/peer/?ip=204.68.207.18)

------
HeavyStorm
IP being dynamic, I don't really know how this affect end users. The list for
my (current) IP shows a bunch of stuff I never downloaded.

------
Keyframe
Tried it from my phone. I guess cool to see people torrent from their mobile
connections? I'd have to ask for a loan in order to do that.

------
freetime2
I tried connecting to NordVPN and loading up this page. Hundreds of results
show up, and surprisingly less than half of it is pornography.

------
kodt
Guess they don't know about private trackers.

------
thyrsus
I torrented CentOS 8 in December; I must have been given another DHCP address
since then, since the site shows an empty list for me.

------
hnick
According to the results, they know what a housemate of mine downloaded... I
don't think I'll bring it up in conversation.

------
gcbw3
With encryption, if anyone join as a peer NOT to join the torrent
distribution, is that considered computer hacking under the DMCA?

------
duxup
I had nothing for my actual home IP, but if you want to see something fire up
your VPN and see what they have listed for that IP ;)

~~~
UncleEntity
Had to try it, surprisingly zero porn?!?

Actually...for a free wireguard server there wasn't a whole lot of bittorrent
traffic at all.

~~~
duxup
The VPN endpoint I picked was only ~10% porn.

I too was surprised.

A lot of TV shows.

------
mirimir
Not really. It shows what people using my current VPN exit have downloaded.
And seriously, TPB warns people to use VPN services.

------
cjohansson
This list must be violating integrity-policies and be illegal. This is similar
to publishing DNS look-ups related to IP.

------
peterbmarks
How does this work? I thought the whole idea of the torrent protocol was to
prevent identification of who downloads what.

~~~
cactus2093
Not sure where you got that idea, maybe you're mixing up torrents with Tor or
with gray area VPN services that people use while torrenting to anonymize
themselves.

The whole reason you can google "____ Torrent" and get results is because
there are torrent trackers out there that, well, track which IP addresses have
which files. The same thing that allows those to exist allows someone to watch
and record who is downloading which torrents. Which is what movie studios and
the like are doing as well when they send out copyright warnings based on
torrenting.

------
manishsharan
How is this usable in any legal system ? There is a huge difference between
downloading content and clicking on a link.

------
amanzi
Interesting - I have a fixed IP at home and this shows me having downloaded a
Debian ISO recently, which is correct.

------
coddle-hark
Might be worth keeping in mind that carrier grade NAT and dynamically
allocated addresses are both pretty common.

------
mr-ron
List is blank for me, but definitely shouldnt be, so no it definitely does not
know what I download on BitTirrent.

------
partiallypro
a) this is creepy b) I have wondered this... you know those letters some ISPs
send to people telling them what they downloaded illegally? Do they send that
stuff to VPN providers? Because it seems like they would just get flooded. I
connected to my VPN service and there are thousands on that IP range.

~~~
hombre_fatal
The ISP is looking for IP addresses in its address range in the peer list,
looking it up in its customer database, and sending its own customers a
letter.

~~~
larntz
Is this true?

As I explained in another post, I used to work at a small ISP many years ago.
We did not monitor anything, but we did get emails from MPAA people (my memory
is a little fuzzy) about an IP downloading a something. We would then pass it
on to our customer.

~~~
hombre_fatal
It was at least true for Comcast in 2007-2011. They were using a third-party
agency for this info and then moved it in-house when I was doing contract work
for them.

No clue how MPAA letters interfaced with them. Could have been an agreement
with them for all I know.

------
8K832d7tNmiQ
Too bad my place is assigned behind layers of NAT, ( or basically CGNAT )
which is basically useless to trace.

------
scott_paul
This mostly shows me what other customers of my VPN in various countries like
to download.

------
thiscatis
I'm on a personal 4G sim wifi router currently and the results are completely
wrong.

~~~
jiggunjer
It's unlikely that you have a personal public IP from a telecom provider.
Everyone connecting to the same tower(s) will share that IP.

------
Bnshsysjab
Great, you just reminded me of my favourite trash TV series which is stuck at
80% :(

------
A4ET8a8uTh0
It is interesting. I was expecting to see blue data leak, but nothing showed
up.

------
Jsharm
I have not downloaded any of these, how are these associated with my IP
address?

~~~
electricviolet
If your internet provider dynamically assigns IP addresses, they may have been
downloaded by people who previously had your current IP address.

------
pretzel_boss
It shows the linux distros I have torrented but not any piracy lol

~~~
Macha
Oh, I thought it filtered out legal content. Doubly confused why it doesn't
know anything I have since I've left my very infrequently changing public IP
seeding arch linux isos reasonably often.

------
skipants
That "Track Downloads" feature seems highly unethical.

------
dariosalvi78
Why does this appear with 272 comments but I can only see one?

------
aftergibson
Just checked while on mullvad, that's a lot of porn....

------
rusk
Interesting... shows me a list of things I didn’t download!

------
pfdietz
Makes me glad I have never been tempted to use BitTorrent.

------
kaetemi
Not really with carrier grade NAT that has a dynamic IP.

------
mey
How does BitTorrent handle Carrier level NATs with IPv4?

~~~
the8472
Depends on one of two factors: 1. Does the CGNAT use EIM for TCP or UDP? 2.
Does it, your CPE and your torrent client implement PCP or forward UPnP
mappings as PCP?

------
sli
This is honestly fascinating if you're a VPN user.

------
Kubuxu
I can only see one comment for some reason?

------
mb720
Funny it categorizes Big Buck Bunny as XXX.

------
WarOnPrivacy
blackarch-linux-live-2020.06.01-x86_64.iso 14.37GB

I'm totally outed.

Those other IPs in my subnet do like their porn. Well, someone's porn.

------
mito88
Does this really work?

Not seeing any torrents of mine.

------
reedwolf
...last summer.

------
cikibirki69
The info on my IP is not correct lmao

------
101008
It matched my downloads 100%. Wow.

------
wincy
It has things I didn’t download.

------
m0xte
Regretting that static IP now :)

------
ghostwriter9151
doesn't work for me ..

------
Idered
Thanks for recommendations

------
zoost
Completely innacurate information and doesn't even know what is being
torrented right now.

------
jayrwren
haha, no you don't.

------
fidelramos
No you don't. :)

------
rglover
VPN is working :)

------
hijef
> nothing

nice :sunglasses:

------
techiefreak21
just check it out mine then :P

------
zoost
Completely innacurate information.

------
thug_life
lol....no you don't

------
ghostwriter9151
not working

------
Macha
Apparently not.

------
DumbUser123
weird

------
Madzen__
I currently have 44 active torrents, this site doesn't show any of them, none
of my friends torrents either. Cool concept tho.

------
m0zg
Looks like my neighbors are huge fans of some nasty pr0n.

------
mcs_
Is Torrent still a thing? I'm not sarcastic here, just not downloading music
since Napster. Is it common for you to install a torrent client on your
machine?

~~~
phyzome
Mostly for Linux ISOs. :-)

