

Isohunt users beware - ygtckr

If you are using isohunt as your torrent tracker you should beware. Recently a friend of mine had to pay a fine of $250 for downloading a Rhapsody album and it seems like he is not the first, neither the last.<p>Does bittorrent had become a hostile environment for users or is it just isohunt?
======
Deadsunrise
isohunt is an aggregator not a tracker. Your friend was probably downloading a
torrent which used lots of trackers (usually piratebay, demonoid, etc.. you
can see them in the torrent description)

It makes no sense to recomend people to be careful using isohunt when
bittorrent itself is the problem. Anyone downloading that torrent, doesn't
matter if he got it from isohunt or TPB will be able to see you in the swarm.
Even if you use an isolated tracker, isohunt and other aggregators usually add
all the trackers they find to the torrent to have only one multitracker
torrent per hash.

That way even if the sources are on an isolated private tracker they will
spread using PEX to the public trackers the moment one peer uses a
multitracker torrent.

I've run a tracker at <http://tracker.frozen-layer.net:6969/stats> for the
last 7 years. We used to have 250000 peers in 2005 and I think that the
decentralization of BT has become more of a problem than a solution. If you
have stable trackers you don't need DHT or multitorrent trackers.

~~~
ygtckr
Thank you for the knowledge. I did not know much about the way bittorrent
works, but your comment made me research and learn.

In the meantime, I learned more about that occurrence; The comapany who is
behind this is digiprotect:
<http://www.digiprotect.org/html/wirliebenmusik2.html> You can read about that
incident at bbc news: <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8619407.stm> and techdirt:
<http://www.techdirt.com/blog.php?company=digiprotect>

