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.
I used to work at a ~100 person company that provided satellite equipment, mostly to media companies - radio stations, movie distributors, that type of thing.
A senior customer service rep realized he had VPN access to a customer's, like.. T1 line. He started torrenting movies on it. On the CUSTOMERS network. Our entire company was nearly taken offline and the customer threatened cancelling the entire contract and suing us.
Dude got walked out the next day. A MEDIA company customer.
I worked for a large cable company and usually once a week, a thumb drive went around with all the latest pay per view movies on it. Folks from every aspect of the business were apart of this, people who worked in security (had to get rid of logs), people with access to the files (stored in s3 buckets), and people with the decryption keys (set top video app guys). Once the videos were decrypted once, they were converted over to a normal mkv file. I wasn't in the right groups as I had been waging war on the people who were just comfortable at Charter. My team had their own supply of video sources, which was generally things that weren't even ppv yet.
Friend of mine had his brother working for a big ISP, they had an internal NewsGroup with everything you could dream of, only the tech people of the company were on it as you might guess though.
Wow, a classic case of "What were they thinking?"..
> a senior customer service rep
If an intern or new hire was guilty, it'd be more understadable. Perhaps, being senior, they got too comfortable with the power they wielded - but without the tech savvy to understand the consequences.
There were sites that tracked ratio which required maintaining a certain ratio to continue to be a member. Some members, however, took pride in having a ratio that skewed uploads over downloads.
I personally know people who paid for T1s just to maintain their "rep" of having the highest upload ratio. Not saying this is the case, but having access to a T1 back in the day was almost a way to "boost" their rep on these sites.
I can remember someone denying me an invite to a private tracker because I might “hurt his ratio”. He eventually relented but it was a hassle. My internet was faster than his at the time so it was a factor for sure.
Somewhat off topic, but a T1 line gave a full one-and-a-half megabit/second. "Back then", this was the second coming. Today I have 600 megabit/second in my apartment...
I had a friend who worked at an early dedicated hosting provider in the late 90's / early 2000's. He did "network security." He had his own servers on the network, serving up pirated warez and movies. Since he was in charge of the monitoring, this was never found out... until he was let go during the dot-com crash and needed to retrieve his equipment.
I've fired people for having less wherewithal than to ask a question like this. His performance, output, or attitude are irrelevant. He knowingly used company property to violate federal law... IP law at that. Guy should be lucky he didn't get sued for gross negligence.
If you fire people just for asking questions (possibly after misunderstanding the intent of the question like in this case), then it seems likely you'll end up with a team of sycophants that only tell you what you want to hear.
I had the first impression as you but IIUC they are saying the rep's poor ethics/judgement are enough to make them unemployable and we should all realize and agree or our judgement is also questionable.
E.g. Bob's super smart and gets 10 times the work done as anyone else but he also sexually harasses the secretary and dips into the petty cash drawer at least once a week.
It should be clear we don't want to have Bob as our employee. See Susan Fowler's experience with her boss at Uber who sexually propositioned her repeatedly but HR said they would not remove because he was a high performer...
https://www.susanjfowler.com/blog/2017/2/19/reflecting-on-on...
I might be misreading the comment above, but it sounds to me like it's asking, "Were there any signs of him being untrustworthy?" (and not "He shouldn't have been fired.")
It is precisely because of the magnitude of his error that it would have been nicer to fire him before he made it.
I'd bet that was a bouncer/client set address, for the joke.
Sigh, people probably trust things like this today because FB(whatsapp)/Google/slack/discord forces you to sign up with valid phone numbers and probably expose that as your ID.
I worked for a place where our internet was bad, but not that bad. We were coming up to a release and things were fubar. I asked the network guy to find what was up - a guy that reported to me was torrenting child porn.
I worked at a place where, one morning, the guy in the next office over got swarmed by company security and the police. He was trafficking in child porn on the company network. He was a super smart, super dumb guy who lost everything over it, his wife, custody of his kids, friends and a very high-paying career. His car sat in the company garage for weeks.
I worked on a secure project a very long time ago. A very smart guy (he was working on the operating system for a military avionics computer) printed out some child porn photos on a company color printer. (This was long enough ago that good quality color printers were very expensive, not like now when you can buy a color printer for less than $100.)
He got walked out. I don't know what other consequences he suffered. Being smart doesn't mean you can't do something really stupid.
I worked somewhere that had that happen. The FBI showed up with Yahoo messenger logs from our IP address, they wanted to take our file servers etc (he didn’t save anything on our network, but was signing into those sites while at work)
They ended up having to come back the next day with a new warrant because he was at a branch office but their internet was from a point to point connected to the main office.
They took his pc and I provided them with a months worth of squid logs. We had just spent like $4500 on a new CAD workstation for him.
I knew him well and he was well-liked and professionally well-regarded throughout at least my division of the company. He was a high-energy, tireless guy with great ideas and worked nearly daily with senior-level management, often traveling with them all over the world.
I, along with a whole lot of others, were absolutely dumbstruck by his profound fall from grace.
Ye I guess seeming like a nice person doesn't prove or disprove anything, but lets not dive to far into your colocated worker's case, but generally.
I had a malware once that distributed (legal) porn. Since then I have had that in the back of my head when reading about child porn. I mean, what more effective way to ruin someones life by framing without having to involve yourself physically by planting drugs etc. It doesn't even have to be a specific target that is framed, but a target.
I really hope that the police have the technical knowledge to judge the evidence in these cases. Even if a framed person is cleared his reputation might be ruined anyway.
It's possible. I remember reading about forums on the dark net a while ago where some hackers were advertising their services where you pay them bitcoin and they plant child porn on any target's computer. Then presumably you report them to the FBI or whatever and they are arrested. You know the rest.
If hackers can encrypt your entire hard drive holding it ransom without you knowing, this attack seems even easier.
Ye, there are actual perpetrators too of course. And I agree from news I have read that many seem to have some other pathalogical condition, like hoarding.
Hopefully the police is aware of the risk for hacking and are looking for other clues too.
Professor in the next office came back from vacation a few years ago and started noticing his unix workstation was doing a great deal of disk access. Disks also seemed to have a lot less space than he remembered. Worked with IT and found out a porn server had been stood up on his system while he was gone. It happens.
> I mean, what more effective way to ruin someones life by framing without having to involve yourself physically by planting drugs etc. It doesn't even have to be a specific target that is framed, but a target.
There’s a subplot where this happens in the comic 100 Bullets.
Jesus, do you not wonder if maybe he was framed? I guess it’s a bit of a roundabout way to frame someone, and unlikely to work on anyone who keeps an eye on their running processes... but damn.
> and unlikely to work on anyone who keeps an eye on their running processes
Rootkits are a thing. It would be perfectly reasonable for a criminal to intentionally use one to hide a process doing illicit things on their own computer from prying eyes.
On the other hand, people with that kind of evil inside of them don't go around letting everyone know. They keep it secret and hide it well. Most of the time. So it's not entirely surprising that when that happens to someone you never would have expected it.
Reading stories like this makes people think that all pedophiles are stupid, but then again, as with any other crime, it's only the stupid ones who get caught...
An estimated 1% of men are pedophiles. It's kind of like finding gays in Saudi Arabia. They don't advertise their presence. I heard from an old lady that there were no gays in the Soviet Union until they got infected by the west when it collapsed.
Jesus, is that some sort of proven statistic? Because if it's accurate that's orders of magnitude more than what I expected.
No wonder they seem to come out of the woodwork lately, but still, kind of chilling.
One of the reasons most criminals get caught, is because they think they are smarter than all other criminals, and only the stupid ones get caught. No criminal thinks they are stupid.
The ones that don't get caught are typically full on psychopaths, because they are random and don't have an MO that identifies them.
My previous employer had a strongly worded email and CEO statement sent out after they were sent a notice of over 100 company IPs (out of 15000 employees) torrenting the game of thrones finale to basically tell people "Hey, don't do that, we do business with many of those companies".
"Hey, don't do that, we do business with many of those companies, and we don't want them to associate us with the shoddy work on the later seasons of the series, certainly not that ridiculous ham-fisted finale".
Maybe someone had a netflix or international TV account and they somehow shared a stream of it playing live or something.
Now I'm kind of wondering how one would deploy such a thing for 80K clients though.
There are no Netflix streams licensed for further broadcast. Sharing a stream with 80k people is just as illegal as torrenting it to 80k people. Copyright law doesn't differentiate between protocols.
The flip side: When I was an intern I once had four people arrive at my desk (including an HR lawyer) for torrenting ubuntu server.
Thankfully I shared a cube wall with someone smart enough to realize the confusion, and explain me out of being walked out.
They were monitoring for torrent traffic, but weren't paying attention to what was being torrented. Apparently a company-wide warning had gone out the week before I started.
I was "caught" by some monitoring system sharing Knoppix on a machine in the CS lab at university. I'd forgotten about it, and it had been running for months.
One of the helpdesk staff told me that it had been noticed, since the bandwidth to that machine was very high, but he unofficially liked the idea of the university being top of the seeding table, so I should leave it running :-D
Mine did too. Though oddly the wifi in the classrooms was fair-game, but this was before most people had laptops, and even fewer ones that could last more than 2 hours without charging.
I remember downloading some content over IRC to share on the campus network because I knew how to use it and it was slow, but not blocked.
My university had bad wifi and I think 50mb drive space per student. I ended up plugging in my laptop directly and spoofing a whitelisted IP/MAC combination (the PCi just plugged out) for several assignments.
Those fees they charge the international students did go somewhere, then :-D
I had as much backed-up space as I could justify (some gigabytes by default), plenty of space for laptops where there were power sockets as well as 1Gb/s wired and fast wifi connections, personal webspace/server, a PostgreSQL database, a Tomcat server, remote SSH access to all computers and a distributed computing system (Condor).
Looking at the current guide for students[1], they also get access to a local Gitlab instance, a private IaaS cloud and a GPU cluster.
My industrial experience year at university was at a research lab, working with satellite imagery.
I got two urgent panicked phone calls from the same person within five minutes of each other for bulk-downloading satellite images from, if memory serves, NASA.
Not long after we started WFH I needed to share a pre-configured VM with a coworker. We tried all sorts of stuff and finally just decided to torrent it. Zipped it up tight with a password and private torrented it overnight. Next morning we were up and running.
You find a website that creates a link between 2 clients, and the file is shared via https (maybe the file is decrypted at the server and encrypted again using your public key). Sounds easy if both clients don’t have a public IP (to get SCP to work, at least one client needs a public IP) and every browser now has WebRTC.
Unfortunately, I've never managed to get this to work, even though the two computers have open ports and can connect to each other via nc/telnet. The other peer m just never starts downloading when I seed the file.
BitTorrent is a fantastic way to transfer files, except for this one hitch I keep hitting.
The workaround I usually use when that happens is to pick a existing torrent that you added from a magnet link, then have the other end add the same magnet link, which downloads the magnet-linked file and then (IIUC) finds your source computer via PEX. YMMV; it's worked something like four times out of four for me, but it's a bit cargo-cult.
If your client/libtorrent hates you enough, it won't work with local peers regardless of settings, and two instances of the same version number of the same software will fail to communicate with each other despite the embedded tracker being accessible from the browser.
I wanted to about 2tb of data, mostly torrents, over a wlan from my NAS, and kept getting dropped packets. Eventually I gave up on smb and ftp, and set up opentracker (a simple download and build, with iirc two config options) on my windows desktop under WSL, and swapped the tracker to a local address; after this, it worked perfectly.
Many, many years ago I used to build distributed content delivery infrastructure for K-12 education systems, state and national.
I remember one customer (a state department of education) in particular had a server at each school with reasonable private bandwidth but unreliable routing and dismal internet connectivity, so we used the BitTorrent protocol for eventually-consistent asset distribution between their sites.
To resume, someone would have to notice the failure and start it again. If this happens every few minutes, it's effectively impossible. Even once an hour means their overnight transfer is impossible with scp.
Always use rsync. It's almost drop in compatible with scp, you could probably alias it for most uses, but it's more robust against failures and has more features.
I torrented a couple of Ubuntu versions from a VM and then forgot about it. In one month I got though nearly 5TB of data before I noticed. It was a home connection and unmetered, but it gave me a fright.
The protocol is more or less all plaintext. The "best" peer to peer cipher available is rc4; almost no one uses it. The tracker announces can run over HTTPS, but often run over plain HTTP.
The "best" peer to peer cipher available is rc4; almost no one uses it.
...which is unfortunate because even something like the anonymous DH that is specified, or more standard, TLS with random/self-signed certificates, would force monitors to need to MITM all connections in order to find out what they contain.
Because, quite frankly, parts identified by hashes is not all they see.
If you're monitoring and logging the traffic then it's trivial to not only determine the filename of a bittorrent download, but also everything you need to connect to the torrent yourself and download it to verify that it's what the filename says, if that's what you wish to do.
And, personally, I'd expect someone to at least check the filename before accusing me of committing a crime. :(
The torrent file is downloaded over a secure connection that you can’t monitor. Can you please tell me which messages in the BitTorrent protocol contain the filenames?
I remember getting an abuse warning from Hetzner as one of our employees was seeding (legal) files via a p2p file sharing framework (IPFS I think?) and the client on his machine sent out broadcast and port scanning requests over the VPN into our Hetzner infrastructure. Hetzner is quite nice in that they dont' immediately block your servers, other providers are less lenient though and such stuff can quickly get your infrastructure to be taken down, especially if you're not an "important" customer of your hoster. I think after you reach a certain scale you can't stop this from happening easily, so it's good to either block such stuff via the firewall or have good audit logs.
The only moral problem I have in your anecdote is the lying about it. With every fibre of my being, I could not care less about torrenting game of thrones.
I pay for netflix, amazon prime, spotify (and thus hulu), and apple tv+, sometimes youtube tv, HBO+ during Game of Thrones.
I pretty much just torrent much of the content I could find on these services. It's so much easier to just have it appear in the list instead of switching devices, sometimes remotes. Just so tired of boxes and remotes and accounts and having to "type" with a stupid remote control.
Most of this could be solved if I could reliably queue something from my laptop to be played on my tv. Like how YouTube lets you queue videos.
More importantly, if you downloaded some episodes, barring an act of god that destroys your house and the equipment within, you know you will get to enjoy those episodes at the time of your own choosing and with the best quality, no streaming issues or glitches. With HBO, who knows? I still remember they were unable to cope with the load for some of Game of Thrones episodes.
They make kinda do it pretty easy to stream the major services on TVs now. I can't imagine its easier to just torrent the files. I kinda don't care if people torrent, but they've made it easy enough I don't bother.
The trouble is of course I'm paying for something that isn't as versatile (shows/movies come and go, I can't watch without a connection) but I think its easier and the tradeoff is worth it. I don't tend to watch shows over and over so that helps.
Although I agree typing with the onscreen keyboard and remote just sucks...
Of course I am old and remember the hassle of video rentals which involved physical media (where what you wanted often wasn't available), so my threshold for retrieving content might be higher.
At some point I find it hard to draw a distinction between a library and a torrent. Gotta to avoid legal trouble, but from a moral standpoint outlawing torrents is like outlawing the library.
Digital and physical copies of media content differ significantly in their transmissibility and copy-ability.
For example, creating a digital copy of some content is typically so easy that creating an entirely new duplicate copy is actually how works are transfered. Compared to physical media where creating a copy can be so difficult that copies are shared by physically moving individual copies rather than re-duplicating them.
While many libraries do have significant and valuable collections of digital works, they also tend to have somewhat overrought (or overly trusting) systems for preventing illicit copying.
Actually, HDMI has DRM built in, and many DRM-laden apps won't work unless the HDMI DRM is working. The Amazon app has been telling me recently that my connection to my TV doesn't have it, but it actually does. Then I'll hit "play" again and it'll work. (I think it was a bug in their app, because it stopped again.)
So recording it requires something that implements that HDMI DRM scheme, but still allows you to record.
Some people use torrents, others use the library, and some use both. Are you asking why some prefer a library to a torrent? For them, likely ease of access and greater access to content. Effectively torrents are an expansion of the library where sharing is easier than ever.
Are you suggesting a library is only moral because of the difficulty in using it? If so, what if someone were to suggest that current libraries have become easy enough to use that they have already crossed that line?
And making a copy of something that hundreds to even thousands of people worked hundreds of thousands of hours on just because you can also has some negative morals do it.
I don't know what analogy to make since all the physical ones fail. Maybe it's like hiring someone for a service and not paying. You get a haircut and don't pay. You hire a lawyer and don't pay. You have an accountant and don't pay. In all of those cases the only thing lost is the time the hair stylist, lawyer, accountant, movie maker spent. Yet we generally consider the first 3 morally wrong. Why not the 4th. That you can copy without getting caught doesn't mean there are zero moral implications.
A library pays once and then allows an unlimited number of people to use an item. A torrent uploader buys once and then allows an unlimited number of people to use an item. The only core distinction is the number that can access it at once. I will grant this is something of a significant distinction, but only if we grant that a torrent technology that allows only one user of any given uploaded item at once is the same as a library, and thus has the same moral implications (multiple uploads can allow for multiple users as long as they don't exceed the number of independent uploaders at any one time, much like a library can have more than one copy of a book as long as they buy more than one copy).
Can you explain why? I can understand why people want things for free, but thinking that you shouldn't contribute towards the production cost of the programme you enjoy seems strange to me.
It feels so weird to grow up in an age of rampant, unabashed piracy, where literally everyone around you is burning CDs or cracking games or handing out copied mixtapes, and see questions like these. It just goes to show how thoroughly streaming squashed piracy (at least before everything fractured into the current landscape), and how short our collective memories are.
Data yearns to be free -- sharing it and copying it cost nothing. Shows are just video data. Forcing real-world, scarcity economics, in a realm where the only currency of the land is plentiful, seems strange to me.
There are so many other ways to monetize media content, and yet we keep going back to DRM and publisher-controlled walled-gardens. It's a complete and total shame.
I don't mean to pick on you, per se, but I think there's a long-standing confusion about creative works that's captured in your line:
> Data yearns to be free -- sharing it and copying it costs nothing.
The latter part of that is true (setting aside quibbles about bandwidth and storage not being absolutely 100% free), but here's the thing: back in the days of physical media, of books and DVDs and CDs and what have you, the bulk of the price was never the physical media itself. The paper and plastic was never the valuable part.
> There are so many other ways to monetize media content...
Maybe, but just about all the ones that I've seen boil down to one of three methods:
- charge people directly for the content
- give the content away for free and sell ads against the content
- give the content away for free and make ancillary sales (e.g., merchandise)
Charging people for content doesn't require DRM: essentially all digital music sales are now DRM-free, for instance, and many ebooks are, depending on the publisher.
Also, two other observations.
First, while music publishers were always unduly whiny about the ability to record music at all, burning CDs and making mix tapes did cost money; it may have "felt" just like putting your entire music library up on Napster, but unless you had enough money to just hand out thousands of CDs of other people's music on street corners, it wasn't. It's not really super surprising that digital music piracy made those music publishers a lot soggier and hard to light.
Second, "data yearns to be free" sounds like a rephrasing of "information wants to be free," and I think it's worth remembering that the full quote from Stewart Brand went on to say "Information also wants to be expensive. This tension will not go away." Technology may let us reduce the marginal cost of reproducing anything that can be expressed as data to zero, but that doesn't make everything that ben expressed as data valueless.
Information doesn't 'want' to be expensive. We, people, want it to be expensive. And I'm with the folks want it to be cheap. Both groups will do what they can within their power to achieve their goals.
We may have DRM and walled gardens, but media distribution is much more consumer friendly than it used to be.
There are many services that offer streaming at a flat rate, where you can watch or listen what you please and when you please without being subjected to third-party advertising. You can also subscribe and unsubscribe with ease, without paying additional fees. Contrast that to prior decades where none of that was true.
There are other services that offer perpetual licenses (I am hesitant to call them purchases) of books, music, videos, and software. You can access that content across multiple devices. In some cases you can even legally acquire it without DRM. Contrast that to early digital media. I remember floppy based software that would disable the installation media once it was installed to a hard drive. You could not re-download your music in the early days of iTunes, and they were considered consumer friendly.
I doubt that many people actually expected information to be free. What they wanted was for information to be convenient and cheap. As for those who actually did want information to be free, there are options out there that respect the creator's wishes (creative commons licensing, open source, etc.).
If someone puts great effort and cost into producing media, why would others be entitled to get the fruits of that labor for free? Game of Thrones is a luxury, not a necessity; people aren't entitled to it just because they want it and refuse to pay for it.
I don't mind paying for the latest album/ebook/videogame. What I mind is not being able to watch GoT in HD on Linux. I mind paying for the latest album then not being able to play it on my openhome DLNA devices. I mind not being able to play a random selection of more than 1000 or so songs from my library (a big enough playlist to not hear the same song multiple times daily). I mind not being able to crossfade my music, or use a media player that can adjust for the shitty speakers in my phone. I can finally share my video game library with my friend, but if I want to play even a free game while they use my library, that's not possible (the only limitation here should be playing the same game). I mind paying for an ebook, then not being able to read it in purple 34pt copperplate against a green background with line breaks where they belong (get thee hence PDF). I mind not being able to search the contents of multiple ebooks I own for the name of a character because I forgot the book title or because it's a cameo in another series. I mind not being able to create a playlist of music that contains files from my Google play music library, my Dropbox folder, and my desktop. I mind buying media from a DRM provider, then they decide to shut their service down and I can never access those files again; I may have some chance if I install their software before they shut down their servers, but I'll lose access if I ever upgrade my computer/OS (Nintendo DSi store, various other defunct ebook/music/video game providers). I mind that the e-book I downloaded through my library's OverDrive subscription cannot be read offline at all because it's not available as an epub or on Amazon, and thus it can't be downloaded to read offline, and for the same reason I also can't take notes or have multiple bookmarks. I mind that I can't give away my purchased ebooks after I'm done with them. I mind the fact that to watch movies away from home, I need to get a more expensive tablet (cellular version) and pay monthly for an extra data line that likely limits me to only watching 3-4 movies anyways.
Free is nice, yes. But money isn't the only reason for piracy. Downloading is easier and frequently faster than ripping the DRM off myself.
Media companies have abused laws and rights that are supposed to encourage and enrich society not diminish and stifle it.
They're beyond redemption at this point. The whole industry can burn at the stake for all I care. Netflix included. (Why does it matter what country I live in again? Why do you remove access to certain shows st random?)
The only media I pay for willingly is books and that is purely because amazon did such a great job of rejecting the authors guild and creating an atleast seemingly competitive market.
If media companies want my money they need to stop suing their largest customers.
They need to stop lobbying my government to enforce their governments rules.
They need to respect fair use.
They need to understand that it no longer costs anything to produce a copy and they are more than capable of finding a business model that works through the use of product placement. Hell they could run ads on their self listed torrents and I wouldnt bother reripping or looking for one without the ads.
Theyre way too focused on producing profits and protectionism than where they should be focused. Creating great entertainment and enriching society.
This just reads like a list of excuses. You could swap “piracy” with “selling drugs” and “entertainment industry” with “big pharma” and it would read just fine.
I don't think it's a valid argument to brush raised issues aside as excuses.
Media companies are aggressively litigious bullies and the way they conduct their business is at odds with the interests of the public at large. Not speaking for the others but I have no tears for cry for losses incurred by actors like that, especially not "losses" of digital media licensing opportunities.
And it probably wouldnt be all that wrong. All that tells you is that the same problem exists in multiple industries and sections of society. General patent law is another one.
The real solution isnt ignoring copyright like i do. That is just all i have available.
The real solution is to reign in the timeframes copyright and patent law lasts for.
Have it only long enough to recoup costs of development and provide some level of capital for the next innovation. Not an indefinite stranglehold on information for the benefit of only a few.
The thing people seem to argue is that these businesses have a free right to profit off of society. They dont, society should demand something in return.
I'm almost at odds with myself on this. I think it's probably somewhat unethical to pirate stuff, but it's much more unethical to aggressively punish people that do... For the most part
The effect is so intangible for the large media funded projects as well, pirating your local struggling musicians might be another story, but is that really much worse than the current streaming model what you get paid a few thousand dollars for millions on streams?
I feel like that would be a rare soul these days. People are so prone to screaming about every little "sin", even if it's really nothing. It's like they can't distinguish between things that are bad and things that are unconscionably bad, and scream at the same volume regardless.
I think that people that can contribute to the cost of making the programme should do so, but I’m also happy if people that cannot still get to enjoy it.
Exactly! I used to be in the latter camp as a child - allowance paid for some stuff, but not a lot, now I'm in the former group and am happy to subsidize the enjoyment of those less privileged than me. Especially because some of those people are probably going to be inspired and create some great art I'll really enjoy.
It's probably fairly common among people who want to be able to access content freely while preserving an internal sense of ethical behavior.
That's basically what I did with a certain popular TV series. I'd torrent the individual episodes, then buy the DVD box sets at the end of the season to pay for it. When it became clear that the writers didn't actually have any idea what they were doing (which was a topic of no small debate at the time), I stopped buying the box sets.
Whether I stopped torrenting it is neither here nor there, but let's just say that the peer comment ("The last season wasn't something I enjoyed, it was something that happened to me") really rung a bell with me. Later, the same story repeated itself with another popular show on a different network, at which point I just disengaged with TV for good.
I don't know if that was a joke, but Jon Snow is pretty clearly going to resuscitate in the books as well -- the exact way may not follow the TV show in detail, but it will in essence -- because he is important in GoT prophecy. I don't see this as pandering, any more than Gandalf surviving Moria is.
You could argue that season 8 was rushed, that some battles made no sense, that they botched the Night's King, or that Daenerys' character development was ruined by the abruptness -- though I think this too will play out similarly in the books -- but Jon Snow's resurrection was neither pandering nor the fault of HBO.
>I could not care less about torrenting game of thrones.
Promoting and distributing game of thrones is a crime against art, beauty and taste. Pirating it only makes things worse as it exacerbates the network effect.
And the fact that the intern didn't care/foresee we would suffer downtime or at the very least a major inconvenience if our accounts were suspended as long as they could finish their personal task.
Couldn't the intern have paid for his own bare bones VPS and done it from there? Or used a different paid VPN service, which cost roughly the same ~$5? Seems like the cost of a VPN compared to the value of his internship wouldn't even compare. All for some campus clout.
It's potentially less anonymous to the people who might prosecute you. Probably didn't realize how anonymous it wasn't to the employer and didn't factor that cost in to the decision. But if you're willing to $5 to get a show, you're probably less likely to pirate it anyway (or at least be the seed).
As far as I recall, $20 wouldn't even get you a single GoT episode in Australia. As a consequence, Australia had one of the highest piracy rates on GoT / HBO shows.
The Foxtel monopoly has got to go, one way or another. They pay for the rights to all of the best shows, then charge huge sums for subscriptions. I'd pay for Netflix, HBO online etc if only it were possible here for a reasonable, non inflated price without content restrictions.
I was recently surprised to discover that Foxtel still exists. Even living in Australia it had been years since I had heard or seen anything to do with the company.
Personally, I dont feel like Foxtel is a problem so much as the business model of locking up a show within a paid streaming service. There are so many of them. If a show or movie isnt on the streaming services I already have access to I immediately just discard the idea of ever watching it. Its unlikely to even be worth the bother to find a way to watch it.
Worse, there was one season (S2 or S3?) where it was released on iTunes the day after each episode aired, for I bought a season pass, think it was maybe $30-40, perhaps even $50. The following season that option wasn't available due to Foxtel having a big sook, so I just stopped watching altogether.
If you were willing to wait until the month that the final episode aired, you could watch every episode for $15 (by subscribing to Foxtel Go for that month, then cancelling).
I don’t watch GoT, but I have friends who have and I know that a lot of people who were fans of the series liked to talk about the latest episode together. So waiting until later would not be an option for them.
Even if it wasn't, I bet the experience of the internship would be worth more than the cost of a personal VPN. Unless the internship didn't really provide much value.
what does that have to do with anything. If the opportunity was good enough for you to take the internship, then they were good enough for you not to risk it by torrenting on their material. He likely got sacked mid summer. He now can't even have that internship on his resume. So much wasted time, so mindless.
IIRC they have a minimum payment. You need to put $5 in your account. Not sure what they do if you pay by subscription and only use a few hours, but when I was using DO, you needed to fund your account with $5 even if you were using the $100 free credit from GitHub education.
I paid for a dedicated server with an unmetered 100mbit connection back in the day. (More than a decade ago, now that I think about it) I wasn't using it for much, so I decided to be a good citizen and run a Tor exit node on it. No filters, every port, why not? What could go wrong?
Well, it turns out you can run bittorrent over Tor. Got dozens of DMCA emails, host took the server down within 24 hours. Taught me a lesson on being nice.
I once pirated a Tv show and was accidentally on my work VPN for a portion of it.
Had a moment of being a bit frozen and scared.
Decided to email the IT head and explain the situation. I got a “thanks for letting me know” and that was it. Not as big a deal as my head conjured up.
I could have done the wrong thing though and made it a big deal.
So funny. But seriously, always be super nice to IT. They might be present during your most frustrating days but don’t make them feel the blame. They’re one of your best allies.
Another interesting story (as the site is just picking on IP, disregarding dynamic ips, vpns etc.) that might save potential users (for legal cases) some costs. The service is heavly false positive and wrong accusation might be expensive:
Piracy has always been rampant at companies, sure now days its too easy to track but in the beginning we only had good piracy bandwidth because so much of it was done on company dollars. With the good eyes of CEOs, sure it was cold hands when they got raided.
I never do personal stuff on company time/equipment, just seems stupid. I'm not sure I think it should matter though...
Ex put.io customer, I downloaded a bunch of media to consume over a flight, except their App would not let me watch already-downloaded videos offline on a plane.
My understanding is that they bank on the fact that takedown operations are relatively slow and starting up from scratch is easy (or even automated), so they fully expect it to get taken down and make as much money as possible in the meantime then rinse and repeat.
From an 1841 speech to the British House of Commons on the dangers of increased copyright times:
At present the holder of copyright has the public feeling on his side. Those who invade copyright are regarded as knaves who take the bread out of the mouths of deserving men. Everybody is well pleased to see them restrained by the law, and compelled to refund their ill-gotten gains. No tradesman of good repute will have anything to do with such disgraceful transactions. Pass this law: and that feeling is at an end. Men very different from the present race of piratical booksellers will soon infringe this intolerable monopoly. Great masses of capital will be constantly employed in the violation of the law. Every art will be employed to evade legal pursuit; and the whole nation will be in the plot… Remember too that, when once it ceases to be considered as wrong and discreditable to invade literary property, no person can say where the invasion will stop. The public seldom makes nice distinctions. The wholesome copyright which now exists will share in the disgrace and danger of the new copyright which you are about to create.
When I was younger, out of curiosity I've downloaded leaked source code of Windows or video games.
Got an impression that code is not that useful to an outsider. It can help answering extremely specific questions how a particular small isolated function is implemented. Even ignoring legal issues, it won't significantly help building competing products, let alone building a successful business around such product.
When we hire people, they gain access to complete source code, documentation, continuous integration environment, bug tracker, and most importantly to the current developers. It usually takes them months to become productive. With just the source code, would probably take a year even for very smart person.
I think the irony is that someone on HN will jump on this thread saying copyright needs to be abolished, and you didn't lose anything as the user wouldn't have paid for it anyways, with the irony being that a large majority of HN either earns money via tracking ads(which is far worse than any copyright), or works money by writing paid software.
I think a lot of HN readers write software that is hosted somewhere, so the users never see the code. Thus, copyright provides us no protection. (I suppose the ex-employee could always take the code and start their own competing service, so copyright does have some value.)
> a large majority of HN either earns money via tracking ads
Have you ever seen any numbers on HN users jobs? I’m continually surprised by the diverse roles of domain experts that appear in threads. I guess I’m hoping you’re wrong.
Wouldn't it be ironic if your job arose in part due to demands placed on the internet infrastructure as a result of pirating activity? Or due to pressure on content owners to lower the cost of streaming enough to make it become mainstream? It would be interesting to tally up all the investment into streaming platforms and the supporting software and servers. Without BitTorrent I really wonder how much smaller that market would be. Or if we'd all still be waiting for our discs in the mail or trying to program our DVRs to record the right shows.
Doesn't make copying someone else's work without payment right.
> Doesn't make copying someone else's work without payment right.
I believe it is right in a moral sense. The illusion that any art is always to be treated as having a value commensurate with the effort involved (or the transient demand), is a fantasy that has been commoditized. Thats the current worldthink.
Many of us create over years and see our programs go to waste without a second thought in the same way. It has been a brutal set of lessons over the years. Media creators are no different than me and both arts are better serving humanity in the digital age where the information can flow freely in society. Software licensing is bad and media copying is goid. I believe this now (20 years later), as I always have.
The idea "exclusive monopolies" and transferable intellectual property rights for perpetuity is bullshit.
The blunt fact of the matter is - A majority of the movies would gain more by giving it away to the public domain because most movies fail. Radio did not kill Art. Internet is the new radio.
The same is true even for software. 80% of business fail. It would not matter if they gave their code away. GPL based business have made billions, i'n not even talking about open source and have more users than some of the biggest "startups".
Among the minority that made it "big" copyright contributed maybe 5% to the success. IP allows big companies to bully creators, lie to consumers and bully independent companies that they perceive as threats.
In Music, Code, Science ... openness has lead to more innovation. Movies and Games present an interesting case. They have plenty of upfront costs. Games have already embraced some notions of the freemium mode. It would be really interesting if 100 million dollar movie is entirely funded by the people. There is nothing stopping that from happening. Copyright, Patents should last at-most 1 year.
Plenty of 100 million dollar movies have been entirely funded by the people [0]. They pay using a thing called “tickets”, or sometimes by paying a small fee to download it to their homes.
To your point, the vast majority of media and software is proprietary, though much of it is supporting in nature and not directly for sale. Nevertheless, shouldn’t publishers be free to choose how they fund their creations?
If we take away the option of artificial scarcity then an entire highly trained professional class will be out of work. While I don’t think Jonny Depp, for example, is worth $650M [1], I don’t personally think that’s a great option for the editors, writers, extras, gaffers, and many other professionals that work together to make great media.
Companies are motivated to maximise the revenue from making this stuff. If they could make more money without copyright, they would have done this already. (And radio is a terrible example: commercial radio simply plays advertising for artists, called “songs”, 24x7)
> Nevertheless, shouldn’t publishers be free to choose how they fund their creations?
Of course. The problem is when they demand that goverments take away their ciziten's natural rights to copy and share information in order to support their chosen business model. If publishers want society to make their business model possible by being given special "rights" and having public institudions enforce those "rights" then it is very much up to all of society to choose if that is acceptable.
Remember copyright is an entirely artificial construct meant to benefit society by encouraging creators to produce content. It is my and many others opinion that the current state of copyright is a very one sided affair that benefits mainly big corporations while having numerous negative effects on society.
> If we take away the option of artificial scarcity then an entire highly trained professional class will be out of work.
Unlikely. There will always be a demand for entertainment and people interested in filling that demand will find a way to make it worthwile.
But even if the entire entertainment industry would instantly disappear then that would still not be an argument to uphold unjust laws. Professions becoming obsolete with progress is entirely natural. People can adapt.
While I agree in spirit with some of what you say, the law is as it is and producers invest in content with the expectation that those laws will be enforced. You want copyright to go away? Then get enough people to agree, and get the law changed.
> copyright is an entirely artificial construct meant to benefit society by encouraging creators to produce content
The problem with this line of reasoning is that all property is an artificial construct. Just because it’s an artificial concept doesn’t, on its own, make it wrong.
> It is my and many others opinion that the current state of copyright is a very one sided affair that benefits mainly big corporations while having numerous negative effects on society.
That may be true, but last I looked we live in a democracy, which means that we have a process for changing the law, which does not include doing whatever you want.
And honestly, while there is plenty about modern copyright that I find repulsive, especially the constant extension, nevertheless the wholesale removal of copyright would have many consequences that you probably don’t want. For starters, the GPL, CC, Apache and many other free licenses rely on copyright to work.
> There will always be a demand for entertainment and people interested in filling that demand will find a way to make it worthwile
Copyright supports far more than just entertainment. The wholesale destruction of journalism, for example, has clearly damaged society. Part of the damage has been caused because Google and Facebook have subverted copyright to their own causes.
> … the law is as it is and producers invest in content with the expectation that those laws will be enforced.
The law can change tomorrow with the stroke of a pen and society won't owe them anything for these past "investments" no matter what their expectations were. Which, of course, is why they invest so much in politics and astroturf campaigns to head off any attempt to actually change the law to something more in line with what most people actually think is right. (If you applied the principle of estoppel and required anyone who had ever violated copyright law to suit words to actions and vote against it then you probably couldn't even get a quorum in favor, much less a majority.)
> The problem with this line of reasoning is that all property is an artificial construct.
Property rights arise naturally as a result of scarcity. Someone has to have the right to decide how the scarce resource will be used or it might as well not exist.
"Property" rights in things that are not scarce are a purely artificial construct.
> For starters, the GPL, CC, Apache and many other free licenses rely on copyright to work.
Copyleft licenses were created as a reaction against copyright. Sometimes they overstep their bounds, true—especially the less permissive variants. However, in general, if copyright and software patents did not exist then there would be no need for any of these licenses.
> The wholesale destruction of journalism, for example, has clearly damaged society. Part of the damage has been caused because Google and Facebook have subverted copyright to their own causes.
Taking it at face value, this appears to be an argument against copyright? Not that I really agree that Google and Facebook are primarily to blame. The public simply prefers to be entertained and reaffirmed rather than informed. If anything, copyright reinforces this outcome since you can't copyright facts (and rightly so); as such, actual journalism, uncovering the facts of the situation, has become a cost center to be minimized, whereas the "expression" is heavily subsidized via copyright monopoly.
> The law can change tomorrow with the stroke of a pen and society won't owe them anything
What you say is literally true, but because most investment ends up as wages, such an act would literally destroy tens of billions of dollars of working capital, and put a hundred thousand people out of work overnight.
I assume that's not an outcome you actually advocate.
> Property rights arise naturally as a result of scarcity
Rubbish. The whole concept of rights is almost entirely artificial [0]. For most of history, property and other rights were determined by whoever had the biggest army. Jesus, many people still don't have the right to their own bodies in some places in the world.
The idea that rights of any kind are somehow anything other than a set of cherished beliefs codified in law, is nonsense.
> Copyleft licenses were created as a reaction against copyright.
I think the situation is much, much more complicated than that, but it is a side issue of this conversation at best.
> this appears to be an argument against copyright... The public simply prefers to be entertained
You surely can't blame people for wanting to be entertained? Are you saying you never watch something fun?
In any case, weak and misapplied copyright laws have enabled Google and Facebook, in particular, to concentrate the important elements of journalism and present it to their users in a way which reduces the diversity of all journalism. They show just enough to get away with "fair use" while ensuring that the likelihood of people clicking outside the walled garden is minimised.
Imagine what these companies would do to us if basic copyright was even weaker. Do you think Facebook would link to an article it can just copy? 2 billion+ people on the earth would have just one web browser and it would never - not be allowed - to leave fb.com.
> I assume that's not an outcome you actually advocate.
I don't wish misfortune on anyone, and I expect there would be a transitional period in any real-world implementation, but just the same I cannot possibly justify continuing this parasitic situation any longer than absolutely necessary. If I were presented with a button that would eliminate copyright law instantly, globally, and permanently, I would press it without hesitation—and then get to work dealing with the inevitable fallout.
> For most of history, property and other rights were determined by whoever had the biggest army. Jesus, many people still don't have the right to their own bodies in some places in the world.
You are obviously referring to legal recognition of rights, not the rights themselves. The law is artificial, founded for the most part on non-defensive application of force to achieve a desired outcome, and doesn't correlate very well with the rights that people naturally possess. Some legal systems are better than other in this regard. No law which comes from a government will ever fully recognize natural human rights because, quite simply, that would put them out of business. However, here in the U.S. we at least explicitly recognize that there are rights which humans naturally possess ("endowed by their Creator"—whatever that happens to mean to you) which do not derive from the law, but rather have priority over it. There is a difference between what the law says you may do without penalty and what you may rightfully do, and when the two are in conflict it is the law which is wrong, no matter how popular the law might be or how much force can be brought to bear to back it up.
> You surely can't blame people for wanting to be entertained? Are you saying you never watch something fun?
I'm not blaming them. I'm just saying that there isn't a strong market right now for actual journalism. It's thankless work, for the most part, with or without copyright.
> In any case, weak and misapplied copyright laws have enabled Google and Facebook, in particular, to concentrate the important elements of journalism and present it to their users in a way which reduces the diversity of all journalism. They show just enough to get away with "fair use" while ensuring that the likelihood of people clicking outside the walled garden is minimised.
Are you trying to say that copyright should be expanded to cover facts and not just expression? That it should be illegal to quote or paraphrase a small portion of a copyrighted work? I believe the majority would side with me in vehemently disagreeing. Keep in mind that (in the U.S.) the exceptions for fair use are the only reason why copyright law was not declared wholly unconstitutional on 1st Amendment grounds. Freedom of speech is far more important than this runaway social engineering experiment known as copyright. (IMHO they gave in too easily. Copyright law violates the 1st Amendment and freedom of speech even with fair use.)
> I don't wish misfortune on anyone ... I would press it without hesitation
I can’t reconcile these two statements. People would definitely die if you pushed that button; I don’t think you want that.
> here in the U.S. we at least explicitly recognize that there are rights which humans naturally possess
Perhaps true, but only for certain values of ‘human’.
> Are you trying to say that copyright should be expanded to cover facts and not just expression? That it should be illegal to quote or paraphrase a small portion of a copyrighted work?
I think it’s pretty clear that I’m saying that fair use has been subverted by companies for profit, and that eliminating copyright will make things far worse.
> Freedom of speech is far more important than this runaway social engineering experiment known as copyright
Given the rate at which people are getting sick and dying in the US right now, I’m not certain that the “runaway social experiment of free speech” - as moderated and directed by the copyright infringing trolls at big social media - is working out too well for you guys either.
> Copyright law violates the 1st Amendment and freedom of speech even with fair use.
Didn’t you just essentially argue that the law is not morally authoritative?
You clearly believe that there exist natural rights. I happen to believe that the right to control the things I create is natural. Just because something can be copied easily doesn’t abrogate my natural rights, any more than the fact that your genome can be copied abrogates yours.
Despite what you think, its entirely possible and natural for me to suffer a loss if you copy something that I created, particularly if creating it was expensive for me, and your copying it prevents me from making good my loss.
While there is much I find dismaying about copyright law, there is nothing unnatural about it.
The number of CEOs who think printing money is a good idea might make you wonder if they even know anything about money. Polluting air costs less money why not do it ?
80% movies don't need the 100 million dollar budget and I'm pretty sure Johnny Deepp would be happy to release Edward Scissorhands to the public domain.
Most big movies make their money by single day screenings and releasing movies at different dates in different regions with market buzz.
> If we take away the option of artificial scarcity then an entire highly trained professional class will be out of work.
Interestingly your argument fails for porn. Its about 1/4th the size of hollywood.
How about publishers own the copyright and creators own the copyright instead of commoditising a copyright artefact ?
I assure you musicians can survive and Depp can do some theatre. Most EDM is essentially copyright free, especially techno. 1 year of exclusivity is fine. Fuck NDAs.
These days the cost of production has gone down so I think you will see more indie media taking advantage of that. The average budget for a reasonable movie is less than 5 million, heck even 500k dollars going by kickstarter funded movies.
I don’t really know what you’re arguing, you seem to be making a few assumptions about my position, which are probably wrong.
In terms of $100M movies, I think they almost all suck, but that was the value you suggested. I’d say that no movie needs to cost $100M!
But plenty of movies cost $10M. If it takes 100 people a year to make a movie then you can easily spend $10M on salaries and overheads alone.
> Interestingly your argument fails for porn
Does it? I’d guess that the average porno costs a few hundred bucks to shoot, and takes a couple of hours. There is easily 100x more hours of porn produced per day than narrative fiction, and yet it only makes 25% of Hollywood, and notoriously, the actors are frequently exploited. I’d say that porn is a warning of danger rather than a proof of success!
> Depp can do some theatre
When was the last time you paid to go to the theatre?
> Most EDM is essentially copyright free, especially techno. 1 year of exclusivity is fine. Fuck NDAs.
My raver days are (sadly) behind me, but sure, OK, like porn, EDM can be produced with little investment. So what? No everything that is good is also cheap or easy to build.
> These days the cost of production has gone down so I think you will see more indie media taking advantage of that.
I’m a huge fan of indy media but, because of that, I pay for it, and I don’t like it when people freeload.
> The average budget for a reasonable movie is less than 5 million
I think you’re just making things up now, but even so, 5 million is a buttload of money that you need to get back. Few people are gonna spend that sort of money with no expectation of recouping it.
There are a lot of undeserving idiots with money out there, no doubt. And they have certainly taken advantage of copyright to get wealthy. But it seems to me that you just want to solve this by making everything “indy”, on the cheap, and as much as I love independent music and film (I saw 40 movies over a two week period at a film festival last year, it was awesome) I think the world is far more complex and interesting than can be expressed by a couple of dudes with a camera.
The problem is that some productions are simply expensive. Think about sending an imax camera to the space station. There is literally no way to make that cheap. And why concentrate only on music and movies, what about games? What about journalism? There are a huge number of industries that depend on at least some form of copyright, even if not specifically the bastard form that exists at this moment.
> Is copyright / patents the only way to finance and get money back ? Absolutely not. Thats the argument I am making.
But as far as I can tell, you’re only arguing against copyright, you’re not actually making an argument for a viable alternative, and that is my problem.
Just because you dig EDM and punk, and these specific types of music can be made on the cheap, doesn’t mean all good media can be made cheaply. Just because most $100M movies suck doesn’t mean that $10 million movies shouldn’t be made.
Accept that, and then explain to me how to repeatedly raise the $10 million investment needed to create high quality, high cost products that will be given away for free, no strings attached. I think you’ll find that the problem is that doing so is incredibly hard and extremely risky, which is why nobody is doing it.
I believe in reform. 1 year exclusive copyright / patent at most and author always holds the copyright. Its ironic that the movie with the biggest budget is a pirate movie ;)
So we agree :) except that like the pirate party, I’d make copyright 5 years since some works take much longer than one year to create, and it can often take more than a year to distribute certain works or plan and go on tour.
Also, I believe nobody should go to jail or be bankrupted for copying digital works.
And what do you know? Two randos came to an amicable position on an Internet forum :) next stop, world peace!!
> A majority of the movies would gain more by giving it away to the public domain because most movies fail.
What exactly about being in the public domain would help a movie "gain more" if it hadn't had a successful box office run previously? "GPL-based businesses making billions" does not strike me as a meaningful comparison here. ("Well, 'Cats' is a fiasco, but if we give it away for free we can make a killing selling enterprise service contracts for it!")
How about scene by scene commentary for cats on a youtube video. Sports have this and you can watch old sports matches on youtube. Right now youtube would block it and my use case extends the fair use by quite a mark. You have to understand that under DRM even seeing the movie with family and friends is illegal.
Because it was great and it wasn't available legally in so many countries, or it was with forced reader and no native-English language versions in TV or 480p streaming online.
It's most pirated because it was great quality product with low quality service and delivery.
That's probably the episode they're talking about but it doesn't render their complaint less valid. It just shows the limits of streaming technology in its current form.
Also in some markets the official local release was a year behind. Given that it's not possible to get an HBO subscription outside of the US, for many people pirating was the only way to watch it.
I have an HBO premium subscription (along with access to HBO Go), but I have downloaded a few of the episodes over torrent to ensure I can watch it where there was no internet or where it was unstable.
While I have technically participated in copyright infringement (I haven't raided any ships, I promise, arrgh), I do not feel I have done anything morally wrong.
I don't think that this argument would hold up in court as you're not just downloading for yourself (which you could argue you have a license to the content), but you're also providing (at least parts) of the content to others. I think this is where you'd definitely get into trouble.
Yup, at least in Germany that's the legal situation: They send out cease&desist letters because torrent upload counts as "sharing the copyrighted work without a license", and because of bit-torrent high connectivity they just assume by default that you are doing it on the "scale of a business", stipulating absurd damage sums.
I once torrented an episode of the show The Americans, my last option as my usual sources were weirdly all offline and it was the middle of a season, the show wasn't even legally distributed in Germany at the time.
Turned out some German publisher picked up the distribution rights to the show and their first action wasn't to make it legally available in Germany, but trying to profit from Germans who followed the show trough piracy by sending out serial c&d letters demanding 800€ payments and stipulating damages in the range of 10k€
It's a pretty wide-spread and annoying situation to such a degree that using public torrent is a very quick way to get expensive mail as there's a whole lot of anti-piracy outfits in Germany that monitor public torrent trackers for German IPs downloading files named after copyrighted works to send out those c&d letters.
I'm not living in Germany, but am downloading torrents (to watch stuff unavailable via HBO/Netflix) via VPN which terminates in Germany. I wonder if the VPN company is getting shitloads of those C&D letters and if they can ever blow back on me.
Afaik the worst they could do is cancel your service/subscription because the c&d letter is addressed to the owner of the connection, which in your case would be the VPN company.
My collage had similar restrictions for many website and torrents.
I tried something similar by renting a server and then trying to download torrent in it but obviously got instantly blocked from Service provider.
Somehow 1-2 months later I got a request from my college's computer center to make some changes in the college intranet landing page.
Then I became good friends with them. and later I got an account from them, where everything was open.
I was a good time ;)
Hmm but doing that in a 7 person startup, and then repeating the offense, and then failing to come clean !! seriously man..
My undergrad would just throttle/packetshape torrents/p2p/IRC-dcc/etc so it would move at 1~2kbps. My grad school would ban your MAC address if you had any torrents running (I found that out the hard way when I got banned for DemocracyNow/Miro video player, which I didn't realize, used torrents as its backend transfer protocol).
When I was young and stupid (at least more than now) I did some pranks using dormitory server, and knew that I should clean bash history (actually using a single space before command did that).
But what I didn't know was that vim also has a history of commands :) server admin wasn't happy.
Ugh, and he/she could have gotten a box for an evening for fraction of a cent or something. To even think about using company infrastructure for this seems really very uneducated. Ok, that wouldn't also have been stupid, but at least you wouldn't put your company at risk.
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.
Then everybody would be as wrong as you. You can repeat this as much as you like, but it is simply false.
Legally speaking: copyright infringement is an offense distinct from theft.
Speaking from reality: copyright infringement does not deprive the holder of the right of their property.
Speaking ethically: Copyright infringement is a violation of a particular commercial mode of exchange. "Unauthorized Looking" would be a better term for what retail bittorrent users are up to.
I agree with your interpretation of copyright and that it is not theft, but your position ignores the fact that very many “properties” would not exist except for the understanding that they might be profitable. In some cases, like GoT, the likelihood of profitability is very high.
In that sense, copyright infringement _indirectly_ deprives the holder of the property through the capital that they invested in order to create the property in the first place.
I mean, if I spend $100 to make a movie with the hope that 100 people will each spend $2 to watch it, and then you make a copy and distribute it for free to my audience, then you’ve deprived me of my $100 in capital, and the $100 in profit. The profit itself is a loss because it is an opportunity cost: if I hadn’t made the movie then I might have spent my time making money some other way.
The distance between your position and mine is, I think, one of scale. Individual infringement of a property with millions of views is a tiny fraction of the cost of creating that property. But as the number of infringers increases relative to the audience, it really does deprive people of property.
The actual likelihood of this happening in the real world approaches zero, given the intrinsic incentives of pirates ie to release as early as possible, and the fact that pirates don’t usually know (or care) if the product has recouped its investment, or not.
Even if it was possible, surely the people who have invested real money should be the ones to make this decision? Indeed, lots of IP becomes free (even freedom-free) after it’s made money, eg the Quake engine.
> Even if it was possible, surely the people who have invested real money should be the ones to make this decision?
Why? They have no inherent right to limit the distribution of their content, only the special rights society has decided to give them in order to encourage the creation in the first place.
But all rights are granted by society, including your right to own a house or a car or a laptop or the clothes on your back. ALL of these rights are “special rights society has decided to give”.
And in the case of copyright society has decided that media is something that is worth investing in and we have created laws that encourage that.
Some of those laws suck and are stupid and overreaching, but that’s not the argument here.
piracy is taking someone else's work without compensating them for that work. There are lots of forms of work that require nothing but time. Programming is one, lawyer work, accounting work, digital design work, planning, managing. I'm sure we could list 100s more.
I don't know what the legal term is for hiring someone for a service and then not paying them for that service.
If you want the your tax forms filled out you pay the tax accountant. If you want the movie you pay the creators of the movie.
I know there is a difference in the the movie already exits but is that an important difference? When I arrive at the tax accountant's office to collect my tax forms they already exist. Maybe I should just make a copy for free and leave and say "copies are free so it's not theft"?
It's not the document that was stolen, it was the value of their time.
I am unsure when you grew up, but for many of us who grew up in the 90s and 00s, this is exactly the mindset we have. I used to be able to take a movie I had and lend it to a friend, the same with music. The movement away from physical copies took this away from many of us, so we tried to take it back in kind -- piracy is what they called that behavior.
I understand it might not seem right to you, but in all the social groups I am a part of piracy and sharing accounts is normative. The only fault I see is mixing personal and work resources, which naturally have separate concerns.
I see nothing wrong with "lending a movie" to someone.. But how often does the "lent" movie ever get "returned" ( read: deleted )? If not your analogy breaks down and it becomes the same as physically copying a VHD/DVD/CD.
I’m not sure why that’s important. I don’t frequently watch movies multiple times so the loaning and watching once is, I think, most common.
Back in the dvd days, I would frequently never get discs back. The few times I’ve loaned a file from a digital file I’ve bought on Amazon, I’ve never watched the movie again. So for all I care, they could keep it forever.
I wrote more about this in another comment [1], but I believe that the limitation of not being able to lend something is a constructed limitation of digital goods. I already do "lend" access through streaming services -- I would call it "lending" because many of the services have limits on concurrent streams (This is the exclusivity principle that is important in lending, as you mention).
In terms of digital goods writ large, there is no good way for me to lend access in a provable manner -- so of course piracy is the natural evolution because that's the only way to lend things.
Also, we used to copy Blockbuster tapes too, which is illegal, but there was never enforcement because we never re-sold these copies. Maybe I'm just a miscreant through and through. Irrespective, this is another clear example of where the transition to digital caused a dissonance between the physical and digital worlds that led users to believe behavior called "illegal" was actually just a subtraction of their ownership rights.
I just don't understand this argument, physical copies of virtually any type of media absolutely still exist. If you want to own even Netflix shows on disc, you can do that pretty cheaply. I'd you want to get Blu Ray discs delivered to you by mail for a subscription fee, you can probably do that (although this is slightly more geographically restricted).
That claim isn't true. There are games that are not provided with a physical copy (i.e. Beatsaber for PSVR, Quest for Booty-Rachet and Clank, etc)
Also, I'm sure there are other Hulu, Netflix, Prime excluses that won't make it to the physical market.
----
This still avoids the main issue here: It's the right of ownership of the copy. Having a digital copy, in it's current state, prevents you from transferring it to others. Amazon's ebooks have the option for lending, but you're still reliant upon Amazon's "holy permission" to do that. (They can reascend it at any time). With physical mediums the original creators cannot prevent you from reselling what you own. (They can try.. but often times they've failed)
It absolutely is. I said virtually all, and for virtually all it's true. A small number of counter examples that aren't relevant to the majority of the media-consuming public does nothing to change the inarguable fact that the vast majority of media is available in physical form.
These are not a small number of counterexamples, these are patterns that are pervasive throughout modern media distribution. Let's look at Star Wars as an example. I bought a Star Wars box set and I can't watch it on my computer without installing malware. I can't play "Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order" without installing malware. I can't watch the new Clone Wars or Mandalorian show without paying for yet another streaming service. "Think of the content creators" is the new "think of the children". It's not my fault that every aspect of our culture is for sale to the highest bidder; my rights matter more than the profit margin of faceless megacorporations and as long as they engage in these unethical business practices I will not give them my money. Piracy is civil disobedience.
"Civil disobedience" is a rather grandiose way to dress up not paying for things you use because the person who owns them didn't sell them exactly the way you wish they did. You're not marching in the streets, you're watching TV.
I don’t buy movies on dvd or Blu-ray any more. But I still lend access.
I don’t think it’s reasonable to say that if I watch a movie that I like, I should purchase it again on physical media just to loan it. And that my friend should buy a DVD player just to watch a borrowed movie.
If I’ve bought it once digitally, I will make copies and lend them to friends. Or more specifically, I’ll give them a login to my private Plex server.
It’s great to hear about people using software to share culture. Re: Plex, I looked in your bio but didn’t see contact info. I also have a private server to share culture with friends. Find my contact info in my bio and maybe we can talk more?
I agree that the statement "Physical copies don't exist for digital media" is false (And I wasn't trying to assert that, of which I could have been more explicit), time of release aside. I can still hold the above position and not be in conflict with that, though.
The issue we saw is that there is no way to legally lend a digital resource to someone else, which is a constructed limitation. Lending here involves two things, one is that the resource is exclusive and the other that it has the same traits as the original good. In crux, why do an illegal, but "not as bad" thing when there is no legal difference -- just do the illegal thing at that point.
This is how torrenting, piracy, and account sharing became normative. Access to digital goods was restricted further than physical goods, meaning that as content moved to digital first, there was a dissonance between worlds (This is where all the "First Sales Doctrine" litigation tens of years ago comes from). When that dissonance was resolved in favor of businesses, we adjusted via legal brinksmanship -- wherein we said "This is normal behavior, but if you're calling it abnormal and illegal I'll just do the actually illegal thing because it doesn't matter anymore".
I have a library card, where I borrow exclusive, digital copies of a resource for a reasonable price (If we snake a path between my taxes and the library service). I think this system is great, even though it has just the same properties as physical lending has. It is when properties are lost inexplicably that you see new, emergent behavior.
Once again, I understand that this isn't widely accepted view point in some circles and that you may just fundamentally dislike it. I know that behavior might be illegal by US code, but the nature of something being illegal is that it is illegal because it is an accessible possibility. We create laws to inhibit possible behavior, and, in this case, many of us have just said "I don't care" to these laws in a similar way to jaywalking or speeding.
> Access to digital goods was restricted further than physical goods
You only have two choices as a rights holder when it comes to digital works; much less sharing or much more. There's no workable digital equivalent of the kind of sharing limits imposed by having to move a physical thing from one place to another. In order for sharing to be viable with digital versions the DRM would need to be much more sophisticated, or the prices would need to be much higher.
Edit: if you want a concrete example of the harm caused by this attitude, go look into why there's no HD remaster of DS9 or Babylon 5. The studio broke down sales figures for previous SciFi remakes and then the degree to which those shows are torrented. If even an appreciable fraction of the freeloaders ever actually bought the discs, then it would be worth it to make one. You don't, so they don't.
Are you sure digital piracy is theft?
Wikipedia defines theft as:
"The taking of another person's property or services without that person's permission or consent with the intent to deprive the rightful owner of it."
Copies are made, sales (possibly) lost, but no property is being taken such that the owner cannot continue to sell/rent/etc it.
My take: I'll pay for whatever streaming service that has the content I want (except Hulu), but if it is not available to stream then Internet Copies are an option for me. I don't have a DVD/Bluray/etc player to go the physical copy route and would simply go without if not for streaming first then Internet Copies.
physical copy theft: the physical medium is being stolen, the works are still available, but it is theft because packaging is an industry unto itself, costing money. Making an internet copy costs (basicallly) nothing.
In all: I will pay for what is available, I will even wait if they announce something I want is coming to x-platform at y-date. Because of Netflix alone, I basically don't download movies now. Disney+ is an interesting option now, too. If the market provides, it can have my money!
My reason: movies and TV shows are a form of storytelling and the execution is often very bad if you care to think about it. Storytelling doesn't need to cost much. Poor storytelling should cost even less. Shows from the 80s were very enjoyable but cost only a fraction of current shows. With current distribution systems, shows should cost even less. And I never asked for a team of 100 CGI artists. I just don't want to contribute to the absurdity of all this.
Just get a DVD/Blueray player. The content is there for you to legally get and pay for. Heck, you can buy pretty much any movie from Amazon digitally. There is really no excuse not to pay.
HN is a global community. Quite a few people here are in countries where legitimate DVDs/Blu-rays are not available locally. If a person were to try to order them from Amazon, the shipping fees would be enormous, and the package may get stuck in customs and require further payment to get it out. In fact, some online shops (like Criterion) will not even ship abroad, because they have licensed the content for a DVD/Blu-ray release only in North America or some other limited geographic region. Consequently, it is no surprise that many ardent cinephiles turn to torrenting (or buying a release from the local marketplace that is going to be a pirated copy anyway) even if they would have liked to build up a physical collection.
> Heck, you can buy pretty much any movie from Amazon digitally.
Not really, I pay for Amazon prime, tho in Germany, as such the content is very limited and often only exists dubbed, granted: They've been getting better with this.
But delivery of certain shows sometimes is days and weeks late compared to US release, streaming quality has also been spotty for me with no real way to fix anything.
I also have shared access to Netflix, but once again: It's German Netflix, as such it does not have the same offerings as what's current in the US, for example no second season of Twilight Zone.
With Netflix I could use a VPN to get access to the US version, but finding a free VPN with enough bandwidth to stream Full HD content is easier said than done and finding a good paid one seems like quite a bothersome task.
Meanwhile, none of that matters with the warez scene, which also covers everything, not just specific IP. Meaning that I don't run the risk missing out on something interesting or a new season due to not having properly kept up with the news or checked dozens of different services.
No weird issues with streaming, just a handy *.mkv file, add whatever language subtitles I want/need because unlike the entertainment industry, the warez scene actually has been extremely good and consistent about setting and keeping standards [0]
> With Netflix I could use a VPN to get access to the US version, but finding a free VPN with enough bandwidth to stream Full HD content is easier said than done and finding a good paid one seems like quite a bothersome task.
My understanding is that you'd still be breaking copyright laws, so you might as well download from torrents...
Some services restrict online commerce to USA, because that's where money are, doing anything beyond that is an effort that is unlikely to pay off. Also DVD/BD is just plastic waste.
There isn't much of a difference between digital media and "services." We'd all agree it would a dick move if I walked out of barbershop without paying, even if the barber didn't have any other available customers at the time.
If I used my haircut-robot to create a strand-for-strand identical hairstyle as the one you paid your barber for, is that me stealing from your barber?
In many jurisdictions this isn’t theft either, and often the police can’t do much about it. Technically it counts as non payment of debt, which would have to be recovered by a civil action.
In practice they’ll just bar you from the premises.
It’s not theft. It’s not legal, but it’s not theft. It’s also not a big deal, maybe you disagree with that assessment but it’s how the majority of people feel.
So I’d say that piracy is potential copyright infringement and leave it at that. It’s curious to see moral judgement on this. I assume that the judgers work in media or something.
But I also come from a generation that thought DLC was unjust.
I think the jury is still out on copyright infringement. I think it may be a net benefit to society, although a negative for copyright holders.
Back in the Napster days I bought so much more music based on stuff I downloaded. Not everyone was like me, buty piracy made money for the record industry.
I also think copyright infringement has allowed lots of knowledge and entertainment to be available to low resource markets that would never attract releases. How many young people in Lagos got software and media only through piracy?
I challenge you to demonstrate that copyright infringement per se is bad for society. This would mean copyright is good for society which is still to be proven at least in it's current acception.
As part of society. Piracy is pretty good for me. Paying for DRM-infested media and fragmented streaming services on the other hand is bad for society.
Some people we're never and are never going to pay for some of the they consume, they'll either pirate it or just not consume it.
I'm presently watching Avatar: The Last Airbender. Which I just pirated earlier today. I'm never going to our-right buy, nor rent, it.
One season is presently on Netflix here in Australia, so I'll watch that there, and the publisher will get their three cents out of me via Netflix, or whatever Netflix pays.
That's three cents they were otherwise never going to get out of me.
If the content was available at a reasonable price, say some portion of what I pay my ISP and the AU$8 I pay the VPN service to hide my traffic from my surveillance-state ISP, I'd pay it.
But it isn't, and I can't afford to pay for all the content I consume on my trifling skilled-tradesperson wage.
You realise when people like me see job ads for doctors getting paid in a day what I earn in a fortnight, and revenue figures like:
The Last Airbender had grossed $131,772,187 in the United States, and $187,941,694 in other countries, making for a total of $319,713,881 worldwide.
... there's no way you're going to convince me this side of the heat death of the universe that copyright infringement in universally bad.
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.
It's not pedantic at all. If we could copy-paste food, clothes, etc. for free, theft would be very different.
Or maybe not, I can just about imagine a bunch of suits suing Jesus for multiplying bread to feed the poor because it deprived them of their baked good sales revenue.
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.
> 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…
Furthermore, by the way, theft typically destroys total value. If someone steals a wallet (or anything really), the amount he gets from fencing it is typically much smaller than the cost (including hassle, time spent, and potentially nostalgic value) to the original owner of replacing everything (if that’s possible at all).
Copyright infringement, by contrast, arguably creates value - instead of one person being able to see the movie, two can see it.
If I don't watch your movie or watch it for free, it doesn't change anything for you (I'd even argue that the later might actually be better for you, but that's another topic)
On the other hand, whether I eat your apple or not make a big difference to you, since you might not be able to eat it in one scenario.
The ads that infringed the copyright of a small music creator ... when the execs of the companies that paid for the ad go to jail for conspiracy to commit theft I'll change to using your wrong terminology.
"Piracy" is not the problem, it is the solution. The truth is all subscription services straight up suck. They don't hold a candle to copyright infringement. Despite making billions of dollars in revenue, they simply can't compete with what's essentially a bunch of enthusiasts. More often than not the reason why they can't compete is copyright itself.
They have clunky interfaces, making users miss mpv. They don't have chapters, making it annoying to seek to a specific part of a film or episode. They don't allow users to download content beforehand, locking them out whenever there's no internet connection. They have annoying DRM, preventing content playback on perfectly good computers and TVs for no good reason. They aren't available in most countries, locking out entire regions of the globe. When it is available, users get only a subset of the content and feel like second rate consumers. Whatever ends up being available is frequently modified, censored or cut. Users straight up lose access to content with no warning when licensing agreements expire. Every copyright holder launches its own little streaming service with its own annoying quirks. They compress the video so much even pure black frames have massive artifacts and have the audacity to charge for this garbage. They don't have enough subtitles. There's usually zero extra content such as commentary tracks. They track everything users do and watch.
There is exactly one area where streaming offers a superior experience compared to copyright infringement: multiple audio tracks. This is because of a technical limitation: video players can load subtitles that are external to the video file but not audio tracks.
Something as good as "piracy" shouldn't have to stop existing for the benefit of aging industries. It's the 21st century, copyright doesn't make sense anymore. Society must rethink its laws. The copyright industry must adopt new business models or disappear.
> Because everybody does it, that makes it okie dokie?
The fact everybody is infringing copyright is evidence that the law is wrong. Laws are supposed to codify the customs of a people. If everyone is violating a law then that law obviously does not represent the customs of that people. Society must recognize this and adapt so that the behavior can be allowed.
> … video players can load subtitles that are external to the video file but not audio tracks.
Not true for MPV:
--audio-files=<files>
Play audio from an external file while viewing a video.
This is a path list option. See List Options for details.
--audio-file=<file>
CLI/config file only alias for --audio-files-append. Each use of this option
will add a new audio track. The details are similar to how --sub-file works.
They said before Netflix was available in their country. There were / are many countries where it is impossible to legally watch US cable television. I cannot hold someone at fault for wanting to view creative works that are blocked just because of where they live.
I had Netflix for a year and canceled because I ended up still using torrent. There are lots of movies and anime missing in Netflix and it is annoying to use with Widevine (as I run almost 100% FOSS I use Kodi as a media center).
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.
Where I am currently in India, the ISP does provider-level NAT: multiple customers are on the same IPv4 address. No idea how many. This thing is showing around a dozen movies (a mixture of English and local language, plus it looks like someone wants to become a web developer) being downloaded per day, and I’m confident none of them are coming from the local network I’m attached to. This NAT is also a right pain, because there are always at least one or two strains of malware running on the address, so that it’s always on at least one or two blacklists, which causes the occasional problem. As an example, earlier today I couldn’t access ConvertKit’s Terms of Service page at all because Wordfence didn’t like my IP address. (But it only blocked access to that one page. Weird.) It was worse when I was here 3–4 years ago: at that time, the IP address was on most of the blacklists, and each and every site protected by Cloudflare would complain and require a CAPTCHA before it would let you in. (Though at least it would let you in, unlike Wordfence today.) It’s times like that when you realise viscerally just how much of the internet is behind Cloudflare.
Back in 2012, the same ISP was intercepting all DNS (!) and serving OpenDNS with the stupid give-you-a-search-page-instead-of-an-NXDOMAIN-response thing that they had back then, forcibly enabled.
Hopefully the copy of “Avast Premium Security 20.2.2401 (Build 20.2.5130) Final + Serial” someone downloaded will help them clear the malware out, rather than make things worse.
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.
That, and you should know that there is almost certainly history of who had which IP address when; it's not going to be the same DHCP server running on your small router.
If you download something, get a new IP, and the ISP gets a complaint for your old IP, they have that data and may be obligated legally to do something about it.
In the long long ago I worked at a small regional ISP. We offered dial-up and dsl. Users were assigned whatever IP was available when they connected, and this was logged (including disconnect time).
So, it was very easy to search the logs and see who was using an IP at a given time in the past (assuming we still had the logs).
Earlier this year there was a case where someone was accessing illegal stuff (as in, the sort of stuff that does warrant police kicking their door down at 4am) using public WiFi.
Except the ISP had forgotten to take into account daylight savings time and given the police the wrong customer's details. Oops.
The orthodoxy is that the two most common forms of time stamps are:
(1) Unambiguous: a time in the past that is represented by the number of seconds since the epoch, Jan 1 1970. When coupled with a location/jurisdiction, they can be converted into a wall-clock time like “1:23pm 04 May 2006 Europe/Paris.”
(2) Ambiguous (but semantically meaningful): a time in the future that would be shown on a clock at the location of the event.
The logging of IP addresses would use the former.
The upcoming trial date for illegal torrenting would use the latter.
I would pay extra for an ISP who only kept those logs say 1 hour.
1 hour should be plenty to identify who is currently running some network attack, and arguably an ISP doesn't have a legit reason for keeping private data longer than necessary to be an ISP under the GDPR .
I wonder if there are any government requirements here for people operating ISPs. Does anyone have any insight into the time range that is required to keep these logs (if there is one)?
My modem has had the same IP for nearly 10 years now! It's the same even after several moves, one to a new county. Super convenient, but that's the nicest thing I have to say about Comcast. Boy I wish there were other options.
It's probably because it needed an IP and the modem that was turned off, leaving an IP open was your old one. That or they changed their system. The odds historically have been low getting the same IP.
I had the same IP address for the entire 3 years I lived in an apartment. Even telling my router to release and renew the IP would still give me the same IP. Only when I moved to a new house (and still used the same ISP) did my IP change.
You don't need a tool to change your MAC address. You can do it from the Control Panel.
And as another commenter said, this would only change my local IP (192.168.254.x) IP, not the WAN IP (50.39.x.x). I would need to change my router's MAC address, since that's the only MAC address my ISP sees. And depending on my ISP's DHCP configuration, I still might not get a different IP. I might even make it unable to get an IP at all.
I did this many times back when I just had a plain cable modem, not router or anything. I havent tested since I switched to a Modem Router combo, I would suspect it wont work under that setup.
But yes, my original point stands. I can run the tool, change my network cards MAC, restart the Modem, and I get a new public IP address. Ive been doing this for years to bypass IP blocks.
Ahh, that explains a bit: let me guess, your modem had a single Ethernet port on it, which you were running directly to your computer?
That means the modem was cloning your device's MAC address onto its own WAN interface. Which is... weird, but would have had some kind of logical motivation.
Maybe it meant the modem vendor didn't have to maintain their own MAC registration ("just copy the device's!"), or maybe it was an ISP "what kinds of devices are our customers using?" kind of thing (the majority of results would have been routers, not single devices). Or maybe this is normal for cable modems (never used cable myself, just ADSL2+).
Exactly, I posted the title as it's the link of the site and admittedly salacious enough to click, but I don't (and I'm sure the site owners don't) want to allege that there's any internet mysticism going on.
Comcast assigns you an IP based on the MAC address of your modem and the only way to change it is to get a new modem. When I had AT&T it could change at anytime.
Yeah back when there was that company that used to send threatening emails through ISP companies I used to get emails from my ISP claiming I downloaded various shows and movies I had never seen. It was a completely pointless farce and fraud.
I checked this from a phone who's provider NATs IPV4.
People be wild on their mobile connections. I don't torrent on mobile only because the bandwidth will get me throttled, but god damn someone on my NAT has some filthy habits.
yeah at first I thought this was a prank and it just randomly shows you a lot of porn and movies and games and stuff (I mean who torrents porn?). Now I am not sure if other people on my ISP have bad taste / are dumb or a combination of both.
Indeed, not only I'm seeing somebody else's pretty mediocre taste, but I have no idea of my previous ips so can't check real accuracy.
However, what does impress me is that somebody downloaded multiple movies and games a day, with books and tailoring instructions thrown in. Dunno if the site counts seeding torrents too, but if not—someone is very busy just consuming all that.
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.
We should really stop calling copyright infringement 'piracy'. Piracy is a violent penal crime which results in a theft of property by the use of physical force / weapons. Accepting this label helps media conglomerates distort the public perception of the issue into their favor.
A german blogger likes to call it 'hold up murder downloads' (Raubmordkopie) to show the absurdity (the German word 'Raubkopie' literally translates to 'heist copy').
If you don’t want to use the term “piracy”, the best alternative I’ve heard is “bootlegging”. Credit for the idea goes to the author of https://daringfireball.net/, who suggested that term way back in 2009.
I "had a friend" with a Comcast (or maybe Cox) email address that was given to them when they started with their internet service, but didn't know about. They didn't use a VPN and downloaded thousands of movies and TV shows. Several years after signing up they logged into their account to update their auto-billing info, and it notified them that they had new emails at the email address they had no idea existed. They had literally thousands of these threatening sounding emails and called me in a panic, thinking they were going to have to pay several million dollars. But I calmed them down when told them that they had been getting these emails for several years and nothing else had happened.
Comcast had their personal information to include their home address, so they obviously could have snail-mailed them something or sent a process server if they were actually being sued, but they didn't. I figure that most individuals don't make enough money to make actual lawsuits worth it- what is the court going to do, garnish $10/month from someone flipping burgers?
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.
Changing the law takes a fair amount of time, and it would unlikely be retroactive. Not to mention that if everyone is doing it (and it doesn't go against the Charter), good luck legislating against it.
Historically, predatory behaviour by media companies in Canada has been pretty badly received by both major parties, which is how we ended up with notice-and-notice, where the emails have a long intro about "this is just a notice and you don't have to do anything".
I don't encourage piracy, but it's probably the kind of thing that most people do occasionally, while also being 'good' paying consumers.
p.s. oddly enough, I get these emails sometimes from Teksavvy, but not from Bell.
They can't make something retroactively illegal, but piracy is already illegal. They'd just be retroactively making it harder to get away with. Much like how we've used forensic evidence to put people in jail years later, even if our forensic techniques didn't exist yet at the time of the crime.
Well if they actually decide to sue the customer, and get a court order, they could force the ISP to identify them. But that's way more trouble than it's worth in most cases.
And safe harbor laws mean that as long as the ISP is adhering to the notice-and-notice policies, they can't be directly sued for infringement.
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.
I agree, but it's not a legal requirement, it's just how things usually work. Here's a counter example: http://www.assnat.qc.ca/en/travaux-parlementaires/projets-lo... - tl;dr: Quebec abolished the statute of limitations for sex/child abuse crimes. Shortly after the law was passed, a group of priests were arrested.
(it took a while to pass the law, and was a multi-party, multi-year process)
A BitTorrent client uploads data to other peers who want the data blocks you have already downloaded (even while you're still in the process of downloading the content, depending on the peers in the swarm around that time). I think it'd be difficult to argue technically that you were just downloading and not uploading when using BitTorrent. If you leave the torrent running after the download completes, you're seeding (uploading) to any other user's client that connects to yours and asks for blocks from your client.
That is incorrect. Neither uploading nor downloading is strictly speaking forbidden. Only once it's been fully downloaded does it become illegal. Though a judge will likely defend the spirit of the law over the letter, making you guilty anyway.
The issue why uploading is even more dangerous is because then the urheber can demand damages for lost sales as well.
Don't take it on the light shoulder in Germany. Torrentung without a VPN can quickly get super expensive here
I believe it was Comcast who was performing payload injection (possibly over https with cert fuckery) a few years ago to display warning overlays that you've been caught torrenting.
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:
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.
It's harder, perhaps, but not impossible, and would certainly still hold up in court. When tracking a user behind CGNAT you need to capture not just their source IP, but also their source port. If you have timestamp, source IP and source port, that's enough for the ISP to resolve it back to the subscriber.
Never knew this was a thing. Btw, it's appalling to see more and more companies these days are doing everything they can to keep employees working as much time as possible, while paying the smallest amount of money possible. They do everything: Provide breakfast, lunch and dinner, videogames, massage service, you name it.
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.
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.
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.
Alternately, a seedbox or seebox-like service like Put.io.
My ISP actually prohibits P2P transfers, so whatever you're downloading, if you want to use torrents, it's the only way to go without getting nasty emails.
Yes - but in my case I'm happy to comply. My ISP is a locally-owned small-business that operates a WISP. They're genuinely nice people, pick up on the 1st ring when there's an issue and provide great support.
If they say that P2P transfers on their network cause congestion and degradation, I believe them, and I'm happy to find alternatives.
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?
Two things for your last comment - in reverse order:
- Usenet is likely the "best" option because it's super niche due to it's age. Only a certain subset of people even know it exists, much less use it, and the effort to track down anything except the most popular stuff is just too expensive.
- I think file sharing in general started to die off because streaming services actually provided a good alternative for a while. Right now, they are basically online cable companies though, and I feel like a new re-surgance of file sharing is likely coming as a backlash. As the prices go up, the fragmentation explodes and items come and go as contracts, consolidation and new launches affect availability, people will be frustrated and look for alternatives, legal or not.
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.
I remember in college I used to be able to download as far back as my Usenet provider's retention allowed in most cases. Shortly after graduating, I couldn't download anything that my auto-downloader (SickBeard back then) didn't pick up unless it was really niche. That aligns with your 7-8 year estimate.
I've not run into anything that I wanted to watch which isn't available on Usenet. DMCA takedowns haven't been an issue at all because I use two Usenet servers with multiple aggregated indexers. If something gets taken down, it gets replaced very quickly and the tools I use automatically retry in the event of failure. The other benefit is I can saturate my bandwidth instantly instead of the dreaded kb/s trickle that torrents start out as / become. After making a request for a TV show in Ombi, I will usually have the episode show up in my Plex list within a few minutes. Most movies are there in less than ten minutes. I haven't tried torrenting in a good while, but my Usenet experience has been dramatically better than what I experienced with P2P.
Usenet is still a good option for 5+ year old videos. I've noticed I'm getting 10+ years retention lately and some of the files that were missing started working again. However, there are services that you pay for that cache popular torrents and also provide premium file hosts leeches for the stuff that is missing on Usenet.
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.
This is really interesting and gives me a new respect for Signal for thinking about it.
After considering the options it seems Apple made a reasonable default assumption but in the case of sites that reveal information about me it is a bit frustrating. An option would be nice but, :Apple:.
Their blog is pretty interesting about a lot of things like this. There's a lot of Good Thinking™ through Signal.
And some super weird stuff like relying on Intel SGX for contact info... that they don't need to store, and don't let you opt out of. I basically trust them to actually do what they say they're doing, but I don't see the point of needing that trust in the first place (and there's no way to validate that it's happening, so it could change in the future and no user could tell).
This feature is a “very good thing” so you can’t force someone to disclose their whereabouts to you by sending them a link to the server you control.
If you don’t want to send people your own info in the thumbnail, don’t send them thumbs of URLs that display your own info to you in image or title text when generating the preview on your device.
I just checked a few links sent back and forth between me and another iMessage friend, both from within Messages.app on my Mac, and the synced Messages app on my iPhone. I don't see any IPs being displayed at the end of URL strings when I copy and paste the link from the generated previews. My friend would have definitely only ever sent links from their iPhone, but often I would send mine from the Mac.
The IP leaks through the name of the page on the URL preview. https://iknowwhatyoudownload.com redirects to https://iknowwhatyoudownload.com/en/peer/ which includes the IP of the sender. The name of the page includes the IP address of the sender. "Torrent downloads and distributions for IP 0.0.0.0". If you paste the URL in a sentence with a period at the end this preview may not be generated.
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.
That does not appear to be how iMessage works. I just tried this and my IP did appear on the receiving end. Since I edited the URL in the actual message it is possible the preview was cached from the original redirect.
Either way it is infuriating that iMessage does not show you what it is actually going to send.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
I used to do that (Demonoid...) but gotten lazy over the years. If something is rare and I really want it, I don't mind paying 15-20$ for it on Amazon Video/iTunes.
Only thing I don't like is they don't let me download it, and I haven't found ways to download them otherwise.
The baseline I can get for $10-30 worth of my time as effort put into piracy is a reasonably encoded `*.mkv` with subs, chapters, multiple audio streams.
It's just a far far better experience from a user perspective than anything that's commercially available these days.
> 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!
To be clear: you're presumably not paying for redundancy there (which you usually are with cloud providers), so you're trading price for an increased risk of data loss, which may or may not matter to you.
> 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!
Since you mentioned you're using Whatbox in another comment, why not simply use Plex to catalog and stream the files?
Because I haven't heard about it before this comment? I am taking a look now, it looks interesting.
I usually like to download the whole files anyway and keep them on my external big drive to make sure I have them when a movie stops being popular and becomes harder to find on torrents.
Also, I have an external projector that can play movies from a USB and having the full file available for me to copy onto the USB in few minutes is very useful for my use case.
If you want to use Plex you will need something to run the player on (the library and server would live in your seedbox).
Years ago people used to build PCs for that (HTPCs). These days you can get 4K HDR with the Plex player running on a smart TV or one of those set-top-boxes (Nvidia Shield TV, Apple TV, etc). It's like your own private Netflix.
> the software has a bad config and skips the VPN and uses your actual connection
Just stuff it into a separate network namespace. It's easy to do with firejail, but can also be done manually (firejail automatically configures the IP address, the routing table, and so on.)
$ cat /etc/firejail/qbittorrent.local
net enp3s0
ip 192.168.100.201
dns 1.1.1.1 1.0.0.1
I have a dedicated 25$ tiny baby router (https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01FJ4S9JK/) configured for VPN one-time. I just disconnect from my main router and connect to it whenever I need VPN. Its pretty fool-proof and easier than setting each OS/software individually and undoing it each time.
Countries like Iran/Cuba/NK do not have any trade with the US. Its impossible to get the content legally. Seedbox paid for with BTC would allow them to download what they like without the government knowing it. These are not "lost" sales.
Even Saudi Arabia, despite having ties with the US, doesn't allow the sale of so much US content (e.g. ideological books, NC17/adult movies), and bans VPNs. For citizens there, Seedboxes are the only way to get hold of that content. These are not lost sales either.
Someone with a family and many kids who like movies can't and will not spend hundreds of dollars a month on movies/music to satisfy their entertainment desires when they have other things to worry about like putting food on the table. If they don't pirate it, they won't buy it. At best its a single lost sale, out of the dozens they download each month and make their kids happy despite the other difficulties they have in life. These are not lost sales either.
Software pricing isn't adjusted for local income levels. Something that costs 100$ means 10 hours at most of work in the US. In other countries, 100$ can be 2-4 weeks worth of salary in the "3rd world" countries (is that term still allowed ?). No one is gonna pay for Windows/Office/Photoshop in those countries anyway. If they can't pirate it, they would use the open source ones. No one will accept to double-triple the price of their new desktop computer because of software when they've already spent many month-year to have enough money to ask the shop around the corner to assemble them a desktop with Walmart-level specs. These are not lost sales either.
Fragmentation. If you want all the content, you need to have Netflix, Disney+, HBO, YouTube Premium, iTunes AND physical media from Amazon (do you even have a DVD/Blu-ray player ?). The hope that Netflix becomes a one-stop-shop vanished a long time ago. Netflix is only good if you like them to dictate what you'll watch. If you want the same content as torrents offer, for a movie that you'll watch one time, you might end up having to pay hundreds of dollars per month in subscriptions only to have one movie/series from each channel per month and not use the rest of what the distribution channel offers.
The music industry got its s*t together and iTunes/Amazon Music/Google Music/Spotify all offer all the music in the world for a small monthly subscription and there is no need for piracy. The movie/TV industry on the other hand is just moving in the opposite direction making it harder and harder to have a single useful subscription. Each content owner wants to put their own hands in the consumer's pocket.
The list goes on and on.
Now, you're right. A good amount of those who pirate content can afford it, but without those being involved, the rest who can't obtain the content legally wouldn't be able to get into the party.
Its a very complex question, but keep in mind that piracy existed since the very first days of software and music and these companies survived just fine.
For the cinema industry its more complex, but at the end of the day most people who visit the cinema do so because of the experience rather than to just watch a movie. No one is gonna say no to going out with their friends to watch a movie because they can get the DVD rip for free from a torrent, or refuse to sit with their family and watch a new episode of a TV show on their cable because their pirated it the night before.
You have to broaden your vision my friend and look at piracy from more angles than just the 30 yo male adult making 100k/year who pirates movies instead of paying for Netflix.
The "US" servers are actually in Canada. I use them and the performance for streaming is slightly better. Although I wouldn't really be worried either way as I don't use public torrent sites.
Thanks for posting about this. I hear about seed boxes, but never thought it was affordable to rent one. One question: after downloading the files, how easy is it to get them back on a home computer?
1) Open Whatbox from Chrome, or any other browser on your home PC/Phone/Tablet. Its all HTTPS, your ISP can't know what you're doing. It is just like any regular website, not an "app" or anything at all special about it.
2) Find the torrent in the list of files.
3) Right-click on the file you like (e.g. the big .mp4 file) -> Download. Chrome will download it like any other file and save it anywhere you like.
4) Profit!
If there is a large number of files (e.g. full TV season), use an FTP client. Instead of right click -> Download on a file, do right click -> Download on the entire folder, or drag drop to where you like it on your PC. Can also work just as fine on any FTP client for Android/iPhone.
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.
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...
A better description would be “I know what people that happened to share your current IP address downloaded on BitTorrent”. Given that providers either implement dynamic addressing (unless the user pays for a static address) or NAT, it’s not accurate at all.
Maybe, it's a mobile IP so I'm pretty sure it changes regularly. I know I can force it to change by turning airplane mode on and off. I've avoided IP bans this way.
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?
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.
Given FBI's history of turning imagined non-crimes into press-releasable criminal cases (eg: agency hand-crafted terror plots, CFAA violations), one could easily wind up with two bad guys to deal with.
Well, well, well. But how did YOU know it was child porn? File names don't count, as there have always been malware, and junk, and even law enforcement traps on peer-to-peer networks. You seem to have some experience to distinguish the real deal. Why don't you have a seat?
It's a joke, but nothing protects you from being officially asked that.
The state of moral panic in which everyone is supposed to agree that “protecting the children” is a wild card which only complete deplorables dare to question resulted in what has been predicted decades ago. All around the world, governments and corporations have lobbied censorship infrastructure for themselves in the name of the children. It's written right there in the laws, as if straight from Four Horsemen of Infocalypse Wikipedia article. In addition to that, Internet is subject to semi-legal de facto “agreements” based on ever-reaching US laws. It's because of these agreements between dealers on the shady side of the net (and their connections elsewhere) you don't see child porn advertised just as often as regular porn. A lot of people wouldn't hesitate to make lots of money on the hottest topic.
That's something they have in common with other professionals. Murder (of a person of any age) results in a couple of regular news flashes, some mentions on roller captions, and that's it. However, add sex (or sex with children!), and you'll have a media goldmine. And, of course, there will be some politicians proclaiming it's the right time to ban encryption. But they can do it only because everyone react the way they react.
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.
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.
> 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).
If your mobile uses a dynamic IP the pool will be shared by others. In my country at least, Logs of client details to DHCP assigned IPs is Legally required.
Private torrents do not show up because I know what you download relies on DHT broadcasts.
This website shows a good 40 downloads from my IP, and I don't recognize a single one. I have torrented some files recently, but they're not in the list. And so far I've never used a VPN, it's unnecessary where I live.
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!
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.
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.
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...
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 . . .
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.
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.
Yeah, i used to be massively into piracy. now i use spotify and netflix.
I still pirate the odd thing because while it's completely worth it to pay $10/mo (or whatever it is now) for netflix, i'm not about to pay the same just to watch a single show on some other streaming service, or go through the hassle of figuring out what new service i have to sign up for or if it's even available in my country or on my roku.
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!
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.
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 :(
I remember switching from XDCC to bittorrent when it first came out. There was a very short period where XDCC bots would have .torrent files on them.
Back then bit torrent was exclusively fansubs (anime) and the bit torrent client didn't have an upload limit, so it was painfully slow on the average connection.
Because at the time bit torrent didn't have any retention, and you could use a service like xdcc spy or xdcc finder to find old content similar to pirate bay today, I was somewhat of a skeptic of bit torrent then for this reason.
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?
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.
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.
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.
> in countries where IP address = person that rents it.
Does that actually exist today? At least IPv4 addresses I would expect to increasingly mean nothing, as address exhaustion drives more people behind CGNAT.
Even with dynamic IPs (Not NAT in this case) it's not a problem as ISPs in most countries have to keep a record who used the IP at which point in time.
CGNAT means multiple people are using each IP address at every point in time. To disambiguate customers the ISP would need to log every connection, which is a huge amount of data to keep track of and only useful if you have not only the IP addresses and timestamps but also the peers' port numbers.
I know people complain (fairly!) about comcast a lot, but some things they've consistently gotten right are stable IPs even if you don't pay for an explicit static address, and pushing v6 VERY hard.
There are still plenty of places where this can apply, though. Any organization that owns an AS is susceptible to this especially. Consider universities, which might own one, where each IP corresponds to a student. Universities also just happen to be a hotbed of torrent traffic.
Without incontrovertible proof that these lists are not just "connections" but "engaged in true data exchange with us, in which we verified that the data they sent us was indeed part of the torrent in question", I'm having a harder time seeing that.
Connecting to a torrent is in itself not illegal (if it were, legal torrents such as that used for software delivery would be impossible).
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
And you're pretty much in the clear. Not perfect, but pretty much.
When you open a .torrent file or magnet link the client connects to a set of trackers (or DHT, a distributed tracker network) and receives a list of peers to connect to. This site just repeats that process for a bunch of different torrents and collates the resulting data. Of course, dynamic IP addresses are a thing—and the trackers can (and do) lie about which IP addresses are part of a swarm. If you see something that you didn't actually download it could be because your IP address was shared with another customer recently or it could simply be a tracker "poisoning the well" by mixing in random IPs.
I'm surprised it worked even on 'private' torrents I had. I had some misguided thoughts that they were a bit more secure as you needed a specific torrent downloaded that tied you to the torrent. I see now that it's just an authentication thing on top of the public interface.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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/
There are people with abusive and stupid partners who wouldn't be able to get this information without doing more work or paying money.
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.
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?).
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 to generate a short URL that lets you get the downloads for someone's IP address.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
> how can someone trust a VPN not to sell the details
you can't. but, you could use 2 nested vpn services, which would help if you can know that the 2 aren't affiliated with each other ... which you can't know.
i mean, it's hilarious that VPN services suggest privacy as one of their selling features. lol.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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 :(
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
> 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?
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
One thing I've dabbled with[1] is using pfSense to set up a VM with a management 'interface' that only routes to my local network and drops any packets not on the web UI port[2], and an Internet 'interface' that pfSense routes over a VPN (I can't remember if I ended up actually using two separate interfaces, or a set of firewall rules to allow the LAN traffic access). AFAICT, it seemed to work reasonably for the brief period I used it - the VM could only see the pfSense gateway, and all of the Internet traffic from the VM went over the VPN, whilst the traffic from the rest of my network was unaffected, but I could access a few services locally on a 10.x.x.x IP (different subnet to my main network).
[1] Actually to setup a Pi-Hole instance that bypassed my ISP's DNS hijacking, but the principle seems similar
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.
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).
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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?
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.
I just checked from my (government) building’s connection and, well...someone has been downloading some Lovecraftian horror movies. Not what I expected.
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.
On the contrary. It is extremely easy to know the IP addresses of all downloading. This is a major problem in PeerTube as well, as you can know what videos someone watch. I'm not up-to-date with this, but last I checked, this was still unsolved.
you should forget whatever you read and start over :)
The purpose of it is exactly to help you find other peers with the same content. It's a bunch of peer finding protocols on top of each other. Trackers, DHT, peer xchange, etc, etc
I mean, the data itself is all hashes, but very public hashes. Unless you hashed it yourself and shared only the hash ever, the reverse hash is a websearch away.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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?
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.