Here is the interesting thing - India never had the concept of static IPs for residential home Internet. You have to pay a premium to get one, request for one with reasoning and has to be "for commercial."
So, all of our neighbors shares IPs or are within a range. It is fun knowing what all of my neighbors and the a few blocks away are all downloading.
This made me remember one anecdote written in one of the books about how Amazon became what it is today (it could be "The everything store", but I'm not sure.)
If my memory serves me well, the book mentions that, for a while, Amazon had "the most read books in your zip code", until someone realized some corporations were so large a zip code was basically just them. So that became "the most read books at Intel's research department", and the entire thing was scrapped.
In the UK, it’s not uncommon for a large building to have its own postcode. It’s quite useful because in most densely populated areas, you can use the postcode alone to navigate to within a hundred metres of your destination.
>Yes, but I’d bet your ISP is required by law to store what IP was given to which customer at any given time for a certain period.
In that sense, it’s just as bad privacy wise,
If the gp you're replying to is talking about CG-NAT[1] (which is common in
India), the privacy leak is not the same.
With CG-NAT, a hundred homes simultaneously share the same public-facing IP address at the same time. That's different from Verizon or Comcast in the USA where each house has a different temporary public ip address rotating from a pool of ip addresses.
My outside IP address in Missouri hasn't changed in at least five years. No matter how many times I try to get it to release and renew, I always get the same address. So I'd say that's pretty static...
I noticed that I kept getting the same IP address after reboots and even extended (tens of minutes) of the router being switched off.
A couple of years later my house was raided by the police.
I don't know if the two are related though, but within a couple of months after the raid my IP address changed for the first time since I noticed it being "static". Likely to be pure coincidence, but after that particular experience there are all sorts of different things that could be "putting two and two together"-type paranoia.
It's back to being reliably static at the moment... brb, someone at the door ;)
They took about $10k worth of my home lab gear. After eight months I was told I could go collect it back after they found nothing.
It was pretty traumatic. I still need to write down the complete summary. I've got about 50 pages of notes.
Knowing I was innocent was a certain comfort, but I really didn't know if there were going to be other motivations to manufacture something. Thankfully that didn't happen.
This is the kind of thing where a home server being hacked could be used as a proxy/dumping/holding spot with the homeowner not even knowing… until that knock. Proving you didn’t know on your own svr.. prob impossible.
That's horrible and ridiculous, did you ever find out how they pinned this on you? I've heard of people in Europe running Tor exit nodes getting raided.
Just getting raided for something like that, or accused without evidence, is enough to destroy a person's life.
No. Other than receiving a minimal by mail notification about picking up my stuff, there's been no further communication.
At the time of the raid, and when I rang the lead investigator (roughly once a month) to get a status update and ask a couple of questions, the only answer I ever got was that the IP address of my household was flagged a number of times over the course of a few years.
Similarly to this "I know what you download" site listing something I definitely haven't downloaded, it makes me very skeptical of the thoroughness of both the Police's source information and their ability to understand what it actually means (and therefore any ability to apply logical reasoning to implications of it - such as it's potential fallibility).
All information I've received has been because I asked questions. Nothing was given voluntarily.
Upon asking "whether this was over", the lead Investigator gave me the impression I was still a suspicious character because:
- I had "tor" on one of my computers
- I had visited and downloaded things from Mega (apparently frequently used for such materials)
- I had virtual machines.
This is the Police's level of understanding of technology. It's scary, it's sad, and it's disappointing, and I fucking hope I never get caught in their web of incompetence ever again.
I actually viscerally feel like I'm still under some amount of surveillance. But that might be just standard background paranoia (refer: Slartibartfast).
I actually viscerally feel like I'm still under some amount of surveillance.
I'm not a lawyer, but my business is networking hardware and monitoring software. My company has worked with law-enforcement in the past, so take this with a grain of salt…
My opinion is that you are still absolutely under a cloud of suspicion, and I would not rule out the possibility that there is a flag on your ISP account, police are continuing to actively monitor your traffic, and hopefully you don't have to undergo a background check anytime soon because it will probably come up.
I suggest you speak to a lawyer, maybe even send a freedom of information request to the police department, and to the FBI for your file, and a direct question if you are currently under investigation.
My guess is that they will lie and say no, but at least you have it in writing for someone else. You might get a Glomar which is the same as a yes. Either way you will have some insight.
I started a new job about a month after the raid (unrelated, the previous contract expired around that time) and had to do a police check which is partially normal just for getting a job and partially because I'm working adjacent to sensitive PII. Nothing sus there.
But, after 12 months I had to re-do a police check, and I thought that was normal for the industry, but one of my co-workers who started around the same time as me didn't have to re-do any police check.
Maybe nothing, but maybe there is a little bit of a stain that just will not come out.
We have attempted follow ups with the police ombudsman and local politicians regarding this, but there's little recourse unless it's police misconduct as opposed to "the system is shit". Beyond that it becomes expensive and time consuming and I really, honesty, truly do not want this to consume me or become my life's purpose.
I'm still planning on pursuing various other (limited) avenues, but I'm at a point in my life where personal free time is at a minimum due to the age of my family, so the pursuit of this is a backlog item.
(the effect on my family is also a strong motivating factor - side note: the police appeared to have absolutely zero expectation that there were children in the house; there was an almost panicked reaction from the officer who woke up my kids when they went into their rooms)
Funny thing: I don't like talking about this, but I need to, to keep it fresh as a reminder, but it also makes me angry again. But I'm not someone who wants to live in denial of reality.
AUSTRALIA. That's a completely different animal, incredible country, but your justice system is/may be a little more fair than America. I wish you luck!
I don't have to reboot my router or modem. I just have an a script that changes the MAC and releases and renews or rather gets an IP address via DHCP. My ISP is slow at handing out an IP address out as it takes several minutes, but it is automated. When the same operation is done for an IP on the LAN, it is a second or or two to get a new IP address.
I figure the main reason to get a new IP address is so that web sites can't track one by IP. If carrier grade NAT is used, then is there a point in changing one's IP?
If one does not use any peer to peer, then it seems that carrier grade NAT should lower the cost of one's internet service and that should be preferred. If one needs anonymity for bittorrent or other peer to peer, then shouldn't a VPN or i2p be used? I got the impression that i2p might be slow.
> India never had the concept of static IPs for residential home Internet.
I’m not sure about your experience, but I was always allocated a dedicated public IP (not static though) between 2009-2013 when on the mobile networks of two different ISPs. I even remember being able to host public websites off of them, from my phone.
This might have been true in the age of modems and two hours of internet access per day, but not any more.
Most people have exactly one device directly connected to the internet (their router), and that router has hours of downtime per year at most. Most of that downtime (if there is any) is due to electricity outages, and so correlated with downtime of other consumers. When there are no outages, very few consumers can be left without an IP address. I'd expect the savings in IP space to be <1%, although I have no hard data here and might be missing something.
This doesn't apply to cellular carriers, there are plenty of subscribers who maintain their plans but disconnect often. This includes people living abroad (who normally use another country's SIM), or even people who turn off their work phones on weekends.
They won't admit it's static, but it is. I've had the same IP for three years since moving into this house. In that time, I've had power outages lasting for days, IP was still the same. I've replaced my router and the assigned IP didn't change. The only way it can change is if they replace their media converter "fiber jack" or you call or go to their store to ask them to change your IP.
My last 3 ISPs in the UK actually specify static IPv4 addresses as part of the service. My current one (IDnet) allows you to buy a block of 5 or so for a small monthly fee too.
In Slovakia one of the biggest networks used to use "almost static" public IPs for home clients, they were assigned by DHCP and cached for 24 hours, so in the few years we've used them our IP changed twice... but since then they switched home customers to IPv6 using DS-Lite so no public IPv4 anymore...
Not only am I getting a static IPv6 address, I configured the address myself from a random number generator and just request it. (Subject to the prefix I'm assigned, but still.) So really I'm being given a very large number of static addresses to do what I like with.
My UK based ISP provides static IPs by default (v4 & v6!). There's a few aiming at smaller niches that do.
We're relatively unique compared to a lot of countries though, where we have an infrastructure provider that serves basically the whole country with very good to tolerable internet (mostly) - Openreach.
Any ISP can sign up to use Openreach's network & a backhaul provider for providing services, and they usually get handover from their backhaul provider in London. Means we have a lot more small/niche ISPs that can still cover the entire country, and provide unique features - like static IPs or even blocks of static IPs.
There are alternative providers too (lots of 'alt-nets', and virgin media) - they're mostly not so open, though.
It used to be common in Estonia, these days I think it's slightly less so, but the price is in the ballpark of five bucks a month to have a static one. It has many good uses and is definitely not a waste if you need it.
It's a waste for the ISP when 99.9999% of users do not need a static IP address. When users turn off their routers they can reassign the addresses to other users. Not to mention the privacy issues of always using the same address.
Who turns off their router? An ISP needs as many IP addresses as they have customers so there's nothing to gain there. I think assigning a dynamic ip is just a way for ISPs to make people pay more to get a static ip.
Well then 99.9999% of the people don't really need it. But if one decides to run their own mail server at home (to save those 5-10-20 per month for their mailbox) it's worth the trade-off.
> Not to mention the privacy issues of always using the same address.
For me that's the thing. Privacy AND Security. Especially when you got something 'listening'/waiting.
That’s not really the same thing though because your ISP doesn’t gain a usable IP while you’re rebooting it.
The only way ISPs would, would be if their customers routinely turned their router off while they’re not using any electronic devices. But even the older generation I know (80+ years old, no “smart” devices apart from a Samsung tablet or a laptop, depending on the individual) don’t turn their routers off. It’s just not something people do.
In fact if anything, the kind of people who might want to are likely the same kind of people who would get scared to in case it broke something.
The only class of people I think who might, would be ultra tin foil hat paranoid people. And that’s certainly not going to be a large demographic.
So when was the last time you checked for patched-but-not-auto-applied vulnerabilities in your (almost certainly ISP-provided) router?
ISPs don't want things to randomly break for consumers, so are likely to avoid rolling out updates that could potentially go wrong, but all code has vulnerabilities, and this controls access to your internal network.
I think that's too much 9s if you consider everyone who would run a home minecraft server or some other small scale personal server if having a static publicly addressable IP was easy and simple.
In Denmark you can normally buy it for a small extra fee. My previous ISP didn't really understand the meaning of a static IP and announce that after having performed service in the area any customers with static IPs would get a new IP... making it specifically not static.
Most normal households don't get static IPs, but on the other hand they change very infrequently, so they are practically static.
The ISP that services our apartment building has static IPs available. Residential and commercial are just billing SLAs. The actual network equipment treats you exactly the same. It's not like they are rolling a separate fiber for ground floor commercial and residential services.
Same here. But for private trackers the traffic is basically “invisible” as the whole point of private trackers is to keep out snoopers and whatnot.
It’s kind of interesting how well these private, trust-based networks work. While there are some they get breached, based on my experience there are many that exist for decades and have thousands of strangers cooperating toward a common goal, in shared secret.
It gives me hope that humanity is largely “below the surface” of productive groups quietly meeting and doing stuff. And it’s not visible because they aren’t tweeting.
This gives me joy compared to the more visible alternative that the whole world is an idiot because idiots are constantly tweeting.
I've never thought about it this way but it makes a lot of sense. In a world where it looks like everyone is tweeting there are actually a lot of people not tweeting, you just don't hear about them because, well, they aren't tweeting!
I’m not sure the name of the fallacy, but there’s a common urge to assume what’s measurable is real. So in statistics you have to really design your sample well.
But frequently whatever is nearby can still be useful for selling ads or whatever so people get used to using it for everything.
Back in the olden days people would mock others who quoted a random twitterer who said “George Bush thinks xyz” but now that’s like half of all the news stories.
I too am seeing a bunch of downloads listed here, none of which are known to me. Either I've got some unauthorized use of my network or this data is invalid.
Clicking through on their site to the "IP List" for any of the entries it claims are associated with me, my address is not included there.
I have a static IP and all the torrents seen by iknowwhatyoudownload since October, 31 are definitely not mine. All the torrents before that day look familiar.
It seems legit for me and i've been on this static IP for 10 months and only downloaded some old NATGEO magazines that they're showing. I'd at least check no one is using your wireless, check the dates & see if someone is using a "free" VPN or something malicious?
I'm the only user on this internet connection, I am pretty restrictive with what I run, my Unifi controller shows no unexpected devices in the last month (and that covers the time window the site claims), and my librenms graphs of my router's interfaces don't show any traffic spikes at the times the site claims that a torrent client was last seen.
edit: and I've been the only user of this static IP for a decade at this point.
Approximately the same case here.
I'm thinking the dates are not completely precise.
Also the site shows announces and tracker requests, so there's no need for the whole stuff to have been downloaded. Requesting torrent info through a magnet link should land you on this page.
I share an IP with one person but the stuff showed (a dozen or so torrents) does not really check out: porn and genshin impact stuff (pretty common I guess), series in Korean and Russian, movies in Italian.
I live in France, and neighbouring IPs show a few movies or video games in French. I'll definitely double check my networks and Unifi controller for unexpected connection or torrenting. Parts of my network are less secured than others, but I pay close attention to the traffic...
Fyi as a Unifi user who recently implemented IPv6, be wary a number of the intrusion and detection alerts apparently do not work when IPv6 is enabled -- won't even detect unencrypted http requests.
They have a 'demo' command on their Help site to test it (that a bunch of people in the forum report doesn't work with v6, for years) might be worth double checking!
Looking around for some explanation and ending up on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrier-grade_NAT I can only assume your public IP is actually shared with your neighbors and it's not you, your wife or a hackerman downloading naughty films.
Trackers do poison the data, but if a lot is showing up, then I'd doubt you are the only user of the IP or that your network is secure. I do use torrents, but only private sites, and there are zero data on my IP. Lots and lots of data on all the neighbouring IPs.
Any source on trackers poisoning this data? I assume if that were common, requesting a few blocks from a provided IP address could let you know if they're really seeding that torrent.
Adding fake entries from certain IP ranges would be quite funny, and a good example of the data not being trustworthy.
That was my initial thinking, but there are no unknown devices connected to the router. What I suspect has happened is that I've been given a new IP some time within the last few days and the data on the site isn't exactly live.
There might also be something in how the data is collected and how Bittorrent works, so some else had this IP a few days back and there are still Bittorrent clients that are trying to connect and that might be what the site is seeing.
Bittorrent might also be much more popular than I expected, because almost every IP around mine seems to be torrenting something. But I think it's due to short leases on IPs because it seems unlikely to me that 8 out 10 is using Bittorrent.
It shows all the "free to air" (in country of origin) content I share, four or five torrents I don't and never have, and nothing else from any private tracker.
I don't download torrents but because I'm on a CG-NAT connection, I now know what kind of pr0n one of my neighbours is into. I could probably have done without that. :-|
Water is ubiquitous in the Atlantic Ocean but it's salty and full of fish poop. I drink water from my kitchen faucet because it's filtered and treated freshwater that is pristine and tasty.
There was a website (don't recall the URL) which matched Wikipedia edits against known IPs of corporate and political organizations. Would be interested in seeing a similar application but for torrents.
People don't generally torrent at work... I don't think you'd get anything.
Wikipedia was different, in that an organization had a vested interest in article content. But with torrents, organizations simply have a vested interest in not torrenting, since the content is frequently illegal.
Pretty sure they just block it in the first place usually (not necessarily trivial, but still frequently done).
I think it's more to do with companies harvesting IPs so that they can report them to ISPs later. This is pretty common on things like big new movie releases.
We have 11,210,350 torrents which where classified and which are using now for collecting peer sharing facts (up to 200.000.000 daily). We don't guarantee we can show ALL peer sharing facts:
User could download torrent which we don't have"
The other possibility is the user blocks the IP addresses that these folks are using. Thus the user never connects to them as a peer and never appears in the "peer sharing facts".
I'm behind CGNAT, so it shows a whole lot of stuff downloaded by other people who shares the same exit point as me. This makes it pretty useless for anyone in the same situation.
Shows weird results for the static IP address of my VPS.
So either I got pwned and somebody is using my server to download anime, or this doesn't work very well.
For me results are plausible. Some random videogames for my home dynamic IP, which could be downloaded by someone around me and no downloads for my VPS IP.
Shiit, i am using this from my phone and it seems like the previous user of my ip downloaded a lot of child pornografi. I dont know whats worst, the child porn or that someone would use something so easily trackable to access it
Feels like this is a perception/reality thing. This gives a perception of insights into use, but its highly qualified by what can be seen and why.
So it does show "these things exist" but it doesn't mean its complete, or statistically informing to relative amounts, or even that endpoints are always known because of things like CGNAT and TOR/vpn.
So interesting, but less informative than some would think.
Primary concern would be people in EU (and like) content regulation going "SEE SEE WE KNEW IT NEEDED POLICING" based on a flawed premise.
Turned on my VPN to see what other users of the same service/server use it for and out of the dozens of movies, games and occasional linux distros, theres two entries straight up labelled "child porn"..........
Not a warcraft fan but my coworker is. There's pirate servers, a few extensions behind the official game and in his experience a bit laggier but they work.
Having accidentally visited IKnowWhatYouDownload, I was surprised to discover that tons of porn, pirate games, movies and other garbage were allegedly downloaded from my IP every day. The hair stands on end. I have had a static IP always, I never don’t download torrents on this IP. But here is a WireMin messenger node running here that uses BT technology. Therefore, IKnowWhatYouDownload site generates false information, makes it possible to blackmail anyone with fake data, creates an atmosphere of fear around the BT technology.
IKnowWhatYouDownload has been operating for 7 years. Who's funding this shit, who makes a profit from the scam site? I think that maintaining its work requires some of money.
So, all of our neighbors shares IPs or are within a range. It is fun knowing what all of my neighbors and the a few blocks away are all downloading.