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http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~tpc/Papers/P2PSecComm2012.pdf

Link to 18-page scientific article by University of Birmingham. This is the actual meat behind the BBC article.

Not an alarmist paper, just boring work with Bittorrent download progress bitmap monitoring.

Some juicy bits on their usage of Tor, from the paper:

"we created our own indirect monitoring client that gathers newly-published torrent files from the Top 100 in each category on The Pirate Bay, and continually contacts each of the trackers and stores (IP address, port number, infohash, time) tuples from the peer lists that are returned; it then attempts to establish a TCP connection with each host and sends a handshake message to ensure that the host is in fact a BitTorrent peer. [..] We collected data from July 21–28, 2009, routing our traffic through the Tor anonymity network."




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