I Know What You Download on BitTorrent

880 750 6 years ago

duxup3• 6 years ago

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

UncleEntity• 6 years ago

Had to try it, surprisingly zero porn?!?

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

duxup3• 6 years ago

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

I too was surprised.

A lot of TV shows.

onychomys• 6 years ago

My current VPN endpoint has a dude who downloaded an unfortunate number of things about Adolph Hitler. :(

dt3ft• 6 years ago

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

easterncalculus11• 6 years ago

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.

yjftsjthsd-h• 6 years ago

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.

xxpor2• 6 years ago

The US has very little CGNAT outside of mobile networks and small rural ISPs

dewey2• 6 years ago

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.

dewey2• 6 years ago

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.

duxup3• 6 years ago

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

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

https://arstechnica.com/tag/prenda-law/

m0xte2• 6 years ago

Had one of those in the UK. Ignored it.

jliptzin3• 6 years ago

Uh oh, I rent out a vacation house on Airbnb, I am terrified to look up what the guests have been downloading on my account...

TheRealPomax5• 6 years ago

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).

fsflover2• 6 years ago

This is why I am only using torrents in I2P.

jokowueu• 6 years ago

How slow is it ?

fsflover2• 6 years ago

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

grawprog2• 6 years ago

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...

easterncalculus11• 6 years ago

Has your IP address changed recently? I definitely didn't want to post this under the implication that it is always 100% accurate.

grawprog2• 6 years ago

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.

lone-commenter2• 6 years ago

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.

timdorr• 6 years ago

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

willcipriano• 6 years ago

Drop a dime: https://www.fbi.gov/tips

MattGaiser• 6 years ago

Child porn on my VPN connection too.

easterncalculus11• 6 years ago

Always report it. Worst case scenario there's proof that you didn't do it that can be found, and it's the right thing to do.

ogurechny• 6 years ago

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.

gloryless• 6 years ago

Funny, Hannah and twilight zone in my building too. Wouldn't surprise me if they have some titles sprinkled through where they have no content

LordOfWolves• 6 years ago

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

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

easterncalculus11• 6 years ago

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).

Jsharm• 6 years ago

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

sailingparrot• 6 years ago

You don't have a fixed IP.

electricviolet• 6 years ago

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

Santosh83• 6 years ago

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.

Tepix2• 6 years ago

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.

easterncalculus11• 6 years ago

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.

andrewstuart2• 6 years ago

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.

ivanovb• 6 years ago

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

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

ktm5j2• 6 years ago

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.

Sohcahtoa823• 6 years ago

Yup.

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.

wil4213• 6 years ago

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.

lucisferre• 6 years ago

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.

monocasa• 6 years ago

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.

alias_neo• 6 years ago

Someone sharing mine really enjoys some BBC "documentaries" on mobile, and I don't mean the broadcasting corporation.

nroets• 6 years ago

I'm on LTE. The carrier grade NAT implementation of my ISP may use a different public IP address for each TCP connection I make.

The webserver of my bank sees it as a hack and will then log me out.

Fortunately my ISP also has an APN when I'm allocated my own IP.

pier253• 6 years ago

I don't know but I imagine ISPs keep a record of which IPs they have assigned to which modems, no?

Jolter• 6 years ago

Most do. In some jurisdictions they are legally required to.

chrismorgan• 6 years ago

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.

aasasd• 6 years ago

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.

reportgunner2• 6 years ago

Perhaps it was a whole family:

- games for parent 1

- movies for kids

- tailoring instruction for parent 2

steve_adams_86• 6 years ago

Likewise, this says I downloaded 3 movies I've never heard of.

clashmeifyoucan• 6 years ago

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.

dreen• 6 years ago

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

mito882• 6 years ago

Me too

splatcollision• 6 years ago

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

glxxyz• 6 years ago

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

loufe• 6 years ago

It was worth the VPN investment I guess.

cerberusss• 6 years ago

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 :(

tstrimple2• 6 years ago

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.

atourgates2• 6 years ago

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.

rozab• 6 years ago

What about, say, Windows updates?

leetcrew• 6 years ago

wouldn't a VPN also work? it should just look like a single encrypted stream to the ISP.

SV_BubbleTime2• 6 years ago

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

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

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

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

ViViDboarder• 6 years ago

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.

techntoke• 6 years ago

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.

LocalPCGuy• 6 years ago

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.

iso8859-1• 6 years ago

Why would something stop being popular just because it is old (aka 'mature')? What a weird argument.

'Best' is subjective, often the network effect wins and people will keep using something that is 'good enough'.

Usenet archives go back 10 years. How are you going to start a Usenet competitor with 10 years worth of content?

tstrimple2• 6 years ago

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.

loeg4• 6 years ago

Only the past couple? I thought it was more or less overwhelmed by DMCA bots as early as maybe 7-8 years ago.

TheRealPomax5• 6 years ago

How can you tell if someone uses on usenet? Ask them what a par files are.

loeg4• 6 years ago

I learned of par2 from usenet but I continue to use it for FEC on my local backups.

dingaling• 6 years ago

Laughs in Usenet

The rise in pirate binary groups is what killed Usenet feeds on most ISPs.

I used to be a great follower of text groups but it became more and more difficult to find a feed and the overall signal:noise ratio faded.

Eventually I gave up. Thanks for nothing, you folks who want to watch other people's content for free.

Cyph0n• 6 years ago

I don’t get this argument at all. Are you saying that the rise of online forums and then social media had absolutely nothing to do with it?

SenoraRaton• 6 years ago

Less?! I have had little to no problem finding even niche media on the internet...

jayrwren• 6 years ago

haha, no you don't.

thiscatis• 6 years ago

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

jiggunjer3• 6 years ago

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

jiggunjer3• 6 years ago

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

goda90• 6 years ago

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

Tepix2• 6 years ago

In Kuwait a normal 4G contract includes 1TB of monthly traffic and people use it to watch Netflix on their 4K TVs.

AdmiralAsshat• 6 years ago

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.

Lammy2• 6 years ago

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

mey• 6 years ago

How does BitTorrent handle Carrier level NATs with IPv4?

the8472• 6 years ago

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?

vmception• 6 years ago

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

notRobot• 6 years ago

Submission from six months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22102806

easterncalculus11• 6 years ago

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.

veganbeef• 6 years ago

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

tekstar5• 6 years ago

That's the colour of visited links.

Lammy2• 6 years ago

<tr class="danger">?

easterncalculus11• 6 years ago

There are different shades of red, too. Some of the porn entries are illegal, and rightfully are listed as such.

mulmen7• 6 years ago

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

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

giantrobot• 6 years ago

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.

mulmen7• 6 years ago

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.

kalium-xyz2• 6 years ago

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

Terretta• 6 years ago

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.

mulmen7• 6 years ago

I don't believe iOS gives me an option to control that. iMessage parses any URL you paste and send. I'll double check the settings though.

e: apparently this can be accomplished by putting periods before and after the link or pasting the link in a sentence.

First quack: https://osxdaily.com/2018/08/02/disable-url-link-previews-me...

Still need to test the behavior.

Groxx3• 6 years ago

Signal has a fairly detailed strategy for previews, as they're quite privacy sensitive: https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/360022474332-Li...

And a (small, but has a few links) blog post about it: https://signal.org/blog/i-link-therefore-i-am/

mulmen7• 6 years ago

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:.

mindfulhack2• 6 years ago

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.

How exactly do you find these leaked IPs?

mulmen7• 6 years ago

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.

ltbarcly3• 6 years ago

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

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

SV_BubbleTime2• 6 years ago

For reference that is not a fool proof model.

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

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

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

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

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

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

larntz3• 6 years ago

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

stordoff• 6 years ago

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

[2] And DNS in this case

noxer• 6 years ago

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.

Pxtl2• 6 years ago

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

WarOnPrivacy4• 6 years ago

Same here. I torrented a doz distros but only one logged. Nothing I'm seeding shows up.

My dynamic IP can go a year w/o changing. I have to re-spoof my MAC when I want a new one.

tekstar5• 6 years ago

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

zingermc• 6 years ago

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?).

tekstar5• 6 years ago

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

partiallypro• 6 years ago

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

hombre_fatal4• 6 years ago

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.

larntz3• 6 years ago

Is this true?

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

Canada• 6 years ago

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

easterncalculus11• 6 years ago

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.

ip_addr• 6 years ago

How does this site work? Do they just join popular torrent swarms and log the ips?

Pxtl2• 6 years ago

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.

carstenhag2• 6 years ago

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

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

sbarre2• 6 years ago

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

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

so yeah, don't pirate stuff...

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

AnonC3• 6 years ago

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.

4111111111111112• 6 years ago

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

Andrew_nenakhov• 6 years ago

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.

Sebb7672• 6 years ago

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').

roryokane• 6 years ago

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.

parsimo2010• 6 years ago

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?

jliptzin3• 6 years ago

That means the notices aren't even worth the amount it would cost to snail mail.

mtgp1000• 6 years ago

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.

That was egregious.

jermier• 6 years ago

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

https://www.eff.org/de/deeplinks/2011/08/why-ip-addresses-al...

https://www.securityweek.com/eff-warns-police-courts-about-u...

samcrawford• 6 years ago

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.

pathseeker2• 6 years ago

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.

m0xte2• 6 years ago

Regretting that static IP now :)

ravenstine• 6 years ago

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.

easterncalculus11• 6 years ago

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.

101008• 6 years ago

It matched my downloads 100%. Wow.

ghostwriter91512• 6 years ago

doesn't work for me ..

ghostwriter91512• 6 years ago

not working

adolfojp• 6 years ago

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

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

janandonly• 6 years ago

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

toyg• 6 years ago

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

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

pretzel_boss• 6 years ago

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

Macha3• 6 years ago

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.

flak483• 6 years ago

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.

Macha3• 6 years ago

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".

megablast2• 6 years ago

And our company (80,000+) showed us the finale live from the US. Paid for of course.

einpoklum• 6 years ago

You mean:

"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".

deadalus• 6 years ago

seedr.cc, bitport.io or zbigz.com exist to solve this problem and would have saved him his job.

ceejayoz• 6 years ago

Or... just don't use work resources to torrent, period.

_tbyy2• 6 years ago

Seriously. The idea that it's just fine to pirate everything because you can or have the tech to do it is appalling to see in this community.

fernandotakai2• 6 years ago

i'm a put.io customer and i swear by them. absolutely great service.

pmarreck• 6 years ago

bitport is awesome, can vouch

air7• 6 years ago

how do such services escape the clutches of DMCA? I assume they're used for pirating content.

thomastjeffery• 6 years ago

He may have already weighed his internship as less valuable than the cost of using such a service.

_tbyy2• 6 years ago

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

Bjartr• 6 years ago

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

katbyte• 6 years ago

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.

alextheparrot3• 6 years ago

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.

whitexn--g28h• 6 years ago

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.

_jal• 6 years ago

If everyone treated piracy as theft (it is)

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.

brutal_chaos_• 6 years ago

as theft (it is)

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!

matheusmoreira2• 6 years ago

"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.

neop1x• 6 years ago

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).

tekstar5• 6 years ago

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.

cutemonster4• 6 years ago

This customer service rep, how was otherwise his work performance / output? How was he like to work with?

lioeters• 6 years ago

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.

technick• 6 years ago

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.

elygre• 6 years ago

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...

icedchai4• 6 years ago

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.

sevenf0ur• 6 years ago

Game of Thrones was the most pirated TV show in history. I remember when the first 4 episodes of season 5 were leaked at once. Christmas came early!

bootlooped• 6 years ago

But it was a devil's bargain: you would then have to wait multiple weeks for the 5th episode.

srg0• 6 years ago

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.

akerro• 6 years ago

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.

necovek2• 6 years ago

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.

Dirlewanger• 6 years ago

Yup. Entirely HBO's fault too. I don't know why they didn't offer HBO GO with a paid subscription. Missed out on so many sales.

jjice3• 6 years ago

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.

NullPrefix• 6 years ago

Depends, was it a paid internship?

kohtatsu2• 6 years ago

DigitalOcean bills per hour.

TallGuyShort• 6 years ago

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).

djsumdog2• 6 years ago

This was what a seedbox is. You can get seedboxes really cheap (usually under 15euro/month).

megablast2• 6 years ago

Yeah, interns have so much money.

krzyk• 6 years ago

One needs to remember to cover their tracks :)

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.

kart23• 6 years ago

You never know what type of logging is set up though. You can log others users commands too, making use histories irrelevant.

debacle• 6 years ago

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.

Symbiote2• 6 years ago

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

[1] http://torrent.unix-ag.uni-kl.de/stats.html?info_hash=8dcb18... (but mine would have been in 2007 or so).

tinus_hn5• 6 years ago

How are they supposed to know what you’re torrenting?

sixothree2• 6 years ago

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.

lostlogin2• 6 years ago

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.

RyJones• 6 years ago

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.

Wistar4• 6 years ago

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.

userbinator2• 6 years ago

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...

ThePhysicist• 6 years ago

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.

Reelin2• 6 years ago

I don't understand what's wrong with port scanning or broadcasting to your own infrastructure that you pay for?

sho• 6 years ago

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.

sixothree2• 6 years ago

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.

SkyBelow3• 6 years ago

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.

flak483• 6 years ago

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.

joe4633692• 6 years ago

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.

GoblinSlayer3• 6 years ago

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.

ComodoHacker• 6 years ago

Somehow I can only see one this comment of 252 in this thread.

pronoiac• 6 years ago

I had the same issue, emailed the moderators using the "Contact" link in the footer, and got a response quickly. Recommended.

alafazam• 6 years ago

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..

djsumdog2• 6 years ago

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).

minhazm• 6 years ago

You'd think they would just pay for their own droplet in that scenario. Digital Ocean runs promo's all the time with free credits too.

pbhjpbhj4• 6 years ago

I thought DO blocked torrenting, or perhaps officially disallows it?

mr_toad2• 6 years ago

None of the large cloud providers will let you do this. You’d need to rent a box on a service that turns a blind eye to this sort of activity.

ThePowerOfFuet• 6 years ago

So did you sack him?

flak483• 6 years ago

Yep, since he didn't seem to care if our Digital Ocean account would get suspended.

jnsaff2• 6 years ago

http://bash.org/?258908

dri_ft• 6 years ago

I thought of this exactly.

ben174• 6 years ago

Hey that's me :)

sbierwagen2• 6 years ago

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.

Waterluvian2• 6 years ago

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.

zzzeek• 6 years ago

"Someday, and that day may never come, I will call upon you to do a service for me."

- your company's IT guy

teekert• 6 years ago

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.

stiray3• 6 years ago

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:

https://torrentfreak.com/wrongfully-accused-pirate-wins-4420...

Macha3• 6 years ago

Apparently not.

scott_paul• 6 years ago

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

8K832d7tNmiQ• 6 years ago

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

gonzo41• 6 years ago

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!

wincy• 6 years ago

It has things I didn’t download.

quickthrowman2• 6 years ago

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

ColanR• 6 years ago

cries in demonoid

quickthrowman2• 6 years ago

The destruction of what.cd was similarly terrible.

proverbialbunny3• 6 years ago

Yah me too.

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.

Keyframe• 6 years ago

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

sn_master10• 6 years ago

I've been using a Seedbox since December 2014.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

demadog• 6 years ago

Which seed box?

sn_master10• 6 years ago

Whatbox. The 15/month plan I have is the legacy one, but the new plans are only very slightly more expensive (22$) and have more storage and speed.

chimeracoder• 6 years ago

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.

sn_master10• 6 years ago

I understand. I have a paid Dropbox and GDrive accounts which I use for important data.

Having a 2 TB storage that I can use to share whatever I want with others or even across my devices is pretty useful for those cases.

I have downloaded data there since I created my account that still is safe and available after almost 5 years.

pier253• 6 years ago

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?

sn_master10• 6 years ago

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.

AnonC3• 6 years ago

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.

sn_master10• 6 years ago

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.

blaser-waffle• 6 years ago

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.

tracker12• 6 years ago

Or, you can do both. ;-)

balls1872• 6 years ago

Curious why pay $15/mo for a seedbox just to securely pirate content.

No judgement, just curiosity.

sn_master10• 6 years ago

Some reasons (not necessarily applying to me):

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.

throwaway8941• 6 years ago

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

sn_master10• 6 years ago

I am not that good with networks :)

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.

powersnail• 6 years ago

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

flatiron• 6 years ago

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

Stierlitz2• 6 years ago

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

Haaaarrrr

skipants• 6 years ago

That "Track Downloads" feature seems highly unethical.

jchw• 6 years ago

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.)

areactnativedev• 6 years ago

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.

simion3142• 6 years ago

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.

pbhjpbhj4• 6 years ago

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

simion3142• 6 years ago

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.

kodt• 6 years ago

Guess they don't know about private trackers.

jlengrand2• 6 years ago

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

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

Orochikaku• 6 years ago

As Gabe Newell once said,

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

jlengrand2• 6 years ago

That is a very fitting quote indeed.

ConsiderCrying• 6 years ago

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.

notatoad2• 6 years ago

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.

shiado• 6 years ago

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

https://iknowwhatyoudownload.com/en/peer/?ip=204.68.207.14

Stierlitz2• 6 years ago

“Executive Office Of The President"

Haaaarrr!

lasagnaphil• 6 years ago

There's also one porn entry:

https://iknowwhatyoudownload.com/en/peer/?ip=204.68.207.18

crazygringo• 6 years ago

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.

TheRealPomax5• 6 years ago

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.

bserge• 6 years ago

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

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

mb720• 6 years ago

Funny it categorizes Big Buck Bunny as XXX.

AnonC3• 6 years ago

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

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

jwilk• 6 years ago

And January 2020: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22102806

d332• 6 years ago

This part is outright creepy:

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

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

1: http://mafiaa.org/

martindbp• 6 years ago

Is that acronym deliberate? "Are we the baddies"?

notatoad2• 6 years ago

Very deliberate.

The MPAA and RIAA don't actually call themselves the MAFIAA. that's not an official website.

TheRealPomax5• 6 years ago

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).

d332• 6 years ago

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.

albertshin• 6 years ago

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

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

sli• 6 years ago

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

Exuma• 6 years ago

I like connecting through a VPN and then refreshing the page

paulie_a• 6 years ago

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.

nottorp2• 6 years ago

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

And I have such eclectic tastes.

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

koheripbal2• 6 years ago

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

odd.

dijksterhuis2• 6 years ago

Yeah I found that odd as well.

rootsudo2• 6 years ago

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.

postit• 6 years ago

There’s a business in Germany entirely dedicated to this and to send letters to people’s residence.

virtue3• 6 years ago

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.

angry_octet2• 6 years ago

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

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

rootsudo2• 6 years ago

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.

nybble416• 6 years ago

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.

rohan10242• 6 years ago

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

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

salusinarduis• 6 years ago

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.

rohan10242• 6 years ago

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

reedwolf• 6 years ago

...last summer.

Reason077• 6 years ago

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:MyContributions

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

easterncalculus11• 6 years ago

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

cooper12• 6 years ago

Also supports subnet notation, so you could add /24 to the end of the URL for example.

PopeRigby• 6 years ago

Interesting. If I use ProtonVPN, one of the Australian IPs is blocked globally.

davedx• 6 years ago

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!

dependenttypes• 6 years ago

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

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

RandomWorker• 6 years ago

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.

fidelramos• 6 years ago

No you don't. :)

Scoundreller2• 6 years ago

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

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

mr-ron• 6 years ago

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

rusk• 6 years ago

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

yupyup54133• 6 years ago

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).

AvailableMe• 6 years ago

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.

mdoms• 6 years ago

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

easterncalculus11• 6 years ago

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

DumbUser123• 6 years ago

weird

dfraser992• 6 years ago

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.

EastSmith• 6 years ago

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

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

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

ficklepickle• 6 years ago

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

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

metalliqaz• 6 years ago

s/you/yourIpAddress/

IP addresses are not people

Madzen__• 6 years ago

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

coddle-hark• 6 years ago

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

Kubuxu• 6 years ago

I can only see one comment for some reason?

loeg4• 6 years ago

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).

manishsharan• 6 years ago

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

kinghajj• 6 years ago

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?

curiousgal• 6 years ago

I also ran into he same issue! First HN bug I've come across in years.

joan_kode• 6 years ago

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.

dariosalvi78• 6 years ago

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

rglover• 6 years ago

VPN is working :)

aftergibson• 6 years ago

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

Sohcahtoa823• 6 years ago

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

And this site says I don't have anything.

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

lucb1e3• 6 years ago

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.

VivaCascadia• 6 years ago

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

Groxx3• 6 years ago

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

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

stiray3• 6 years ago

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.

benhurmarcel• 6 years ago

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.

Not very reliable.

netsharc• 6 years ago

Your ISP is certainly using CGNAT, or maybe IPv6, so multiple subscribers look to be using 1 IPv4.

Bnshsysjab3• 6 years ago

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.

tomxor• 6 years ago

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).

stiray3• 6 years ago

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

j45• 6 years ago

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

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

lucb1e3• 6 years ago

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

techstrategist• 6 years ago

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.

lucb1e3• 6 years ago

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.

skocznymroczny• 6 years ago

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.

pampa• 6 years ago

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

jeroenhd• 6 years ago

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!

ballenf2• 6 years ago

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

LeoPanthera• 6 years ago

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.

p1necone2• 6 years ago

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?

gcbw34• 6 years ago

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.

p1necone2• 6 years ago

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.

m0zg• 6 years ago

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

codezero2• 6 years ago

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.

WarOnPrivacy4• 6 years ago

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

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

codezero2• 6 years ago

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.

gcbw34• 6 years ago

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

peterbmarks• 6 years ago

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

gcbw34• 6 years ago

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.

cactus2093• 6 years ago

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.

dkarp• 6 years ago

The point of the protocol is to distribute data efficiently. It has nothing to do with privacy. Maybe you’re thinking of Tor?

MarcellusDrum• 6 years ago

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.

thug_life• 6 years ago

lol....no you don't

nickfromseattle• 6 years ago

- Was 26

- Moved into company apartment

- Torrented stuff

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

- Hear CEO talking to lawyers (open office)

- 99% sure it was me

- Come clean to CEO

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

oxguy32• 6 years ago

What happened next? Did they punish you?

quickthrower2• 6 years ago

Explain the lawsuit?

jandrese• 6 years ago

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.

sbierwagen2• 6 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prenda_Law

phendrenad2• 6 years ago

- company apartment

I guess there's a reason company generally aren't allowed to provide housing in many countries. Some things should just be separate...

rafaelvasco• 6 years ago

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.

TheKarateKid• 6 years ago

Come clean to CEO

Talk about integrity. I'd give you a raise after this if you were my employee.

A4ET8a8uTh0• 6 years ago

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

fiatjaf• 6 years ago

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

Idered• 6 years ago

Thanks for recommendations

WarOnPrivacy4• 6 years ago

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

I'm totally outed.

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

hijef• 6 years ago

nothing

nice :sunglasses:

gandalfian• 6 years ago

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.

mcs_• 6 years ago

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

phyzome• 6 years ago

Mostly for Linux ISOs. :-)

swayvil• 6 years ago

Piracy benefits us all.

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

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

alexhaber• 6 years ago

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

Disable DHT in the torrent client settings.

Bnshsysjab3• 6 years ago

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

qes• 6 years ago

I Know What You Download on BitTorrent

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

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

quicklime• 6 years ago

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.

chemmail• 6 years ago

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

Polylactic_acid• 6 years ago

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.

microcolonel• 6 years ago

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.

cosmodisk• 6 years ago

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.

zoost2• 6 years ago

Completely innacurate information.

zoost2• 6 years ago

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

Benjamin_Dobell2• 6 years ago

Is this supposed to be a hoax?

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

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

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

Does seem extraordinarily unlikely though.

gtirloni• 6 years ago

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

Benjamin_Dobell2• 6 years ago

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!

mirimir• 6 years ago

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

dom96• 6 years ago

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?

Sebb7672• 6 years ago

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.

jiveturkey• 6 years ago

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.

hnick• 6 years ago

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

amanzi• 6 years ago

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

CGamesPlay• 6 years ago

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...

balls1872• 6 years ago

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

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

Needless to say, we never received another complaint.

mindfulhack2• 6 years ago

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.

freetime2• 6 years ago

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

kanox• 6 years ago

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

pfranz• 6 years ago

It seems correct for me. A bunch of Linux ISOs. It is missing some I've been seeding from http://academictorrents.com/

Others mentioned having an ISP level NAT. Could that be it?

everfree• 6 years ago

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

nitwit005• 6 years ago

If you read the paragraph at the top, it lists other "similar" IPs. It's not strictly accurate.

thyrsus• 6 years ago

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

vxNsr• 6 years ago

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

cjohansson• 6 years ago

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

throwaway_pdp09• 6 years ago

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.

cikibirki69• 6 years ago

The info on my IP is not correct lmao

techiefreak21• 6 years ago

just check it out mine then :P

pfdietz• 6 years ago

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

HeavyStorm• 6 years ago

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

kaetemi• 6 years ago

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

kabacha• 6 years ago

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

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

iwasakabukiman• 6 years ago

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

rekabis• 6 years ago

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.

mito882• 6 years ago

Does this really work?

Not seeing any torrents of mine.

I Know What You Download on BitTorrent

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