Researchers Expose Locations of Pirate Bay Uploaders

http://torrentfreak.com/researchers-expose-location-of-pirate-bay-uploaders-120831/

by llambda • 14 years ago

35 21 14 years ago

jaytaylor• 14 years ago

If this information can be gathered by researchers who have no special access, just think what law enforcement agencies could be doing. What a scary world we live in.

What hope is there for being able to exchange massive amounts of data in an anonymous fashion?

vibrunazo• 14 years ago

Why is it hard to use random open wifis? Walking around my neighborhood there are at least 5 open wifis in my block. With google fiber, high speed, open public wifi will only get more common.

moe• 14 years ago

Why is it hard to use random open wifis?

Because of the "walking around" part.

graue• 14 years ago

Where do you live? In the two major US cities where I've lived, I consistently find that wireless networks are passworded, don't work, or just show a paywall.

In 2005 I could find random apartment-dwellers with open wifi, but things have changed. Even cafes use passwords to make sure you bought something there.

acabal• 14 years ago

This is going to become less and less common, if only because routers/modems distributed by ISP's typically are passworded by default now. In Germany (where I'm staying) it's almost impossible to find an open wifi network anywhere, despite having 20 to choose from at any point in town.

I'm pretty scared for anonymity on the internet in the next decade. Even with just email, you can take total precautions on your own end: host your own mail server, always use SSL, and so on, but if your emails aren't PGP encrypted (and let's face it, PGP is too hard to comprehend for mere mortals, which is who you'll be communicating with most of the time), there's always going to be a copy of your communications on the recipient's mail server: Google, Hotmail, etc.

Never before in history has a complete and total record of all of your mail ever sent in your entire life been available for government snooping. But that's the reality today--all the government has to do is ask your email provider--or one of your contact's email providers--nicely.

batista4• 14 years ago

>Why is it hard to use random open wifis? Walking around my neighborhood there are at least 5 open wifis in my block. With google fiber, high speed, open public wifi will only get more common.

If you are in the US (and in some other countries), you know it's illegal, right?

btbuilder• 14 years ago

Freenet perhaps?

mistercow• 14 years ago

People are acting like this is surprising news. I guess people don't actually understand how BitTorrent works, which is troubling. When you connect to a peer on BT, you have to be told its IP address (or that of a proxy, and most users obviously aren't using them) in order to connect to it. You can easily then run a reverse IP lookup on that address and usually find out the ISP.

Matching that to the initial seeder should be pretty trivial so long as you get to the torrent quickly enough after it was first seeded so you can see who the only person with 100% is. Even if you can't get to it before there are a handful of seeders, you should be able to narrow it down by looking for the common IP among several torrents.

piffey• 14 years ago

Many clients let you look at the seeder list and show geoip data. Been doing this with rtorrent for ages. I'm with you... how's this news?

benologist• 14 years ago

Mapping ip addresses to ISPs is somehow HN-worthy when it's wrapped in torrentfreak's propaganda? These articles should be used as a honeypot to identify people who might prefer getting their tech news at reddit because that's where torrentfreak and its fans belong.

fromhet• 14 years ago

Yeah! Reddit sucks! r/programming is filled with doo-doo-heads!

rockyleal• 14 years ago

I used to go to slashdot for news, but i like HN better now. What sites do you recommend?

Researchers Expose Locations of Pirate Bay Uploaders

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