Alleged founder of world’s largest BitTorrent distribution site arrested • Hacker News Board

Re: Alleged founder of world’s largest BitTorrent distribution site arrested

#71

Post by pablovidal85 » Thu, Jul 21, 2016, 12:45 AM UTC

supergreg wrote: post #45

scrollaway wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Distributed discovery is possible, but you quickly run into spam/noise problems. Centralized communities generally have features such as curation and deduplication (duplication is bad for torrents, as it causes peers to be spread across multiple slightly-different packages of files, reducing the available peers for both). It's not a technical problem, it's a social one.

In a blockchain-based system, proof of work could give users points so they could spend them to show their trust on a file (or maybe transfer them to whoever they trust so they can release files with a number of points from the start). For the duplication problem, solve it like IPFS does, the file's hash is it's Uri so a duplicate would just point to the same resource. Actually, people could build KAT-like sites enti…

Proof of work burns money and I guess users won't pay for some content's reputation score, there are no incentives to do it other than altruism. POW-based currencies work well because you can exchange the points for stuff or services, not because you can spend them within the system (proof of stack does exactly this indeed and its long-term reliability has been questioned many times).

Re: Alleged founder of world’s largest BitTorrent distribution site arrested

#72

Post by ceejayoz » Thu, Jul 21, 2016, 12:46 AM UTC

chj wrote: post #43

ceejayoz wrote: post #9

> It also shows that Apple handed over personal details of Vaulin after the investigator cross-referenced an IP-address used for an iTunes transaction with an IP-address that was used to login to KAT’s Facebook account. I find it darkly ironic that a legal purchase of music helped them catch the guy.

Does that mean that Apple basically feeds every transaction information to Feds so that they can find this match?

Unlikely.

KAT apparently had a Facebook page, so step one was serving Facebook with a search warrant demanding the list of IP addresses used to administrate that page.

They likely then went to major companies like Apple, Google, etc. with search warrants for any billing activity (valuable as it comes with a cardholder name and address, usually) matching those IP addresses.

Re: Alleged founder of world’s largest BitTorrent distribution site arrested

#73

Post by derefr » Thu, Jul 21, 2016, 12:47 AM UTC

GadgetJax wrote: post #56

cocotino wrote: post #15

Wow, this sucks, I love KAT, what now? TPB is rubbish.

Whip out that credit card and start buying stuff instead? Who cares if you don't use it much, it's all relative. I like buying CDs and Bluray, then I rip them for everyday use. But its nice to have something tangible to back it up. Plus its all legal and protected, since I don't rebroadcast any of the content, just private enjoyment.

Two instances where this isn't practical:

• "Abandonware" — IP held by a company that wants to just sit on it and never release it again, and probably forgets it exists. Probably the company that produced the IP was acquired and shut down by the company currently holding it. It's nearly impossible to find a physical copy of most of this kind of stuff. I'm not a collector; I don't want to pay $1000 for the only surviving copy of some old book or NES cartridge or whatever. (Or, rather, I would, but only as part of a group-buy with the goal of giving the thing to a digital archivist who will properly preserve it and publish the results to everyone.)

• "Isolationism-ware" – IP that only legally exists in some particular markets. Usually meaning "some Asian country, and no English-speaking countries." To acquire such, I'd—at the easiest—have to convince the iTunes Store that I have a credit card with an address in that country; for the more indie stuff, I'd have to find someone physically in the country willing to go be my proxy, searching used book-stores/record-stores for the item and then sending it to me. Either way, I'd then have to work pretty hard to consume the thing, given that I don't fully understand the languages involved. Translated release groups handle all these steps. (I wouldn't mind if I could donate money to them in a way that would in turn give money to the original IP owner; I've just never heard of such a setup.)

Re: Alleged founder of world’s largest BitTorrent distribution site arrested

#74

Post by ekianjo » Thu, Jul 21, 2016, 12:49 AM UTC

derefr wrote: post #19

It seems like a lot of the most well-known pseudo-legal BitTorrent "groups" (PopcornTime, YIFY, ISOHunt, now Kat) turn out to be one-man shops, and as such, just completely dissolve as soon as their owner crosses paths with law enforcement. In some cases, these services are integral enough to the "scene" to be brought back by others. But other times, everything just stops for a while. This seems like a bus-factor pro…

> Meanwhile, there's no single country that could shut down e.g. Wikipedia.

You don't have to shut it down, you can simply prevent access to it, like in China. Problem solved, if that's something you considered a problem in the first place.

Re: Alleged founder of world’s largest BitTorrent distribution site arrested

#75

Post by aerovistae » Thu, Jul 21, 2016, 12:50 AM UTC

drcross wrote: post #25

akavel wrote: post #14

ArsTechnica seems to have the most detailed and best linked (PDF + DoJ press release) article as of now: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/07/kickasstorrents-a... Somewhat more/complementary details seem to be available on: https://torrentfreak.com/feds-seize-kickasstorrents-domains-... — e.g. regarding methods: [...] The complaint further reveals that the feds posed as an advertiser, which revealed a bank acco…

Should have used bitcoin :(

Wouldn't help much once the bitcoin is exchanged for another currency, thus linking the bitcoin address to his personal information if the authorities compel the exchange to provide the info.

Re: Alleged founder of world’s largest BitTorrent distribution site arrested

#76

Post by ac29 » Thu, Jul 21, 2016, 12:50 AM UTC

GadgetJax wrote: post #56

cocotino wrote: post #15

Wow, this sucks, I love KAT, what now? TPB is rubbish.

Whip out that credit card and start buying stuff instead? Who cares if you don't use it much, it's all relative. I like buying CDs and Bluray, then I rip them for everyday use. But its nice to have something tangible to back it up. Plus its all legal and protected, since I don't rebroadcast any of the content, just private enjoyment.

Ripping Blurays isn't legal in the US, though I doubt anyone has ever been prosecuted for it if the resulting files aren't shared.

Re: Alleged founder of world’s largest BitTorrent distribution site arrested

#77

Post by cynix » Thu, Jul 21, 2016, 12:51 AM UTC

mason55 wrote: post #60

kayman wrote: post #5

The cat and mouse game continues. Remember The Pirate Bay? Why don't studios have their own similar sites where they allow free torrents of some shows and offer paid torrents. As a busy person, I'd much rather pay for something which guarantees: - high quality - no subtitles - no buffering issues - no viruses - click and play

You can do all of those things on iTunes or Amazon Video. Why would the movie studios run their own content distribution when it gives them little competitive advantage.

The video quality of iTunes or Amazon content are much, much lower than torrents though, due to more aggressive compression.

Re: Alleged founder of world’s largest BitTorrent distribution site arrested

#78

Post by ac29 » Thu, Jul 21, 2016, 12:52 AM UTC

dsacco wrote: post #54

derefr wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It feels like you could factor off the trust requirements into a much smaller kernel, though. For example, you could operate (your instance of) your pseudo-legal service yourself, but open-source the codebase (sticking it on GitHub even) and accept patches from anyone. You could also implement a simple replication architecture for your service, where at any time one node (yours) is considered to be the 'canonical mas…

You just described what.cd. What.cd open sourced Gazelle, the source code for the website and tracker. The core development team accepts pull requests, but they are themselves insulated from the owner and operator of what.cd. Since opening Gazelle, many other private trackers have adopted it.

Yes, the code is open, but the state of the what.cd tracker and website is not. If they were taken down, the service would cease to exist.

Re: Alleged founder of world’s largest BitTorrent distribution site arrested

#79

Post by joering2 » Thu, Jul 21, 2016, 12:53 AM UTC

tn13 wrote: post #6

CaptSpify wrote: post #3

As an American, I wish we would stop doing this. It isn't effective, and it's a waste of time/resources that could be better spent elsewhere. I'd even argue that its counter-effective to progress. Instead of punishing people for making more efficient systems, we should reward them, and try to integrate.

Well, Americans have been saying that about drug war, civil forfeiture, surveillance and many others things for a long long time.

... and its important to say, as experience shows, at this point its sadly irrelevant what average americans say.

while OP is right -- this doesn't seem to serve majority, the truth is that the system is rigged and this supposed to serve a few multinational corporations that feel their profits are severely cut due to copyright infringement, meanwhile posting record earnings.

it is still mind-boggling to me that this non-US human being doing allegedly non-violent crime will probably end up serving 25 years in american prison (wire fraud is a magic word in LE indictments) for a bunch of bits being configured the way to organize in magnet links that sharing of - as far as I know, similarly to URLs, had been found in courts around the world as a non-infringing act.

Re: Alleged founder of world’s largest BitTorrent distribution site arrested

#80

Post by dmix » Thu, Jul 21, 2016, 12:55 AM UTC

Another black market business opportunity brought to you via fed money. DOJ, FBI, polish police, etc, etc all spent tax money on this takedown. All working so the next guy can make a website and make $16 million / year. And it only takes one guy to run the site apparently.

Who knows maybe the next guy will use Tor, Bitcoin, read Grugq's blog and be 5x as expensive to hunt down. Thanks US tax payers!