Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

I Know What You Download on BitTorrent

iknowwhatyoudownload.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

581–590 of 786 posts

Re: I Know What You Download on BitTorrent

#581

Post by caf »

jimmydorry wrote: post #475
TallGuyShort wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

As far as I recall, $20 wouldn't even get you a single GoT episode in Australia. As a consequence, Australia had one of the highest piracy rates on GoT / HBO shows.

If you were willing to wait until the month that the final episode aired, you could watch every episode for $15 (by subscribing to Foxtel Go for that month, then cancelling).

Re: I Know What You Download on BitTorrent

#582

Post by jiggunjer »

Hyperborian wrote: post #453
tinus_hn wrote: post #429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No but all they see is parts identified by hashes. How are they supposed to know whether is a Linux distro or a movie?

Because, quite frankly, parts identified by hashes is not all they see. If you're monitoring and logging the traffic then it's trivial to not only determine the filename of a bittorrent download, but also everything you need to connect to the torrent yourself and download it to verify that it's what the filename says, if that's what you wish to do. And, personally, I'd expect someone to at least check the filename be…

Clients can obfuscate traffic though?

Re: I Know What You Download on BitTorrent

#583

Post by j79 »

lioeters wrote: post #467
tekstar wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 su…

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.

> "What were they thinking?"

There were sites that tracked ratio which required maintaining a certain ratio to continue to be a member. Some members, however, took pride in having a ratio that skewed uploads over downloads.

I personally know people who paid for T1s just to maintain their "rep" of having the highest upload ratio. Not saying this is the case, but having access to a T1 back in the day was almost a way to "boost" their rep on these sites.

Re: I Know What You Download on BitTorrent

#584

Post by suyula »

rhino369 wrote: post #414
brutal_chaos_ wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 ha…

There isn't much of a difference between digital media and "services." We'd all agree it would a dick move if I walked out of barbershop without paying, even if the barber didn't have any other available customers at the time.

If I used my haircut-robot to create a strand-for-strand identical hairstyle as the one you paid your barber for, is that me stealing from your barber?

Re: I Know What You Download on BitTorrent

#585

Post by the_af »

AlexCoventry wrote: post #560
toxik wrote: post #441

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GoT season 8 is something that happened to me, not something I enjoyed. Like a bully ruining your sand castle after a long day at the beach.

I stopped when they resuscitated Jon Snow. That was blatant pandering, and it was clearly going to be downhill from there.

I don't know if that was a joke, but Jon Snow is pretty clearly going to resuscitate in the books as well -- the exact way may not follow the TV show in detail, but it will in essence -- because he is important in GoT prophecy. I don't see this as pandering, any more than Gandalf surviving Moria is.

You could argue that season 8 was rushed, that some battles made no sense, that they botched the Night's King, or that Daenerys' character development was ruined by the abruptness -- though I think this too will play out similarly in the books -- but Jon Snow's resurrection was neither pandering nor the fault of HBO.

Re: I Know What You Download on BitTorrent

#586

Post by the_af »

sixothree wrote: post #328
sho wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 .

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 c…

More importantly, if you downloaded some episodes, barring an act of god that destroys your house and the equipment within, you know you will get to enjoy those episodes at the time of your own choosing and with the best quality, no streaming issues or glitches. With HBO, who knows? I still remember they were unable to cope with the load for some of Game of Thrones episodes.

Re: I Know What You Download on BitTorrent

#587

Post by ben509 »

jiggunjer wrote: post #582
Hyperborian wrote: post #453

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because, quite frankly, parts identified by hashes is not all they see. If you're monitoring and logging the traffic then it's trivial to not only determine the filename of a bittorrent download, but also everything you need to connect to the torrent yourself and download it to verify that it's what the filename says, if that's what you wish to do. And, personally, I'd expect someone to at least check the filename be…

Clients can obfuscate traffic though?

How much can they obfuscate it if other clients need to be able to download it?

Re: I Know What You Download on BitTorrent

#589

Post by megablast »

Macha wrote: post #97
flak48 wrote: post #89

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…

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".

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

Re: I Know What You Download on BitTorrent

#590

Post by gloryless »

grawprog wrote: post #7

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...

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
Post reply on HN