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I Know What You Downloaded on BitTorrent…

torrentfreak.com

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Re: I Know What You Downloaded on BitTorrent…

#41

Post by acangiano »

rickmb wrote: post #39
acangiano wrote: post #14

Interesting removal terms. They pretty much force you to admit that you downloaded, whatever they say you downloaded in order to have your data removed. Immediately after having confirmed your real identity via Facebook, of course. They could sell this information to MPAA and RIAA for gold. The Details: By submitting a request to have your download activity removed from our database, you are acknowledging that the ac…

> They could sell this information to MPAA and RIAA for gold. Maybe in the US, but in many other countries they would be breaking several privacy laws. In fact, even the collecting the initial minimal information (IP's + downloads) already breaks privacy laws in most of Europe. Commercially, this information has no value.

They are an American company.

Re: I Know What You Downloaded on BitTorrent…

#42

Post by nutjob123 »

I download around 2-3 torrents a week normally using public trackers and this site says "Hi. We have no records on you.". Another note, I use peerblock while downloading not really because I believe in the protection but because its interesting to see the names of organizations which care what i'm doing. Perhaps its actually doing something.

Re: I Know What You Downloaded on BitTorrent…

#43

Post by DanBC »

SonicSoul wrote: post #30
jrockway wrote: post #6

I don't use BitTorrent very often (because I have incoming connections for that torrent in my router's state table for years after I do so), but there were a few things I wanted to download today so I just spun up an EC2 instance, installed Transmission, and did it from there. A 38GiB Blu-Ray image took about two hours. The next time I want to do this, I'll have a completely new IP address. Is this a terrible idea?

any ideas why, transmission on a mac is crawling with the same torrent that's lightning fast on vuze via windows? i've tried a few torrents using trasmission, and they would either crawl or not DL at all.. Vuze seems to be more and more intrusive (in fact some malware detectors continually report malicious activity coming from vuze), but somehow they figured out how to make torrents fly.. it's not uncommon for me to…

Check you haven't got the Speed Limit on; then make sure the slow torrent is set to ignore any speed limits; then check how many peers it can share with (default is 60); then check ports are okay.

Re: I Know What You Downloaded on BitTorrent…

#45

Post by soult »

gillianseed wrote: post #32
beloch wrote: post #5

They claim they can track 20% of the public torrents people download, and I suspect it's a very specific 20% corresponding to certain trackers and certain torrent clients. I wonder what they are.

There's no way for any torrent client to hide itself since all this site needs to do is to have a program join the swarm of all torrents it can find and log all the ip's of the peers in that swarm, it doesn't matter what torrent client you use. However if it's a closed tracker and they do not have access they can't join the swarm and log the ip's. I'd assume that at this point they are only logging ip's on open track…

Private trackers are a lot more difficult. I bet it would raise some eyebrows if a user on a private tracker were to suddenly announce all torrents. On public trackers they can just use multiple IPs, on DHT they are trackers themselves and don't even need to ask others, but on private trackers their crawler will have a hard time getting many accounts to hide its activity.

Re: I Know What You Downloaded on BitTorrent…

#46

Post by lotu »

acangiano wrote: post #41
rickmb wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They could sell this information to MPAA and RIAA for gold. Maybe in the US, but in many other countries they would be breaking several privacy laws. In fact, even the collecting the initial minimal information (IP's + downloads) already breaks privacy laws in most of Europe. Commercially, this information has no value.

They are an American company.

Thought the site said Russian.

Re: I Know What You Downloaded on BitTorrent…

#47

Post by lotu »

rhizome wrote: post #40
cjfont wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think they mean that they can't stop someone who may have already scraped that info before you requested the delete.

Were they ever asked to do so?

Some people might, and this is making it clear that they can't fulfill that request.

Re: I Know What You Downloaded on BitTorrent…

#48

Post by deno »

gillianseed wrote: post #32
beloch wrote: post #5

They claim they can track 20% of the public torrents people download, and I suspect it's a very specific 20% corresponding to certain trackers and certain torrent clients. I wonder what they are.

There's no way for any torrent client to hide itself since all this site needs to do is to have a program join the swarm of all torrents it can find and log all the ip's of the peers in that swarm, it doesn't matter what torrent client you use. However if it's a closed tracker and they do not have access they can't join the swarm and log the ip's. I'd assume that at this point they are only logging ip's on open track…

As long as the connections are direct. If even a small part of Torrent users would use something like OneSwarm, it would provide enough plausible deniability to make this data automatically useless.

Re: I Know What You Downloaded on BitTorrent…

#49

Post by rhizome »

lotu wrote: post #47
rhizome wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Were they ever asked to do so?

Some people might, and this is making it clear that they can't fulfill that request.

What do you mean? I'm quoting their statement, and regardless it's irrelevant towards their ability to delete user data that they actually possess.

Re: I Know What You Downloaded on BitTorrent…

#50

Post by lotu »

rickmb wrote: post #39
acangiano wrote: post #14

Interesting removal terms. They pretty much force you to admit that you downloaded, whatever they say you downloaded in order to have your data removed. Immediately after having confirmed your real identity via Facebook, of course. They could sell this information to MPAA and RIAA for gold. The Details: By submitting a request to have your download activity removed from our database, you are acknowledging that the ac…

> They could sell this information to MPAA and RIAA for gold. Maybe in the US, but in many other countries they would be breaking several privacy laws. In fact, even the collecting the initial minimal information (IP's + downloads) already breaks privacy laws in most of Europe. Commercially, this information has no value.

The lack of seriousness on the site greatly compromises the value of the data. As a captcha they they ask you enter the entire text of the USA Constitution, and give a mailing address in Antarctica. There is no evidence that large portions of the data isn't made up, no sane company would want to touch this. The agreement above sound more like an attempt to prevent people from contacting them in the first place (probably as they have to remove data manually), than a prelude to extortion.
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