Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

54609 readers

585 users here now

⚓ Dedicated to the discussion of digital piracy, including ethical problems and legal advancements.

Rules • Full Version

1. Posts must be related to the discussion of digital piracy

2. Don't request invites, trade, sell, or self-promote

3. Don't request or link to specific pirated titles, including DMs

4. Don't submit low-quality posts, be entitled, or harass others

Loot, Pillage, & Plunder

📜 c/Piracy Wiki (Community Edition):

💰 Please help cover server costs.


Ko-fi	Liberapay

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

225

I Know What You Download (via torrent) (iknowwhatyoudownload.com)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

131 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I guess this settles it for me. What VPN should I go for?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago

I’ll admit, this spooked me, but for different reasons than the OP and most comments.

I didn’t recognize any of the downloads, even though I have a publicly routable static IP and don’t use a VPN (I have a domain and self host so I know my IP hast changed in years).

I use exclusively private trackers, and nothing I’ve actually downloaded showed up, and the things that did were sporadic—one every couple days or so, first/last seen times identical, random torrents. I started asking myself if I had a rogue device in my network, so I checked logs and stats—nothing unusual (I think…I hope…hard to tell sometimes).

I looked more into how this site tracks peers, and it seems they have different levels of confidence. Their first API tier (peer API) is a “best guess” and this is based on listening to the DHT and PeX networks for their known torrents. I’m guessing their website uses this or a combination of this with their other APIs. I looked at my torrent config and saw I hadn’t disabled DHT/PeX and had a couple idle public torrents.

Not positive on this, but I think there can be false positives if your torrent box participates in DHT/PeX even if it doesn’t actually download said torrents. Can anyone confirm this?