I Know What You Download on BitTorrent
iknowwhatyoudownload.com
iknowwhatyoudownload.com
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 doing it, so I had to find the offender via checking the bash history of the box for all users.
Sure enough a couple of mkv files had been downloaded and deleted by an intern :( Making the mistake of downloading it was forgiveable once, since we lived in a culture where piracy was rampant / normal (this was before Netflix et al were available in my country). But repeating the offense, failing to come clean and making us waste our time to locate who did it was not. (This was a small 7 person startup so trust was super important).
As for why the intern needed to ssh into a digital ocean box to run a torrent? The college internet (where he was working from) blocked torrent connections and he wanted to be the first one to download and release the episodes on the college intranet. Smh.
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 suing us.
Dude got walked out the next day. A MEDIA company customer.
Thankfully I shared a cube wall with someone smart enough to realize the confusion, and explain me out of being walked out.
They were monitoring for torrent traffic, but weren't paying attention to what was being torrented. Apparently a company-wide warning had gone out the week before I started.
Well, it turns out you can run bittorrent over Tor. Got dozens of DMCA emails, host took the server down within 24 hours. Taught me a lesson on being nice.
Had a moment of being a bit frozen and scared.
Decided to email the IT head and explain the situation. I got a “thanks for letting me know” and that was it. Not as big a deal as my head conjured up.
I could have done the wrong thing though and made it a big deal.
https://torrentfreak.com/wrongfully-accused-pirate-wins-4420...
Somehow 1-2 months later I got a request from my college's computer center to make some changes in the college intranet landing page. Then I became good friends with them. and later I got an account from them, where everything was open. I was a good time ;)
Hmm but doing that in a 7 person startup, and then repeating the offense, and then failing to come clean !! seriously man..
When I was young and stupid (at least more than now) I did some pranks using dormitory server, and knew that I should clean bash history (actually using a single space before command did that).
But what I didn't know was that vim also has a history of commands :) server admin wasn't happy.
And yes, it shows my IP downloaded the movie Zombieland, which I never did, so it is some other subscriber of the same ISP.
Back in 2012, the same ISP was intercepting all DNS (!) and serving OpenDNS with the stupid give-you-a-search-page-instead-of-an-NXDOMAIN-response thing that they had back then, forcibly enabled.
Hopefully the copy of “Avast Premium Security 20.2.2401 (Build 20.2.5130) Final + Serial” someone downloaded will help them clear the malware out, rather than make things worse.
I think the point of this website is to show people that using torrents is far from anonymous and invisible.
If you download something, get a new IP, and the ISP gets a complaint for your old IP, they have that data and may be obligated legally to do something about it.
The webserver of my bank sees it as a hack and will then log me out.
Fortunately my ISP also has an APN when I'm allocated my own IP.
People be wild on their mobile connections. I don't torrent on mobile only because the bandwidth will get me throttled, but god damn someone on my NAT has some filthy habits.
However, what does impress me is that somebody downloaded multiple movies and games a day, with books and tailoring instructions thrown in. Dunno if the site counts seeding torrents too, but if not—someone is very busy just consuming all that.
Apparently if you don't reply to those emails you're fine, because they can't escalate the process unless you reply - I've heard stories of people receiving dozens of these "we saw you downloading pirate stuff, stop doing that" emails.
Comcast had their personal information to include their home address, so they obviously could have snail-mailed them something or sent a process server if they were actually being sued, but they didn't. I figure that most individuals don't make enough money to make actual lawsuits worth it- what is the court going to do, garnish $10/month from someone flipping burgers?
But in Germany the only real bad thing is uploading, downloading by itself is more of a grey thing.
That was egregious.
https://www.eff.org/de/deeplinks/2011/08/why-ip-addresses-al...
https://www.securityweek.com/eff-warns-police-courts-about-u...
- Moved into company apartment
- Torrented stuff
- Company received a $30k lawsuit for downloading porn on company network
- Hear CEO talking to lawyers (open office)
- 99% sure it was me
- Come clean to CEO
- Was actually another c-suite who forgot they were logged into the VPN
Talk about integrity. I'd give you a raise after this if you were my employee.
I guess there's a reason company generally aren't allowed to provide housing in many countries. Some things should just be separate...
The rise in pirate binary groups is what killed Usenet feeds on most ISPs.
I used to be a great follower of text groups but it became more and more difficult to find a feed and the overall signal:noise ratio faded.
Eventually I gave up. Thanks for nothing, you folks who want to watch other people's content for free.
My ISP actually prohibits P2P transfers, so whatever you're downloading, if you want to use torrents, it's the only way to go without getting nasty emails.
On certain things you now have download as it becomes available, in a week it’ll be gone. For things that no one cares to pay for monitoring of, you can go back years.
So, pros and cons to torrents that don’t get taken down specially but torrents “die” of old age when no one seeds them.
It’s odd to me that file sharing seems to have hit a wall after torrents got popular. Doesn’t it seem like Usenet shouldn’t be the best option considering it’s age?
e: Just tested this, it shows my IP on the receiving end. It appears iMessage creates the preview text on the sender’s side so this will leak your IP. I tried it in Slack too and it leaked whatever IP Slack used to fetch the URL which interestingly is not my IP.
And a (small, but has a few links) blog post about it: https://signal.org/blog/i-link-therefore-i-am/
If you don’t want to send people your own info in the thumbnail, don’t send them thumbs of URLs that display your own info to you in image or title text when generating the preview on your device.
How exactly do you find these leaked IPs?
This is easy to test if you've got another device with iMessage. Take your phone off WiFi and send yourself the link. The device on WiFi should show your home ISP address while the device on cellular should show the cellular provider IP.
Best 15$/month I pay. You can even pay with Bitcoin, tho I just use PayPal.
2 TB of storage, very fast speed with caching (i.e. some torrents finish immediately if someone else has it downloaded). An uncached Blu-ray ~4 GB movie gets finished in 15-30 mins.
They also have auto-delete feature. If they get a legal complaint they just delete the offending torrent and keep my account the same, no "strikes" or anything like that.
I then download the actual content either from FTP or HTTPS. If its a movie, I just download the single .mp4 file from the portal itself (and skip the subtitle/cover files) with HTTPS straight from Chrome, or even stream it directly through VLC! I only use the FTP if there is a large number of files (e.g. series or non-ISO-packaged software).
They have servers in US, Netherlands and Singapore. I always use the Netherlands server. I doubt anyone uses the US ones.
Even better? I can use the 2 TB for whatever I want, not just for the torrents. That's cheaper than most cloud storage plans for just dummy storage without any torrenting features!
Only problem I have with torrents are unpopular movies/series usually have no seeds, but there is nothing that can be done about that. Only older clients like LimeWire/eMule didn't have that problem, but those had endless malware issues because the content wasn't verified.
Pro-tip: Do not download the actual .torrent file. Many websites are setup to redirect you into an endless loop of shady .exe downloads. Always, always just copy the magnet link to your clipboard. This also makes you safe from any network monitoring that checks for .torrent downloads. No one can prove anything if you just copy a magnet link to your clipboard then paste it to a seedbox since they don't/can't monitor clipboards. Just browsing the page which has the link is perfectly file and doesn't prove intent, vs actually downloading a .torrent file.
VPNs in comparison are quite dodgy. They have slower speeds, no torrent-caching, its possible (and happens more than it should) that the software has a bad config and skips the VPN and uses your actual connection.
Also, I can never trust that the VPN company won't share my details if they get a legal request, specially when most of them are in the US.
VPNs are useful for bypassing censored networks in a university campus or corporate network, but for torrenting they're infinitely inferior to seedboxes.
> Pro-tip: Do not download the actual .torrent file. Many websites are setup to redirect you into an endless loop of shady .exe downloads. Always, always just copy the magnet link to your clipboard.
A better pro-tip for these issues: if you're anyway using a seed box, figure out and switch to private trackers and follow their rules. With the good ones around, you won't have to worry about shady downloads. Some of the unpopular or older content may also be available on those.
To be clear: you're presumably not paying for redundancy there (which you usually are with cloud providers), so you're trading price for an increased risk of data loss, which may or may not matter to you.
Since you mentioned you're using Whatbox in another comment, why not simply use Plex to catalog and stream the files?
Just stuff it into a separate network namespace. It's easy to do with firejail, but can also be done manually (firejail automatically configures the IP address, the routing table, and so on.)
$ cat /etc/firejail/qbittorrent.local
net enp3s0
ip 192.168.100.201
dns 1.1.1.1 1.0.0.1No judgement, just curiosity.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:MyContributions
There are a lot of weird people who share my IP address editing a lot of weird stuff!
My dynamic IP can go a year w/o changing. I have to re-spoof my MAC when I want a new one.
But.
You dont know and you are clueless that this is not my ip.
Furthermore, I have also checked my phone where I have never downloaded any torrent and you are showing 3 movies.
This is just scaremongering.
I did a few more tests.
For multiple private trackers you didnt detect anything (except your false positives), you have failed to detect there is more than one user of IP, you didnt detect VPN (but you could).
Not accurate at all.
A sane advice from this example - use VPN (from other jurisdiction than you are in and not massively well known or free), stop using public tracker.
Not sure if this is the same in every country but mobile phones in UK jump around the same IP block pretty frequently (i.e all day long) even when standing still - i'm using this as home internet so i notice.
IP addresses are re-used all the time, this is why it's not usually permissible as evidence in court.
The down side of such frequent IP changes is i'm pretty much permablocked by google and captcha'd to death by them due to frequently swapping IPs with in pool of users with malware (now i've completely given up using google.com).
Private torrents do not show up because I know what you download relies on DHT broadcasts.
Not very reliable.
I'm pretty confident my ISP is doing the least amount of work possible to fulfill its logging and archive requirements. Keeping track of this stuff is like cleaning up industrial waste. It's not core the money stream for ISP's so it's going to be daily logs, zipped up on glacier storage, or better just hdd's that get thrown in a container and cycled out each year.
People gotta do something these days, there's talk covid may go for 24 months!
Previously (December 2016): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13249578
In addition it is extremely inaccurate, it used to say that 8.8.8.8 was torrenting anime.
But even assuming they scrape "all" torrents, what percentage of users use DHT as opposed to just trackers, and how often will a DHT request hit their server as opposed to someone else's? And are they really able to simultaneously function as part of the DHT for all torrents they've ever scraped, or is it only some small percentage at a time?
I'm just wondering if they're managing to grab something like 90% of torrenting activity, or more like 1%?
Legality aside, I'm just really curious about the technical accuracy here. Also why they chose DHT instead of connecting to trackers directly.
However, seeing how many streaming services are popping up lately, each with their own specialty and each wanting my money, (and seeing how crappy free Youtube is becoming) I feel more and more like coming back to my old habits . . .
"We think there is a fundamental misconception about piracy. Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem”
I still pirate the odd thing because while it's completely worth it to pay $10/mo (or whatever it is now) for netflix, i'm not about to pay the same just to watch a single show on some other streaming service, or go through the hassle of figuring out what new service i have to sign up for or if it's even available in my country or on my roku.
They've taken down the hashes now, which means the trick doesn't work anymore. Using other people's interests as recommendations was pretty useful though!
Others mentioned having an ISP level NAT. Could that be it?
By calling itself "I know what you download, dot com", it's potentially suggesting that "you are your IP address", thus suggesting that it is usable evidence for others to use against "you", when it actually could not be the case at all. IANAL, but this site seems legally problematic.
I remember switching from XDCC to bittorrent when it first came out. There was a very short period where XDCC bots would have .torrent files on them.
Back then bit torrent was exclusively fansubs (anime) and the bit torrent client didn't have an upload limit, so it was painfully slow on the average connection.
Because at the time bit torrent didn't have any retention, and you could use a service like xdcc spy or xdcc finder to find old content similar to pirate bay today, I was somewhat of a skeptic of bit torrent then for this reason.
Edit: Could this be due to me having a static ipv6 range, would my ipv4 address that this is looking at be shared by other people?
And this site (which i guess is just a couple lines of python collecting the data) is not bothering to distinguish any of the finer details.
The solution is to use VPNs or private trackers and it's pretty widely known. If you move into a flat / AirBnB one of the first things people will tell you is to not torrent on the connection.
Does that actually exist today? At least IPv4 addresses I would expect to increasingly mean nothing, as address exhaustion drives more people behind CGNAT.
Connecting to a torrent is in itself not illegal (if it were, legal torrents such as that used for software delivery would be impossible).
Torrents are peer to peer. Bit torrent is a type of application. Bittorrent are not inclusive to torrents anymore.
Since everything is public, you can load several torrents, and watch for the handshake to occur and record the time/date and ip address.
Do it on a large enough scale and there you go.
There are many ways to secure against this, usually USA IP holders use USA cloud services or USA IP addresses. Some are public, but even if not, you can block the entire USA , so geoblocking by a simple tool such as: https://www.countryipblocks.net/acl.php
And you're pretty much in the clear. Not perfect, but pretty much.
Copyright monitoring firms have many endpoints that look like consumer ADSL/cable... because they are consumer connections.
I think about stop paying and switch to torrents simply because of the horrible UI each of these providers has. It will probably will be more of an effort, but enough is enough.
What I want: VCL interface - start / stop / pause. What I do not want: the rest of the crap like extra info (Amazon), bad search interface (hello all), buffering issues (hello HBO, Netflix), dark patterns where you can not stop at the end of the episode, but they may let you to continue watching credits (FY everyone).
It is also possible, of course, that your ISP doesn't have one.
There are people with abusive and stupid partners who wouldn't be able to get this information without doing more work or paying money.
Also, the what-bad-guys-might-do klaxon is a powerful tool, is too often used to restrict everyone's abilities.
Jsut click the "Track Downloads" tab or go to https://ikwyd.com/r/QgHP to generate a short URL that lets you get the downloads for someone's IP address.
In another place I worked for I had a guy from a very rich shipping family ask me about torrenting stuff illegally (soz M8, not helping ya there). This guy could have afforded to buy the media remotely, say in the US (we were in the uk), and have each disk individually couriered to him cushioned between the warm thighs of high-class call girls. He had the money but he preferred to... be stupid I suppose.
[1]: https://iknowwhatyoudownload.com/en/stat/KP/annual/2020
Also, if your VPN is located somewhere exotic and just somewhat uncooperative, the bureaucratic overhead of getting the logs, getting the IP, sending the request to your VPN and then matching the result with your ISP might be long enough for the logs to expire.
you can't. but, you could use 2 nested vpn services, which would help if you can know that the 2 aren't affiliated with each other ... which you can't know.
i mean, it's hilarious that VPN services suggest privacy as one of their selling features. lol.
I’ve already tried it from a few different IPs, and not only did it list none of what I actually torrent, but it also listed shit I’ve never even heard of before. Mostly porn. And identical content across different IP’s (home static and cell LTE).
As in, I don’t torrent through my phone, and even on that (wifi turned off) I got a list of torrents with a completely different listed IP.
Just tried my home Internet, static IP, secure WiFi, in COVID lockdown, so no visitors.
Myself and my wife only (besides a toddler and baby). Wife doesn't normally use a computer (just mobile) and has no clue how to torrent. Site claims we torrented some MP3 three days ago; I had to Google the name of the artist.
If it's not a hoax then my best bet is some seriously impressive JS malware on a site my wife visited.
Does seem extraordinarily unlikely though.
And yes I know, that doesn't mean I'm protected from getting into trouble if I did something wrong since my ISP could probably link an IP and timestamp to me if asked by a lawyer.
Still, using a VPN remains the safe option. My IP is as clean as a CPU factory.
> We cooperate with Right Holders, Law Offices, Internet Service Providers, Advertising Agencies and National Police. We provide information about sharing/downloading content via Bittorrent Network all over the world.
It's one thing to collect this as some sort of research, but another to feed MAFIAA [1] with this data to make their job easier. The fact that they process the data without disclosing who they actually are doesn't make it any less fishy. Doesn't it violate GDPR or something?
IP addresses are not people
And I have such eclectic tastes.
Shared IPs are still very much a thing you know...
odd.
1. A streaming service with a reasonable monthly fee that has all movies and TV, not sharded between multiple different services.
2. The ability to buy and download movies and TV shows, DRM free, for a reasonable one-off fee. I know that the entertainment industry is allergic to no DRM, but I promise you, if they did this, piracy would go down, not up.
Haaaarrrr
Disable DHT in the torrent client settings.
I'm not sure what conclusion to draw from this. Am I not torrenting enough? Do blocklists work? Did my ISP recently acquire an Amish IP block?
I will happily recommend that everyone buy a router that can be flashed and pipe all your traffic through a VPN. It doesn't give you perfect security, but it defeats a lot of attempts to deanonimize like this.
Even if you do everything right all your traffic goes through VPN...
This create a case where the “bad thing” you do woth the PC, is also on the same address as all your “good things”.
Let’s say with Google, your thermostat, your Wi-Fi enabled coffee maker, your game console, your phone, every website you connect to with any other device that runs through that router/VPN - they all know your VPN IP at that time and your account info at that time.
Let’s say your WiFi refrigerator mfg sells IP and account detail information as a service to a data mining company - as I’m certain some do - in order to “get around” your home VPN, someone might need relatively cheap access to this data.
Putting everything on a VPN gives a lot of devices and accounts to tattle on you.
A VPN for the PC alone might be a decent idea if you are downloading things on the PC.
A pity that the output columns seem to be fixed, or else I could probably do some fun analysis.
As a Canadian, I guess others have much much much better plans that I do. We pay $5-$10/go here. Maybe telecom employees get unlimited plans?
I confronted her about it, and she lied denying it was her.
Needless to say, we never received another complaint.
If ads must exist, they should be at the bottom where users, after being delighted can decide to click on it.
I think if anything this website is a good illustration of how IP =/= person and should never be assumed it is.
Joke's on me. I'm behind CGNAT.
Sadly it's also the same thing that I absolutely hate about my ISP.
It brings art and knowledge to millions that wouldn't otherwise have access to it.
The rest of society benefits indirectly too, by having these enriched persons in their midst.
No, they don't. They don't know anything I've torrented.
I've been using the same _private_ tracker for about a decade. 10 TB downloaded.
Am I missing something, or is my impression that this tool can “see through” tunneled traffic false?
And this site says I don't have anything.
I don't use a VPN, but I use an invite-only tracker.
Haaaarrr!
Actually...for a free wireguard server there wasn't a whole lot of bittorrent traffic at all.
The whole reason you can google "____ Torrent" and get results is because there are torrent trackers out there that, well, track which IP addresses have which files. The same thing that allows those to exist allows someone to watch and record who is downloading which torrents. Which is what movie studios and the like are doing as well when they send out copyright warnings based on torrenting.
The purpose of it is exactly to help you find other peers with the same content. It's a bunch of peer finding protocols on top of each other. Trackers, DHT, peer xchange, etc, etc
I mean, the data itself is all hashes, but very public hashes. Unless you hashed it yourself and shared only the hash ever, the reverse hash is a websearch away.
I'm totally outed.
Those other IPs in my subnet do like their porn. Well, someone's porn.
Not seeing any torrents of mine.
nice :sunglasses:
On the up side, static IP makes it easy to quite reliably host stuff on my own computers, in my home.