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Comment by gruez | Hacker News Reader

People seem to think this is some sort of betrayal, but anyone could have done it. The whole point of trackers is to allow anyone to get a list of peers who have the same torrent. If anything, this gives me a startup idea: archive.org, but for torrent swarms. Scrape public torrent sites, grab all their torrents, for each torrent connect to their associated tracker and grab their peer list periodically. You can even try connecting to them and grab a few bytes to confirm they're actually uploading. Now you have a list of IPs known to have committed copyright infringement. Sell this list to copyright trolls years/months later for $$$.

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https://iknowwhatyoudownload.com/

Super funny because this shows approximately five or six different people's downloads for my ip address from their porn tastes, movie language preferences, etc

It has some delay and dynamic timed IPs do the rest.

That says I downloaded ssni-845-C.mp4 7GB (XXX) three days ago, but I didn't. WTF is that all about?

Someone else must have downloaded it from your current IP address.

That's extremely unlikely. It says last seen at 8:30 AM on Thursday which makes no sense. I have a dedicated VLAN that routed over a VPN for anything not 100% super legit.

You must be somebody else's VPN. As it were. There are plenty of uses for pwned machines. Since they are free, the uses don't even need to makes sense.

No, I ran a test through two linux VPSes that I control, and both of them show me downloading something I didn't. I'm reasonably sure that neither of my boxes were compromised, although if we want confirmation we can get someone who works at a hosting company to check with an IP that hasn't been routed in months. I posed a explanation in a sibling comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24256890

> WTF is that all about?

Doing a Google search… someone likes the acting abilities of Yua Mikami.

I've got to call bullshit on that site. It comes up with a "likes porn" tag, claims porn downloads, and has a huge VPN ad at the top. That's seems like sketchy, fake, scareware tactics to me.

AFAIK trackers would randomly put IP addresses into the peer lists that they return, to provide plausible deniability for everyone[1]. If the site just grabs the peer list without validating them (ie. attempting a connection), that might be responsible for the false positives.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opentracker

Dynamic IP or CGNAT by your ISP.

Nope. DHCP IP, but they're effectively static. It hasn't changed for 2 years.

As others have already mentioned, some trackers poison the well with random IP addresses so that getting peer lists from trackers alone is not confirmation that that peer actually is sharing that torrent.

And this is why I use the built-in reboot functionality on my (Asus) router: getting a new IP address every day helps improve privacy. I use Safari as my daily browser and have cookies blocked by default, allowing them only when I need to log into a site (e.g., posting a comment on HN or Reddit, banking stuff).

If anyone wants to track me they have to do browser fingerprinting or talk to my ISP about getting the PPPoE login logs for the IP in question.

Except if they have a time and date, and IP, your ISP will know who that IP belonged to at that time. No fingerprinting necessary.

Unless your ISP employed a very privacy-focused person like me who had set up a daily cronjob that deleted these logs once they were no longer needed.

thank you for your service

More ISPs need employees like you.

> Except if they have a time and date, and IP, your ISP will know who that IP belonged to at that time. No fingerprinting necessary.

As I wrote IN MY POST:

> If anyone wants to track me they have to do browser fingerprinting or talk to my ISP about getting the PPPoE login logs for the IP in question.

If I really want to hide my activities I will use Tor, but for the day-to-day stuff of avoiding ad trackers a daily reboot and cookies-off setting is Good Enough™ (for me).

The people you really need to be worried about when it comes to torrenting if you're downloading illegal content, are anti-piracy groups. They will reach out to your ISP, and if they don't comply, they will sue them to comply. Most ISPs (at least the big ones) don't care enough to lose money on a lawsuit and they'll rather easily comply.

Changing your IP daily is not meaningful within the context of piracy on torrents.

reboot every 15 minutes is better, if your client is set up properly it willtolerate it. I know someone who does that by default for any BT sessions and it isnt very painful also look for a block list and keep up on IP addresses

Nice tool! At least now I know the egress IP of my Lightsail/EC2 instance running WireGuard has zero history when it comes to torrent traffic.

I always switch from my personal to a commercial VPN if I need to do anything that could be construed as questionable, or whenever I need both privacy as well as anonymity.

That wouldn't give you the email address used for login on the site.

A decade ago, I worked for an ISP and we got hundreds of emails a day that matched this pattern. The copyright trolls had this idea a long long time ago :).

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