lfodofod

Private trackers are small, uninteresting targets.

Even the big private trackers have less users in total than you can find in individual public swarms.

> Public evidence is hard to track down (especially quickly) since raids on private trackers are so rare

And why is that? It’s because nobody cares about private trackers. It’s not like it’s particularly difficult to find the people behind sites like BTN and PTP, one of the sysops uses their reddit account to discuss the tracker, their US tech job and frequently comments in their local city subreddit.

> The damage there was limited since according to the admins all site and user data was destroyed.

Maybe true, maybe not. The servers were at OVH and seized by French LE. Perhaps they were encrypted, but I rather doubt they had any hardening against DMA tools.

But what about BCG then? That was shut down by uk cops around the same time as What.CD, as far as I know nothing happened to the users.

Also, despite what that torrentfreak claims. Gay-torrents was not a private tracker, but a public (paid) site.

If people had started receiving letters after private trackers getting raided, there’d be a plenty of forum discussions to be found. This just hasn’t ever happened.

> Public trackers are the low hanging fruit, but when a private tracker gets raided they'll jump at the chance.

Do you have evidence to support this happening, or are you just speculating?

How many people got in trouble after the What.CD raid?

It’s extremely rare for private trackers to get raided, and not because of excellent OPSEC.

If you’re going to include a bunch of screenshots of text, it might be a good idea to not compress them till they’re unreadable. Maybe even use PNGs?

It’s pretty late, so I might be missing something. However, neither of those groups seems to be releasing netflix content?

The first does bluray remuxes on HDB (a private tracker). I don’t think they directly release anything on public trackers.

The other did a bunch of 360p porn uploads in 2019.

> https://www.cashmanlawfirm.com/list-of-strike-3-holdings-cas...

This is about people downloading torrents from public trackers. These law firms do not care about private trackers, there is more money to be made on public trackers.

What these law firms definitely don’t care about is going after uploaders, that would obviously ruin their business model.

> This is like setting up a premium subscription library to keep poor people out - the "slums" are precisely the people who benefit from a public library the most

With those people come automated abuse reports and law firms trying to collect money from downloaders.

> Public torrents have been plenty fast enough for me, I'm not sure why people are complaining. Maybe they're not sophisticated enough to up the connection limits on their torrent software, which is why slow peers are hampering their speeds.

Are you using a gigabit connection? If not, it’s not too surprising that you would not notice this.

> It's more like a bunch of people trying to show who has the biggest e-penis (ratio, highest upload, etc.

Literally nobody cares about that stuff anymore, most members have been on these sites for so long that things like ratios have become utterly meaningless.

> Every one I've ever seen. At a minimum they'll want an email address or to chat with you on some service like discord that requires a sign up. The process leaves breadcrumbs everywhere.

It’s kind of trivial to get a throwaway email address, no? What tracker uses discord? All the big ones use IRC.

> When it works according to plan you won't hear about it, but it doesn't always. For example:

Your example is a very public lawsuit by the MPAA against a public tracker? Anyone with PACER access would see this.

> This is also dead wrong, lawsuits still continue to this day against uploaders

Give an example?

> but the vast majority of them never go to court since they're forced into paying settlements, the terms of which are rarely disclosed to the public.

Nonsense, they just ask you to sign a paper saying you won’t do it again. For example this guy, one of the most prolific BTN uploaders https://torrentfreak.com/pirate-release-group-ntg-shut-down-...

They just politely asked him to stop, that’s all. They won’t demand money from you unless you’re making a profit.

No, this appears to be some even less relevant (hard to imagine, amirite?) trackers stealing content from IPT.

> They force you to create accounts and hand over personal info that can get you busted later when the site gets raided

What tracker forces you to hand over personal info?

> just silently handed off to the authorities who run it themselves for a time to go after the pirates

This has literally never happened.

> It's gotten people caught many times.

MAFIAA groups don’t even bother to sue private tracker uploaders anymore, what do you mean by “caught”?

It’s like as if your comment was coming from a parallel universe where industry groups hadn’t stopped giving a shit about private trackers a decade+ ago.

Dude, I know exactly how not hard it is because I have done so.

The fact remains, zero scene groups figured this out.

> And there are more than enough groups directly release their content on public trackers for anything remotely popular (any Netflix series fall into this category)

Name one! Or link a torrent. I’m pretty sure you will only find shit quality webrips made with capture cards and not actual decrypted streams.

> The piracy scene (with 0-day FTP etc.) worked fine before BT was even well-known.

The TV scene has been reduced to nothing because none of the groups could figure out Widevine. Just look at any pre feed.

Private tracker groups did though, and now everybody depends on them.

Why hate private trackers? That’s where all the good quality content on public trackers comes from.

Without private trackers, it’s not obvious that anyone would have bothered to extract Widevine keys and set up decryption pipelines for all the streaming sites. (So far zero scene groups seem to have achieved this)

Because your torrent client will never find those dedicated servers, and instead wastes all of it’s connection slots on the Indian residential connections.

Also because there’s no incentive for anybody to seed public tracker content on servers. Your host will get abuse reports and you will not be rewarded in any way, on private sites you won’t receive abuse reports and you have to seed in order to maintain access.

This is not correct, swarms on good private sites are way better than on public trackers.

With real world torrent clients, you’d much rather have a swarm with 100 dedicated servers on 1gbps+ connections than a swarm with a million Indian residential connections.

None of these are major (private) torrent sites, torrentfreak is just hyping up bullshit as usual.

Just looking at the filenames makes it obvious that these can’t be from any major private tracker, there’s no way BTN or the likes would accept these files.

So what? Vast majority of transactions don’t benefit from the vast speed advantages cryptocurrencies offer. Bank transfers are perfectly fine if you’re happy to wait a few days for the money to arrive.

What’s the point of moving goalposts like this?

> I do not understand how bitcoin would be better over bank controlled transaction.

Because you get cash in Kiev within the hour, instead of in a couple of days.

There are multiple cash desks in Kiev processing millions worth of transactions every day. You can easily send 100k from anywhere in the world and have it cashed out within the hour.

> to be able to rescue your money, you need to find someone who wants to take that risky currency and exchange it to crypto for you and back if you need it.

Ukraine runs on USD, very few “serious” transactions occur in UAH. All businesses accept USD, from kiosks to restaurants to car dealerships.

> but does Ukraine not have banks that accept wire transfers

Of course they do, it’ll just take at least a day for the money to arrive.

Buying drugs on the internet? Need to rapidly transfer money to a country like Ukraine? (exchange desks in Kiev are still working, processing millions a day)

> What you seem to have discovered are client-side vulnerabilities that would require direct network access to the client machines to be exploited

It’s so weird how many people (developers!) actually seem to believe this.

Websites can send bad stuff to local ports!

This story reeks. It’s extremely difficult to believe that there was “intense legal wrangling” as the article claims.

Odds are that SBFs lawyers offered to waive extradition in exchange for the government not opposing bail, and the government immediately agreed. Why would there have been any wrangling?

Epstein killed himself, nobody covered it up.

Why are you polluting HN with baseless conspiracy theories like this?

Or don’t do any of those things and use an adequate password instead.

Perhaps there were no more people to charge? This was probably mostly Epstein’s and Maxwells private hobby, they presumably did not go around advertising the fact that the girls were underage.

Ghislaine Maxwell was specifically charged with trafficking children to Epstein.

Were you arrested? No? How is this supposed to refute the GP comment if not?

This attack is nothing new, has been endlessly discussed by the grapheneos team. An accelerometer is just a shitty microphone, even a camera can be a shitty microphone.