Anyone Can Play Big Brother With BitTorrent

An anonymous reader writes "I was at the 3rd USENIX Workshop on Large-Scale Exploits and Emergent Threats yesterday, and there were people from the French Institute for Computer Science who have continuously spied on most BitTorrent users on the Internet for 100 days, from a single machine. They've also identified 70% of all content providers; yes, those guys that insert the new contents into BitTorrent. As a BitTorrent user, I was shocked that anyone with a box connected to the Internet can spy on what everyone is downloading on BitTorrent."

Comments

Re:Good!

[Jer]

Actually, despite the credulousness of the summary poster, if you click through to the abstract you also get this bit:

To circumvent this kind of monitoring, BitTorrent users are increasingly using anonymizing networks such as Tor to hide their IP address from the tracker and, possibly, from other peers. However, we showed that it is possible to retrieve the IP address for more than 70% of BitTorrent users on top of Tor [LMC_POST10]. Moreover, once the IP address of a peer is retrieved, it is possible to link to the IP address other applications used by this peer on top of Tor.

Perhaps I'm exposing my own ignorance (because I've never felt the need to use Tor myself) but that strikes me as surprising if it's true. And something that even savvy internet users might not think about.

Re:Shocked. Shocked!

[peragrin]

you forgot the real part.

You then have to download the entire thing to find out if those blocks are part of IronMan2.avi are actually part of ironman2 movie or some dumb students project on feeding excessive iron to a man.

what percentage of the RIAA music takedowns where not actually infringing music but someone's project with a similar name? I know of at least 3 separate incidents where they made a school take down a professors own notes because of a file name.