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Third of Content On Popular BT Portals Are Fake
siliconbits writes "A study published by a group of researchers, most of them based in Europe, analysed the publishers of content on two major BitTorrent portals, Pirate Bay and MiniNova, and found out that almost a third of all files on the two sites were fake."
Same ratio /. has for how many stories are real.
Considering that I have not once downloaded a fake on TBP in the past 10 years or so that I have been using it, I think that either the "researcher" is fiddling with the numbers or has no idea how to download something.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
One of the biggest benefits of torrents is that the fake crap gets weeded out quickly and the real torrents rise to the top with a high number of seeders. So it doesn't matter if its fake because it dies off quicker, than normal as people stop uploading it.
That's why you go with a place like Demonoid.
Living With a Nerd
For some reason fakes are usually well seeded with lots of peers...
So I get sued for downloading / uploading a fake file can I beat it based on that they are calming that I downloading / uploading the real file?
Is this like that professor sued for haveing a mp3 file in name only?
Ultimately I don't have a problem with leaking fakes, so long as you're not intentionally trying to distribute viruses or anything like that.
Apparently Batman: Arkham Asylum had a leaked version that was basically a demo. There was a level you couldn't get past because of an intentionally crippled feature. When people were screaming and complaining about a "bug" in the product they purchased on the support forums, they were informed that "bug" was only present in an intentionally leaked version on torrent sites. They knew people were going to pirate their game, and they tried to get in front of it and turn it into a scenario where the pirated copy did act as a demo, perhaps convincing people to pay for the real thing.
But the bigger issue is that game studios, music companies and Hollywood still haven't seen the bigger picture.
It is to your benefit to pirate rather than deal with DRM nightmares. And corporate America is more focused on punishing their customers than trying to attract new ones.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
I've become so used to the alt.binaries being polluted with either passworded inner-rars or corrupt/scrambled files that I'm now used to just grabbing the first couple of rar's and extracting them just to make sure. I'm not too surprised to hear this. What does surprise me a little is the amount of people that continue seeding this crap on BT. Do they not open the damn files as they come down? If only for a cursory glance to confirm.
jaymz
Publishers of fake content include antipiracy groups
;)
So, if someboy sues those publishers then they have to show to the judge that they have "written permission to distribute, post, or copy" every and each of the files they're using to polute the sharing ecosystem? Because gay porn companies can get millions for inapropiate use of their films
...Isohunt.com because they have a section for reviews and comments. I know the others do as well, but I've had great luck with them and for many years. I would like to see a similar study done on Usenet because unless its a movie, I can rarely get quality downloads. Even then, I have to par those things to fix the broken files.
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People still use Pirate Bay and Mininova? I stopped using them more than a year ago when they stopped being effective.
http://www.acetonestudio.com
That this research didn't involve taking a random sample, and working out that 1/3rd is fake.
The strength of Bittorrent is that if there are:
1. Low seeds
2. Bad comments
Then its fake.
If you have a file with a few thousand seeders, then you can be sure that its real. Nobody is going to continue to seed a fake/virus ridden file unless its on purpose - but that requires a ton of resources.
And most admins will take down any files reported in that manner.
One third seems very high. Maybe they're looking through comments for reports of being "fake" as a sign of actually being fake. I swear there are bots, likely affiliated with anti-piracy groups, that post "It's fake" comments to everything. There's also the idiots who mark things as fake when they're labeled as ITA and not in English, or when movies are labeled as 1080p with aspect ratios of 1920x800.
Everything is fake if you try hard enough to find something wrong with the label.
Ironically, it's the two-thirds of US users without fast broadband who are responsible for supplying the two-thirds non-fake content. It's a tough job...
are they fake but most of the files advertising pirated software or movies are actually viruses and other malware.
Are the real ones. Those things are malware for my eyes. And it isn't like you have to wait so long for a pristine bluray rip.
Suckers born every day.
I can understand someone creating spam pages for popular search terms but I've never understood quite how they manage to come up with really obscure shit, like if I type in "three inch frange demodulator" and there's the first hit proudly declaring "Internet's leader for three inch frange demodulators!" I just made that term up two seconds ago. How do they get that cached into google? A few years back they were doing that with porn text and it would be "'Harder!' she cried, and I thrust my three inch frange demodulator deep inside." I have two questions: how did they do that and is it even doing anything useful for them? Surely they couldn't generate real ad revenue off of banner cruft on that sort of page, right?
I'm not sure of the utility of the torrent spams, either. I know never to download video files that are compressed archives because it's just going to be a scam to get you to sign up for something or pay to get the password but those are few and far between. Pirate Bay and kickasstorrents are usually pretty good. It's the other oddball sites that don't even have the damn file you're looking for but give you a dozen "sponsored links" that pretend like they do and don't. Do they live off of money made from drive-by malware?
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
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Insert sufficiently witty sig here.
These articles are only FUD to keep the curious from bothering.....
It can't be. From where I am watching, these boobs, asses, and orgasms look 100% real. Besides, like, there's no fake stuff anywhere in my modern life, there's just too much government, inspection, lawyers, insurance and all that. The movies are not fake, the acting is not fake, the stories are not fake, the news is not fake, the point of profit and money is not fake, the mission statement of my company is not fake, my job is not fake, the reason I get up to work everyday is not fake, the food I eat is not fake. It's all 100% authenticated by authentic authorities, how could anything be fake?
Build your own energy sources from scratch. http://otherpower.com/
If anything, I'd expect more then a third of the torrents to be fake. I'd also bet that if you weighted the torrents by completed downloads, you'd get more like 1% 'fake', maybe more like 2-3% if you include things that are real but include a virus.
Does a line appended to your comment give your post meaning in and of itself, or only in relation to those without?
I've never gotten a fake or malware-infected file; oh wait, I actually pay for the software, music, and movies that I want to watch. Maybe that's why.
What (I imagine) happens most of the time with intentionally leaked broken software:
"Man, this DRM is so restrictive! I'm just going to pirate it!"
"HEY! This game is broken! Forget this!"
Result: Lost Sale
I'm a fan of companies attempting creative ways to ensure they get paid (online pass type restrictors excluded) but why would you even gamble against the bad PR. All it takes is one legitimate site running the issue (game breaks halfway through) with some of the info omitted and you could tank sales for weeks.
I see complaints about the quality of stuff on usenet with some frequency. I agree that there's a lot of noise hiding the signal. But the complaints about unreliable transfers are something I don't understand. I've downloaded hundreds of things over the last few years and I no longer even have a program on my computer to handle PAR files. I'm able to successfully unRAR everything I download. I take a quick look at things and if there's obviously parts missing, I don't bother. But that's very, very rare.
I tend to wonder if the complaints come from folks who expect all the parts to show up at the same time? If you see a piece of something good, you sometimes have to wait for it to all appear. But once it's all there, it usually works for me.
Are there really crappy nntp servers out there trying to sell access to binaries and screwing it up? That might be another explanation. I've always used one of the big name providers so I haven't run across any problem in this quarter.
Mininova has been legal "content-distribution" only for a long time. How old is this research?
I wouldn't necessarily say a full third of content is faked, but combined with otherwise legit torrents where the parent seed botched their upload and started passing around fucked up content, I could see where someone might say a third of what they gather from the portals is fake. Most torrent users that are not ignorant of the risks involved would probably consider all torrents faked until otherwise proven, anyway. The risk involved with downloading most of that crap is too great to just make assumptions, anyway.
I wonder if putting a fake torrent file on the internet can be considered entrapment?
All the world's a CPU, and all the men and women merely AI agents
I had a room mate who was obsessed with downloading everything and burning it to DVD. He literally had hundreds of burned DVDs in his closet on spindles. There's absolutely no way he had time to consume that much media, but he seeded it back while he slept and worked before burning it to dvd. Even if he opened the archive to look at the filenames, who's to say he actually watched and or listened to each file to verify?
Also, with ratio sites a lot of people download high demand files (which are obviously the highest priority targets for fakes) even if they have no intention of consuming that media. They just want the ratio. They may not even open the files, or even keep track of them at all. They just dump some high demand torrents onto a seedbox and forget about it.
On a side note, I think that when the internet goes to metered pricing we will see much better curation of torrent sites, because people don't want to pay by the megabyte for fakes.
Run your keygens from a Windows XP virtualbox install. After booting a Knoppix cd, making sure the only hd that is mounted is not bootable and is the one holding the virtualbox install. After that, delete the vm and restore from an archive.
Test your software that way too. Run Wireshark or Netwatch on the virtual adapter and see if it's trying to talk to anyone.
So I get sued for downloading / uploading a fake file can I beat it based on that they are calming that I downloading / uploading the real file?
I am betting "No" - unless you are willing to submit to an independent forensic examination of all your storage media. The fake file is, after all, an admission that you were looking for the real one, and, quite probably, others as well.
The uploader/downloader is the guy who tried to eat one potato chip. What the plaintiff wants is the whole bag.
Shouldn't law enforcement be focusing its copyright-related resources on combating fake torrents? Shouldn't the RIAA and MPAA be forced to finance the identification and removal of fake torrents?
C'mon, Slashdotters. I know you're dying to say it.
I am betting "No" - unless you are willing to submit to an independent forensic examination of all your storage media. The fake file is, after all, an admission that you were looking for the real one
But looking for the real file isn't a crime. Sharing the real file is the crime, and if you never got it you couldn't share it. Obviously, if there are other copyrighted files that you were actually sharing, and they can prove it, then you may still have a problem.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Apparently, fakes are one of the very few things against TPB policy.
From http://thepiratebay.org/about :
"The Pirate Bay only removes torrents if the name isn't in accordance with the content. One must know what is being downloaded. (accordance with the content also means any torrents which description is made to match a certain search phrase that is not relevant will also be deleted)"
http://thepiratebay.org/policy also tries to preclude commercial interference with TPB; the about page obliquely refers to an anti-kiddie porn attitude.
(All of this in addition to explaining the technical nature of BitTorrent)
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
No because no one is forcing you to download it. It is just like the police using bait cars to catch car thieves. They lure you in but you are the one that ultimately makes the choice to proceed.
Fakes have never been my problem with TPB - rare stuff that doesn't get seeded all the way is a far more common and thus far more frustrating problem.
Once I unknowingly uploaded a file that was corrupted, the comments pointed this out, and I then actually bothered to fix, reupload and reseed.
As with many other computer-tech issues, it's a PEBKAC problem. :)
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
Shows how outdated the study is.
Don't most torrent sites have rating systems or comments? Don't most downloaders actually check the rating before downloading? Sure, anybody can post a file, but it only takes one downloader to notice that it's crap and alert all the others. The torrents actually downloaded by users are seldom fake. Of course, this report is probably FUD by rights holders in the first place.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
over here - whats the odds that their data matches mine? :-)
I'm a minority race. Save your vitriol for white people.
Considering the two sites mentioned in the synopsis, the first thing I thought of was that these were sites that were supposedly no longer listing copyrighted materials. So the question to me then became, "Is there copyrighted material being shared under fake, non-copyrighted names? If I download 'Nasty.Old.People_2009_TS3.dvd.iso', am I really getting the Creative Commons-licensed movie, or am I getting 'Toy Story 3' because I read on some hacker site that the fake name is just a way to distribute the copyrighted movie?"
UNIX: Find it, fsck it, forget it.
??AA attack dogs may be many things, but seldom are they calm.
The only trusted uploader is the original owner-author-artist. The alleged trusted uploader would have to directly purchase all media from an authorized store.
He is too cheap to buy it.
Deal with it.
Have you ever bought a SONY gadget on the internet?? How do you know it was not fake, inferior junk, knockoff from China? You do not, not unless you buy the product from an original, authorized seller.
Deal with it.
I used to download files, modify them, and upload them back up. Some of the music, books and video are un-original fraud because it it fun to dupe people.
Deal with it.
There is no honor among thieves.
There is no honor among pirates.
You just cannot ever trust 'free'.
Deal with it. LMAO!
Score & Karma: SASA: Slashdot Approval Seekers Anonymous
Let's hope that those suffering in other countries work their way toward that land which is "greater" than America for a better chance at life. /s
+10 for relevance!
So what if they're fake? The fake ones don't have any seeders, and have comments like "WTF fake!!!" on them. They are easily identifiable and easily ignored.
It's very easy to browse the comments and see which are fake and which are not. People only download the real ones. How about look at seeder/leecher total numbers for fake files vs real ones?
These two might be famous BT trackers, but there are plenty of others, with tens of millions of users on them. Everyone I know has long ago moved from the ones in this study to tightly moderated forums where every torrent is checked and verified to have the correct, uncorrupted, adhering to guidelines content. This assures very rare fakes. Malware's harder to fight of course, as scanners may not yet have definitions to find just what is hidden in this keygen or that crack.
or was there another reason why people stopped using it a couple of years ago? (I forgot) I'm not sure where these guys got the idea that it's a "major bittorrent portal", it hasn't been for a long time..
--
Stay tuned for some shock and awe coming right up after this messages!
One third is fake. Two thirds are fake. Mkay?
Which is why you need to firewall outbound traffic, which should prevent unauthorized programs from uploading anything without your permission.
Don't people read the comments on TPB? People will usually chime and say that "this is teh suxxors" or "Help me, I can't use this, it put funny words on my screen". Usually, you'll see "A++++++++++, will download again!"
But, it all depends on what you are looking for. Music, books, is pretty solid, and popular programs are pretty decent, and you can pick out the wheat from the chaff pretty quickly. Just read the remarks, and remember... SEED SEED SEED!
It's all damned lies and statistics!! I mean 47% of all people use statistics to back up their arguments.
I think the fact that 100 users are responsible for 75% of the traffic & 66% of the total "real" BT content is a much more interesting fact from TFA .The fact that torrents have also a fare share of fakes, that are combed out anyway by the communities, is just expected and should not be an issue for slightly experienced BT users.
I don't have an intelligent phone, so I need to be.
The only "fake" I can recall getting from TPB was one time I downloaded Spiderman 3, and towards the end where there's the fight scene with Venom in the skyscraper frame, someone from an animal rights group had edited over the "breaking news" portion with a really bizarre "meat is murder" clip that went on for about 1 minute, showing cows and pigs being tortured and slaughtered. I wasn't even mad thought, it was so trippy, the whole "wtf just happened??" moment was more entertaining than what was happening in the movie
Slavery is the legal fiction that a person is property; A Corporation is the legal fiction that property is a person.
It is to your benefit to pirate rather than deal with DRM nightmares. And corporate America is more focused on punishing their customers than trying to attract new ones.
20% of peak hour download traffic was a Netflix stream before Netflix offered a streaming-only service at $9/month.
The Neflix client is baked into every HDTV, video game console and set top box. OnLive! gaming on your Vizio. The same can be said for Pandora and a dozen other services, and with more, much more to come.
Internet radio is becoming as a much a part of home theater sound as FM.
You can imagine a parallel universe in which you cable company or telco offers high speed service exclusively for these direct feeds.
The PC isn't needed.
The browser isn't needed - or at least not the browser that hasn't made its peace with protected content.
Flash. H.264/HEVC video, etc, etc. etc.
The P2P client - always problematical - disappears.
Entrapment isn't about who makes the choice to commit criminal activity. If you are made to do something that you would not choose to do yourself, then the crime committed is not entrapment, it is coercion.
Entrapment is anything which induces a person to commit a crime that they would NOT have otherwise committed. Baiting a car thief is not entrapment because the car thief is a car thief, and stealing cars is what he does. But if you're a cop sitting in a bar listening to a woman complain about her abusive husband, and you offer to "take care of the problem" and flash a gun, you're committing entrapment because the woman would not have considered murdering her husband otherwise.
It's not about who makes the choice, it's about influence.
This is the same story as spam (though we'd be happy eliminating spam); it started out as a novelty ("look what I can do!") and slowly migrated into an extremely profitable (and largely criminal) business. The fact that it's so poorly policed (I'm not talking filters here) makes it a perfect vehicle for all sorts of criminal ventures that vastly pre-date email, the internet, and even the fax machine (though most of these scams were seen as faxes 40+ years ago). Specifically, drug peddling, advance-fee fraud (Nigerian 419 scams), fake charities, crap merchandise, and the list goes on.
Congratulations, BitTorrent pirate networks, you are now "mature" because the criminals have you in their cross-hairs.
As to whether this is "the end of" anything ... I strongly disagree. People forget that BitTorrent is a protocol. Piracy may be one of its more visible applications, but there is so very much more. Criminal spam destroyed joke spam and most bulk email, but email has remained (well, it might eventually be obsoleted by Facebook Messages, SMS, IM, etc, but that's not really spam's fault ... and is an entirely different debate).
This is really about the use of BitTorrent to transfer copyrighted material and not about the protocol itself. Malware will persist in pirated software and media and people will get better at detecting and eliminating it. There are invite-only BitTorrent communities that closely monitor their userbase and content library for this sort of thing. These will only get more popular. There in an increased volume of free anti-virus applications out there (Avira, AVG, and Avast, ClamAV, and more), and there is also an increased variety of platforms people use (Mac OS is on the rise, as are the various smartphones, not to mention the less-notable increases in F/OSS OSs). There is also the legal fight against the MPAA/RIAA (MAFIAA) conglomerates, which seems to be heading in a good (albeit slow) direction for fair use.
We're seeing legitimate software and media increasing its adoption of free distribution; upcoming artists are embracing Creative Commons licenses, Free Software is immensely popular and will get a major bump once China, Russia, and other governments start to make good on their promises to dump Windows, and mobile phones are entering the arena.
Phones' 4G technology symbolizes the marriage of high bandwidth with high computational power, which trivializes things like streaming TV over your phone. 4G also represents an IP telephony model (VoIP), which means any cellular carrier that offers TV (currently all of the major players) must offer it as IPTV. Even my cable connection is IPTV (I can see my router's downstream byte count add up while watching TV). Couple this with Netflix and its competitors having quickly adopted their paradigms to allow streaming their content to any computer connected to your TV (video game consoles, smarter TVs and DVD/BluRay players, specialty boxes) as well as other vendors like Boxee and Hulu and you have a streaming-TV revolution.
How will this play out with respect to "piracy" remains to be seen, but I think we can see hints of its hopeful outcome in looking at the past battle of music, won by iTunes and Grooveshark; why get a questionable copy when a legitimate one is so much easier to obtain?
Use my userscript to add story images to Slashdot. There's no going back.
You're right, it's not entrapment ... on the other hand, if the owner of a particular work (or their representative) goes on a public site and says "hey guys, download this!", how does it make sense to sue people who download it? In this case, the content is being distributed by those who have the right to do so, ergo no laws are being broken, right?
Start setting up at a gig, and some crackhead makes off with your dongle?
Start setting up at a gig, and some crackhead makes off with your musical instruments? That's what insurance is for.
So I guess that means it's even as accurate as the evening news as well.
My son loves watching original Japanese anime cause the edits and cuts they do here are major in suckage.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Imagine if movie studios released their movies as a torrent but they were subtly edited improperly
They already do something similar: show an improperly edited version in theaters to foil camcorder pirates. Compare the disappointing theatrical version of The Phantom Menace to Mike J. Nichols' version without most of Jar Jar Binks' scenes.
Many people would rather pick their noses while their movie is downloading or they would go to the bathroom for a quick leak. Most of the time I get over 30 Mbit when downloading from (and about same speed for uploading to) European servers, both public and private. To answer your question: millions people don't give a crap about what they're transferring, because the transfer is fast, reliable and cheap (it costs .03 USD/MBit).
> It is just like the police using bait cars to catch car thieves.
Of course that, "crime provocation", is illegal in some countries. Yes, for the police too.
Belief is the currency of delusion.
So if I D/L a bunch of stuff via BT, can I provide some gnuplot graphs that show that (honest!) I was just downloading it in an attempt to determine malware infection rates as a get-out-of-jail-free card?
1) TPB and MiniNova don't host content, only torrent files, therefore 0% is fake.
2) The S/L ratio and/or the trust status of the uploader are fairly reliable indicators of the status of the torrent in question, which makes the number of fake torrents all but irrelevant.
3) 2 out of 3 ain't bad.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
About a third of comments on /. are worthless. 90% of email is spam. 70% of FM radio signal is noise...
What matters is not the noise, it's whether you can consume the signal. It's easy to keep the "signal" in focus when looking for a file on a BT tracker - look for files with lots of seeders. Ergo, this research reports on a problem that isn't a problem.
"And the meaning of words; when they cease to function; when will it start worrying you?"
WAY more than 2/3 of all bittorrent portals are fake.
These aren't innocent torrent sites that have been duped into hosting three dozen links like "M6 Screw - Full download" or "M6 Screw and keygen". The sites themselves are fake; they will generate similar fake links for ANY search phrase.
If you want a torrent, go to the pirate bay, or one of the two other (ahem) legitimate torrent search engines. You are wasting your time if you try to Google for torrents, and google doesn't appear to care about it any more than they care that it is nearly impossible to find technical information on anything that might be in anyone's (aka everyone's) web store.
While I'm on the subject, all those fake/scam review sites can die in a fire.
See that "Preview" button?
Third of Content On Popular BT Portals Is Fake
I was being sarcastic toward the guy that claims the world is so much better off without America. That's what the /s indicates.
You can lead a man with reason but you can't make him think.
If they were smart they would give you just enough actual copyrighted content that they could still get you in court. i.e. a trojan, not completely fake. I like that idea though :-)
The information appearing on the press conforms to a journalistic version of our scientific output and, as some of the comments here mention, part of the statements made by the press do not have the technical rigor that could be hoped for. However, it must also be understood that the non-specialized media are not bound to publish information in the same manner as scientific conferences such as those sponsored by the IEEE or ACM, in our field. The work that we have developed jointly three universities (UC3M, Darmstad and Oregon) and a research institute (Institute IMDEA Networks) conforms to the most rigorous scientific methodology. If you would like to view the actual results of our work, the publication is available at: http://conferences.sigcomm.org/co-next/2010/CoNEXT_papers/11-Cuevas.pdf. You will be able to establish the methodology and the data in which our research is based.
Regards,
Ruben Cuevas (University Carlos III de Madrid), Michal Kryczka (Institute IMDEA Networks and
University Carlos III de Madrid), Angel Cuevas (University Carlos III de Madrid), Sebastian Kaune
(TU Darmstadt), Carmen Guerrero (University Carlos III de Madrid), Reza Rejaie (University of Oregon)