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Site Offers History of Torrent Downloads By IP
tsu doh nimh writes "You may have never heard of youhavedownloaded.com, but if you recently grabbed movies, music or software from online file-trading networks, chances are decent that the site has heard of you. In fact, you may find that the titles you downloaded are now listed and publicly searchable at the site, indexed by your Internet address. So far, youhavedownloaded.com has recorded more than 50 million unique Internet addresses belonging to file-sharing users. The site is searchable by file name and by Internet address. When you visit, it automatically checks and lets you know if your Internet address is in the database."
Beware all you clickers!
The MPAA must really be getting desperate. I guess owning Congress just isn't what it used to be.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
I use public trackers regularly (three or four times a week) and it's all DVD/BluRay rips or TV show caps. So it looks like this index is a load of crap.
I do not live in Marion, North Carolina and did not recently download an 8GB Lord of the Rings related file. I am on a tethered internet connection and that would take weeks.
I guess the whole concept of non-static IP addresses went right over their head?
But my Internet address is not here. It's in Joe's house, that's right next to mine. And in the Kennedy house, and Mrs. Makelin's house, and a hundred others.
Well, at least we know how they're monetizing this admittedly slick database; they won't allow you to submit a removal request until you provide your facebook credentials. To even reach the text below, you need to unblock Facebook in NoScript:
______
Removal Request
What’s the matter? You’re brave enough to steal music, movies and programs but only because you thought you weren’t going to get caught? Well whoever told you that was completely wrong and now your information has gone public. Are you afraid of media companies finding out that you’re a pirate or are you afraid of your friends finding out exactly what you’ve been downloading? Whatever your reason may be, the internet is no place for secrets. Even if you use every precaution in the book, there’s always a chance that someone like us will figure out what you’ve been up to. Because, the reality is, if man made it...man will get around it...and man will figure out how to exploit it. It’s just human nature.
Anyway, like we said before, luck is on your side today because we’re actually nicer than we let on. I never said we wouldn’t bust your chops about it, but at least we’re offering you a chance to redeem yourself — The details can be found after logging in to your Facebook account.
. We've got computers, we're tapping phone lines, you know that ain't allowed - Talking Heads, "Life During Wartime"
I don't do anything out of the ordinary to otherwise secure or anonymize my downloading using either Transmission or Vuze, for what it's worth.
"When you visit, it automatically checks and lets you know if your Internet address is in the database."
Except most people don't have a fixed IP reserved for them. Does that mean I'm going to get the "warning" because someone else on my ISP downloaded content? (Yes.)
Nevertheless, it's an interesting tool, but this information is probably useless since you still need to contact the ISP in order to know who actually was using that IP in that given time frame.
Also, keep in mind that this site currently only displays a time frame accurate to a MONTH (e.g. Dec, 2011) as far as I can see.
If they were trying to scare pirates off, well: Avast, thar! I be not scared!
... by Tor. I regularly download torrents from behind a draconian campus proxy using Tor. (Yes, I know, the Tor guys don't want us running torrents with it. But I'm too lazy to go looking for other solutions.) I'm "in the clear." :P
And if they track any IP address from Switzerland, they are breaking the Swiss data protection laws and can be sued for damages for collecting the IP and breach of privacy.
See http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/09/switzerland-gathering-ip-addresses-from-bittorrent-sites-illegal.ars
What happened to another IP slurper...
"But Switzerland, which is not an EU member, has decided that it can't sanction Logistep's behavior. The country's Federal Data Protection and Information Commissioner, Hanspeter Thür, took Logistep to court and this week won a major victory. The Federal Supreme Court ruled that IP addresses are in fact personal information and that companies like Logistep can't go about slurping them up for mere civil cases like file-swapping lawsuits. Logistep must cease all current copyright infringement data collection.
In a press release issued yesterday, Thür praised the court's decision. He sees Logistep as trying to "assume tasks clearly in the State's domain." Only the state can violate personal privacy, and only when pursuing criminal cases."
From the site:
The privacy policy, the contact us page — it’s all a joke. We came up with the idea of building a crawler like this and keeping the maintenance price under $300 a month. There was only one way to prove our theory worked — to implement it in practice. So we did. Now, we find ourselves with a big crawler. We knew what it did but we didn’t know how to use it. So we decided to make a joke out of it. That’s the beauty of jokes — you can make them out of anything.
However, if you have a better idea — don’t hesitate to contact us.
"Science will win because it works." - Stephen Hawking
I've uploaded almost 2 tb and none of my ip's show up. It's either borked or I did better than I thought covering my tracks.
I'm paranoid so I'll say it's not accurate.
Ha! They didn't catch me in the act of downloading my car.
I went to eat some animal crackers and the box said, "Do not eat if seal is broken." I opened the box and sure enough..
now I can see what all the other people who share the DHCP pool at my ISP are downloading
Information wants to be free, right? IMO this is awesome.
I have quite a few torrents open. Some legal, some less legal. But it seems they only listed 4 of them, and 1 of them wasn't even me downloading it.
Since I have seeded all those that they listed to a ratio of 2+, I decided to remove them.
Nice proof of concept, but I wonder if they work with any semiprivate torrent tracker.
I'm on ADSL. My IP address changes every few hours. Meaning I've got the 'same' IP as about 20 million other people. I foresaw this kind of crap a long time ago, so much so that I have a script that logs my public IP every minute in case sometimes comes knocking at the door. At least I can have a lawyer show the log. For what it's worth.
Non-Linux Penguins ?
Well, getting people's personal data voluntarily (well, okay, via semi-blackmail) is one way to reduce the workload for your legal staff.
Seriously, who would be stupid enough to login to facebook and FURTHER link themselves? This is just asking to be sued.
Please help metamoderate.
Slashdoting is one way to solve the problem.
Bring on the Slashdotting!
mirror?
It didn't take long...
how many of these downloads can they even validate occurred?
how many ip addresses can they even confirm are valid?
oh right, facts. forgot about those things.
Instead, it's some RIAA themed site that says "Hi, Pirate!" at the top of it.
It pulled back 1 torrent of the hundreds I've downloaded in the past few months. It was on the pirate bay of a Channel 4 Series and the only reason I grabbed it there was my usual private trackers were down or skipped the release.
If you're dumb enough to only use the big public open trackers then they'll have plenty on you. Otherwise it's nothing to be concerned with.
From the "Contact Us" page (which, among other things, lists a postal address in an Antarctic research base):
This site is a joke. But its data is not.
Misleading titles? Inflammatory blurbs? Keep in mind that Slashdot is a tabloid.
Slashdot, can we have a "Remove Article" option for articles like this that are quickly revealed to be a joke? The site doesn't track anything, and it even says so. The article is pointless.
"You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war." -- Albert Einstein
VPN, anyone ? Witch serious p2p user still downloads in the open, without a *good* VPN solution for obscurity purpose ?
also make sure to visit: someguywhopreviouslyhadyourdynamicipdownloaded.com
9/11: Never forget it was a false-flag operation
Here, "you" clearly means someone at a single point in time accessed the internet *via* an IP address traceable to a known account holder.
This has been debated endlessly and surely is common knowledge amongst those supposed to know better.
Pretty creepy in my opinion.
It would take me less than an hour to write a .torrent file crawler and a modified bittorrent client that kept on connecting to different trackers and requesting different torrents. I'm sure there are hundreds of code gurus on /. that could do this trivial task in half the time.
Dear courts and judges:
Connecting to a tracker != copyright infringement
Requesting a block from a peer != copyright infringement (for all we know the ISP could've used DPI to drop that packet)
Applying for a search warrant, getting it signed by a judge, and then legally seizing the computer as evidence is the only way to prove that someone committed copyright infringement. Anything less is just hearsay.
They mean the IP address of my gateway, not *MY* IP address. Even then, it's not *MINE*, it comes from a pool of IPs handed out by my ISP's DHCP server and it changes periodically. The address assigned my gateway today could have been last used by the Disney Princess Bootleg Video Mafia, and I'd be a little offended if I found that I was being impugned as a distributor of low-brow animated bastardizations of classic fairy tales. Doubly so if some numb-nuts from Disney's legal department gets all uppity and litigious about it.
Dynamic IP FTW!
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Fire up Tor and visit this site! It scrolls on for pages and pages!
But my IP address keeps changing, and I am sure some one had my current address before me as some one else will have mine affter me. Kinda makes this meaningless in my opinion.
WARNING! Only do this if you are an idiot! Don't unblock / log into Facebook or anything else. Odd that they presume you have an account too.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
On the pages where it says:
"it looks like we’ve picked up some activity from your friends or family" I gave my results from completely different IP addresses, In completely different countries, for content I've never heard of.
Why not say "some random other internet users" if that's what they mean"
...with my server's IP : this site brilliantly detected that I had downloaded an ISO of the latest stable release of Open Indiana (Open Solaris' fork). Feels good.
So where is Anonymous when you really need them.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Interesting, website says that I have downloaded shows when in fact I never touch pirate torrents. So ether someone spoofing my IP or neighbors somehow got past MAC filtering and authentication. I am fairly sure my provider did not shuffle my IP address, but then I don't keep track of this. Should I, in case *AA comes knocking on my door?
I just checked this site - it displayed a list of things it thought I downloaded, but none of those has even ever caught my fancy, so apparently it does not work in my case. I'm only using internet via 3G mobile network and each time I connect I'm getting a random IP, so the records on this site may contain all the files downloaded by the same IP, but not the same user.
... And that's assuming their dynamic IP was even theirs at the noted time. Most people who download torrents on a regular basis disable DHT - and since their method of finding information is via DHT, then disabling BHT lowers any chance of showing in their lists to zero.
OK how about all of us seed 100 popular filenames and sizes with RickRolls and leave them up for a week, just to mess things up a bit.
What, this is /.? I thought it was /b/. Dammit!
Given all the TV shows I've downloaded over the years both current and old, I suspect this site really doesn't do much if you're not downloading torrents from "big names" like The Pirate Bay. With their grotesque lack of accuracy in their date, I do hope that anybody sued as a result of the information they do collect is wise enough to fight and question the validity of the data as a whole -- it's clearly not accurate, and likely to result in "fishing expedition" lawsuits such as we've already seen from the RIAA and MPAA for years.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
"It's a Wonderful Life" is a horrible movie.
The only reason it's remembered is because it fell into the public domain.
see you in Hell, modpoints!
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Hi. We have no records on you.
This means you are using a private torrent tracker or, of course, you may not be a torrent user at all!
I torrent a ton. On that IP. I don't use private trackers. I am even seeding now.
Their detection method is clearly terrible.
If the only way you can accept an assertion is by faith, then you are conceding that it can't be taken on its own merits
They seem to have missed all my downloads of the install CDs for SGI Irix 6.5 as well.
If you're going to "pirate" something, make sure to use Peerblock. Problem solved.
I sort of tire of the ol' Slashdot jumping to conclusions but here's how it works:
1. They visit public tracker websites.
2. They query the tracker for a list of peers given a torrent hash (not difficult)
3. Dump all data into the database that can be searched through their website
That means your data is not on there if you're a torrent user because you're using a tracker they aren't indexing or you have a dynamic ip that they haven't categorized yet. In the same way this is why you can get false positives. All this B.S. about honey pots or fear mongering is dumb considering how straight forward this website is.
one was from a public shitty tracker and the other was from some dickhead who i always thought was a little sketchy and now will avoid. i downloaded a bunch of porn from isohunt but it didn't show up, haha on them and none of my stuff from obscure private trackers showed up either. oh well just one more reason russians are scummy thugs.
"This means you are using a private torrent tracker or, of course, you may not be a torrent user at all! It happens."
Yeah, sometimes people just happen to not pirate movies and things (and, alright, haven't needed an Ubuntu installer in a while)..just how things work out sometimes!
Mostly wanted to see if anybody else around here was up to something.
"These people look deep within my soul and assign me a number based on the order in which I joined" --Homer re:
This is nothing. My last job involved p2p analytics among other things. You have no idea how easilly the system can be subverted and how much information can be harvested. The good news for you guys is that the RIAA are cheap ass bastards who don't like to pay their bills, so the company went under and as far as I know the technology we used has been shelved.
Over the 4G network, said that I had downloaded The Twilight Saga, Breaking Dawn.
I want to sue them for slander. I would NEVER watch that teenage girl necro-beastiality movie.
Ignore it.
They claim to have indexed 104.22TB in 100,800 torrents.
Most slashdotters have got that much just on optical media, let alone on spindle.
This is a drop in the ocean, it's no suprise your local starbucks isn't listed.
Note to ACs: I won't mod you up, even if you are being funny or insightful. So take a chance! It's not real life!
Oh Ya, uh huh, I'm not listed. Inflated numbers, scam, or facebook ip's
I'm not listed.
Might send a little something to PeerBlock.
The site also uses the facebook API, so if you're one of the bagillions of unwary people out there and are always logged in to facebook, they could now have your name to go with the IP...
I have 4 ISPs all with DHCP IPs ... good luck with that "ïnvestigation" :)
when i'm in the mood to fap to some tranny porn i just go to ashemaletube.com, not waste time with torrents. nice try though.
Doesn't seem to know about Linux distros. I queried openSUSE-12.1-DVD-i586.iso and got no hits.
for those who don't get the reference, "By-Tor and the Snow Dog" is a song on the Rush album Fly By Night (and general nicknames for two of the band members IIRC)
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
I'm thankful that I have a dynamic IP. It might the only defense I have if I get sued.
for those unwilling/unable to watch the video:
it's a clip from a Wonderful Life, the scene where there's a run on George Bailey's bank. George explains that the bank's assets are invested "in Joe's house, that's right next to mine. And in the Kennedy house, and Mrs. Makelin's house, and a hundred others". i.e. not in cash-on-hand for the depositors. at least the loans aren't in default.
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
too bad for everybody using static ip.
Free MMA Training - http://www.newbreedacademy.com
took a look and it wasn't accurate at all.
USING THIS APP REQUIRES: Your e-mail address Your profile info: description, hometown, likes, location, relationship details, website and work history
WHAT DO THEY NEED THAT INFO FOR? The whole thing is a scam on a level ALMOST on par with the RIAA/MPAA. If you are a facebook user now is a good time to click through and report the app as malicious.
they say it is often more relevant then the comment above, all we know is its called the Sig!
I looked up 127.0.0.1 on their database, they came up clean.
If you haven't downloaded anything, why would you check using same IP address that's in the database?
Visit it and lose plausible deniability.
OK, I went to the site. I have a dynamic IP but I know for a fact I haven't disconnected anytime in the last couple of days, so if the site was worth anything it should have picked up my downloading of the finale of Boardwalk Empire at the very least.
What does it think I downloaded:
"Cyprus Isles - Hard Fucking Dogging.wmv"
Good work.
To all newcomers - people here are very close-minded and can't handle complaints about Linux. Keep this in mind.
Someone at my IP address has been downloading porn! This indexing of that must stop!
The site says I'm a pirate and I've downloaded tons of warez and porn from a Hughes Net satellite connection capped at 500MB per day. I check my modem's quota regularly and we never use more than a few MB. Obviously either a) making stuff up or b) not accounting for dynamic IPs whatsoever.
Copyright trolls use residential ISP accounts with dynamic IPs like everyone else. By the time you've figured out who they are (and how exactly did you do that?) they've already got a new IP. The only people you're protecting yourself from are other legitimate peers.
"It's a Wonderful Life" is a horrible movie.
The only reason it's remembered is because it fell into the public domain.
It is a James Capra film starring Jimmy Stewart, Lionel Barrymore and a young Donna Reed. The release of so sentimental a fantasy in the immeadiate postwar years may have doomed to it to failure at the box office.
But you could say with just as much truth that 1939 was not the right year for "The Wizard of Oz," which found its television audience in the mid-fifties.
Despite the lapsed copyright, television stations that aired it still were required to pay royalties. Although the film's images had entered the public domain, the film's story was still protected by virtue of it being a derivative work of the published story "The Greatest Gift", whose copyright was properly renewed by Philip Van Doren Stern in 1971. The film became a perennial holiday favorite in the 1980s, possibly due to its repeated showings each holiday season on hundreds of local television stations.
It's a Wonderful Life
95% Fresh --- Critics ---- 94% Audience
It's a Wonderful Life (1946)
Ignore all the facebook angles, consider if someone actually wanted to build database of known copyright infringers (I refuse to use "pirate" since it isn't hijacking ships on the open seas)...
Scenario: MAFIAA would like a "high value target" database of IPs to check each time a new high-value release comes out.
1. MAFIAA have zero IPs today.
2. MAFIAA "front" puts out a "History of Torrent Downloads By IP"
3. "We" check it - and hand them our IP, which they add to the database.
3a. Whatever the site tells you back when you check is irrelevant.
When high-value release is made:
1. Pass IP database to associates who have the tools to port probe looking for torrent ports and query what they are seeding.
2. Pass confirmed hits IPs to the "Collections" dept for letters to ISPs and/or John Doe lawsuits.
Probing a few hundred thousand people who thought "crap, did they catch me?" is all of a sudden so much easier and your paranoia ironically leads to you being caught.
Gathering torrent IP's from popular sites isn't difficult.
But they clearly want people very badly to sign in with their facebook accounts. First they're scaring people to sign in by promising removal from their database. If you visit the site again they provide you with a choice - an impossible (!) captcha or facebook. It's social hacking.
First off - don't let them scare you. Copyright holders has all the info anyway. Second, don't ever give away your facebook credentials to a third party that you don't trust. Third, don't trust these people.
Logging in with Facebook shares your address, email and name, so they can link your info with your IP, so they can later sell that info, or make threats. JUST DON'T DO IT. Click the log in, then report it to Facebook!!
apparently they cant even log my accurate captcha submission.
At the time of writing this comment, they have implimented a facebook-login in order to see your list. I attempted to use their captcha device instead, because I hate facebook (which was somewhere around 20 characters long, case sensitive). I tried to enter the captcha about 15 times using different images and each time it told me I was wrong. I don't believe it is possible to login by their captcha and they are mandating the facebook.com login. I suspect this website might be a trap / facebook scraper. Earlier in the day I was able to see 'my results' which were incorrect.
I tried to check mine, but the landing page asks me to login with my facebook account so that it knows that I'm a human.
I do not have a facebook account, so I had to fill in that horrible long captcha.
After four failed attempts, I gave up.
However: Suppose you did have a Facebook account. Would that allow them to tie facebook account X with friends Y and real name Z to IP address L which has downloaded torrents T,J,K, and M?
It sounds like a trap! A method for linking your real name to your torrent history! (Even a fake torrenting history)
Is anyone able to actually use the site via captcha, or is it just phishing for Facebook passwords? Even if I get a captcha where all the characters are readable and unambiguous (is it "O" or "0"?), and double-check it before entering, it still says it's wrong.
Not any more. As of a few days ago I sold my 2001 vintage rear-projection TV. I didn't watch it any more and it was just taking up space (if I want to watch a TV show, I do it on the PC, which has a decently large screen, and no commercials). Due to the weird pricing at Comcast, it's cheaper to have Internet + basic cable TV than to have just Internet, so I still have TV service, even though I don't have anything to plug into the cable at the moment.
Captcha never works. I think they're harvesting facebook data. Also: Google cache on the page has a link called "Don't take it seriously"
Popup with this:
Don't take it seriously
The privacy policy, the contact us page — it’s all a joke. We came up with the idea of building a crawler like this and keeping the maintenance price under $300 a month. There was only one way to prove our theory worked — to implement it in practice. So we did. Now, we find ourselves with a big crawler. We knew what it did but we didn’t know how to use it. So we decided to make a joke out of it. That’s the beauty of jokes — you can make them out of anything.
However, if you have a better idea — don’t hesitate to contact us.
Additionally, the captcha code is:
success: function(data){
if(data=='OK') location.href='/';
So if the data matches, it just reloads the page.
And on top of it being by far the most frustrating one I've ever had to do, it doesn't actually work.
Or you could sign in with facebook, but I honestly don't care enough to make one.
IIRC opentorrent trackers also feed random IPs to make exactly these kind of practices unreliable.
IP addresses change. not everyone has a static ip.
It didn't get slashdotted.. just can't let boss see those logs.
Now everyone will know I've downloaded !
My captcha here was squirm. Do ho ho.
The domain was created a month and half ago by XMLSHOP, LLC. Wonder what they do .......
http://www.xmlshop.com/
Registrant:
XMLSHOP LLC
Registered through: GoDaddy.com, Inc. (http://www.godaddy.com)
Domain Name: YOUHAVEDOWNLOADED.COM
Created on: 23-Oct-11
Expires on: 23-Oct-13
Last Updated on: 22-Nov-11
I mean, plenty of things have fallen into the public domain and have been forgotten. The movie had an appeal that went beyond being free for the station. I mean what use would it have been if it garnered no viewers?
As for being "horrible", this is an opinion. Not fact.
It says I downloaded Amsterdam Heavy, which oddly enough, I did.
It didn't get though:
The weird world of blowfly
The man on the train
Boy Wonder
Drive
which i downloaded at the same time.
Oh, it calls me a pirate also, totally cool.
Be seeing you...
Just want to confirm that I checked my current home IP, it has four entries, two of which are definitely episodes I downloaded, two are someone else's listed from a previous month. I think it's safe to say they're 'legit' insofar as they're recording actual activity and querying it honestly at least some of the time.
Wow i checked this site out and it called me a pirate for downloading music, Music that i don't even like or even knew existed and according to their logs i have like 4 albums worth of it.
Actually, my ISP sucks, but in such a way, that it's great for stuff like this.
Every last one of us users is squirreled behind a poorly checked single public-facing IP. It keeps very few, if any logs (having people who work there that can actually see the proof of this), and when I pull my IP up on their site, it's chock full of other pirates such as myself downloading all sorts of stuff I've never seen/herd of.
I get to be anonymous, and I get to see what my 'neighbors' pirate! Win/win!
First, don't get a Facebook account.
The privacy policy, the contact us page — it’s all a joke. We came up with the idea of building a crawler like this and keeping the maintenance price under $300 a month. There was only one way to prove our theory worked — to implement it in practice. So we did. Now, we find ourselves with a big crawler. We knew what it did but we didn’t know how to use it. So we decided to make a joke out of it. That’s the beauty of jokes — you can make them out of anything."
Calm down, people. It'll get funny when the RIAA subpoenas them for their database.
bah.
I don't use torrents and have 0 illegal downloads. All my music, movies, and software is 100% legally paid for...
...So, they try anything: Not only will they be heavily disappointed, but will be at the receiving end of a nice counter-suit as well!
Torrentfreak found some juicy hypocrisy going on:
Absolute power corrupts absolutely. indymedia
Qtel seems to do a really thorough job, unfortunately. :|
how is babby formed?
smilies are for reetards