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Most Torrent Downloaders Are Monitored, Study Finds
derekmead writes "A new study from Birmingham University in the U.K. found that people will likely be monitored within hours of downloading popular torrents by at least one of ten or more major monitoring firms. The team, led by security researcher Tom Chothia, ran software that acted like a BitTorrent client for three years and recorded all of the connections made to it. At SecureComm conference in Padua, Italy this week, the team announced that they found huge monitoring operations tracking downloaders that have been up and running for at least the entirety of their research. According to the team's presentation (PDF), monitors were only regularly detected in Top 100 torrents, while monitoring of more obscure material was more spotty. What's really mysterious is who all of the firms are. Chothia's crew found around 10 different monitoring entities, of which a few were identifiable as security companies, copyright firms, or other torrent researchers. But six entities could not be identified because they were masked through third party hosting. Now, despite firms focusing mostly on just the top few searches out there at any given time, that's still a massive amount of user data to collect and store. Why? Well, if a reverse class-action lawsuit were feasible, those treasure troves of stored data would be extremely valuable."
Personally, there haven't really been any movies or music made in the past 15 years that are even worth downloading for free,
"Yeah, well, you know, that's just, like, your opinion, man!"
Oh wait, that movie's not 15 years old. So you wouldn't get it.
Everything is better with chainsaws.
"I would assume that most people are using VPNs these days, even for casual web surfing."
The skewed perspective of slashdot never ceases to amaze me.
Not a bad idea actually. I really liked face2face feature in sneakernet. Going to a friend and get the latest CD on tape (some of my friends had 'auto-reverse'!) and then go - with the walkman playing my latest freshest copy - to other friends who copied the tape for themselves to their tape (some of those had 'doublespeed'!). Sit down and have a coffee, talk a little until the tape was done. Reverse both tapes. Have another coffee... Great times!
I wouldn't necessarily call it sneakernet though. I would call it a SOCIAL NETWORK!!
rm -rf --no-preserve-root /
Obviously you're not a golfer.
Well, if a reverse class-action lawsuit were feasible,
No, my EULA explicitly says you drop your right for a class-action lawsuit.
`echo $[0x853204FA81]|tr 0-9 ionbsdeaml`@gmail.com
"But six entities could not be identified because they were masked through third party hosting."
NSA
FBI
FAPSI
GCHQ
CSE
GCSB
Please tell me FAPSI has something to do with porn...
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
I'm behind seven proxies.
Yea, we know -
Six of them are ours.
Yours,
The NSA
Don't you mean "raping"?
That comment and your sig are offensive to those people who have gone through the horror of having their copyrights ignored.
Where I work, we have monthly-ish meetings that also includes watching a classic type of "Blood On The ____" workplace safety film. Naturally, at the beginning, there is the FBI warning about stealing imaginary property...
I really do hope to meet an example of someone who pirates safety films: a thieving cheapskate who is concerned for his employees well-being.
Cito (1725214), your IP has been logged.
It must be exciting for them to monitor me downloading Fedora or openSUSE.