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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."
monitored torrents likely to be monitored... news at 11.
no, most normal people don't care
you really live in quite the bubble if you think MOST people are using VPNs...
Most good VPNs say they don't keep logs, or say they delete logs within 24 hours.
FTFY.
Scare tactic away. I'm going to keep downloading.
I can get a product the media assholes won't give me at ANY PRICE! For free.
It's not even up for debate anymore. I'm not listening to the media mafia anymore. Wrong? Illegal? Immoral? Stealing from the artists?
Sure whatever you say fucknuts. I'm going to keep downloading anyway. And teach other people how to as well.
Go try to convince and have an arguement with someone who still cares. I'm going to do whatever i want.
Why? Because fuck you thats why.
And no matter what i do. I'll never be as big of a douche as anyone from the media mafia. Never.
One day the illegal media cartels might actually get it, that the "pirates" provide a better product. No adverts for other films (Disney is top culprit but there are others), no trailers accusing you of being a crook despite buying a legit DVD / BluRay, no DRM... no regiuon coding, in other words, it just works. The illegal media cartels just p people off with their crappy product.
The problem is, the politicians in many countries that can sort this out have been bought and paid for by the illegal media cartels, so expect no change to their tactics.
Take Nobody's Word For It.
"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.
It's safer to rent movies and rip yourself, direct download links for movies, borrow an open Wifi point, and direct exchange content with friends (hard drive swaps). These methods are far safer than Bittorent. As for TV shows, those seem to be a bit unclear in terms of legality (tested in courts), and not taken to court that I am aware.
For my part I don't really know who to trust. How do I know that PrivateInternetAccess is a legit service, and that they are really doing what they say they do? If I'm going to pay for a VPN service, I definitely want to be sure that they are solid.
A friend of mine works for a UK company (musicmetric.com) that provides artist popularity data to record companies and other entities (top list providers, etc). One of their data points are monitoring of music torrents. Note that this data is not for the purpose of lawsuits but just to see which artists/albums/songs are popular in different countries and regions (even down to city level using geoip lookup). Their spiders/crawers/monitors they have deployed are, AFAIK, hosted by a 3rd party hosting provider. I also know there's another competing company in the UK doing the same thing.
"But six entities could not be identified because they were masked through third party hosting."
NSA
FBI
FAPSI
GCHQ
CSE
GCSB
sudo make me a sandwich
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 /
Why does it matter that they keep track of this information. Pretty soon we'll all have an IP address and we'll be globally trackable and tracked.
Seems about right to me.
So only people downloading the latest movies/music are monitored.
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
Well, what is the disadvantage? Why would you NOT want to use one?
Because unless you're running your own VPN, there's no proof or guarantee that whoever is running it isn't farming your data anyway, and just lying to you about it.
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
Block lists don't work. The lists are overly broad and include a lot of ranges that are clearly not an entity you need to be worried about. Also, it's unlikely that the content holders would do their own research... it's going to be outsourced contractors that clearly would know the value in swapping out IPs.
Once monitored, who knows what else they may be doing with your IP address and it MAY NOT BE YOU. Go to somebody's yard use their open Wifi and touch just one of the Top monitored files and they'll get on the monitor list.
Hate your neighbor? use their Wifi to torrent a bunch of movies currently out in theaters. Six strikes...they probably won't even realize it is the Wifi before being banned by the local monopoly. (In my area both ISPs signed up with the content Mafia so you are probably banned from internet almost completely.)
Does anybody think it is time to start connecting their neighborhoods on their own?
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
Personally, I don't care if the movie business or the music industry dies. Let them. They're almost universally a bunch of self-congratulatory assholes to begin with. There might be a lack of blockbuster movies for awhile, maybe, but I doubt it. And certainly, they can't argue that we'd be missing out on "quality" music if the music industry shuts down, because most of the crap they provide these days is marketing with a tune anyway.
People are going to keep making this stuff and, one way or another, it will continue to be supported. Sound engineers and artists are still going to be needed, and good actors, directors, crew and others will be needed as well. Once they figure out how to make themselves useful to the new distribution methods, have no fear, the middlemen will be able to make money hand over fist again. I'm only suggesting that perhaps it is time to move on to the next swindle.
When you have such a high population of downloaders, many of them who would actually buy some of this stuff if you released it at the same time you did for everyone else, instead of bullshit restrictions to artificially drive up prices, you need to understand that you are not only fighting a losing battle, but you are missing a market you can work with.
Copying and downloading bits from people sharing them is not stealing and it's not depriving the businesses of sales they deserve to make. They are distribution organizations and cartels which sort of made sense when you needed to press vinyl records and distribute them via trucks to stores. They make little or no sense now that you can just duplicate millions of copies of their wares cheaply and without cost to the distributor.
So, in summary, the Music companies and Hollywood can feel free to go away. They will not be missed.
Its that most of these films were released after IMDB was created. When people see a new movie they actively want to share their opinion of that particular film with the rest of the world. With old movies people are more likely go go "Meh. History already judged it." This is especially true when old movies are cheap and new movies in theaters are expensive. The second factor is how many positive reviews for films are given by the younger people who will give movies like Transformers 10/10, but have never seen better movies like Terminator 2 and the Abyss.
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.
Shareware for the PC in the days before I started to use Linux was just impossible to keep up. 10 dollars here, 10 dollars there... it just never ends. I recently made the mistake of paying for a license for Sublime Text 2. Then I had the need for a plugin to edit files directly over SSH. That plugin wants money too. No doubt more plugins are useful and want money too. And I still need to get a winzip license and pay for god knows how many more tools.
It is knickle and diming me to death expect the dimes are 100 dollars and the knickles are 50 bucks. And it is not like these sellers try and make it easy, NOT EVERYONE IN THE WORLD HAS A CREDIT CARD YOU FUCKING AMERICAN CENTRIC ASSHOLE!
You can either give in (I actually tried to see if F2P works for MMO's and NO IT FUCKING DOES NOT) or say fuck it and be a leech but a leech with money for food.
But YOU are only asking for a small amount. That ain't the issue. The issue is, SO IS EVERYBODY ELSE.
Think of ads. One ad ain't a problem. A thousand ads ARE a problem. And there aren't a thousand ads out there, there are millions. You either shut them all out or go insane. And then that poor honest advertiser who really has a product you might want... well. that honest bastard is blocked out too.
For me the killer with paying for media content was when it became clear that even if you had a song on both LP and CD and Tape AND minidisc (I am a gadget whore)... if you wanted to put it on your new fangled Mp3 player, the music industry wanted you to pay for it again. Now I am a sheep and a I love it when I am shorn but I put the limit at being skinned. Leave us sheep alive to be fleeced once a year, not skinned alive and our succelent meat sucked from out still breathing roasting corpse. Do that and even sheep might get an attitude.
For desktop software, Winzip was the killer. It whined so much for such a basic tool (and you would need a rar license and lha etce tc) that it just became easier to ignore it and just go free software altogether.
It was this shareware attitude that killed the Mac for me. Once was forced to use one and every tool seemed to cost money. Run Linux and you got enterprise grade software for free, use OSX and you pay for a basic text editor. Fuck that.
This sheep is not for skinning.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
It must be exciting for them to monitor me downloading Fedora or openSUSE.
Of course cheaper isn't a reason on it's own, otherwise you are condoning stealing because that too is cheaper.
The vendors' selection of a price point is something that has gone astray here. And it's linked to competition from other entertainment devices - music and video are a smaller fraction of the pie than they used to be.
I'm willing to pay up to euro10 for a DVD, and less than that for a CD. This means I wait several months (or a year) after a new release before it reaches my price point. DVDs typically start out here at euro20+ and some CDs are amazingly priced at euro20+ when "hot". After a few months, one has a better view on whether a CD/DVD is worth getting for the long term. There was a time I'd pay the crazy prices being asked for new releases, but it passed a long time ago.
A few years ago, a survey (maybe in The Economist magazine) indicated that people were spending about the same fraction of their income on entertainment as they had 25 years earlier. However, the share taken by music and video (predominantly VHS then, DVD now) had declined significantly, while that taken by gaming and suchlike had grown, and dining out etc. had not changed much. Clearly, if we're expected to buy just as much music and video, the price has to be more attractive. They're competing with PlayStations, internet, and suchlike for money and attention.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
Does anyone know what responsibilities these monitoring companies have under the data protection act?