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Game of Thrones Pirates Being Monitored By HBO, Warnings On The Way (torrentfreak.com)
HBO is leaving no stones unturned in keeping Game of Thrones' piracy under control. The company is monitoring various popular torrent swarms and sending thousands of warnings targeted at internet subscribers whose connections are used to share the season 7 premiere of the popular TV series, reports TorrentFreak: Soon after the first episode of the new season appeared online Sunday evening, the company's anti-piracy partner IP Echelon started sending warnings targeted at torrenting pirates. The warnings in question include the IP-addresses of alleged BitTorrent users and ask the associated ISPs to alert their subscribers, in order to prevent further infringements. "We have information leading us to believe that the IP address xx.xxx.xxx.xx was used to download or share Game of Thrones without authorization," the notification begins. "HBO owns the copyright or exclusive rights to Game of Thrones, and the unauthorized download or distribution constitutes copyright infringement. Downloading unauthorized or unknown content is also a security risk for computers, devices, and networks." Under US copyright law, ISPs are not obligated to forward these emails, which are sent as a DMCA notification. However, many do as a courtesy to the affected rightsholders. The warnings are not targeted at a single swarm but cover a wide variety of torrents. TorrentFreak has already seen takedown notices for the following files, but it's likely that many more are being tracked.
http://theoatmeal.com/comics/game_of_thrones
I have no problems paying for something when it's easy to pay for that thing and reasonably priced. HBO and the cable companies are all off their rockers where I live, so pirating content is often the only solution available if I want to know what the hell my online friends are yammering about the next day.
Randal: That look was so gay, I thought Sam was gonna tell the little hobbits to take a walk, so he could saunter over to Frodo and suck his fucking cock. Now that would've been an Academy Award-worthy ending.
Hobbit fan: Hey! Faggot! They're not gay! They're Hobbits.
Randal: And then right after the Sam/Frodo suck-fest, right before the credits roll, Sam fucking flat-out bricks in Frodo's mouth.
Hobbit fan: I swear... Fuck you...!
[Hobbit fan suddenly vomits. Randal runs to the manager's office, laughing.]
Randal: I made fun of The Lord of the Rings so hard, it made some super geek puke all over the counter. Where do we keep the mop and bucket so I can have Elias clean it up?
Streams are (usually) hosted by a single pirate site, which (presumably) isn't inclined to share their IP logs with the media companies. Torrents, however, are hosted by users, which can (and do) include monitoring companies hired by the media companies, which allows them to track the IP of pretty much everyone torrenting that file.. The only way the media companies can track streams is to either have direct access to the ISPs or hosting sites logs, both of which are possible, but considerably more work than tracking a torrent.
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
As an Australian, you can pay $15/mo for Foxtel Now "Pop pack", which includes Game of Thrones and a bunch of other TV shows.
That's cheaper than Americans who pay for HBO GO who have to pay $15USD
https://www.foxtel.com.au/now/...
Get a VPN. You can get a year for about the price of 2 months of HBO.
Why can't we go back to using jumpers to configure slot adapter cards? Why? I say!
After I got a warning email from HBO by my ISP, I just decided to Stream instead of Downloading. I'd like to see them monitor that.
I'd like to get this straightened out: when you torrent, the file divided up into pieces and sent to your computer in more-or-less random order, where it's reassembled and stored. when you stream, the file is divided up into pieces and sent to your computer sequentially, and the pieces are deleted after you see them. Aside from not having the pieces afterwards, how is this different in terms of their tracking you? In both cases the files are sent to you. Do you mean "use a proxy"? Or is the difference that a streaming viewer isn't sending pieces to other viewers and you believe that watching it illegally is less criminal than watching it and distributing it?
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You are a pirate if you have a hand in making the a pirated content available online. When you leech a torrent content, you are also sending the part that are stored in your local storage to other downloader, which more or less is the same as burning the episode to a disc and sell them. Streaming on the other hand only make you a consumer of pirated contents, which is not a target of DMCA take down
There's also the possibility that the torrent swarm list has false endpoints in it deliberately to poison any data gathered from monitoring the swarm. Personally, I would _expect_ all public trackers to add false peers into the mix as doing so increases plausible deniability for the real peers. Whether they actually do, I don't know, since I don't use them, but I've heard rumours of this activity in the past.
Anyone wanting to monitor would then have to actively connect to advertised peers to ensure they exist, then transfer some valid data, to check it's a legitimate peer - a simple TCP handshake is not sufficient since it might be some other random service you've connected to. This increases the resources required from whoever is trying to monitor the swarm.
The VPNs are now blocked by the geo-lockers such as Netflix and HBO. So that doesn't help, unless you find a particularly small and obscure VPN provider they haven't identified and blocked yet.