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An intern once thought it was a good idea to torrent a couple of Game of Thrones episodes using my startup's Digital Ocean box. We found out after Digital Ocea
by flak48 6y ago
An intern once thought it was a good idea to torrent a couple of Game of Thrones episodes using my startup's Digital Ocean box.
We found out after Digital Ocean forwarded us an email from HBO (who presumably tracked Digital Ocean down via the IP) that we were engaging in piracy. We sent an email to everyone with access, saying whoever was doing it to stop. Then we got a second email (a final warning).
Everyone denied doing it, so I had to find the offender via checking the bash history of the box for all users.
Sure enough a couple of mkv files had been downloaded and deleted by an intern :( Making the mistake of downloading it was forgiveable once, since we lived in a culture where piracy was rampant / normal (this was before Netflix et al were available in my country). But repeating the offense, failing to come clean and making us waste our time to locate who did it was not. (This was a small 7 person startup so trust was super important).
As for why the intern needed to ssh into a digital ocean box to run a torrent? The college internet (where he was working from) blocked torrent connections and he wanted to be the first one to download and release the episodes on the college intranet. Smh.
- Macha 6y agoMy previous employer had a strongly worded email and CEO statement sent out after they were sent a notice of over 100 company IPs (out of 15000 employees) torrenting the game of thrones finale to basically tell people "Hey, don't do that, we do business with many of those companies".
- megablast 6y agoAnd our company (80,000+) showed us the finale live from the US. Paid for of course.
- xorcist 6y agoHow do you even pay for that? 80k potential viewers? Aren't streaming licenses normally region exclusive?
- falsaberN1 6y agoMaybe someone had a netflix or international TV account and they somehow shared a stream of it playing live or something. Now I'm kind of wondering how one would deploy such a thing for 80K clients though.
- xorcist 6y agoThere are no Netflix streams licensed for further broadcast. Sharing a stream with 80k people is just as illegal as torrenting it to 80k people. Copyright law doesn't differentiate between protocols.
- falsaberN1 6y agoThat's even worse in terms of creating more questions. Did every employee pay for their part? Did the company pay for it? How does this even work?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- einpoklum 6y agoYou mean: "Hey, don't do that, we do business with many of those companies, and we don't want them to associate us with the shoddy work on the later seasons of the series, certainly not that ridiculous ham-fisted finale".
- deadalus 6y agoseedr.cc, bitport.io or zbigz.com exist to solve this problem and would have saved him his job.
- thomastjeffery 6y agoHe may have already weighed his internship as less valuable than the cost of using such a service.
- ceejayoz 6y agoOr... just don't use work resources to torrent, period.
- Kaze404 6y agoThat's exactly what the parent comment is suggesting.
- pastage 6y agoPiracy has always been rampant at companies, sure now days its too easy to track but in the beginning we only had good piracy bandwidth because so much of it was done on company dollars. With the good eyes of CEOs, sure it was cold hands when they got raided. I never do personal stuff on company time/equipment, just seems stupid. I'm not sure I think it should matter though...
- _tbyy 6y agoSeriously. The idea that it's just fine to pirate everything because you can or have the tech to do it is appalling to see in this community.
- cosmojg 6y agoHuh? Why?
- NortySpock 6y agoBecause I make my money selling my labor and IP to my company (software engineer, it's in my contract.) If someone stole my IP from me or my company, it would be harder to pay the bills for either me, or my company.
- _tbyy 6y agoThe problem here is not recognizing that the piracy was actually the problem. In what way was it forgivable? Because everybody does it, that makes it okie dokie? Because you don't have a Netflix account? If everyone treated piracy as theft (it is) then no one would have to waste their time investigating it because the collective will would exist to prevent it.
- Bjartr 6y agoPiracy is copyright infringement. There's no reason to call it theft. They are both bad for society, they are both illegal, but they are distinct.
- TheSpiceIsLife 6y agoIt's not that clear cut. Some people we're never and are never going to pay for some of the they consume, they'll either pirate it or just not consume it. I'm presently watching Avatar: The Last Airbender. Which I just pirated earlier today. I'm never going to our-right buy, nor rent, it. One season is presently on Netflix here in Australia, so I'll watch that there, and the publisher will get their three cents out of me via Netflix, or whatever Netflix pays. That's three cents they were otherwise never going to get out of me. If the content was available at a reasonable price, say some portion of what I pay my ISP and the AU$8 I pay the VPN service to hide my traffic from my surveillance-state ISP, I'd pay it. But it isn't, and I can't afford to pay for all the content I consume on my trifling skilled-tradesperson wage. You realise when people like me see job ads for doctors getting paid in a day what I earn in a fortnight, and revenue figures like: The Last Airbender had grossed $131,772,187 in the United States, and $187,941,694 in other countries, making for a total of $319,713,881 worldwide. ... there's no way you're going to convince me this side of the heat death of the universe that copyright infringement in universally bad.
- lostgame 6y agoWhile literally true; I have always found this argument to be petty and pedantic. I’ve heard every argument in the book; but even the old ads said ‘you wouldn’t steal ____’. The fundamental principle is so similar to the point that discussing it quickly devolves into pedantry. I am one that has had this discussion probably a dozen times; half of those on this forum, and I’ve just decided to stand by my educated opinion that it’s absolutely a type of theft.
- tekstar 6y agoI used to work at a ~100 person company that provided satellite equipment, mostly to media companies - radio stations, movie distributors, that type of thing. A senior customer service rep realized he had VPN access to a customer's, like.. T1 line. He started torrenting movies on it. On the CUSTOMERS network. Our entire company was nearly taken offline and the customer threatened cancelling the entire contract and suing us. Dude got walked out the next day. A MEDIA company customer.
- icedchai 6y agoI had a friend who worked at an early dedicated hosting provider in the late 90's / early 2000's. He did "network security." He had his own servers on the network, serving up pirated warez and movies. Since he was in charge of the monitoring, this was never found out... until he was let go during the dot-com crash and needed to retrieve his equipment.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- cutemonster 6y agoThis customer service rep, how was otherwise his work performance / output? How was he like to work with?
- ooobit2 6y agoI've fired people for having less wherewithal than to ask a question like this. His performance, output, or attitude are irrelevant. He knowingly used company property to violate federal law... IP law at that. Guy should be lucky he didn't get sued for gross negligence.
- geofft 6y agoI might be misreading the comment above, but it sounds to me like it's asking, "Were there any signs of him being untrustworthy?" (and not "He shouldn't have been fired.") It is precisely because of the magnitude of his error that it would have been nicer to fire him before he made it.
- sevenf0ur 6y agoGame of Thrones was the most pirated TV show in history. I remember when the first 4 episodes of season 5 were leaked at once. Christmas came early!
- bootlooped 6y agoBut it was a devil's bargain: you would then have to wait multiple weeks for the 5th episode.
- srg0 6y agoAlso in some markets the official local release was a year behind. Given that it's not possible to get an HBO subscription outside of the US, for many people pirating was the only way to watch it.
- akerro 6y agoBecause it was great and it wasn't available legally in so many countries, or it was with forced reader and no native-English language versions in TV or 480p streaming online. It's most pirated because it was great quality product with low quality service and delivery.
- jankiehodgpodge 6y agoThere's was also providers in the UK who's bad video compression made the picture so dark it was unwatchable.
- jjice 6y agoCouldn't the intern have paid for his own bare bones VPS and done it from there? Or used a different paid VPN service, which cost roughly the same ~$5? Seems like the cost of a VPN compared to the value of his internship wouldn't even compare. All for some campus clout.
- NullPrefix 6y agoDepends, was it a paid internship?
- jjice 6y agoEven if it wasn't, I bet the experience of the internship would be worth more than the cost of a personal VPN. Unless the internship didn't really provide much value.
- elcomet 6y agoIf you have no money, it doesn't matter what's the value of the internship.
- make3 6y agowhat does that have to do with anything. If the opportunity was good enough for you to take the internship, then they were good enough for you not to risk it by torrenting on their material. He likely got sacked mid summer. He now can't even have that internship on his resume. So much wasted time, so mindless.
- loktarogar 6y agonot getting paid often leads to not having much money
- make3 6y agothe solution is not to use your work equipment was my point
- krzyk 6y agoOne needs to remember to cover their tracks :) When I was young and stupid (at least more than now) I did some pranks using dormitory server, and knew that I should clean bash history (actually using a single space before command did that). But what I didn't know was that vim also has a history of commands :) server admin wasn't happy.
- kart23 6y agoYou never know what type of logging is set up though. You can log others users commands too, making use histories irrelevant.
- debacle 6y agoThe flip side: When I was an intern I once had four people arrive at my desk (including an HR lawyer) for torrenting ubuntu server. Thankfully I shared a cube wall with someone smart enough to realize the confusion, and explain me out of being walked out. They were monitoring for torrent traffic, but weren't paying attention to what was being torrented. Apparently a company-wide warning had gone out the week before I started.
- Symbiote 6y agoI was "caught" by some monitoring system sharing Knoppix on a machine in the CS lab at university. I'd forgotten about it, and it had been running for months. One of the helpdesk staff told me that it had been noticed, since the bandwidth to that machine was very high, but he unofficially liked the idea of the university being top of the seeding table, so I should leave it running :-D [1] http://torrent.unix-ag.uni-kl.de/stats.html?info_hash=8dcb18c22d1877dde2e61c916dac406220521bb4 http://torrent.unix-ag.uni-kl.de/stats.html?info_hash=8dcb18... (but mine would have been in 2007 or so).
- marvelous 6y agoMy university did ban p2p, no matter the content. Officially for upload bandwidth savings.
- Scoundreller 6y agoMine did too. Though oddly the wifi in the classrooms was fair-game, but this was before most people had laptops, and even fewer ones that could last more than 2 hours without charging. I remember downloading some content over IRC to share on the campus network because I knew how to use it and it was slow, but not blocked.
- josefx 6y agoMy university had bad wifi and I think 50mb drive space per student. I ended up plugging in my laptop directly and spoofing a whitelisted IP/MAC combination (the PCi just plugged out) for several assignments.
- RyJones 6y agoI worked for a place where our internet was bad, but not that bad. We were coming up to a release and things were fubar. I asked the network guy to find what was up - a guy that reported to me was torrenting child porn.
- Wistar 6y agoI worked at a place where, one morning, the guy in the next office over got swarmed by company security and the police. He was trafficking in child porn on the company network. He was a super smart, super dumb guy who lost everything over it, his wife, custody of his kids, friends and a very high-paying career. His car sat in the company garage for weeks.
- inetsee 6y agoI worked on a secure project a very long time ago. A very smart guy (he was working on the operating system for a military avionics computer) printed out some child porn photos on a company color printer. (This was long enough ago that good quality color printers were very expensive, not like now when you can buy a color printer for less than $100.) He got walked out. I don't know what other consequences he suffered. Being smart doesn't mean you can't do something really stupid.
- partyboat1586 6y agoSmart != Wise
- fortran77 6y agoSee "The Rise and Fall of Patrick Naughton" https://www.zdnet.com/article/the-rise-and-fall-of-patrick-naughton/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/the-rise-and-fall-of-patrick-n...
- Wistar 6y agoI remember that well. Didn't know the guy but I knew several who did know him before the bust but, oddly enough, very few after.
- ThePhysicist 6y agoI remember getting an abuse warning from Hetzner as one of our employees was seeding (legal) files via a p2p file sharing framework (IPFS I think?) and the client on his machine sent out broadcast and port scanning requests over the VPN into our Hetzner infrastructure. Hetzner is quite nice in that they dont' immediately block your servers, other providers are less lenient though and such stuff can quickly get your infrastructure to be taken down, especially if you're not an "important" customer of your hoster. I think after you reach a certain scale you can't stop this from happening easily, so it's good to either block such stuff via the firewall or have good audit logs.
- Reelin 6y agoI don't understand what's wrong with port scanning or broadcasting to your own infrastructure that you pay for?
- sho 6y agoThe only moral problem I have in your anecdote is the lying about it. With every fibre of my being, I could not care less about torrenting game of thrones.
- sixothree 6y agoI pay for netflix, amazon prime, spotify (and thus hulu), and apple tv+, sometimes youtube tv, HBO+ during Game of Thrones. I pretty much just torrent much of the content I could find on these services. It's so much easier to just have it appear in the list instead of switching devices, sometimes remotes. Just so tired of boxes and remotes and accounts and having to "type" with a stupid remote control. Most of this could be solved if I could reliably queue something from my laptop to be played on my tv. Like how YouTube lets you queue videos.
- the_af 6y agoMore importantly, if you downloaded some episodes, barring an act of god that destroys your house and the equipment within, you know you will get to enjoy those episodes at the time of your own choosing and with the best quality, no streaming issues or glitches. With HBO, who knows? I still remember they were unable to cope with the load for some of Game of Thrones episodes.
- acomjean 6y agoThey make kinda do it pretty easy to stream the major services on TVs now. I can't imagine its easier to just torrent the files. I kinda don't care if people torrent, but they've made it easy enough I don't bother. The trouble is of course I'm paying for something that isn't as versatile (shows/movies come and go, I can't watch without a connection) but I think its easier and the tradeoff is worth it. I don't tend to watch shows over and over so that helps. Although I agree typing with the onscreen keyboard and remote just sucks... Of course I am old and remember the hassle of video rentals which involved physical media (where what you wanted often wasn't available), so my threshold for retrieving content might be higher.
- SkyBelow 6y agoAt some point I find it hard to draw a distinction between a library and a torrent. Gotta to avoid legal trouble, but from a moral standpoint outlawing torrents is like outlawing the library.
- ComodoHacker 6y agoSomehow I can only see one this comment of 252 in this thread.
- pronoiac 6y agoI had the same issue, emailed the moderators using the "Contact" link in the footer, and got a response quickly. Recommended.
- alafazam 6y agoMy collage had similar restrictions for many website and torrents. I tried something similar by renting a server and then trying to download torrent in it but obviously got instantly blocked from Service provider. Somehow 1-2 months later I got a request from my college's computer center to make some changes in the college intranet landing page. Then I became good friends with them. and later I got an account from them, where everything was open. I was a good time ;) Hmm but doing that in a 7 person startup, and then repeating the offense, and then failing to come clean !! seriously man..
- djsumdog 6y agoMy undergrad would just throttle/packetshape torrents/p2p/IRC-dcc/etc so it would move at 1~2kbps. My grad school would ban your MAC address if you had any torrents running (I found that out the hard way when I got banned for DemocracyNow/Miro video player, which I didn't realize, used torrents as its backend transfer protocol).
- throwaway666494 6y agolol just use mullvad
- minhazm 6y agoYou'd think they would just pay for their own droplet in that scenario. Digital Ocean runs promo's all the time with free credits too.
- pbhjpbhj 6y agoI thought DO blocked torrenting, or perhaps officially disallows it?
- mr_toad 6y agoNone of the large cloud providers will let you do this. You’d need to rent a box on a service that turns a blind eye to this sort of activity.
- speedgoose 6y agoA friend told me that OVH, the largest European cloud provider, doesn't seem to mind on its cheap Kimsufi servers.
- ThePowerOfFuet 6y agoSo did you sack him?
- flak48 6y agoYep, since he didn't seem to care if our Digital Ocean account would get suspended.
- jnsaff2 6y agohttp://bash.org/?258908 http://bash.org/?258908
- dri_ft 6y agoI thought of this exactly.
- ben174 6y agoHey that's me :)
- lwhalen 6y agoLol, and how did that work out for you?
- gcbw3 6y agoI'd bet that was a bouncer/client set address, for the joke. Sigh, people probably trust things like this today because FB(whatsapp)/Google/slack/discord forces you to sign up with valid phone numbers and probably expose that as your ID.
- nullify88 6y agoHis resume has that place of work listed. Of course it could be part of the joke too, but thats elaborate.
- tomjakubowski 6y agoI think the joke may have been by ChrisLMB, who saw the opportunity when he read the unmasked second-level domain in ben174's address.
- kchoudhu 6y agoDefinitely had this happen to me when I was new on IRC.
- 6y ago
- sbierwagen 6y agoI paid for a dedicated server with an unmetered 100mbit connection back in the day. (More than a decade ago, now that I think about it) I wasn't using it for much, so I decided to be a good citizen and run a Tor exit node on it. No filters, every port, why not? What could go wrong? Well, it turns out you can run bittorrent over Tor. Got dozens of DMCA emails, host took the server down within 24 hours. Taught me a lesson on being nice.
- Waterluvian 6y agoI once pirated a Tv show and was accidentally on my work VPN for a portion of it. Had a moment of being a bit frozen and scared. Decided to email the IT head and explain the situation. I got a “thanks for letting me know” and that was it. Not as big a deal as my head conjured up. I could have done the wrong thing though and made it a big deal.
- zzzeek 6y ago"Someday, and that day may never come, I will call upon you to do a service for me." - your company's IT guy
- Waterluvian 6y agoSo funny. But seriously, always be super nice to IT. They might be present during your most frustrating days but don’t make them feel the blame. They’re one of your best allies.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- teekert 6y agoUgh, and he/she could have gotten a box for an evening for fraction of a cent or something. To even think about using company infrastructure for this seems really very uneducated. Ok, that wouldn't also have been stupid, but at least you wouldn't put your company at risk.
- stiray 6y agoAnother interesting story (as the site is just picking on IP, disregarding dynamic ips, vpns etc.) that might save potential users (for legal cases) some costs. The service is heavly false positive and wrong accusation might be expensive: https://torrentfreak.com/wrongfully-accused-pirate-wins-4420-judgment-against-movie-company-200710/ https://torrentfreak.com/wrongfully-accused-pirate-wins-4420...