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Since everyone is taking about their experiences seeing workmates torrent, and no one is posting how this works - Torrents are peer to peer. Bit torrent is a t

Since everyone is taking about their experiences seeing workmates torrent, and no one is posting how this works - Torrents are peer to peer. Bit torrent is a type of application. Bittorrent are not inclusive to torrents anymore. Since everything is public, you can load several torrents, and watch for the handshake to occur and record the time/date and ip address. Do it on a large enough scale and there you go. There are many ways to secure against this, usually USA IP holders use USA cloud services or USA IP addresses. Some are public, but even if not, you can block the entire USA , so geoblocking by a simple tool such as: https://www.countryipblocks.net/acl.php https://www.countryipblocks.net/acl.php And you're pretty much in the clear. Not perfect, but pretty much.

postit 6y ago
There’s a business in Germany entirely dedicated to this and to send letters to people’s residence.
virtue3 6y ago
I'm surprised it worked even on 'private' torrents I had. I had some misguided thoughts that they were a bit more secure as you needed a specific torrent downloaded that tied you to the torrent. I see now that it's just an authentication thing on top of the public interface.
angry_octet 6y ago
You are very much not in the clear if you block like this. That's just delusional. Copyright monitoring firms have many endpoints that look like consumer ADSL/cable... because they are consumer connections.
- rootsudo 6y ago
  Yes, but consumer ADSL/cable..are still..within the USA IP Address list block. By blocking the entire continent, if you are paranoid, you won't be on that list. I doubt they will engineer much of a solution for non-local markets e.g. UK instance catching USA Ip address, though in the end it is not that hard to move that metadata around.
  - angry_octet 6y ago
    They have many non-American endpoints, and local front companies, and they collaborate and pool data. They definitely had endpoints on a local ISP here, it was in the detail of some of the submissions that the IP they used was from the ISP. https://delimiter.com.au/2011/08/30/wikileaks-cable-outs-secret-iitrial-background/amp/ https://delimiter.com.au/2011/08/30/wikileaks-cable-outs-sec...
nybble41 6y ago
When you open a .torrent file or magnet link the client connects to a set of trackers (or DHT, a distributed tracker network) and receives a list of peers to connect to. This site just repeats that process for a bunch of different torrents and collates the resulting data. Of course, dynamic IP addresses are a thing—and the trackers can (and do) lie about which IP addresses are part of a swarm. If you see something that you didn't actually download it could be because your IP address was shared with another customer recently or it could simply be a tracker "poisoning the well" by mixing in random IPs.

postit 6y ago

There’s a business in Germany entirely dedicated to this and to send letters to people’s residence.

virtue3 6y ago

I'm surprised it worked even on 'private' torrents I had. I had some misguided thoughts that they were a bit more secure as you needed a specific torrent downloaded that tied you to the torrent. I see now that it's just an authentication thing on top of the public interface.

angry_octet 6y ago

You are very much not in the clear if you block like this. That's just delusional. Copyright monitoring firms have many endpoints that look like consumer ADSL/cable... because they are consumer connections.

rootsudo 6y ago
Yes, but consumer ADSL/cable..are still..within the USA IP Address list block. By blocking the entire continent, if you are paranoid, you won't be on that list. I doubt they will engineer much of a solution for non-local markets e.g. UK instance catching USA Ip address, though in the end it is not that hard to move that metadata around.
- angry_octet 6y ago
  They have many non-American endpoints, and local front companies, and they collaborate and pool data. They definitely had endpoints on a local ISP here, it was in the detail of some of the submissions that the IP they used was from the ISP. https://delimiter.com.au/2011/08/30/wikileaks-cable-outs-secret-iitrial-background/amp/ https://delimiter.com.au/2011/08/30/wikileaks-cable-outs-sec...

nybble41 6y ago

When you open a .torrent file or magnet link the client connects to a set of trackers (or DHT, a distributed tracker network) and receives a list of peers to connect to. This site just repeats that process for a bunch of different torrents and collates the resulting data. Of course, dynamic IP addresses are a thing—and the trackers can (and do) lie about which IP addresses are part of a swarm. If you see something that you didn't actually download it could be because your IP address was shared with another customer recently or it could simply be a tracker "poisoning the well" by mixing in random IPs.