11 ms·

YTS torrent tracker part of new anti-piracy scheme

191 points by stiray 6y ago

kevingadd 6y ago
I wonder if YTS users could go after the operator in court for its illegal conduct, or for its use of their personal data in particular. I'm guessing the site being illegal isn't relevant unless they personally have their copyrights infringed, but I wouldn't be surprised if this use of individuals' data without consent is illegal, especially if the shakedown letters turn out to be fraudulent.
- wongarsu 6y ago
  Especially since the operator is a UK company, subject to GDPR. This kind of trade with personal data is one of the big things GDPR is supposed to protect against.
  - kevingadd 6y ago
    I would expect GDPR not to apply anymore after the UK withdrew from the EU, is that not the case for some reason?
    - DanBC 6y ago
      GDPR is the EU regulation. It's been put into UK law in the form of the Data Protection Act 2018. https://www.gov.uk/data-protection https://www.gov.uk/data-protection They'd have to change the law if they want to remove GDPR.
      - wongarsu 6y ago
        I would also expect that they can only remove it after the end of the transition period. Being able to remove market protections while still being in the single market would give them an unfair advantage.
    - proactivesvcs 6y ago
      The UK's Data Protection legislation was fairly strong before GDPR made improvements. GDPR is applied by each member state's own laws aligning with GDPR. Hence I believe, in this specific case, nothing has (or will) change as Brexit reaches its conclusion.
    - Nursie 6y ago
      Most EU law will continue to apply until/unless it is specifically repealed. National laws that implement the EU law are usually required for each country to implement the law in accordance with its own legal codes and structures. The UK is still inside most of the treaties until next year, as there is currently a "transition period" in effect, but even when that ends, a lot of EU law will still be part of UK law.
    - nwallin 6y ago
      The GDPR still applies in the UK, even after brexit. The EU has kind of a weird system IMO. The main EU body decides on a thing. Then each country in the EU reads the thing, and enacts legislation that does the thing. Notably, each country in the EU write their own legislation such that the main EU thing is satisfied. The EU itself doesn't make laws/legislation. What is the legal drinking age in the United States? Trick question: the US has no legal drinking age. The interstate highway act stipulated that if the federal government is going to spend money to build freeways in a state, the state has to enact a drinking age of 21 years. There's a crapload of money tied up in this, so all 50 states have set the legal drinking age to 21 years. So if a state seceded from the union, while many federal US laws would no longer apply, the legal drinking age of 21 years would still apply, because that is a state law. The thing about the EU is that every law is like that. They're national laws that are mandated by the EU. The UK has a GDPR law, France has a GDPR law, Germany has a GDPR law, etc. Presumably the UK will go through its books at some point and make adjustments as they see fit, but that hasn't happened to the GDPR.
      - tgsovlerkhgsel 6y ago
        > The thing about the EU is that every law is like that. This is incorrect. There are Directives (which work like you described) and Regulations, which apply directly: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulation_(European_Union) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulation_(European_Union) Per Wikipedia, "As the GDPR is a regulation, not a directive, it is directly binding and applicable, but does provide flexibility for certain aspects of the regulation to be adjusted by individual member states." For most practical purposes, the transition treaty makes it as if the UK was still part of the EU until the end of the year. I believe many member states did also implement it in local law, since they already had privacy laws and just adjusted them to be GDPR-compatible, but the GDPR would also apply directly.
- ikeboy 6y ago
  Unclean hands doctrine. You can't sue someone when the complaint at issue is you doing something wrong. You'd have to find someone that didn't infringe on anything, and even then you'd have to fight an uphill battle. In the absence of a contract saying the data can never be shared, it's unclear what the cause of action would even be.
  - 29083011397778 6y ago
    It would be up to the courts if you've done anything wrong though - downloading a torrent file isn't illegal, per TFA. Who's to say you followed through with a torrent client to use it?
    - ikeboy 6y ago
      If you haven't, what's the harm? Where are the damages?
      - kevingadd 6y ago
        The harm is your IP address and other information being provided to a company that's trying to extort you...
        ikeboy 6y ago
        As above, what's the cause of action?
        thaumasiotes 6y ago
        > The harm is your IP address and other information being provided to a company that's trying to extort you... If you get sued, you've suffered damages and you have a cause of action. You'd need to show that YTS wrongly provided your information, but in the hypothetical where you in fact did nothing wrong, that seems theoretically doable.
        6y ago
dia80 6y ago
I saw the article refers to the Prenda Law saga, I just looked it up and saw the main protagonists had been sent to jail. This line from Wikipedia made me chuckle as sounds like the exactly like a game of the prisoners dilema In 2019, Steele and Hansmeier both pleaded guilty in Federal court to a range of criminal charges related to and including extortion and fraudulent conduct, with substantial sums of their criminal proceeds to be reimbursed. Steele received a reduced sentence of 5 years due to his cooperation and Hansmeier, who had not cooperated, was sentenced to 14 years. [13]
- kiba 6y ago
  Protagonists?
  - badrabbit 6y ago
    If you think the law is bad, that is what they are?
    - detaro 6y ago
      "Protagonist" doesn't necessarily have a positive judgment attached to it, does it? I.e. if the main player in a story is the bad guy, we still say "protagonist"?
      - badrabbit 6y ago
        Not sure, but in a good vs evil story I think it does. I naturally assumed due to the implucation of an antagonist a protagonist always meant the subject of the conflict (every plot has a conflict they say). But you might be right, I can see how it can simply mean the center of a story.
Nextgrid 6y ago
Is there any evidence that this “YTS” that we’re talking about right now is the real YTS? Whoever was behind YTS got into legal trouble a few years ago and shut down his site, leaving the markets to lots of copycats with YTS-inspired designs and domain names.
- milankragujevic 6y ago
  There is no official YTS. YIFY-TORRENTS was shut down, the most popular and semi-professional site is YTS.(some domain), but there is no official one.
  - Nextgrid 6y ago
    Thanks for the explanation. I always thought YTS and YIFY-TORRENTS were the same operation.
  - Dahoon 6y ago
    The original would still be the real one even if it has been shut down.
    - milankragujevic 6y ago
      Well yes, but it wouldn't be YTS but YIFY-TORRENTS.
dom96 6y ago
I'm surprised there aren't torrent trackers that run on Tor available (or maybe I just haven't heard of them). Seems like it would be a perfect way to avoid both shutdown and the service's ability to identify its users. Am I missing something?
- digianarchist 6y ago
  Considering a tracker's job is to serve up connectable IPs then I'm not sure what the point is other than hiding the tracker's location.
  - derefr 6y ago
    It makes more sense in the context of a larger hypothetical infrastructure. If BitTorrent clients also had the option to publish their open port as a Tor hidden service, then they could register with a tracker that's also a hidden service, entirely over Tor; and then use the tracker to discover the Tor hidden-service addresses of other BitTorrent clients to connect to. You could also run the BitTorrent Kademlia DHT on top of Tor, without any explicit tracker needed; just with Tor hidden-service BitTorrent client nodes publishing the hidden-service addresses of other client nodes to the DHT ring. (I often wish that the Tor overlay network was IPv6-based; then "hidden-service addresses" could just be IPv6 addresses in a particular IPv6 public subnet, reserved to represent the Tor overlay network. Then client software wouldn't need to know anything about Tor in order to take advantage; making a client "only operate over Tor" would just be a matter of giving the client an IPv6 subnet mask to restrict what it was willing to connect to; or putting it in a network namespace that was so-restricted.)
    - xrisk 6y ago
      wow this is pretty ingenious. the only problem is that i think tor has traditionally been a low-bandwidth network?
    - kodablah 6y ago
      I have toyed with DHTs successfully over Tor and it works work fine, but that's just peer discovery. If large data transfer doesn't go over Tor, you're still exposing your IP. If large data transfer does go over Tor you're potentially harming the network (even if it's just to onion service) by over using relays (and Tor actively discouraged BT use over the network). There are alternatives like Tribbler, but none popular enough. Also onion service v3 addresses, which are entire ed25519 public keys, won't fit in an ipv6 address (haven't checked base 32/36/whatever for v2 onion addresses, but surely also won't fit in, say, a /64).
jokoon 6y ago
I was always curious why the website told me to register, felt very suspicious. Some torrents are restricted to users, weirdly. Not to mention the occasional shady popup ads. The weirdest thing about YTS, is the high quantity of very low-quality movies it has. I mean things you would not watch even if it was free. It makes it impossible to really pick anything. So in doubt and in paranoia, I would say that I have low trust for YTS.
- libertine 6y ago
  >I was always curious why the website told me to register, felt very suspicious. Some torrents are restricted to users, weirdly. That was mostly to control ratios, and force people to seed torrents and stop them from leeching (downloading and delete the torrent/not seed). If you had a bad ratio, your access to seeds was also limited therefore the speed at which you downloaded was capped. Some trackers eventually started to monetize themselves by offering "premium accounts" that would bypass the ratio, and allowed users to leech. Mind that this is my knowledge from almost 20 years ago.
- unraveller 6y ago
  One big draw is that they get around to rare movie requests in weeks to months for members. Their website is the most popular daily feed people sit on for the trickle of any thing good so they must be doing something right. Though I had to make a violentmonkey script [1] to auto hide all the b-grade dumps of late. [1] https://pastebin.com/raw/AmAP0fjD https://pastebin.com/raw/AmAP0fjD
stiray 6y ago
A tad off topic but it fits nicely, installgentoo wiki had a very nice article about private trackers: https://wiki.installgentoo.com/index.php/Private_trackers https://wiki.installgentoo.com/index.php/Private_trackers
- raspyberr 6y ago
  I think installgentoo has a few interesting things on it but hopefully you're not confusing it with the actual gentoo wiki: https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Main_Page https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Main_Page
gruez 6y ago
People seem to think this is some sort of betrayal, but anyone could have done it. The whole point of trackers is to allow anyone to get a list of peers who have the same torrent. If anything, this gives me a startup idea: archive.org, but for torrent swarms. Scrape public torrent sites, grab all their torrents, for each torrent connect to their associated tracker and grab their peer list periodically. You can even try connecting to them and grab a few bytes to confirm they're actually uploading. Now you have a list of IPs known to have committed copyright infringement. Sell this list to copyright trolls years/months later for $$$.
- aftbit 6y ago
  That wouldn't give you the email address used for login on the site.
- password4321 6y ago
  https://iknowwhatyoudownload.com/ https://iknowwhatyoudownload.com/
  - ramraj07 6y ago
    Super funny because this shows approximately five or six different people's downloads for my ip address from their porn tastes, movie language preferences, etc
    - squarefoot 6y ago
      It has some delay and dynamic timed IPs do the rest.
  - donmcronald 6y ago
    That says I downloaded ssni-845-C.mp4 7GB (XXX) three days ago, but I didn't. WTF is that all about?
    - thekyle 6y ago
      Someone else must have downloaded it from your current IP address.
jb775 6y ago
The main question to ask her is why is YTS throwing their users under the bus? Were the operators of YTS threatened with lawsuits? Or is YTS being run as a honeytrap to lure unsuspecting users with the intention of eventually receiving copyright settlement money kickbacks? Seems like the strategy here is to go after low hanging fruit (people who create user accounts and people who don't use a vpn) using scare tactics with no intention of actually prosecuting.
- loeg 6y ago
  > Were the operators of YTS threatened with lawsuits? 7th sentence: > The background to this ‘partnership’ appears to have its roots in cases where YTS itself was sued by attorney Kerry Culpepper for copyright infringement.
McDyver 6y ago
The next generation tracker will have to be something like what doctors do with "assisted suicide" instead of "euthanasia": Different independent entities, each performing an action that is legal, that in the end lets the user get the link.
- iwasakabukiman 6y ago
  That’s only a temporary stopgap before they convince a court or change the law so that being part of that chain with intent to infringe copyright is enough to get you sued.
- vbezhenar 6y ago
  The real solution is to use Tor-like network where you're using multiple intermediate proxy-servers located in different countries with different laws. And make that network extremely popular for lawful content. So when you're downloading Ubuntu, some of your traffic will transmit encrypted parts of copyrighted cinema. You have no idea what are you transmitting, you're just obeying protocol (which you should, because otherwise peers will throttle you) and downloading legal content. At this point US have to make that network illegal, causing huge collateral damage. Note that even torrents are not illegal, so it would be quite a precedent.
  - waste_monk 6y ago
    >The real solution is to use Tor-like network where you're using multiple intermediate proxy-servers located in different countries with different laws There are a number of Tor like anonymizing networks already, and they're all slow as hell and unable to handle bulk traffic. This idea has been raised many times and it's never worked out. Compromises have to be made, and if you want good anonymity/privacy then speed is usually the first thing to go. >And make that network extremely popular for lawful content There are already plenty of distribution paths for lawful content that can be fast because they don't have to hide in the shadows. Where is the value add? How will you get media companies to buy in? Almost no one is going to willingly buy in solely on the basis of "we need your traffic to help cover our illegal file distribution". >So when you're downloading Ubuntu, some of your traffic will transmit encrypted parts of copyrighted cinema. You have no idea what are you transmitting, you're just obeying protocol (which you should, because otherwise peers will throttle you) and downloading legal content. That's basically how I2P operates (you have to contribute disk and bandwidth to the network to store and serve files, and you don't have the key to decrypt unless you happen to request a resource that's already locally cached), and it's extremely slow. Not to mention the risk that you end up storing and distributing the really illegal stuff like child sexual abuse materials, not just pirated movies, which is far beyond most people's risk/comfort thresholds. You can't have a network like this "just" for pirate media without it being abused for darker purposes, and a lot of people are simply unwilling to support that. >At this point US have to make that network illegal, causing huge collateral damage. Note that even torrents are not illegal, so it would be quite a precedent. They don't have to make it illegal, just so unusable that the vast majority of people don't bother. Which it already is. Which is why we use torrents instead of already having a solution like what you describe. Not to mention that it doesn't have to be illegal for carriers to try and throttle/interfere with it under the guise of traffic shaping and fair use.
simongr3dal 6y ago
Have anybody discussed how this[0] could complicate things? The developer of the popular tracker, Opentracker, has built in a feature where it throws in bogus but real IPs when you ask for seeders. It reduces efficiency for people who are trying to download from seeders that don't exist, but also introduces deniability because if you ask the tracker for a list of seeders your IP being on that list could reasonably explained as it being one of the bogus IPs. To verify that your IP is actually seeding you have to connect and try to download from it, but does the act of downloading from a peer change the situation so it is actually some kind of entrapment or at least commiting to have done a crime as part of the investigation? [0]: http://opentracker.blog.h3q.com/2007/02/12/perfect-deniability/ http://opentracker.blog.h3q.com/2007/02/12/perfect-deniabili...
- Sargos 6y ago
  I don't think it's entrapment as you were already seeding the file and they didn't influence you to do that.
- jlgaddis 6y ago
  > ... does the act of downloading from a peer change the situation so it is actually some kind of entrapment or at least commiting to have done a crime as part of the investigation? No. It certainly wouldn't be entrapment and it's not "a crime" for you to download files that you own the copyright for (or, in these types of situations, have been granted permission by the copyright owner -- whom you would typically be working on behalf of -- to download). In my opinion, the addition of the "bogus IPs" is pretty pointless. Once you've gathered a list of seeders, it's trivial to actually connect to them and verify that they are sharing (portions of) the file. In fact, I would think you'd have to do that in order to be able to affirm that the file was, in fact, being "shared". You couldn't honestly state that it was if you didn't verify that to be true. I can't recall the name of it now but the firm that does this stuff on behalf of HBO (or did, when I worked at an ISP and received e-mails from them) connects to the "seeders" and downloads (part of) the file(s) from them to verify that they're actually illegally sharing copyrighted content.
  - hellotomyrars 6y ago
deadalus 6y ago
seedr.cc, bitport.io, zbigz.com, offcloud.com exist to solve exactly this problem. Downloading openly from public trackers is extremely risky. Even private trackers have been known to be monitored by DMCA agencies[0]. [0] : https://old.reddit.com/r/trackers/comments/4iele6/empornium_monitored_by_dmca_companies/ https://old.reddit.com/r/trackers/comments/4iele6/empornium_...
- xfer 6y ago
  How is giving your credit card to these companies any more secure? For all i know they could be selling the user registration data with payment info to some lawyer.
  - deadalus 6y ago
    You can use privacy.com or pay using Bitcoin.

191 points by stiray 6y ago

I wonder if YTS users could go after the operator in court for its illegal conduct, or for its use of their personal data in particular. I'm guessing the site being illegal isn't relevant unless they personally have their copyrights infringed, but I wouldn't be surprised if this use of individuals' data without consent is illegal, especially if the shakedown letters turn out to be fraudulent.

wongarsu 6y ago
Especially since the operator is a UK company, subject to GDPR. This kind of trade with personal data is one of the big things GDPR is supposed to protect against.
- kevingadd 6y ago
  I would expect GDPR not to apply anymore after the UK withdrew from the EU, is that not the case for some reason?
  - DanBC 6y ago
    GDPR is the EU regulation. It's been put into UK law in the form of the Data Protection Act 2018. https://www.gov.uk/data-protection https://www.gov.uk/data-protection They'd have to change the law if they want to remove GDPR.
    - wongarsu 6y ago
      I would also expect that they can only remove it after the end of the transition period. Being able to remove market protections while still being in the single market would give them an unfair advantage.
  - proactivesvcs 6y ago
    The UK's Data Protection legislation was fairly strong before GDPR made improvements. GDPR is applied by each member state's own laws aligning with GDPR. Hence I believe, in this specific case, nothing has (or will) change as Brexit reaches its conclusion.
  - Nursie 6y ago
    Most EU law will continue to apply until/unless it is specifically repealed. National laws that implement the EU law are usually required for each country to implement the law in accordance with its own legal codes and structures. The UK is still inside most of the treaties until next year, as there is currently a "transition period" in effect, but even when that ends, a lot of EU law will still be part of UK law.
  - nwallin 6y ago
    The GDPR still applies in the UK, even after brexit. The EU has kind of a weird system IMO. The main EU body decides on a thing. Then each country in the EU reads the thing, and enacts legislation that does the thing. Notably, each country in the EU write their own legislation such that the main EU thing is satisfied. The EU itself doesn't make laws/legislation. What is the legal drinking age in the United States? Trick question: the US has no legal drinking age. The interstate highway act stipulated that if the federal government is going to spend money to build freeways in a state, the state has to enact a drinking age of 21 years. There's a crapload of money tied up in this, so all 50 states have set the legal drinking age to 21 years. So if a state seceded from the union, while many federal US laws would no longer apply, the legal drinking age of 21 years would still apply, because that is a state law. The thing about the EU is that every law is like that. They're national laws that are mandated by the EU. The UK has a GDPR law, France has a GDPR law, Germany has a GDPR law, etc. Presumably the UK will go through its books at some point and make adjustments as they see fit, but that hasn't happened to the GDPR.
    - tgsovlerkhgsel 6y ago
      > The thing about the EU is that every law is like that. This is incorrect. There are Directives (which work like you described) and Regulations, which apply directly: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulation_(European_Union) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulation_(European_Union) Per Wikipedia, "As the GDPR is a regulation, not a directive, it is directly binding and applicable, but does provide flexibility for certain aspects of the regulation to be adjusted by individual member states." For most practical purposes, the transition treaty makes it as if the UK was still part of the EU until the end of the year. I believe many member states did also implement it in local law, since they already had privacy laws and just adjusted them to be GDPR-compatible, but the GDPR would also apply directly.
ikeboy 6y ago
Unclean hands doctrine. You can't sue someone when the complaint at issue is you doing something wrong. You'd have to find someone that didn't infringe on anything, and even then you'd have to fight an uphill battle. In the absence of a contract saying the data can never be shared, it's unclear what the cause of action would even be.
- 29083011397778 6y ago
  It would be up to the courts if you've done anything wrong though - downloading a torrent file isn't illegal, per TFA. Who's to say you followed through with a torrent client to use it?
  - ikeboy 6y ago
    If you haven't, what's the harm? Where are the damages?
    - kevingadd 6y ago
      The harm is your IP address and other information being provided to a company that's trying to extort you...
      - ikeboy 6y ago
        As above, what's the cause of action?
        thaumasiotes 6y ago
        > The harm is your IP address and other information being provided to a company that's trying to extort you... If you get sued, you've suffered damages and you have a cause of action. You'd need to show that YTS wrongly provided your information, but in the hypothetical where you in fact did nothing wrong, that seems theoretically doable.
        6y ago

dia80 6y ago

I saw the article refers to the Prenda Law saga, I just looked it up and saw the main protagonists had been sent to jail. This line from Wikipedia made me chuckle as sounds like the exactly like a game of the prisoners dilema In 2019, Steele and Hansmeier both pleaded guilty in Federal court to a range of criminal charges related to and including extortion and fraudulent conduct, with substantial sums of their criminal proceeds to be reimbursed. Steele received a reduced sentence of 5 years due to his cooperation and Hansmeier, who had not cooperated, was sentenced to 14 years. [13]

kiba 6y ago
Protagonists?
- badrabbit 6y ago
  If you think the law is bad, that is what they are?
  - detaro 6y ago
    "Protagonist" doesn't necessarily have a positive judgment attached to it, does it? I.e. if the main player in a story is the bad guy, we still say "protagonist"?
    - badrabbit 6y ago
      Not sure, but in a good vs evil story I think it does. I naturally assumed due to the implucation of an antagonist a protagonist always meant the subject of the conflict (every plot has a conflict they say). But you might be right, I can see how it can simply mean the center of a story.

Nextgrid 6y ago

Is there any evidence that this “YTS” that we’re talking about right now is the real YTS? Whoever was behind YTS got into legal trouble a few years ago and shut down his site, leaving the markets to lots of copycats with YTS-inspired designs and domain names.

milankragujevic 6y ago
There is no official YTS. YIFY-TORRENTS was shut down, the most popular and semi-professional site is YTS.(some domain), but there is no official one.
- Nextgrid 6y ago
  Thanks for the explanation. I always thought YTS and YIFY-TORRENTS were the same operation.
- Dahoon 6y ago
  The original would still be the real one even if it has been shut down.
  - milankragujevic 6y ago
    Well yes, but it wouldn't be YTS but YIFY-TORRENTS.

dom96 6y ago

I'm surprised there aren't torrent trackers that run on Tor available (or maybe I just haven't heard of them). Seems like it would be a perfect way to avoid both shutdown and the service's ability to identify its users. Am I missing something?

digianarchist 6y ago
Considering a tracker's job is to serve up connectable IPs then I'm not sure what the point is other than hiding the tracker's location.
- derefr 6y ago
  It makes more sense in the context of a larger hypothetical infrastructure. If BitTorrent clients also had the option to publish their open port as a Tor hidden service, then they could register with a tracker that's also a hidden service, entirely over Tor; and then use the tracker to discover the Tor hidden-service addresses of other BitTorrent clients to connect to. You could also run the BitTorrent Kademlia DHT on top of Tor, without any explicit tracker needed; just with Tor hidden-service BitTorrent client nodes publishing the hidden-service addresses of other client nodes to the DHT ring. (I often wish that the Tor overlay network was IPv6-based; then "hidden-service addresses" could just be IPv6 addresses in a particular IPv6 public subnet, reserved to represent the Tor overlay network. Then client software wouldn't need to know anything about Tor in order to take advantage; making a client "only operate over Tor" would just be a matter of giving the client an IPv6 subnet mask to restrict what it was willing to connect to; or putting it in a network namespace that was so-restricted.)
  - xrisk 6y ago
    wow this is pretty ingenious. the only problem is that i think tor has traditionally been a low-bandwidth network?
  - kodablah 6y ago
    I have toyed with DHTs successfully over Tor and it works work fine, but that's just peer discovery. If large data transfer doesn't go over Tor, you're still exposing your IP. If large data transfer does go over Tor you're potentially harming the network (even if it's just to onion service) by over using relays (and Tor actively discouraged BT use over the network). There are alternatives like Tribbler, but none popular enough. Also onion service v3 addresses, which are entire ed25519 public keys, won't fit in an ipv6 address (haven't checked base 32/36/whatever for v2 onion addresses, but surely also won't fit in, say, a /64).

jokoon 6y ago

I was always curious why the website told me to register, felt very suspicious. Some torrents are restricted to users, weirdly. Not to mention the occasional shady popup ads. The weirdest thing about YTS, is the high quantity of very low-quality movies it has. I mean things you would not watch even if it was free. It makes it impossible to really pick anything. So in doubt and in paranoia, I would say that I have low trust for YTS.

libertine 6y ago
>I was always curious why the website told me to register, felt very suspicious. Some torrents are restricted to users, weirdly. That was mostly to control ratios, and force people to seed torrents and stop them from leeching (downloading and delete the torrent/not seed). If you had a bad ratio, your access to seeds was also limited therefore the speed at which you downloaded was capped. Some trackers eventually started to monetize themselves by offering "premium accounts" that would bypass the ratio, and allowed users to leech. Mind that this is my knowledge from almost 20 years ago.
unraveller 6y ago
One big draw is that they get around to rare movie requests in weeks to months for members. Their website is the most popular daily feed people sit on for the trickle of any thing good so they must be doing something right. Though I had to make a violentmonkey script [1] to auto hide all the b-grade dumps of late. [1] https://pastebin.com/raw/AmAP0fjD https://pastebin.com/raw/AmAP0fjD

stiray 6y ago

A tad off topic but it fits nicely, installgentoo wiki had a very nice article about private trackers: https://wiki.installgentoo.com/index.php/Private_trackers https://wiki.installgentoo.com/index.php/Private_trackers

raspyberr 6y ago
I think installgentoo has a few interesting things on it but hopefully you're not confusing it with the actual gentoo wiki: https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Main_Page https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Main_Page

gruez 6y ago

People seem to think this is some sort of betrayal, but anyone could have done it. The whole point of trackers is to allow anyone to get a list of peers who have the same torrent. If anything, this gives me a startup idea: archive.org, but for torrent swarms. Scrape public torrent sites, grab all their torrents, for each torrent connect to their associated tracker and grab their peer list periodically. You can even try connecting to them and grab a few bytes to confirm they're actually uploading. Now you have a list of IPs known to have committed copyright infringement. Sell this list to copyright trolls years/months later for $$$.

aftbit 6y ago
That wouldn't give you the email address used for login on the site.
password4321 6y ago
https://iknowwhatyoudownload.com/ https://iknowwhatyoudownload.com/
- ramraj07 6y ago
  Super funny because this shows approximately five or six different people's downloads for my ip address from their porn tastes, movie language preferences, etc
  - squarefoot 6y ago
    It has some delay and dynamic timed IPs do the rest.
- donmcronald 6y ago
  That says I downloaded ssni-845-C.mp4 7GB (XXX) three days ago, but I didn't. WTF is that all about?
  - thekyle 6y ago
    Someone else must have downloaded it from your current IP address.

jb775 6y ago

The main question to ask her is why is YTS throwing their users under the bus? Were the operators of YTS threatened with lawsuits? Or is YTS being run as a honeytrap to lure unsuspecting users with the intention of eventually receiving copyright settlement money kickbacks? Seems like the strategy here is to go after low hanging fruit (people who create user accounts and people who don't use a vpn) using scare tactics with no intention of actually prosecuting.

loeg 6y ago
> Were the operators of YTS threatened with lawsuits? 7th sentence: > The background to this ‘partnership’ appears to have its roots in cases where YTS itself was sued by attorney Kerry Culpepper for copyright infringement.

McDyver 6y ago

The next generation tracker will have to be something like what doctors do with "assisted suicide" instead of "euthanasia": Different independent entities, each performing an action that is legal, that in the end lets the user get the link.

iwasakabukiman 6y ago
That’s only a temporary stopgap before they convince a court or change the law so that being part of that chain with intent to infringe copyright is enough to get you sued.
vbezhenar 6y ago
The real solution is to use Tor-like network where you're using multiple intermediate proxy-servers located in different countries with different laws. And make that network extremely popular for lawful content. So when you're downloading Ubuntu, some of your traffic will transmit encrypted parts of copyrighted cinema. You have no idea what are you transmitting, you're just obeying protocol (which you should, because otherwise peers will throttle you) and downloading legal content. At this point US have to make that network illegal, causing huge collateral damage. Note that even torrents are not illegal, so it would be quite a precedent.
- waste_monk 6y ago
  >The real solution is to use Tor-like network where you're using multiple intermediate proxy-servers located in different countries with different laws There are a number of Tor like anonymizing networks already, and they're all slow as hell and unable to handle bulk traffic. This idea has been raised many times and it's never worked out. Compromises have to be made, and if you want good anonymity/privacy then speed is usually the first thing to go. >And make that network extremely popular for lawful content There are already plenty of distribution paths for lawful content that can be fast because they don't have to hide in the shadows. Where is the value add? How will you get media companies to buy in? Almost no one is going to willingly buy in solely on the basis of "we need your traffic to help cover our illegal file distribution". >So when you're downloading Ubuntu, some of your traffic will transmit encrypted parts of copyrighted cinema. You have no idea what are you transmitting, you're just obeying protocol (which you should, because otherwise peers will throttle you) and downloading legal content. That's basically how I2P operates (you have to contribute disk and bandwidth to the network to store and serve files, and you don't have the key to decrypt unless you happen to request a resource that's already locally cached), and it's extremely slow. Not to mention the risk that you end up storing and distributing the really illegal stuff like child sexual abuse materials, not just pirated movies, which is far beyond most people's risk/comfort thresholds. You can't have a network like this "just" for pirate media without it being abused for darker purposes, and a lot of people are simply unwilling to support that. >At this point US have to make that network illegal, causing huge collateral damage. Note that even torrents are not illegal, so it would be quite a precedent. They don't have to make it illegal, just so unusable that the vast majority of people don't bother. Which it already is. Which is why we use torrents instead of already having a solution like what you describe. Not to mention that it doesn't have to be illegal for carriers to try and throttle/interfere with it under the guise of traffic shaping and fair use.

simongr3dal 6y ago

Have anybody discussed how this[0] could complicate things? The developer of the popular tracker, Opentracker, has built in a feature where it throws in bogus but real IPs when you ask for seeders. It reduces efficiency for people who are trying to download from seeders that don't exist, but also introduces deniability because if you ask the tracker for a list of seeders your IP being on that list could reasonably explained as it being one of the bogus IPs. To verify that your IP is actually seeding you have to connect and try to download from it, but does the act of downloading from a peer change the situation so it is actually some kind of entrapment or at least commiting to have done a crime as part of the investigation? [0]: http://opentracker.blog.h3q.com/2007/02/12/perfect-deniability/ http://opentracker.blog.h3q.com/2007/02/12/perfect-deniabili...

Sargos 6y ago
I don't think it's entrapment as you were already seeding the file and they didn't influence you to do that.
jlgaddis 6y ago
> ... does the act of downloading from a peer change the situation so it is actually some kind of entrapment or at least commiting to have done a crime as part of the investigation? No. It certainly wouldn't be entrapment and it's not "a crime" for you to download files that you own the copyright for (or, in these types of situations, have been granted permission by the copyright owner -- whom you would typically be working on behalf of -- to download). In my opinion, the addition of the "bogus IPs" is pretty pointless. Once you've gathered a list of seeders, it's trivial to actually connect to them and verify that they are sharing (portions of) the file. In fact, I would think you'd have to do that in order to be able to affirm that the file was, in fact, being "shared". You couldn't honestly state that it was if you didn't verify that to be true. I can't recall the name of it now but the firm that does this stuff on behalf of HBO (or did, when I worked at an ISP and received e-mails from them) connects to the "seeders" and downloads (part of) the file(s) from them to verify that they're actually illegally sharing copyrighted content.
- hellotomyrars 6y ago

deadalus 6y ago

seedr.cc, bitport.io, zbigz.com, offcloud.com exist to solve exactly this problem. Downloading openly from public trackers is extremely risky. Even private trackers have been known to be monitored by DMCA agencies[0]. [0] : https://old.reddit.com/r/trackers/comments/4iele6/empornium_monitored_by_dmca_companies/ https://old.reddit.com/r/trackers/comments/4iele6/empornium_...

xfer 6y ago
How is giving your credit card to these companies any more secure? For all i know they could be selling the user registration data with payment info to some lawyer.
- deadalus 6y ago
  You can use privacy.com or pay using Bitcoin.