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No; it links Skype Accounts to IPs, which then can be correlated with BitTorrent swarm peers. IPs are not people - this is a fundamental misunderstanding that
by bri3d 15y ago
No; it links Skype Accounts to IPs, which then can be correlated with BitTorrent swarm peers.
IPs are not people - this is a fundamental misunderstanding that both MPAA/RIAA lawyers, and, for a long time, misinformed courts liked to propagate, although it seems the tide is turning in this department. Nothing says an IP assigned to an account I owned was used by me, and nothing says the same person using a Skype account from any given IP is also the person who told BitTorrent to join a swarm from that IP.
This is a really obvious, but also relatively serious issue with the P2P nature of Skype, as that account -> IP correlation really is powerful - but I hate the way this article was written.
- ajross 15y agoThe core flaw seems to be that it allows remote, undetectable (via the Skype client, anyway) determination of the user's IP. And it works independently of the privacy settings. All you need to know is someone's skype ID and you can find them on the internet. While you're right that the article is misleading, I think you're interpreting it in the wrong direction: this flaw is much worse than the ability to track torrent downloads.
- pyre 15y agoIf someone is changing locations/IPs regularly enough, and you can correlate those same IPs to BitTorrent downloads, you could make a decent claim that the specific person was doing the downloading. Especially if the person allows downloads to span IPs. For example, you download 50% of a file on one IP and then the last 50% on another. Since you advertise your available chunks of the file over BitTorrent, it would be easy enough to show that there was no overlap. Now granted, single data points don't prove much here, but with targeted data harvesting, you could end up with enough evidence to convince a jury and/or judge (or at least enough to blackmail a person).