I Know What You Download on BitTorrent | Hacker News Reader

I Know What You Download on BitTorrent

iknowwhatyoudownload.com

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I guess I'm doing something right because even though I use a static IP and no VPN, and I've been continuously seeding some torrents since 2012 that site does not list any of my downloads.

It probably only looks at popular movie download sites and I don't use those.

But anyway, the domain name is a lie.

"You" is subjective.

This intimidation tactic fails to intimidate.

Many of the subjective “us” remain recalcitrant.

That's how BT works, of course, what IP is downloading what torrent is not private information (and kind of can't be, from others participating in the torrent. you can blacklist known snoop IPs).

The RIAA already knows too.

But yeah, good to remind people.

Well, it lets me know I have to remind my users that attempting to download porn on the company network is NOT ok. I only wish I could put the title of the video in the all-company email. Even the title is NSFW. But it would scare whoever did it.

Glad you get your priorities right.

A good reminder to Dockerize + VPN

https://github.com/haugene/docker-transmission-openvpn

put that on any cloud vm and you have peace of mind + good internet speed.

This doesn't make sense to me as actual seedbox hosting offers a way better value when you consider your storage & network egress costs. Most cloud vps will have limits that most people will consider low (unless you don't seed)

Depends on how much you're torrenting. GCP's smallest VPS is literally free, so you can get 20gb of storage + 42gb of egress for $5/mo.

If you torrent more than that, then a DigitalOcean box or something similar makes more sense. Above $15/mo, a real seedbox platform is better optimized for what torrenting needs; lots on storage and ingress/egress bandwidth. I'm a fan of Whatbox.

Or "just" use a Scaleway VM and pay €2.99/mo for unlimited egress

>2 x86 64bit Cores

>2GB Memory

>50GB SSD Disk

wow, how are they able to offer this for 3 euro/month?

Wouldn't a cloud provider hand out your data just as fast as an ISP, if someone comes with a court order? Or is it not so easy for the content industry's lawyers to get that data in the US?

All traffic is encrypted + goes through the VPN in a docker image with firewall configured to shutdown the moment the VPN disconnects.

The IP of the cloud VM is never exposed. Only the VPN's.

If you're worried about dropbox type surveillance, you store the data in an encrypted drive.

Why not just use a VPN then?

A cloud VM does seem overkill.

I haven't seen this project before but a few reasons come to mind at first glance

1) Looks like it also runs a headless Transmission client, so you could use it as a seedbox

2) It can be tricky to configure VPNs correctly so that if the VPN connection goes down, your traffic doesn't spill over onto the clearnet. If this Docker image ensures that aspect works correctly then that's helpful.

3) It's a little complicated to setup a VPN connection on a personal computer just for BitTorrent use, without having other traffic (e.g. browsing) spill over onto the VPN. Setting this all up on a segregated remote box and connecting to the headless Transmission client mitigates that.

But couldn't ask the same question of the VPN that the grandparent post asked of the cloud provider? Namely, won't they turn your info over just as fast as an ISP?

1) The VPN's IP will be used by more than one person. (i.e a pool)

2) use a VPN that has a reputation for not keeping logs and turning people over.

https://thatoneprivacysite.net/vpn-comparison-chart/

Ah, I thought this was about running your own VPN server in the cloud!

This is awesome. I've been looking for a Docker project to play with, thanks for sharing.

One nice thing is that this image makes it easy to support various VPNs out of the box. Though mine (ProtonVPN) isn't supported, so I had to use CUSTOM and fiddle a bit.

I made a setup using Transmission + VPN and NZBget, automated via Sonarr (for series), Radarr (for movies), and a few other software such as Muximux (for abstraction) and Emby. You can find these and a lot of other interesting images under the linuxserver.io flag [1]. As soon as a specific series (episode) or movies on my watchlist is released in the wild (ie. leaked from scene) I will get it. Automagically. So the other day, I suddenly had Dunkirk available.

I also learned about this software via HN so I guess I'm giving back this way directly. Or parroting, depending on your PoV. smile

[1] https://hub.docker.com/search/?isAutomated=0&isOfficial=0&pa...

If you download torrents, the datacenter provider will forward copyright infringement notices to you, just like your normal home connection would. So it doesn't protect you much other than making it a bit harder for your tech savvy friends to use this website.

I tried it from my Verizon smart phone and it showed me 4 downloads that happened Thursday night/Friday morning at 1am. I definitely wasn't downloading Torrents on my phone last Thursday nor was I downloading porn while visiting my family? I also don't use the phone as a hotspot. I'm not sure how to take that?

A pretty standard experience for any service which relies on IP and has mobile users. Presumably the constant connect/disconnect and changing map of devices makes dynamic IPs much simpler for mobile providers to use. You're also liable to find yourself banned from a website at some point, if they use IP ranges.

It was probably tracking the tower. I believe the towers use the same external IP for many internal mobile units that connect to it.

Dynamic IP. My IP is so heavily reused that there's hundreds of downloads, porn, tv shows, movies etc.

I wonder why it's so frequently porn? The ones displayed on my device all have "Bubble Butt" in the title somewhere plus extras so it's clear it's all porn. I mean, I know the internet is based on porn but is that really most of what people use BT for now adays? lol

https://iknowwhatyoudownload.com/en/stat/US/daily from the fine link show it's about 80% movies and 10% porn.

Haha unintended advantage to this view, I now know that Flatliners came out! Oh. I must've missed it by a lot it doesn't seem to be in theaters anymore.

It was very poorly received. Probably explains light advertising and short theater runtime. https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/flatliners_2017/

Damn it looked so good in the previews. I was really hoping it'd be good I really liked the original.

Shared IP pool for data users, I'd guess.

It was never private. In BitTorrent, IP addresses are public. Trackers help peers match with each other, but trackerless mechanisms have been introduced not long after, and this keeps a distributed datastore "in the cloud", distributed among participating peers.

Any peer, whether a real downloader, or purposedly written to just crawl the DHT, can obtain IP addresses for peers who have relevant pieces, and aggregate this information over a long time.

I share my IP with N number of people, thanks to IPv4 shortage led CGN-NAT I get. It would offer some anonymity I guess.

Edit: I see 50+ downloads by my IP-neighbours. That's interesting.

Shady practice or not I find this interesting. Following is a link for North Korean BitTorrent activity.

https://iknowwhatyoudownload.com/en/stat/KP/daily

They also appear to be tracking child porn torrents. IP is from the vpn I use. https://i.imgur.com/e5iUctM.png https://iknowwhatyoudownload.com/en/peer/?ip=173.239.215.12

Nothing showed for me, I opened up dev tools to see if some requests were failing and ... wow the page makes a LOT of requests to mc.yandex.ru

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13249578

TorrentFreak story: https://torrentfreak.com/i-know-what-you-downloaded-on-bitto...

Interesting quote: "The company informed us that the site helps to showcase their abilities to the various outfits they work with, including copyright holders.

“We’ve set up the site for promotional purposes and as a demonstration of our capabilities,” Marketing director Andrey Rogov says.

“We are engaged in the distribution of information relating to torrent downloading activity to rightsholders, advertising platforms, law-enforcement and international organizations.”

The company offers API access to its data for interested parties and can also provide TCP dumps as extra proof that downloaded content is linked to a certain IP-address."

Seems IP-based, and so completely ineffective at identifying VPN users, then.

And it promotes sending your friends shady links so you can spy on them.

I hadn't submitted this because I approve it, but because I believe it should be used as a warning. BitTorrent seems to be the most popular P2P network right now and I believe that this kind of websites pose a real threat to it.

I'm not on this list so something is clearly wrong.

As a happy Put.io customer, no you don't.

Make that two of us. And since they take Bitcoin payments, Put.io has no idea who I am.

Bitcoin isn't anonymous unless you're putting it through a tumbler or transferring it to monero/zcash.

But it isn't one-click non-anonymous like normal payment methods either ;)

You don't have to swim faster than a shark, just faster than the guy next to you. It's harder to trace a bitcoin transaction then a credit card payment, even without a tumbler.

Do you also access their website over Tor? If not then they have your home IP address.

According to their about page[1] the company is based in Turkey which isn't exactly a paragon of consumer privacy protection.

[1]: https://put.io/aboutus

I access them over a public library wifi or starbucks connection and tunnel that through a vpn, and randomize my mac each time I connect.

You may know what the countless other users of my VPN download, crafty website, but certainly not what I download.

Apparently somebody at my IP is downloading

Category: "Child porn" Title: "Massive Porn-Torrent"

That's lovely.

Yeah. "Someone" ;-(

No it's pretty awful how this thing works. It showed 4 videos for me that I had never heard of before and would've been downloaded on a torrent on my phone while I was sitting at my parents' house last week chatting with them. Definitely was me....? lol

Jesus Christ... at least they’re not bright or subtle, or they’d never get caught.

IP based, so if your ISP doesn't provide a static IP it will show incorrect results.

As it does for me. I’m writing this from my phone (using my phone’s data plan) and apparently someone else downloaded a couple of movies yesterday from this very IP. It wasn’t me, that’s for sure.

I'll have to take a look at this later when I get home. (I forget what my residential IP is, so I can't easily check this from work.) I've not been on any torrents for some years, so unless my roommate is downloading things, my IP should be clean. If my roommate is pirating things via torrent, then I think a smack upside the head for doing so without protection is in order. If he's on any legit torrents, I don't particularly care, though I should probably throttle it a bit so it doesn't step on traffic that needs to be more responsive, like our video games.

This sham site can't reliably say anything. It returns results of things I didn't touch and fails to show anything I did download and seed. You'd think it would be technically easy to get this right.

Echoing the many here who say "No, apparently you _don't_ know what I download on BitTorrent". And I'm not surprised either.

Interesting companion piece from today's Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/dec/20/police-made-...

I rarely download torrents, however it shows just a list of a bunch of movies I haven't even heard of before

I have not downloaded any of the movies this claims I downloaded, and it lists none of the torrents I actually have downloaded. How should I interpret that?

It means your ISP doesn't always give you the same IP. Some other customer of your ISP must have downloaded those movies.

If a copyright holder gets really serious about protecting their IP, they could ask your ISP who was holding that IP address at the time of the download.

Oh hey check out this cool link: https://goo.gl/8i8qE7

Nice attempt, but I haven't downloaded anything and it shows two downloads. Not so reliable I suppose.

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