How ~75% of PirateBay traffic is seeded by 100 people driven by profit | Hacker News Reader

How ~75% of PirateBay traffic is seeded by 100 people driven by profit

bit-tech.net

130 pointsm0hit54 comments

That is one awful article. Arbitrarily cut in 4 pieces and never getting to the point. It is about a paper: http://conferences.sigcomm.org/co-next/2010/CoNEXT_papers/11... [pdf] which from a first glance is not very good either.

Also the traffic is not what this is about but users uploading things.

Did anyone read the paper? Worth a second look or is it rubbish? "We demonstrate that a small fraction of publishers is responsible for 67% of the published content and 75% of the downloads." suggest the ladder. Not to mention that they talk about Bittorrent but actually mean The Pirate Bay.

Articles like these make me wish HN had a TL;DR option. Something like:

How ~75% of PirateBay traffic is seeded by 100 people driven by profit

"Seeders put links in their content requesting that you visit their Adsense driven site" Click to read more...

Nice idea for my next hacking project maybe.

i did not read the paper but sigcomm is one of the premier networking conferences...so i do not expect the paper to be rubbish

Summary: "some people give away free (others') movies, and then put some links to their private adsense-laden portals in a README file or somesuch. This accounts for a very large percentage of the downloads from the pirate bay."

Very interesting findings, but it doesn't really answer the question of how important these people are to the pirate ecosystem. Are they just taking releases from more-private "underground" seeders and putting them on the pirate bay (in which case they are, effectively, just spammers and their elimination wouldn't really hurt the pirates) or do they actually provide the content themselves?

Most of the content on tpb comes from the scene which does not condone p2p sharing. These people just have access to scene releases early and want to profit from it.

http://torrentfreak.com/bittorrent-releasers-slice-the-top-o...

http://torrentfreak.com/bittorrent-releasers-are-the-new-kid...

Sadly, the report does not list any of the usernames of those that they studied. However, if you just go to a category, pick a frequent submitter, and look at their uploads most of the time there tags from many different groups. Some even try to claim other's releases as their own.

Yep. "The scene" really hates p2p in all its forms. They have been having inter-group drama over it for years. Pretty hilarious all round.

See:

http://www.scenenotice.org/details.php?id=1847

http://www.scenenotice.org/details.php?id=1920

and many others on that site.

Haha, that's awesome! The FTP scene is so big they need distributed ftp agents to FXP their wares?

I always thought their drama and "wars" over shit like sharing files (....like it's not going to happen? not like they're using DRM or something) was incredibly overblown, even as a kid. Glad to see they're just as retarded now as ever.

Don't these people have ANYTHING to do?

It seems to me that they are doing what they enjoy.

Their elimination would slow the system to a crawl I'd imagine, in Australia at least the uploads are always capped low enough that seeding back will slow down the rest of your web activities. So it isn't feasible unless your not at the computer to seed back at any decent frequency. When something new hits the pirate bay and is popular it is already pretty slow.

People have been putting those little files in for years, the only thing that's changed is that now the destination sites are bittorrent trackers with adverts and the txt files are poorly spelled and ugly, whereas back in the day they'd have awesome ASCII art advertising the various scene dumpsites the release had been FXP'd through.

They still have those ASCII art and scene dumpsites. Problem is that someone with access to scene material takes that, and then retags it with their shitty website and uploads it to bittorrent.

What a shame that their beautiful art which they invested time and energy into is being misappropriated by someone else so that they cannot profit from their creative endeavours.

The difference is that the scene shrugs and says "oh well, everyone knows who we are anyway" and doesn't try to bring the power of the state to bear.

I am shocked, shocked that piracy is not driven by music connoisseurs and film buffs eager to bring the artistic and cinematic masterworks of our times like Baby and Salt to poor wretches who can barely afford their $60 a month broadband and $500 computers to say nothing of their $0.99 music downloads.

In the US sure, but how many can afford it in the third world?

Get them reliable electricity, clean water, access to capital and stop propping up their corrupt governments... and give them all computers. And then we can talk about whether their music downloads are priced fairly.

There are also cases where one username corresponds with a few IP addresses from the same ISP, which is known as the NAT [network address translation] effect.

Aren't they getting this backwards? NAT takes multiple computers (i.e., users) and concentrates them into a single outwardly-visible IP.

should be "...which is known as a dynamic IP address."

Actually, it is a bad sentence, 'which is known as' is referring to 'cases'.

A couple of things struck me while reading this article:

1) Everything is a market. Any time people get together, for any purpose, trading occurs. That means the art of trading -- your time for a few ads, or whatever -- is happening. The users of Pirate Bay may be sticking it to the man or whatnot, but it's just another marketplace -- albeit one with much cheaper entry and transaction costs. (So it's a winner for the participants)

2) The confusion, yet again, between correlation and causation. Yes, there may only be 100 people who start all the torrents, but the 100 people are not the cause of the torrents, they're just the statistical artifact of having a marketplace in which certain behaviors are rewarded more than others. Take away those specific 100, and a new group would form. It's not like those 100 people are somehow directly causing the effect, they're just the people who fell into that role in that community at that time.

Everything is a market. Any time people get together, for any purpose, trading occurs.

The truth of that assertion hinges on us not remembering the billion other counter-examples.

It might comfort free-market capitalists like ourselves to paint humanity with that thick brush, but truth tells differently: people don't always gather with the intention to buy/sell, in fact, sometimes, commercial intent is detrimental to a healthy assembly and is frowned upon.

>> Everything is a market. Any time people get together, for any purpose, trading occurs. > The truth of that assertion hinges on us not remembering the billion other counter-examples.

It would have been nice if you'd have provided some of those counter-examples.

> people don't always gather with the intention to buy/sell

There's your problem - you think that trading only involves money. It doesn't. It's the exchange of value.

Yes, you hang around with your friends because you get more out of doing that than it costs you to do so.

Yes, someone will try to impose costs on you to affect your choices. You'll try to avoid them.

Sure, everything's a trade of value if you define the term "trade of value" loosely enough. As far as I can tell, that's more of a semantic game than an actual revelation.

> Sure, everything's a trade of value if you define the term "trade of value" loosely enough.

Your initial argument rested on the (reasonable) assumption that people value lots of things in addition to money.

Do you really want to argue that people don't trade non-monetary value?

Or, does your "loosely" argument rest on how you think that I've twisted "of"?

You say "semantic" like it's meaningless....

At a certain point in that line of reasoning, the "value" becomes nothing but "satisfaction in knowing you did something nice for someone else." It's something people value, but to put it in terms of a market transaction misses the point by a wide margin.

Just that trading occurs anywhere people get together doesn't mean everything is a market. I'd have liked to +10 you. It's so hip these days to see everything in the context of economics, as a market. In my opinion that's actually hurting our understanding of human behaviour, by trivializing every interaction.

It's a generalization, not a trivialization. Saying all human interactions are markets is like saying everything in computer programming is an object (or everything is a function, or everything is data, or whatever). It's a particular way of looking things that yields insights depending on where, how, and how well it is applied.

It trivializes it only if you draw some grand conclusions from economic theory.

I think many times we get the simple fact that humans are traders mixed up with all this political and economic theory nonsense. To acknowledge that people are always trading is an important observation in itself, and doesn't imply any other conclusions. Draw your own.

If anything, it looks like the study of economics is doing exactly what you say: it's showing that these trades many times are irrational, are not for money, and are driven by as many complex forces as exist in the human psyche.

So you can start with "it's all a market" and end up with the complexities of human existence, or you can start with "It's not all economics" and end up with the complexities of human existence. Same difference. Either way, the problem is taking huge generalizations and beating them with a rhetorical hammer until they fit some personal worldview, not the observation of the phenomenon itself.

a market dont require the intention of buying and selling, just the exchange of something in return for something else.

a market dont require the intention of buying and selling, just the exchange of something in return for something else.

Exchange of what? Goods and services for other goods and services of comparable value, or cash, or notes of debt?

Is that not the definition of a market?

Here is a human gathering for you: a funeral. What goods & services are changing hands? And please don't say "the family's savings going to the funeral home".

Money is exchanged for the rite of ceremonial burial. Most people don't just stick their mum into the ground - it's just not "proper". Social factors require a ritual market in most societies.

I pity your society. In mine, the community buries its dead for free. You're not even supposed to cook at your own house for weeks, neighbors bring in food.

Do you really think you're saying anything useful by baldly ignoring the context of the original statement in order to make a fuss over "free market capitalists"?

The context is not funerals or family reunions or random events, it's communities of people interacting over time.

At a funeral, people exchange stories, comfort, and grief.

In a market, participants are indifferent to where they get their products and services from, as long as the price is right.

In a funeral, I bloody hell care who comes to grief with me, more importantly, I care about who didn't.

BitTorrent community is a hydra, and will grow two new heads if one is cut down.

If GrooveShark pays royalty fees, I indirectly pay for music, but movies in my country are nearly unavailable, and only the elite can afford to go to the cinema or buy disks.

discussion on slashdot

http://yro.slashdot.org/story/11/02/16/1342236/How-Do-Seeder...

... which is a dupe of this one:

http://slashdot.org/story/11/01/26/1611226/100-P2P-Users-Upl...

Profit is a form of value. Big surprise that people are deriving value in different ways. Anyone that uses PirateBay without deriving some sort of value is either irrational or has blindly accepted the irrational premises of altruism.

Sounds like some good entrepreneurship going on there. These creative business models should be applauded. Some of them, if encouraged, may even lead to viable distribution business models for movies and music in the future.

I'm far from a fan of the big movie studios and their rigid distribution models, but I'm still unconvinced that annotating other people's content with spam portals is either (i) a particularly creative business model or (ii) a viable alternative revenue source for those creating and selling the content.

You have to make do with what you can. At the moment, any more legitimate form of content monetisation is effectively ruled out by the "rigid", as you call it, stance of the copyright holders. I'm sure the people setting up those sites would rather use more profitable business models.

In fact, if you read the article, you will see a screenshot of one enterprising bit-torrent site offering monthly subscriptions. So even with all the hurdles thrown into their way by the current owners of the time-unlimited copyrights on these works, they still manage to do more than just spam portals.

I think that's to be applauded.

Infinite greed, torpedo their link backs

Uhmmm...Do they really call that piece of crap "research"? Agrhrrrr

I can't agree more. The site is also incredibly irritating. Why split an otherwise average length article over 4 short pages and stuff each with pointless images? We really shouldn't be linking to such crappy sites.

Having been part of the "XviD scene" for many years in the not too distant past, I have to say that the whole angle on this being profit-driven is just... wrong. NFO-files have been around since the early days of BBS trading in the Amiga scene and the PC scene alike, and the presence of web addresses in these files today doesn't change the reality that people just don't care for reading the NFOs when it comes to audio and video, and the vast majority don't even care when it comes to software unless they absolutely need to check the NFO for instructions on how to apply a crack, a registry key or similar. Furthermore, people don't give a damned about looking for web addresses in the NFOs to find out where to "get more"; they don't need to, they already know where to get their warez. To say that there is anything close to even moderate traffic going to the various groups' ad-laden addresses is a gross, gross exaggeration.

Can't say I always read NFOs, esp. for regularly scheduled broadcasts, but they do lend some confidence and credibility. If I see a bunch of search results, I'll check the one with the NFO first.

NFOs are useful for lesser known, possibly out-of-distribution foreign downloads, telling you about audio & subtitle languages. Sometimes bitrate and IMDB links.

And they can be funny. I hope NFOs never die.

The trouble with a declaration like this is that it has no basis in fact, just your own personal experience.

I have never seen anybody click on an ad on a webpage. By your reasoning that means that obviously no-one clicks them.

And yet google makes billions off it. Apparently 10% of internet users make up almost all the advert clicks.

I would agree that it's even more of a small % for nfo files and txt files in torrents because of the effort of getting to them. It could still easily translate to serious money when you're talking about 75% of the entire torrent ecosystem using only 100 peoples' torrents.

I have no facts, but the odd behaviour presented in this article makes me suspect you're actually way off mark as I find it hard to imagine that there is some small group of altruistic French seeders using one ISP who wish to bring the joy of movies and music to everyone for such a massive amount of effort.

The more likely explanation, just as presented in the article, is that there's good money to be made as long as you take the operation to scale.

I have never seen anybody click on an ad on a webpage. By your reasoning that means that obviously no-one clicks them.

And yet google makes billions off it. Apparently 10% of internet users make up almost all the advert clicks.

I disagree that NFO files are anything like web ads. Web ads are in your face and surround content you are trying to access at all times. They are more like spam e-mails that show up in your Spam e-mail folder. You have to open that folder to see them, and then decide if you want to click through any links contained inside.

Plus, the demographic that is a much more specific demographic than users of the internet as a whole.

While there might be a little money in piracy, I doubt there is any serious money. I think that if you had the ability and talent to set up a popular site dealing with piracy, then it would be much more profitable to do something in some other market. For example, look at the piratebay. I'd say that the TPB has had a huge impact on the world. Any other startup that experienced their growth would be considered widely successful. And it has got the owners no monetary benefits. The Swedish police investigation into the site concluded that TPB made less than $200,000 a year from advertisements and millions in legal fines. So I'd question anyone planning to make money off of piracy.

"The trouble with a declaration like this is that it has no basis in fact, just your own personal experience. I have never seen anybody click on an ad on a webpage. By your reasoning that means that obviously no-one clicks them."

You're trying to stand the needle on its tip with those assumptions. You're assuming that my experience is that of a simple, casual bystander - a random "torrenter" - despite that I informed that I for many years up until just recently was a part of the video scene. I know the territory, and I know "the people", just like any other seasoned member of any other movement knows their territory. Take my word for it: there isn't good, or even ok'ish money to be made here.

So, where is profit for groups like XviD?

There isn't any. At best you might be lucky to strike a few bucks taking light payment for leech accounts on FTPs - but this is very, very rare, because nobody needs to pay to get their warez these days. If you are looking to make money in the warez scene, look to the release groups supplying software. That's where money can be made by taking offers to plant malware in software releases - more than a few large groups have been caught red-handed doing this. Pirated software is an incredibly efficient vector for reaching out to masses.

more than a few large groups have been caught red-handed doing this

References please!

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