Hacker News Reader

Comment by dt3ft | Hacker News Reader

I can see this being used by law enforcement in countries where IP address = person that rents it.

This is a long term practice in Germany. Lawyers connect to the swarm, collect peers and then send letters in an automated way to "shake down" people.

The solution is to use VPNs or private trackers and it's pretty widely known. If you move into a flat / AirBnB one of the first things people will tell you is to not torrent on the connection.

Heck in the US one law firm actually seeded the porn themselves ... then sued the people who they accused of downloaded it ;)

Didn't work out for them long term though....

https://arstechnica.com/tag/prenda-law/

Pure Saul Goodman style.

Uh oh, I rent out a vacation house on Airbnb, I am terrified to look up what the guests have been downloading on my account...

Had one of those in the UK. Ignored it.

> in countries where IP address = person that rents it.

Does that actually exist today? At least IPv4 addresses I would expect to increasingly mean nothing, as address exhaustion drives more people behind CGNAT.

Even with dynamic IPs (Not NAT in this case) it's not a problem as ISPs in most countries have to keep a record who used the IP at which point in time.

CGNAT means multiple people are using each IP address at every point in time. To disambiguate customers the ISP would need to log every connection, which is a huge amount of data to keep track of and only useful if you have not only the IP addresses and timestamps but also the peers' port numbers.

The US has very little CGNAT outside of mobile networks and small rural ISPs

Doesn't time Warner /comcast use CGNAT

Not positive about TW, but IME Comcast does not.

I know people complain (fairly!) about comcast a lot, but some things they've consistently gotten right are stable IPs even if you don't pay for an explicit static address, and pushing v6 VERY hard.

My comcast connection has a static IP not behind NAT.

There are still plenty of places where this can apply, though. Any organization that owns an AS is susceptible to this especially. Consider universities, which might own one, where each IP corresponds to a student. Universities also just happen to be a hotbed of torrent traffic.

Without incontrovertible proof that these lists are not just "connections" but "engaged in true data exchange with us, in which we verified that the data they sent us was indeed part of the torrent in question", I'm having a harder time seeing that.

Connecting to a torrent is in itself not illegal (if it were, legal torrents such as that used for software delivery would be impossible).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com