YTS torrent tracker part of new anti-piracy scheme
torrentfreak.com
torrentfreak.com
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]
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-deniabili...
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.
An IP is a terrible way to identify someone and the judges who actually know a thing or two have already learned that.
The copyright trolling industry has worked its hardest to try and goose the legal process in their favor at all junctures and the reality is most judges just don’t have the knowledge to properly adjudicate these cases so the technical nuance of bogus IPs just doesn’t matter. In most cases the copyright trolls just make declarative statements about what their tech discovered. Some cases by more informed defendants have been tossed because they were unwilling to disclose how the data was collected.
Ultimately if you stand up to the copyright trolls, they usually stand down. It’s not worth them to actually fight. They’re hoping for the drive-by payout.
Non of the ISPs in my area are offering IPv6 prefix randomization - if I want not to be correlated, I need to switch ISPs. I am staying with IPv4 for now.
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.
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.
They'd have to change the law if they want to remove GDPR.
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.
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.
This is incorrect. There are Directives (which work like you described) and Regulations, which apply directly: 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.
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.
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.)
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).
Tor relays, while more numerous than exit nodes, are still limited (we're discussing a custom onion service communication setup here, not using Tor for general purpose BT which would use exit nodes). Anyone can run one, and please do so if you have good bandwidth each way. Relays are opt in because not only does it open you up to lots of bandwidth usage, but Tor shouldn't default to running a relay for those that may be philosophically opposed. Relays pass all data through anonymously and encrypted, but some still may not feel comfortable doing it. So there are limited operators.
As for the nature of Tor itself, to keep both the client and onion service operator anonymous, they communicate through a rendezvous which means a Tor circuit for each side (each Tor circuit is 3 hops iirc). And geographic distance is intentionally disregarded, so it may traverse the world multiple times over.
I have considered running a private Tor network with directory servers replaced with a DHT, forcing everyone to be a relay, and then essentially running a private BT over that, but it'd need significant adoption to be viable. Also, there may be Tor limitations in huge numbers of relays (and definitely issues with slow relays), I haven't checked. Finally, in addition to traffic analysis attacks that always exist, it is believed iirc lately that federal agencies are sitting on Tor exploits (granted may only be for exits and/or Tor browser).
But the real danger with torrents is when you're actually sharing the data. Any of the IPs you connect to could be a malicious peer who will later track down your IP through legal channels and send you abusive notices.
I guess the way to protect yourself there is to torrent only over a VPN or through a seedbox.
It’s not perfect, but puts up enough obstacles for me to feel better about it than some fly-by-night VPN
Can switzerland even be considered "non-cooperative"? I mean, most people probably think so because of their reputation as a an "offshore bank", but that's been eroded due to the passing of FATCA.
- Downloading copyrighted material, even from obviously shady sources, is perfectly legal.
- Sharing said material with your friends, even if you obtained it from an obviously shady source, is perfectly legal.
- Sharing it with random strangers (as happens while torrenting) is not legal, but hard to prosecute, because:
- private companies collecting IP addresses to sue uploaders violate privacy laws, and thus commit a crime themselves (!) [1]
I didn't check, but I'd also assume:
- That ISPs and VPN providers aren't required (and quite likely even aren't allowed) to disclose the identity behind an IP address to a private entity
- That VPN providers (unlike ISPs) aren't required to maintain such logs, and thus typically don't.
For comparison, in Germany, downloading from "obviously illegal" sources is prohibited, further sharing a copy from such sources among friends is prohibited (and since breaking copy protection is prohibited too, having a DRM-free copy of the content is a pretty strong indicator that it comes from an illegal source - unless you got it from a Swiss friend...).
[1] https://www.weka.ch/themen/it-technik/it-sicherheit-und-rech...
Is there a single i2p universe or do you have separate self hosted instances. What does i2p offer that Tor doesn’t? Are there active sites or communities it is it just a routing layer?
Doing a Google search… someone likes the acting abilities of Yua Mikami.
If anyone wants to track me they have to do browser fingerprinting or talk to my ISP about getting the PPPoE login logs for the IP in question.
As I wrote IN MY POST:
> If anyone wants to track me they have to do browser fingerprinting or talk to my ISP about getting the PPPoE login logs for the IP in question.
If I really want to hide my activities I will use Tor, but for the day-to-day stuff of avoiding ad trackers a daily reboot and cookies-off setting is Good Enough™ (for me).
Changing your IP daily is not meaningful within the context of piracy on torrents.
I always switch from my personal to a commercial VPN if I need to do anything that could be construed as questionable, or whenever I need both privacy as well as anonymity.
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.
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.
[0] : https://old.reddit.com/r/trackers/comments/4iele6/empornium_...
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.
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.