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Comment by waihtis | Hacker News Reader

Well this is a blast from the past for sure.

I haven't been looking at torrents for ages, mostly because local LEO partnered together with extortion lawyers made it uncomfortable over where I live. Literally extortion in this case, as the legal firms in this business sent blackmail letters to people who's IP addresses had been seen as part of a torrenting activity to either pay a ridiculous settlement fee or go to court.

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Rent a seedbox in eastern europe (somewhere like Belarus or Romania) and torrent your stuff from there. There's no way they can cost-efficiently get you that way.

Tbh I dont really need illegal torrents nowadays, but thats an interesting concept for sure.

It is not necessarily about illegal torrents. There are some niche files such old movies that you wouldn't find anywhere to let you watch it where you live. I used to torrent some, just to keep it alive and prevent such works from disappearing from the Internet. However, I'd still prefer to torrent from a location that reduces the chance of receiving such letters from opportunity seekers to suck some cash out of me.

You do have a good point - although the extortion lawyers were just contracted by some of the big studios. Ergo, the likelihood of being hunted by the heirs of a ww2-era Polish filmmaker or similar entity are considerably slimmer. :-)

Youre right though in that its generally a good idea to stay anon when torrenting.

> However, I'd still prefer to torrent from a location that reduces the chance of receiving such letters from opportunity seekers to suck some cash out of me.

Then you should consider torrents over I2P: https://geti2p.net/en

The law firms aren't going after everyone who is torrenting, they are going after people downloading copyrighted material. You're not going to get a letter if you're downloading a torrent of the latest Ubuntu image.

Not guaranteed, actually, due to the carpet-bombing strategy of targeting the ‘culprits’. Can't remember if Linux specifically was involved, but there certainly were some misfires.

(Ironically, when I tried downloading fresh Ubuntu with desktop Transmission, it froze for a rather long while, presumably due to the near-two-thousand peers.)

It's not going to connect to most of them. The protocol doesn't scale linearly with the number of peers, so most clients won't connect to more than like 50 at a time. And will download from even less.

With an infinite number of peers, 0% of the traffic would be actual file chunks. 100% would be bookkeeping.

I guess that's a long winded way or saying that the issue probably wasn't with the number of peers.

How does one contact such renters?

Would be kinda cool to, err, "join" some majority of the Wi-Fi networks in your area and download some of the most boring stuff possible (including of course Linux distros)...

If you list that as the primary reason, why not just use a VPN?

Why do you just trust a VPN provider, any VPN provider?

Because for this use case of avoiding the extortion lawyers this is good enough. Nobody is going to bother with trying to go after some VPN provider when there's millions of people on normal ISPs where they just have to give them a call.

As usual, it's all about knowing your threat model.

You don’t think providers would be willing to sell that information for cheap? They’d just saw off country sized chunks and sell bit by bit

The business model of these lawyers is to join a few swarms of big popular titles, then send automated letters to the ISP, then send automated letters to the address they got from the ISP and collect money (At least here in Germany).

They are only going after the low hanging fruits, it's not about catching everyone or doing deals with VPN providers located in some hard to reach country.

That’s an extremely definitive point of view. What if the lawyers agree to give the VPN provider 10% of the proceeds?

That VPN provider would likely be out of business extremely fast. If you offer a service that's supposed to increase privacy, and it doesn't... who's gonna pay for that service? Of course exceptions apply with law enforcement, but then again your threat model is very different there (and the VPN provider in question will not be able to say no).

That being said, there are VPN providers who guarantee that no logs are kept (I believe ProtonVPN does this) and are extremely privacy-oriented. I am inclined to believe these companies, if all I'm doing is pirating a few movies.

VPN\seedbox providers probably don’t make the wisest business choices. They may not care bout the longevity of their business even if they do.

Hosting providers that sell bandwidth to VPN services could easily log traffic.

There have been numerous cases where ‘No logs’ VPN providers have been caught logging details. See the recently exposed logstash breach.

Why couldn't lawyers almost as easily send bulk IP requests to VPN providers as they send notifications to ISPs?

The VPN can credibly claim not to hold on to that information.

What does the VPN provider claim when they receive a court summons for copyright infringement?

In the US at least, they are neither liable for the actions of their users nor under any sort of obligation to retain IP address logs. So, as far as I can tell, they're free to respond with "sorry, can't help you." IANAL, though.

The EU on the other hand has mandatory data retention, but it seems that this has been challenged be several countries, according to https://www.eff.org/issues/mandatory-data-retention

PIA (before acquisition) said in lawsuit that they can't provide IP address because they don't save.

They don't receive a summons, because the courts in their jurisdiction don't issue summons for that.

Why wouldn't lawyers run a vpn service in order to collect IPs?

Just a tangent, but you can send Mullvad an envelope with cash and your account number as a form of payment. That's not a proof of trust but it's a statement IMO

It's not so much about trust as it is about defense in depth. Many states won't cooperate with american litigation.

Because trust is what they sell, unlike an ISP.

What is the alternative?

I was a very passive torrenter anyway, just found it easier to source stuff in alternative ways

Does that still happen? I thought that the ability to spoof IP addresses in torrent networks ended that. The accuser not only has to prove that the IP address hosted the file, but also that it was not spoofed; an impossible ask

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