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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
Apparently Blindspot, Warrior, Hanna and the Twilight zone is pretty popular for my ip address. I've never downloaded any of these and Twilight zone is the only one i've even heard of. I also can't torrent things through my service provider, they throttle them, so i've never actually used a torrent program at all from this IP. So, that I guess...
Maybe, it's a mobile IP so I'm pretty sure it changes regularly. I know I can force it to change by turning airplane mode on and off. I've avoided IP bans this way.
A better description would be “I know what people that happened to share your current IP address downloaded on BitTorrent”. Given that providers either implement dynamic addressing (unless the user pays for a static address) or NAT, it’s not accurate at all.
One of my neighboring IPs distributes child pornography according to this site, which is just fan-fucking-tastic. Anyone know how far Comcast distributes IPs on the same subnet geographically?
Simply as an observation, I would be legitimately shocked if the FBI didn't use these same techniques with automation to find suspicious torrents and get data from ISPs.
Given FBI's history of turning imagined non-crimes into press-releasable criminal cases (eg: agency hand-crafted terror plots, CFAA violations), one could easily wind up with two bad guys to deal with.
Well, well, well. But how did YOU know it was child porn? File names don't count, as there have always been malware, and junk, and even law enforcement traps on peer-to-peer networks. You seem to have some experience to distinguish the real deal. Why don't you have a seat?
It's a joke, but nothing protects you from being officially asked that.
The state of moral panic in which everyone is supposed to agree that “protecting the children” is a wild card which only complete deplorables dare to question resulted in what has been predicted decades ago. All around the world, governments and corporations have lobbied censorship infrastructure for themselves in the name of the children. It's written right there in the laws, as if straight from Four Horsemen of Infocalypse Wikipedia article. In addition to that, Internet is subject to semi-legal de facto “agreements” based on ever-reaching US laws. It's because of these agreements between dealers on the shady side of the net (and their connections elsewhere) you don't see child porn advertised just as often as regular porn. A lot of people wouldn't hesitate to make lots of money on the hottest topic.
That's something they have in common with other professionals. Murder (of a person of any age) results in a couple of regular news flashes, some mentions on roller captions, and that's it. However, add sex (or sex with children!), and you'll have a media goldmine. And, of course, there will be some politicians proclaiming it's the right time to ban encryption. But they can do it only because everyone react the way they react.
You're not missing anything, this service shouldn't be able to see it if it's through a VPN. If you're connected to your VPN when you check, then it might be able to see what is going through that server, which of course might not be you (if you're using a commercial/shared VPN server).
Well my ISP gives out a dynamic IP address each time my DSL modem connects to them, so this tactic only reveals who downloaded what when they were assigned my current IP. Nothing much can be inferred from this data unless you are the ISP or govt and can tie the IP to the subscriber.
And yes, it shows my IP downloaded the movie Zombieland, which I never did, so it is some other subscriber of the same ISP.
Nowadays internet users on cable often keep the same IP address for weeks if not months.
Who knows, your ISP could change its configuration tomorrow and always re-assign the same IP address to you as long as its available.
I think the point of this website is to show people that using torrents is far from anonymous and invisible.
Exactly, I posted the title as it's the link of the site and admittedly salacious enough to click, but I don't (and I'm sure the site owners don't) want to allege that there's any internet mysticism going on.
That, and you should know that there is almost certainly history of who had which IP address when; it's not going to be the same DHCP server running on your small router.
If you download something, get a new IP, and the ISP gets a complaint for your old IP, they have that data and may be obligated legally to do something about it.
In the long long ago I worked at a small regional ISP. We offered dial-up and dsl. Users were assigned whatever IP was available when they connected, and this was logged (including disconnect time).
So, it was very easy to search the logs and see who was using an IP at a given time in the past (assuming we still had the logs).
I would pay extra for an ISP who only kept those logs say 1 hour.
1 hour should be plenty to identify who is currently running some network attack, and arguably an ISP doesn't have a legit reason for keeping private data longer than necessary to be an ISP under the GDPR .
I wonder if there are any government requirements here for people operating ISPs. Does anyone have any insight into the time range that is required to keep these logs (if there is one)?
Earlier this year there was a case where someone was accessing illegal stuff (as in, the sort of stuff that does warrant police kicking their door down at 4am) using public WiFi.
Except the ISP had forgotten to take into account daylight savings time and given the police the wrong customer's details. Oops.
The orthodoxy is that the two most common forms of time stamps are:
(1) Unambiguous: a time in the past that is represented by the number of seconds since the epoch, Jan 1 1970. When coupled with a location/jurisdiction, they can be converted into a wall-clock time like “1:23pm 04 May 2006 Europe/Paris.”
(2) Ambiguous (but semantically meaningful): a time in the future that would be shown on a clock at the location of the event.
The logging of IP addresses would use the former.
The upcoming trial date for illegal torrenting would use the latter.
My modem has had the same IP for nearly 10 years now! It's the same even after several moves, one to a new county. Super convenient, but that's the nicest thing I have to say about Comcast. Boy I wish there were other options.
It's probably because it needed an IP and the modem that was turned off, leaving an IP open was your old one. That or they changed their system. The odds historically have been low getting the same IP.
I had the same IP address for the entire 3 years I lived in an apartment. Even telling my router to release and renew the IP would still give me the same IP. Only when I moved to a new house (and still used the same ISP) did my IP change.
I did this many times back when I just had a plain cable modem, not router or anything. I havent tested since I switched to a Modem Router combo, I would suspect it wont work under that setup.
But yes, my original point stands. I can run the tool, change my network cards MAC, restart the Modem, and I get a new public IP address. Ive been doing this for years to bypass IP blocks.
Ahh, that explains a bit: let me guess, your modem had a single Ethernet port on it, which you were running directly to your computer?
That means the modem was cloning your device's MAC address onto its own WAN interface. Which is... weird, but would have had some kind of logical motivation.
Maybe it meant the modem vendor didn't have to maintain their own MAC registration ("just copy the device's!"), or maybe it was an ISP "what kinds of devices are our customers using?" kind of thing (the majority of results would have been routers, not single devices). Or maybe this is normal for cable modems (never used cable myself, just ADSL2+).
You don't need a tool to change your MAC address. You can do it from the Control Panel.
And as another commenter said, this would only change my local IP (192.168.254.x) IP, not the WAN IP (50.39.x.x). I would need to change my router's MAC address, since that's the only MAC address my ISP sees. And depending on my ISP's DHCP configuration, I still might not get a different IP. I might even make it unable to get an IP at all.
Comcast assigns you an IP based on the MAC address of your modem and the only way to change it is to get a new modem. When I had AT&T it could change at anytime.
Yeah back when there was that company that used to send threatening emails through ISP companies I used to get emails from my ISP claiming I downloaded various shows and movies I had never seen. It was a completely pointless farce and fraud.
I checked this from a phone who's provider NATs IPV4.
People be wild on their mobile connections. I don't torrent on mobile only because the bandwidth will get me throttled, but god damn someone on my NAT has some filthy habits.
Where I am currently in India, the ISP does provider-level NAT: multiple customers are on the same IPv4 address. No idea how many. This thing is showing around a dozen movies (a mixture of English and local language, plus it looks like someone wants to become a web developer) being downloaded per day, and I’m confident none of them are coming from the local network I’m attached to. This NAT is also a right pain, because there are always at least one or two strains of malware running on the address, so that it’s always on at least one or two blacklists, which causes the occasional problem. As an example, earlier today I couldn’t access ConvertKit’s Terms of Service page at all because Wordfence didn’t like my IP address. (But it only blocked access to that one page. Weird.) It was worse when I was here 3–4 years ago: at that time, the IP address was on most of the blacklists, and each and every site protected by Cloudflare would complain and require a CAPTCHA before it would let you in. (Though at least it would let you in, unlike Wordfence today.) It’s times like that when you realise viscerally just how much of the internet is behind Cloudflare.
Back in 2012, the same ISP was intercepting all DNS (!) and serving OpenDNS with the stupid give-you-a-search-page-instead-of-an-NXDOMAIN-response thing that they had back then, forcibly enabled.
Hopefully the copy of “Avast Premium Security 20.2.2401 (Build 20.2.5130) Final + Serial” someone downloaded will help them clear the malware out, rather than make things worse.
Indeed, not only I'm seeing somebody else's pretty mediocre taste, but I have no idea of my previous ips so can't check real accuracy.
However, what does impress me is that somebody downloaded multiple movies and games a day, with books and tailoring instructions thrown in. Dunno if the site counts seeding torrents too, but if not—someone is very busy just consuming all that.
yeah at first I thought this was a prank and it just randomly shows you a lot of porn and movies and games and stuff (I mean who torrents porn?). Now I am not sure if other people on my ISP have bad taste / are dumb or a combination of both.
Smart thing to do is to use this as a content recommendation service! Or netflix can improve their catalog by knowing what content people are going off-service for.... Nevermind enforcement, this is a huge data source for marketing purposes... Wait a minute :(
I also have a VPN but guess what, my torrents are nicely showing. I've recently been using BiglyBT, a clone of the old Azureus torrent client. But apparently if something is wrong with the SOCKS proxy, BiglyBT defaults simply skipping the proxy :(
Laughs in Usenet. The proliferation of streaming services and restricted content has me investing in alternative options more these days. It's not about paying for content, it's about content becoming less accessible again.
Alternately, a seedbox or seebox-like service like Put.io.
My ISP actually prohibits P2P transfers, so whatever you're downloading, if you want to use torrents, it's the only way to go without getting nasty emails.
Yes - but in my case I'm happy to comply. My ISP is a locally-owned small-business that operates a WISP. They're genuinely nice people, pick up on the 1st ring when there's an issue and provide great support.
If they say that P2P transfers on their network cause congestion and degradation, I believe them, and I'm happy to find alternatives.
Usenet has its own issues though. The past couple years there’s been a massive jump in DMCA takedowns.
On certain things you now have download as it becomes available, in a week it’ll be gone. For things that no one cares to pay for monitoring of, you can go back years.
So, pros and cons to torrents that don’t get taken down specially but torrents “die” of old age when no one seeds them.
It’s odd to me that file sharing seems to have hit a wall after torrents got popular. Doesn’t it seem like Usenet shouldn’t be the best option considering it’s age?
I believe it’s only really a good option for files because it’s old and there are many obscure providers. I don’t see anything about Usenet itself that makes it well suited for sharing files. In fact, quite the opposite. The fact that each file needs to be split and reconstructed after download results in an esoteric user experience.
All that said, I love (or loved) Usenet for communicating on Newsgroups. I’m glad that they still are around. I hope Newsgroups and IRC never die.
Usenet is still a good option for 5+ year old videos. I've noticed I'm getting 10+ years retention lately and some of the files that were missing started working again. However, there are services that you pay for that cache popular torrents and also provide premium file hosts leeches for the stuff that is missing on Usenet.
Two things for your last comment - in reverse order:
- Usenet is likely the "best" option because it's super niche due to it's age. Only a certain subset of people even know it exists, much less use it, and the effort to track down anything except the most popular stuff is just too expensive.
- I think file sharing in general started to die off because streaming services actually provided a good alternative for a while. Right now, they are basically online cable companies though, and I feel like a new re-surgance of file sharing is likely coming as a backlash. As the prices go up, the fragmentation explodes and items come and go as contracts, consolidation and new launches affect availability, people will be frustrated and look for alternatives, legal or not.
I've not run into anything that I wanted to watch which isn't available on Usenet. DMCA takedowns haven't been an issue at all because I use two Usenet servers with multiple aggregated indexers. If something gets taken down, it gets replaced very quickly and the tools I use automatically retry in the event of failure. The other benefit is I can saturate my bandwidth instantly instead of the dreaded kb/s trickle that torrents start out as / become. After making a request for a TV show in Ombi, I will usually have the episode show up in my Plex list within a few minutes. Most movies are there in less than ten minutes. I haven't tried torrenting in a good while, but my Usenet experience has been dramatically better than what I experienced with P2P.
I remember in college I used to be able to download as far back as my Usenet provider's retention allowed in most cases. Shortly after graduating, I couldn't download anything that my auto-downloader (SickBeard back then) didn't pick up unless it was really niche. That aligns with your 7-8 year estimate.
Since I go through a VPN, I'm more accurately seeing what other people who use my same VPN are torrenting. Surprisingly not as much porn as I would have guessed?
A pity that the output columns seem to be fixed, or else I could probably do some fun analysis.
Depends on one of two factors: 1. Does the CGNAT use EIM for TCP or UDP? 2. Does it, your CPE and your torrent client implement PCP or forward UPnP mappings as PCP?
Yeah, I wonder who flagged this or why. It didn't come up in the search (most recent post was 3 years ago from what I saw) so I figured it would be worth a repost.
Off topic but this raises a question about iMesssage parsing of URLs. I copied just the base URL (without my IP, so he would get his) and sent this to a friend. The preview in iMessage lists my IP, because iMessage actually visited the link. Does the message he receives show his IP or mine?
e: Just tested this, it shows my IP on the receiving end. It appears iMessage creates the preview text on the sender’s side so this will leak your IP. I tried it in Slack too and it leaked whatever IP Slack used to fetch the URL which interestingly is not my IP.
The web preview in iMessage is performed by each client. So your friend should see their IP in the preview since it's their client making the connection on their end.
This is easy to test if you've got another device with iMessage. Take your phone off WiFi and send yourself the link. The device on WiFi should show your home ISP address while the device on cellular should show the cellular provider IP.
That does not appear to be how iMessage works. I just tried this and my IP did appear on the receiving end. Since I edited the URL in the actual message it is possible the preview was cached from the original redirect.
Either way it is infuriating that iMessage does not show you what it is actually going to send.
This feature is a “very good thing” so you can’t force someone to disclose their whereabouts to you by sending them a link to the server you control.
If you don’t want to send people your own info in the thumbnail, don’t send them thumbs of URLs that display your own info to you in image or title text when generating the preview on your device.
This is really interesting and gives me a new respect for Signal for thinking about it.
After considering the options it seems Apple made a reasonable default assumption but in the case of sites that reveal information about me it is a bit frustrating. An option would be nice but, :Apple:.
Their blog is pretty interesting about a lot of things like this. There's a lot of Good Thinking™ through Signal.
And some super weird stuff like relying on Intel SGX for contact info... that they don't need to store, and don't let you opt out of. I basically trust them to actually do what they say they're doing, but I don't see the point of needing that trust in the first place (and there's no way to validate that it's happening, so it could change in the future and no user could tell).
I just checked a few links sent back and forth between me and another iMessage friend, both from within Messages.app on my Mac, and the synced Messages app on my iPhone. I don't see any IPs being displayed at the end of URL strings when I copy and paste the link from the generated previews. My friend would have definitely only ever sent links from their iPhone, but often I would send mine from the Mac.
The IP leaks through the name of the page on the URL preview. https://iknowwhatyoudownload.com redirects to https://iknowwhatyoudownload.com/en/peer/ which includes the IP of the sender. The name of the page includes the IP address of the sender. "Torrent downloads and distributions for IP 0.0.0.0". If you paste the URL in a sentence with a period at the end this preview may not be generated.
Neat, now I know what everyone using my vpn provider has downloaded!
I will happily recommend that everyone buy a router that can be flashed and pipe all your traffic through a VPN. It doesn't give you perfect security, but it defeats a lot of attempts to deanonimize like this.
Even if you do everything right all your traffic goes through VPN...
This create a case where the “bad thing” you do woth the PC, is also on the same address as all your “good things”.
Let’s say with Google, your thermostat, your Wi-Fi enabled coffee maker, your game console, your phone, every website you connect to with any other device that runs through that router/VPN - they all know your VPN IP at that time and your account info at that time.
Let’s say your WiFi refrigerator mfg sells IP and account detail information as a service to a data mining company - as I’m certain some do - in order to “get around” your home VPN, someone might need relatively cheap access to this data.
Putting everything on a VPN gives a lot of devices and accounts to tattle on you.
A VPN for the PC alone might be a decent idea if you are downloading things on the PC.
One thing I've dabbled with[1] is using pfSense to set up a VM with a management 'interface' that only routes to my local network and drops any packets not on the web UI port[2], and an Internet 'interface' that pfSense routes over a VPN (I can't remember if I ended up actually using two separate interfaces, or a set of firewall rules to allow the LAN traffic access). AFAICT, it seemed to work reasonably for the brief period I used it - the VM could only see the pfSense gateway, and all of the Internet traffic from the VM went over the VPN, whilst the traffic from the rest of my network was unaffected, but I could access a few services locally on a 10.x.x.x IP (different subnet to my main network).
[1] Actually to setup a Pi-Hole instance that bypassed my ISP's DNS hijacking, but the principle seems similar
It lists a bunch of crap especially porn and Bollywood movies and some chines stuff I cant identify what it is but certainly no one in my household torrented it. Meanwhile it does not list a single distro iso that I have been seeding for months.
The IP and torrent client is correct tho. Strange.
The beautiful part is that they may have no idea which IP address corresponds to your email until you click a unique link in the phishing email (or load a tracking pixel?).
a) this is creepy
b) I have wondered this... you know those letters some ISPs send to people telling them what they downloaded illegally? Do they send that stuff to VPN providers? Because it seems like they would just get flooded. I connected to my VPN service and there are thousands on that IP range.
The ISP is looking for IP addresses in its address range in the peer list, looking it up in its customer database, and sending its own customers a letter.
As I explained in another post, I used to work at a small ISP many years ago. We did not monitor anything, but we did get emails from MPAA people (my memory is a little fuzzy) about an IP downloading a something. We would then pass it on to our customer.
It was at least true for Comcast in 2007-2011. They were using a third-party agency for this info and then moved it in-house when I was doing contract work for them.
No clue how MPAA letters interfaced with them. Could have been an agreement with them for all I know.
786 comments
[ 4.7 ms ] story [ 369 ms ] threadActually...for a free wireguard server there wasn't a whole lot of bittorrent traffic at all.
I too was surprised.
A lot of TV shows.
Does that actually exist today? At least IPv4 addresses I would expect to increasingly mean nothing, as address exhaustion drives more people behind CGNAT.
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.
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.
Didn't work out for them long term though....
https://arstechnica.com/tag/prenda-law/
Connecting to a torrent is in itself not illegal (if it were, legal torrents such as that used for software delivery would be impossible).
Simply as an observation, I would be legitimately shocked if the FBI didn't use these same techniques with automation to find suspicious torrents and get data from ISPs.
It's a joke, but nothing protects you from being officially asked that.
The state of moral panic in which everyone is supposed to agree that “protecting the children” is a wild card which only complete deplorables dare to question resulted in what has been predicted decades ago. All around the world, governments and corporations have lobbied censorship infrastructure for themselves in the name of the children. It's written right there in the laws, as if straight from Four Horsemen of Infocalypse Wikipedia article. In addition to that, Internet is subject to semi-legal de facto “agreements” based on ever-reaching US laws. It's because of these agreements between dealers on the shady side of the net (and their connections elsewhere) you don't see child porn advertised just as often as regular porn. A lot of people wouldn't hesitate to make lots of money on the hottest topic.
That's something they have in common with other professionals. Murder (of a person of any age) results in a couple of regular news flashes, some mentions on roller captions, and that's it. However, add sex (or sex with children!), and you'll have a media goldmine. And, of course, there will be some politicians proclaiming it's the right time to ban encryption. But they can do it only because everyone react the way they react.
Am I missing something, or is my impression that this tool can “see through” tunneled traffic false?
And yes, it shows my IP downloaded the movie Zombieland, which I never did, so it is some other subscriber of the same ISP.
I think the point of this website is to show people that using torrents is far from anonymous and invisible.
If you download something, get a new IP, and the ISP gets a complaint for your old IP, they have that data and may be obligated legally to do something about it.
So, it was very easy to search the logs and see who was using an IP at a given time in the past (assuming we still had the logs).
1 hour should be plenty to identify who is currently running some network attack, and arguably an ISP doesn't have a legit reason for keeping private data longer than necessary to be an ISP under the GDPR .
Except the ISP had forgotten to take into account daylight savings time and given the police the wrong customer's details. Oops.
More proof dates aren't easy.
(1) Unambiguous: a time in the past that is represented by the number of seconds since the epoch, Jan 1 1970. When coupled with a location/jurisdiction, they can be converted into a wall-clock time like “1:23pm 04 May 2006 Europe/Paris.”
(2) Ambiguous (but semantically meaningful): a time in the future that would be shown on a clock at the location of the event.
The logging of IP addresses would use the former.
The upcoming trial date for illegal torrenting would use the latter.
On the other hand I use extensively a torrent tracker and the site shows nothing.
I found it amusing to see that the OP web link stops showing what my IP has been downloading at the same time that I got the IP only about a week ago.
If you are downloading obscure or non-english stuff chances are they don't have the torrent and it won't show up on the list.
However, if your modem is off long enough for a new user in your area to need a new IP address, they'll snatch up yours.
Also, 10 years? I guess DOCSIS 3.0 has been around that long. That's pretty impressive.
I had the same IP address for the entire 3 years I lived in an apartment. Even telling my router to release and renew the IP would still give me the same IP. Only when I moved to a new house (and still used the same ISP) did my IP change.
To be clear, there's your device's MAC, the Wi-Fi AP's MAC and the modem's WAN-facing MAC. (Integrated Wi-Fi router/modem combos obviously have both.)
If this tool is successfully getting you new public IP addresses, something VERY weird is going on with your (probably integrated) modem.
But yes, my original point stands. I can run the tool, change my network cards MAC, restart the Modem, and I get a new public IP address. Ive been doing this for years to bypass IP blocks.
That means the modem was cloning your device's MAC address onto its own WAN interface. Which is... weird, but would have had some kind of logical motivation.
Maybe it meant the modem vendor didn't have to maintain their own MAC registration ("just copy the device's!"), or maybe it was an ISP "what kinds of devices are our customers using?" kind of thing (the majority of results would have been routers, not single devices). Or maybe this is normal for cable modems (never used cable myself, just ADSL2+).
And as another commenter said, this would only change my local IP (192.168.254.x) IP, not the WAN IP (50.39.x.x). I would need to change my router's MAC address, since that's the only MAC address my ISP sees. And depending on my ISP's DHCP configuration, I still might not get a different IP. I might even make it unable to get an IP at all.
People be wild on their mobile connections. I don't torrent on mobile only because the bandwidth will get me throttled, but god damn someone on my NAT has some filthy habits.
The webserver of my bank sees it as a hack and will then log me out.
Fortunately my ISP also has an APN when I'm allocated my own IP.
Back in 2012, the same ISP was intercepting all DNS (!) and serving OpenDNS with the stupid give-you-a-search-page-instead-of-an-NXDOMAIN-response thing that they had back then, forcibly enabled.
Hopefully the copy of “Avast Premium Security 20.2.2401 (Build 20.2.5130) Final + Serial” someone downloaded will help them clear the malware out, rather than make things worse.
However, what does impress me is that somebody downloaded multiple movies and games a day, with books and tailoring instructions thrown in. Dunno if the site counts seeding torrents too, but if not—someone is very busy just consuming all that.
- games for parent 1
- movies for kids
- tailoring instruction for parent 2
My ISP actually prohibits P2P transfers, so whatever you're downloading, if you want to use torrents, it's the only way to go without getting nasty emails.
If they say that P2P transfers on their network cause congestion and degradation, I believe them, and I'm happy to find alternatives.
On certain things you now have download as it becomes available, in a week it’ll be gone. For things that no one cares to pay for monitoring of, you can go back years.
So, pros and cons to torrents that don’t get taken down specially but torrents “die” of old age when no one seeds them.
It’s odd to me that file sharing seems to have hit a wall after torrents got popular. Doesn’t it seem like Usenet shouldn’t be the best option considering it’s age?
All that said, I love (or loved) Usenet for communicating on Newsgroups. I’m glad that they still are around. I hope Newsgroups and IRC never die.
- Usenet is likely the "best" option because it's super niche due to it's age. Only a certain subset of people even know it exists, much less use it, and the effort to track down anything except the most popular stuff is just too expensive.
- I think file sharing in general started to die off because streaming services actually provided a good alternative for a while. Right now, they are basically online cable companies though, and I feel like a new re-surgance of file sharing is likely coming as a backlash. As the prices go up, the fragmentation explodes and items come and go as contracts, consolidation and new launches affect availability, people will be frustrated and look for alternatives, legal or not.
'Best' is subjective, often the network effect wins and people will keep using something that is 'good enough'.
Usenet archives go back 10 years. How are you going to start a Usenet competitor with 10 years worth of content?
You see this ALL the time and it is the primary driver for people using the work "modern" to excess.
The rise in pirate binary groups is what killed Usenet feeds on most ISPs.
I used to be a great follower of text groups but it became more and more difficult to find a feed and the overall signal:noise ratio faded.
Eventually I gave up. Thanks for nothing, you folks who want to watch other people's content for free.
There were basically a few stages:
1. The Eternal September, and it was dark and cold.
2. The rise of the spam bots, and it became filthy.
3. The weight of the binaries, and ISPs began to shy away.
4. The popularity of PHPBB, and The Eternal September began to wane.
5. The binaries grew heavier, the spam more pervasive, and more and more human peers found their access dropped by their ISPs.
NNTP was glorious while it lasted, but it died by its popularity.
A pity that the output columns seem to be fixed, or else I could probably do some fun analysis.
The above poster is wrong though. It's quite obvious that porn=red and it's easy to test. Anything with "XXX" in the category column is red.
e: Just tested this, it shows my IP on the receiving end. It appears iMessage creates the preview text on the sender’s side so this will leak your IP. I tried it in Slack too and it leaked whatever IP Slack used to fetch the URL which interestingly is not my IP.
This is easy to test if you've got another device with iMessage. Take your phone off WiFi and send yourself the link. The device on WiFi should show your home ISP address while the device on cellular should show the cellular provider IP.
Either way it is infuriating that iMessage does not show you what it is actually going to send.
If you don’t want to send people your own info in the thumbnail, don’t send them thumbs of URLs that display your own info to you in image or title text when generating the preview on your device.
e: apparently this can be accomplished by putting periods before and after the link or pasting the link in a sentence.
First quack: https://osxdaily.com/2018/08/02/disable-url-link-previews-me...
Still need to test the behavior.
And a (small, but has a few links) blog post about it: https://signal.org/blog/i-link-therefore-i-am/
After considering the options it seems Apple made a reasonable default assumption but in the case of sites that reveal information about me it is a bit frustrating. An option would be nice but, :Apple:.
And some super weird stuff like relying on Intel SGX for contact info... that they don't need to store, and don't let you opt out of. I basically trust them to actually do what they say they're doing, but I don't see the point of needing that trust in the first place (and there's no way to validate that it's happening, so it could change in the future and no user could tell).
How exactly do you find these leaked IPs?
I will happily recommend that everyone buy a router that can be flashed and pipe all your traffic through a VPN. It doesn't give you perfect security, but it defeats a lot of attempts to deanonimize like this.
Even if you do everything right all your traffic goes through VPN...
This create a case where the “bad thing” you do woth the PC, is also on the same address as all your “good things”.
Let’s say with Google, your thermostat, your Wi-Fi enabled coffee maker, your game console, your phone, every website you connect to with any other device that runs through that router/VPN - they all know your VPN IP at that time and your account info at that time.
Let’s say your WiFi refrigerator mfg sells IP and account detail information as a service to a data mining company - as I’m certain some do - in order to “get around” your home VPN, someone might need relatively cheap access to this data.
Putting everything on a VPN gives a lot of devices and accounts to tattle on you.
A VPN for the PC alone might be a decent idea if you are downloading things on the PC.
Also handy if you want to do work stuff on a company VPN without letting the employer see all network access.
[1] Actually to setup a Pi-Hole instance that bypassed my ISP's DNS hijacking, but the principle seems similar
[2] And DNS in this case
My dynamic IP can go a year w/o changing. I have to re-spoof my MAC when I want a new one.
https://iknowwhatyoudownload.com/en/link/
As I explained in another post, I used to work at a small ISP many years ago. We did not monitor anything, but we did get emails from MPAA people (my memory is a little fuzzy) about an IP downloading a something. We would then pass it on to our customer.
No clue how MPAA letters interfaced with them. Could have been an agreement with them for all I know.