Thought this was interesting for folks that might use BitTorrent...

Exploring Privacy Threats in BitTorrent
http://www-sop.inria.fr/members/Arnaud.Legout/Projects/bluebear.html

Quote

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We argue that it is possible to continuously monitor from a single machine most BitTorrent users and to identify the content providers (also called initial seeds). This is a major privacy threat as it is possible for anybody in the Internet to reconstruct all the download and upload history of most BitTorrent users.

To circumvent this kind of monitoring, BitTorrent users are increasingly using anonymizing networks such as Tor to hide their IP address from the tracker and, possibly, from other peers. However, we showed that it is possible to retrieve the IP address for more than 70% of BitTorrent users on top of Tor [LMC_POST10]. Moreover, once the IP address of a peer is retrieved, it is possible to link to the IP address other applications used by this peer on top of Tor.

If you can’t model the past, where you know the answer pretty well, how can you model the future? - William Happer Cyrus Fogg Brackett Professor of Physics Princeton University

This is known... if you download a new album or movie via torrent you may get a note from your ISP because one of their watchdogs found one of their users downloading that material.

It is one reason Usenet going away on Cox is bad, it was the last real anonymous way to download.

fairness Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> This is known... if you download a new album or
> movie via torrent you may get a note from your ISP
> because one of their watchdogs found one of their
> users downloading that material.
>
> It is one reason Usenet going away on Cox is bad,
> it was the last real anonymous way to download.

Any given ISP could certainly track their users performing bittorrent downloads - that is not what these folks are talking about. They are talking about folks that attempt to use proxies to hide their IP and how that doesn't work.

If you can’t model the past, where you know the answer pretty well, how can you model the future? - William Happer Cyrus Fogg Brackett Professor of Physics Princeton University



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 04/28/2010 06:23PM by Registered Voter.

but one should already assume they can track you. With Usenet there was no tracking.

With usenet your ISP could still track your activities. With much of today's spoofing technology it makes it a little harder, but the ISP should still be able to directly track what you are doing. What these folks are talking about is being able to track you AWAY from your ISP. In ways that don't even involve your ISP.

If you can’t model the past, where you know the answer pretty well, how can you model the future? - William Happer Cyrus Fogg Brackett Professor of Physics Princeton University

ISPs are not actively tracking torrents. why would they? it takes time (that's money!) to do so and the only thing it could possibly do for the ISP is drive away their customer.

that said, if they are served (OH SNAP! YOU GOT SERVED!) and are legally obligated to give up the details of a torrent then they might. then again, they may take it back to court to avoid having to give out that information. "but why?" you say. simple, if they have to do it once, they have to do it over and over again which again takes time to do. the exception to this is Comcast because it seems like they hate their customers or something.

if you arent downloading movies that are in theaters, it's unlikely you will be "caught". while the RIAA tries to make it seem like they are suing everyone, for each day, the chances of dying are higher than the chances of getting sued by the RIAA.

as for me, i pay the exorbitant fee to see movies with my friends because it's way more fun than watching some shaky cam with shitty audio and chinese subtitles.


"the wisdom of the wise will perish, the intelligence of the intelligent will vanish."