Private Torrent Sites are being infiltrated
I read an interesting article over at the TorrentFreak blog about how so-called private torrent sites were being infiltrated by piracy investigators.
It confirmed that piracy investigators have been gaining access to private torrent sites by either joining them when they were still open for registration or being invited from someone in the inside. It was always pretty obvious to me that private could not really mean private if the site owners did not know each of their users personally.
This system was bound to fail right from the beginning and the article on TorrentFreak only confirms this.
Peter Anaman, a senior internet investigator for legal firm Covington and Burling has admitted that his organisation has infiltrated unnamed private BitTorrent tracker sites and shares their method of gaining access; Anaman added, “Once you’re in, you never take action. You just listen?
I think the last quote is probably the only clue that private site owners could get to identify the moles in the system.Why would they keep users in the system who never share files? Who seem to click on many files but never download them or stop downloads shortly after starting them?
The piracy investigators can adopt new tactics of course which leads to the conclusion that private trackers have and will never be safe. Don't rely on them as your only source of security. If you want security stop using p2p networks.. What's your stance in the matter?
Update: With private trackers opening registration ever now and then to the public, it is safe to say that the majority are tracked by companies specialized in tracking these kinds of things. The data gathered this way can be used in a variety of ways, from the computation of statistics to the take down of the tracker.
While it is unclear if and how the data is admissible in court, it is fair to say that it provides companies with information on how private torrent sites operate.
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And for those looking for a decent alternative that’s free and free from ads plus other crap (though I would recommend donating), then try qBittorrent: http://www.qbittorrent.org/
Why not use the portable version of uTorrent?
Just downlad the .exe from official website into a folder, create a text file in the same folder, rename the .txt file to settings.dat and start uTorrent. You can move the folder anywhere.
^Exactly…. in fact I would recommend avoiding all versions over 2.0, the torrent portion of the program hardly changed, it’s all the ads, ratings, and possible tracking features that require all the additional installs.
And this is why I never updated in a nutshell;
“Ads
More Ads (hit decline offer)
Even more ads (hit decline)”
Nope. I donated $25 several years ago to the utorrent crew.. possibly a decade… so I refuse to accept their reasoning for selling out so much.
You can turn off the ads.
qBittorrent FTW!
Qbittorrent your way out of this piece of crap.
+1 for Qbittorrent
I’m a long long time user of Bitcomet now and forever. Never any ads, no offers, nothing to decline, no sell out… little used due to the complex nature they still scare people away with, but their new install is a simple one click solution that discovers all settings on its own except firewalls.
They follow a simple idea…’share’… if you share you can possibly go faster than those who don’t share. You can even see connections* connected to you and of them who is sharing and who isn’t… then you can boot them / ban them or ignore them selectively ‘mwahahaha…’. We can set how much we share, with who, and how fast we share.
*in my personal experience over 95% of Azures and uTorrent users do not share, I boot them.
So those who believe Bitcomet is hard to understand, they haven’t been that since version 1.09a (current public release 1.35). Also Bitcomet installs a Firefox add-on to capture media from the temp directory. You can easily unload it using Firefox’s Add-on Options page.
Bottomline, Bitcomet is faster and easier to install/use. Signing up as a registered user will allow you to join the ranks as a sharing user. The more you share, the faster you can possibly go.
utorrent installs itself in appdata folder so it can inject malware without the UAC consent. Don’t use utorrent because it’s unsafe!
The best last version of utorrent is 2.2.1 build 25534