Who's been a naughty boy?

David Heath
Tuesday, 13 December 2011 09:13

Your IT - Home IT

There's a "public service" website that is currently tracking around 20% of all peer-to-peer downloads.  Has it found you yet?

We suggest you wander over to You Have Downloaded.  You don't need to do anything else; your incoming IP address will be compared with the database of recorded downloads and any entries will be displayed.  These will include all manner of movies, music, porn etc.  The site probably also captures legitimate peer-to-peer downloads (does this still happen?).

Note that the system takes no account of NAT routing (so we don't know who it was on your private network - home wireless or corporate network - did the download), neither does it care if your ISP dynamically allocates IP addresses to incoming connections - you'll probably be seeing someone else's downloads.

That's also called "plausible deniability!"

What this does show is that it is trivially easy to track torrent downloaders.  If these guys can do it, so can the authorities and so can the content owners.

We hope you all feel much better now!

BTW, this author was very pleased to see that the site responded with, "Hi. We have no records on you."  Clearly this means we're either being a good boy or very lucky!

How do you fare (if you're brave enough to visit the site, of course!)?