I’ll admit, this spooked me, but for different reasons than the OP and most comments.
I didn’t recognize any of the downloads, even though I have a publicly routable static IP and don’t use a VPN (I have a domain and self host so I know my IP hast changed in years).
I use exclusively private trackers, and nothing I’ve actually downloaded showed up, and the things that did were sporadic—one every couple days or so, first/last seen times identical, random torrents. I started asking myself if I had a rogue device in my network, so I checked logs and stats—nothing unusual (I think…I hope…hard to tell sometimes).
I looked more into how this site tracks peers, and it seems they have different levels of confidence. Their first API tier (peer API) is a “best guess” and this is based on listening to the DHT and PeX networks for their known torrents. I’m guessing their website uses this or a combination of this with their other APIs. I looked at my torrent config and saw I hadn’t disabled DHT/PeX and had a couple idle public torrents.
Not positive on this, but I think there can be false positives if your torrent box participates in DHT/PeX even if it doesn’t actually download said torrents. Can anyone confirm this?
I love that even the URL preview shows an IP address lol.
The site just grabs the viewers current IP I imagine it’s probably whatever address is used by the instance to parse the URL and generate the preview, since it’s different if I view it on my instance, vs if I view it on the original post on dbzer0
I assume some instance’s don’t have a front-end with URL previewing, but I can see it on my instance’s alternate front-end (Alexandrite), and also on dbzer0’s default layout.
And this is why - all together now - “An IP is not an ID”. They don’t know what you’ve downloaded; they know what some number of IP addresses have downloaded from some trackers at some points, and you might be have been assigned one of those IPs after the fact. They aren’t useful, alone.
I don't use a VPN nor I bother with one, I download movie torrents all the time (5 this week already) and the list is completely empty. I do have dynamic IP but ir usually only changes after I restart my router, which I haven't done for a month now.
Cool. The government is incompetent and tech illiterate here so I’m safe anyway. It’s like running from a bear, I just have to outrun the others running from it.
There are people who pirate stuff from telegram using their mobile numbers, so I’m fine.
I use Windscribe. I initially used it because the free version which gives you 10GB per month was enough for me. Then there was a deal on a lifetime subscription ages ago that I got for like $15.
If anyone wants a year subscription to Speedify VPN, DM me and I’ll get you a key I got in a Humble Bundle years ago that I never used.
It’s just that it’s a random company. And they have a free tier which is a red flag. Use well-known reputable businesses when your privacy really matters
They are no more or less reputable than more well known providers. Which providers are you comparing it to? Please provide some sort of source for what you are saying.
It’s probably not a honeypot, but if I was the president of Warner Bros or Disney, I sure would want to set up a website that gathered IP addresses of people that probably download pirated media, or better yet, confirm that they did indeed download my product.
It can show things that you’ve never downloaded if your ISP assigns a dynamic or shared IP. So it means some of your neighbors are into that kind of thing.
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