Got a letter

just a heads up, it seems the networks are watching some of the uploads here, i
got tagged on one:
title: law & order (tv)
infringement source: bittorrent
initial infringement timestamp: 7 feb 2008 07:08:48 gmt
recent infringement timestamp: 7 feb 2008 07:08:48 gmt
infringing filename: law.and.order.s18e07.proper.hdtv.xvid-2hd.avi
infringing file size: 367437824
infringers ip address:

what country are you in?

one would expect the usa. who else would give a shit about law and order.
canada doesn't do a thing about torrenting, and england probably wouldn't care
about it either.

i'm in canada. telus forwards the complaints, but they're worded pretty
nonchalant. they're just like "uh check for viruses and stuff"
i don't use peer guardian, but i haven't gotten a letter in like 3 years, since
i got stung on that dead like me season 2 leak of like 5 episodes.

i know some people swear by pg, and i use it as well, but to be honest, it
doesn't really provide that much protection. it only prevents those on the most
current lists from connecting to you or getting a connection from you.

anyone who connects to the tracker will know your ip is somehow in the pool,
whether they can connect to you or not.

secondly, the mpaa or whoever, are only blocked by you if whatever ip address
they are using is in one of the current lists. they can use any ip address to
check who is downloading.

the safest (and probably still not foolproof) is to use some sort of ip address
anonymiser, basically a router which acts as an intermediary between your ip
address and the rest of the world. i don't use anything like that myself, but i
believe tor and similar do this kind of service.

however, i remember a few years back that those running the tor type networks
didn't want it overloaded with people downloading stuff, because the number of
connections and data flowing through torrents would put a huge load on their
system. i think the intention of the tor network was to provide a system where
people could freely share/pass around information without fear of political
persecution.

anyway, things may have changed by now, someone can correct me if i'm wrong.

all pretty much correct.

pg isn't some sort of `magic bullet` - all it can do is reduce your risk
somewhat - it can't take it to zero however.

an anonymous proxy is really the only way you can truly put a firebreak
between any interested legal parties and yourself, and that also has it's
problems. there's no getting away from the fact that bandwidth costs money and
bittorent, by it's very nature, is very bandwidth intensive. the
infrastructure and throughput needs to be paid for by someone.
the free/public anonymisers tend to have very limited capacity - certainly not
enough to cope with a flood of p2p traffic.

i don't know if its relevant but it certainly used to be the case that many
broadband services don't offer you a static ip address, which was a problem
for business users that needed one. it maybe that the reason some people seem
immune is because their ip address keeps changing so they can't be backtracked.

not terribly relevant, i expect.
pretty much any isp keeps a record of who had which dynamic ip and when.

it depends if they can be bothered (or coerced) into going to look it up and
pass on the cease&desist notice to the customer in question.

despite piping the tracker traffic through the tor network, you still end up
announcing your own ip to a potential uploader/downloader right?

i guess its better than not doing anything at all.