MovieX Leeches From The BitTorrent Community
Written by Ernesto on December 01, 2007The private BitTorrent tracker Moviex has been setup and configured to leech from public BitTorrent users. Through some clever modifications, their tracker allows non-members to seed to the private tracker, while downloading is forbidden.
Private BitTorrent trackers are supposed to be private and for registered members only. A non-member that downloads a torrent from a private tracker will usually get a tracker connection failure in their BitTorrent client. They will not be able to download or upload any data from that torrent, rendering the torrent useless to them. This is the basis that most private trackers work upon, but not Moviex.
Lately, several people have noticed a sudden rise in torrent files being uploaded to public indexing sites like Newtorrents, Mininova, and The Pirate Bay. These uploaded torrent files contain two announce URLs, one from The Pirate Bay and a moviex.info URL that always has the same passkey present, presumably the passkey for an anonymous user.
http://www.moviex.info:2710/...3c73mdqxj31q/announce
http://vip.tracker.thepiratebay.org/announce
To see a pirate bay tracker URL present in a torrent file is nothing out of the ordinary. So what’s special about the moviex.info URL being present in public torrents? Well, the message you get when trying to connect to the moviex.info tracker if you are not a member might give you a hint.
“Failure: access denied, leeching forbidden, you’re only allowed to seed”
Normally you would get something like: “Failure: unregistered torrent pass.” However, moviex.info allows non-members to seed files, while they are not allowed to download. This is a huge bonus for MovieX and its members. Currently, newtorrents.info provides 1000’s of downloads per day to torrent users and reportedly 50% of the available torrents on that site have the moviex.info tracker URL present, the actual percentage may even be be higher.
It is not unusual for private trackers to upload files to public sites. Most of the time this is done to advertise the tracker, so their community grows. However, we don’t see torrents like this very often, I’m not sure if they do this on purpose, but they are definitely leeching bandwidth from people who only use the public tracker. It’s a pretty nice system if you want your private tracker to gain external seeds along with faster download speeds for your members, It’s however also a very damaging method for any user who is not a member of MovieX.info as they will continually upload pieces of the torrent to users who will give very little if anything at all back.
To see exactly what this tracker configuration does and how it works watch the video below. The video shows two clear examples, one of a non seeded file and one of a seeded file using these rogue torrents, obviously for legal reasons we have renamed the torrents that I used for this demonstration (HQ download).
There is a way to prevent the leeching. If you download a torrent file from a public tracker check the tracker URL’s and remove the moviex.info announce URL if it is present. This will stop you seeding the file on that tracker and in turn not allow members of moviex.info to leech data from you. You could also try blocking their IP Address (206.53.62.206) in your IP filter if you are not a member of the MovieX community.
MovieX have taken the time to code this feature into their tracker and at the moment as far as we can tell they are the only private site exploiting this type of dirty hack to leech from external BitTorrent users. What moviex.info should do is configure their tracker not to allow external users without a passkey to connect to their tracker in any way, instead it would seem they have deliberately setup to leech as much data from the public BitTorrent community as possible and boost their own private community speeds. MovieX deny this is the case and claim these torrents to be no more than simple advertising for the site in an attempt to attract new members?
Update: MovieX is now blocked by PeerGuardian, a simple solution is to download and install the application.
Previously: What.cd To Launch New BitTorrent Tracker Script
Next: uTorrent WebUI For The iPhone
355 Responses
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Easy to solve. Become a member of moviex.
Moviex sucks. I noticed this long time ago but didnt know who to tell about this.
Anyway, if you want to get/give/trade invites for some better trackers, check this site:
http://tracker-invites.org/index.php?referredby=1767
yeah, be a member of moviex and seed you bitchy ass. All I see is greedy seeders on the Pirate GAY tracker.
multitracker torrents sux for many reasons and this is the least
say a torrent has 10 good safe ipfiltered trackers and 1 bad anti-p2p tracker … the multitracker torrent has pissed in eveyone’s soup
solution is ban multitracker torrents, who needs them?
A novel idea. And yet another reason not to use public trackers..
Please add MovieX.org to the PG2 block list if MovieX.org is not going to play fair.
[quote comment="228181"]Easy to solve. Become a member of moviex.[/quote]
You’re a sheep.
Thats lame, I’ll check all my torrents immidiately
Baaaah
This goes against the princip of filesharing and P2P… Sure, it’s a nice function but hey, they steal bandwidth from you while you get nothing back.
I’m annoyed at this post. All you need to do is become a member. Woo?
[quote] multitracker torrents sux for many reasons and this is the least
say a torrent has 10 good safe ipfiltered trackers and 1 bad anti-p2p tracker … the multitracker torrent has pissed in eveyone’s soup
solution is ban multitracker torrents, who needs them?
[/quote]
That was very stupid of you to say…
Multi-tracker torrents are EXTREMELY useful. What happens if you release a torrent and only use one tracker, and that tracker goes down like so many do? Did you ever think of that before spouting off your arrogant little mouth about things you don’t understand?
These guys steal their files from private trackers in the first place. Then they upload the torrents to public trackers to steal YOUR bandwith.
And guess what ? THEY MAKE MONEY FROM IT TOO
Yep, BUSTED! I always check for dual announce url’s. I know of a few more who do this too but Im gonna be snobby , much like the rest of YOU and keep it to myself.
Banned!
Pretty damn sickening if you ask me.
I personally think that single tracker torrents are the way to go for obvious reasons. Only problem though, is if the tracker gets shutdown, then the content is spread amongst some people that can’t seed because the tracker is gone.
But, this is easily overcome by uploading the torrent somewhere else :)
Hah, if this is true that’s really smart of them. Sure, it’s a low down dirty trick, but you gotta admit it’s smart.
I think utorrent (which probably won’t do this now because of their affiliations) should add a multitracker “ok?” list, so if you download a torrent it would give you a list of the multitrackers and you could uncheck ones and list certain trackers as ‘ok’, so that if you see http://www.tracker-invites.org/announce is in there (how the hell is that not the best mpaa scam yet since their agents traded demonoid accounts on slyck?) you can remove it.
You could ban the IP of the tracker or remove the address from the torrent files, but much better to simply use a local proxy script to add “&left=0″ to any announce string heading to moviex.
It would destroy their leech prevention, mess up their stat tracking completely when a few thousand people are leeching from one account and teach them a lesson about mixing swarms.
Maybe TPB could even do an announce to moviex every 30 minutes as a fake seeder and put all the returned peers into their own tracker.
this really sucks and has been going on a long time and not just moviex
you can remove trackers in utorrent just right click the torrent click properties then erase or add what trackers you want
[quote]I personally think that single tracker torrents are the way to go for obvious reasons. Only problem though, is if the tracker gets shutdown, then the content is spread amongst some people that can’t seed because the tracker is gone.
[/quote]
Obvious reasons?
Multi-tracker torrents are far superior.
LOL just lol we all know this is just plain ingenious sadly its working against most i applaud them for the idea but as it does rip off the unsuspecting user do pleas piss off moviex :)
anything that keeps me away from the mpaa /riaa iam for. you get a thumbs up from me movieX
sounds pretty low of em. no honor among thieves i guess, right? lol.
I myself have been monitoring this entire issue from both perspectives. The fact of the matter is that every site needs a method of advertisement, MovieX is not the first to ‘plant’ torrents at public sites…the only difference here is that instead of forcing registration to access a torrent we allow the average public tracker user to download. These torrents are 100% uploaded and maintained by an account held by a MovieX entity…how do you think anyone completes the file in the first place? There is seeding constantly going on to ensure the health of the public torrents…the least that could be done is show a bit of appreciation that the site is sharing it’s great content publicly and making itself known. Furthermore, the torrent that is placed externally is one that is inert inside…there are official versions of each publicly placed torrent inside…each new user tosses away the old and the new is loaded…when this happens it stops anyone from outside from transferring to that peer. Any seeding that occurs between those with the ‘planted’ torrents is just that…seeding between the people who have the planted torrent…and nothing more. There are no seeds from external sources inside, all are accounted for in statistics, having external seeders would compromise security - and that is something wished to be preserved at such a great community.
The most these accusations will do - as bball has already followed through with - is increase the userbase at MovieX, and nothing more…
moviex must have slow download speeds to leech from a public tracker.prettay, prettay slow.
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