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
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355 Responses
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It seems like all the retards on MovieX were told to go here and spam this article on torrentfreak..
What? No honour among thieves?
I’m a big fan of Internet Rights.
First of all, there is the fact that the MPAA and RIAA are trying to keep their dying oligopoly on top by refusing to adopt new technology, which is the entire foundation of capitalism. Improvisation leads to Profits, and they are quite frankly completely stifling any technology, for fear of losing gigantic profit margins. P2P is the only way until we have a nice compromise between consumers and firms.
However, I will under no circumstances back a site like MovieX. You see, MovieX is quite like the Asian street sellers who sell bootlegged movies, for profit. Of course they tell you, they have to pay the cost of the video tape and the camera and the risk, but all in all, that does not justify the 12 dollars you just spent. Just like donating 6 dollars monthly is ridiculous. I am not a person to make ludicrous accusations, but I have heard AGAIN and AGAIN and AGAIN how you get banned from MovieX if you do not donate, DESPITE you keeping the share ration up.
Now I will move on to how MovieX is the bane of the BT community. Implying that a keystone of BT websites like PB would be mush without MoviesX is delusional. TBP was fine before MovieX, and will be fine when we all block all of their trackers, ON ALL TORRENTS THEY LEECH.
Saying that a public tracker is filled with hit and runners is laughable. If that were the case, you wouldn’t have sites dedicated to BT where users come to congregate and discuss a much loved technology. A technology that is loved by most for its ease of use and lack of greedy mongrels.
Rama you will try to deflect all attacks on the financial situation of your site, but it is impossible to hide that out of 230,000 members, hundreds, if not thousands, donate to a technology you did not create, donate for you to abuse other sites for them, donate to line your fat-cat pockets.
You can throw around the words stupid and dumb, but who here spells like a 11 year old Taiwanese girl? Yeah, you.
Seeing as I’m an economics major, I’m intrigued, how similar would your profit pie be compared to the profit pie of nations that impose tariffs on imported items? I’m guessing excruciatingly alike.
In conclusion I’ve never signed up for MoviesX, because I have enough friends, about 4 who have told me how they got banned even with seed ratios over 1:1. Go fuck yourself, you’re getting in the way of our fight for Internet Rights.
Very, very well said Bluffer Fish.
+1
Ernesto,
You have a fundamental misunderstanding of how the bittorrent protocol works. Your client either receives a peer list or it does not. If it does not receive a peer list, then you will not upload anything to their members, either. It’s impossible. If you do receive a peer list, you will upload AND download from their members. The tracker cannot control whether peers upload or download to each other.
The most they could possibly do is only give you IPs of peers who are not currently seeds, but still downloading; That may be what the slyck.com response is referring to, but he doesn’t really make that clear. In any event, you will be downloading pieces from those peers as they receive them, and they will eventually become seeds themselves.
I would describe that as a badly worded error message, but there is no way that it can be described as bandwidth theft.
I’ve never heard of MoviesX, but I think you owe them an apology, because judging by these comments, you’ve got your readers believing that MovieX is “cheating” somehow, when the fact is you are just uninformed.
–p2p
–cheggit admin
[quote]127.0.0.1 http://www.moviex.info/quoteAdded to the HOSTS file and you won’t have to delete the tracker URL anymore. Your client won’t even try to contact them.
Well, I will have to say that even I don’t like what moviex is doing. And to the other’s who are commenting that moviex are giving, not taking, just because they posted the torrents on the pirate bay, I will have to say that you all are damn phools. Your brains can’t think properly can they? Or maybe you didn’t notice that sometimes moviex just reposts already available torrents with their own trackers.
And by the way, if moviex wouldn’t have posted those torrents then someone else would have, just to get the popularity. LOL!
So yes, moviex is leeching from the public(especially the newbies who aren’t aware of the moviex tracker being present) and not giving anything in return. If they don’t allow unregistered users to leech, then they shouldn’t allow them to seed either.
WTF you have to keep a .8 Ratio or get banned, every private torrent site I belong to the minimum ratio is .4 so why does moviex double the minimum ratio? oh wait so more people will donate, Oh I see what you did there…
LOL @p2p
How can you “download” from the peers when you download is already complete? In case you haven’t noticed, the tracker only starts working once your download is complete. You should have watched that video before commenting. LOL!
been seeing this last couple of months and have been maually removing since the leeching is forbidden message first popped up
cheggit admin,
Your an idiot. Thats exactly what these trackers do and have for months. I love self-proclaimed know-it-alls.
You jack-ass.
Maybe try something before waving our idiot flag.
This a programmed trackers, to allow ONLY those with MovieX membership to leach from EVERYONE in the swarm.
Learn something you toolbag moron, FFS.
If the tracker is truly only giving out a peer list to seeds, then I withdraw what I wrote. That is not fair behavior.
What? No honour among thieves?
Too many people here are reinforcing the idea that P2P users are all just using the system(s) for piracy.
Torrents, in particular, have great potential for the future of independent artists and software developers.
The internet in general, and P2P in particular, are a (relatively) cheap avenue of publicity and distribution — previously things that an entity other than the artist(s) controlled.
Torrents rock in that the users are mainly supplying the bandwidth. If, and this seems likely, my next project uses torrents for distribution, I don’t have to pay for the server and bandwidth costs of direct downloads.
IMO, piracy is the infancy of P2P. It’s got plenty of rational, legitimate uses, and perpetuating the myth that we only want to “steal” media doesn’t serve to help the long-term outlook of this advance in technology.
Stealing music or film is subversive. Creating media completely independent of the “system” is far more so.
I’d like to say ummm no. MovieX being a private tracker obviously tracks it’s members share ratios. It does that by using the passkey method, which a lot of private trackers do/use. Each member is assigned their own unique passkey when they sign up to the tracker so that the tracker can identify each of it’s members when they seed/leech. When a member of movieX downloads a torrent from the movieX site the announce url will contain their unique passkey. So anything seeded/leeched through that exact torrent file will be considered as coming from that one user.
MovieX also has a system to stop it’s members from just leeching everything. If their share ratio gets to low, the tracker tries to dissallow the client from downloading anymore and only allows it to seed, although this is not 100% perfect, eventually the bittorrent client will still find other users that have something it can grab. When the share ratio of that member eventually goes back up to an acceptable rate the tracker allows that member to download again
The problem that is being complained about is actually that a member of moviex is uploading a torrent to MovieX, then grabbing that torrent from moviex (with their unique member passkey in the announce url), then adding tpb tracker and distributing the torrent elsewhere.
So when the bittorrent community use this torrent with the 2 trackers, the users that start off using the moviex tracker WILL be able to leech until the share ratio of whatever user the announce url belongs too, drops so low that the tracker then bans it from leeching. Many people will just let it keep seeding until it starts downloading again, and the people that keep seeding after the torrent is complete is exactly what the original moviex member wants, as this ends up boosting his/her share ratio on moviex
oh and i’m a member of moviex so don’t go telling me i’m wrong. I in fact personally hate the people that do that to up their share ratio/download/upload stats on moviex. Even though I’m a member of moviex, if I find torrents like that I remove the announce url so that they can’t benefit off my seeding/leeching
Im not prepared to offer my personal opinions on why I will be staying at MovieX other then the evidence given in this blog and from what pcbraniac has stated, its clear to me that TPB who are arguably the most popular public tracker known, actually know about this and I think a statement from them would be appreciated.
It amazes me how something can be blown-out of all proportions from a single article that was written without actually finding all the evidence, the author of the article didn’t even ask MovieX for a statement,
Also if MovieX was only interested in getting faster speeds for its own members, why have they not targeted other not-well-known public trackers, if this was a scheme to target faster bandwidth then surely going to the smaller trackers would be more beneficial then going to TPB if this was a under-cut method.
oh and incase you people didn’t know, moviex is open registration. you can go their right now and register. You can then get the original torrent of whatever it is and start seeding/leeching with your own reliable passkey
[quote comment="228904"]ALL OF MY COMMENTS[/quote]
Wow dude, you so lost, its quite funny. Might want to read around a bit mate, including the article at the top of page. LOL
EVERYBODY FREEZE! PUT YOUR HANDS IN THE AIR!
stfu, join the site, and quit bitching about a site that has better download speeds then tpb, I’ve never read a more whiny bitchy moan-y article than this one.
register at the the site, its fucking open. Ernesto needs to quit whining, and realize that community that he preaches about ALREADY STEALS from an even better community known as the scene, you retard.
Kiss my ass, Erenesto, I’ve been a moviex user for a long time. And it pisses me off to see a bitchy article putting down a system that actually works.
Get tpb dicks out of your ass and see tpb system is old broken and slow as hell.
Ernesto: My Torrents are slow!! BAAAAWWWWWWWWWWWWWW!!!
MovieX sucks more dick then its #1 fanboi in the comment above.
You do realize you sound of idiot I suppose? If not, let me tell you,
You suck and your sites sucks. Money hungry cocksucking whore of a fanboi site.
A REMINDER: to stay a gay movieX fanboi, eventually you must pay!
“”Subscription Packages”” SOLD PER MOVIEX
1 Month Access ( $6.00 )
3 Months Access ( $12.00, Save $6 )
5 Months Access ( $15.00, Save $15 )
7 Months Access ( $25.00, Save $17 )
9 Months Access ( $35.00, Save $19 )
12 Months Access ( $42.00, Save $30 )
24 Months Access ( $60.00, Save $84 )
good day.
Stupid basters
MovieX is leech free and does not cost me a penny. Not to mention that the scene releases comes there fast and the download speed is incredible. Who say different is just because they have been banned from MovieX (and other sites probably) for not seeding back what they have leeched, as simple as that!
Public trackers are for noobs who seed like morons for “smart” hit and runners. Go to a private tracker (movie-X or other) and never look back.
ok i’ve read a lot of pages on Torrent Freak and it is very reliable… @lol clearly this is another pey2leech tracker… ppl like this gotta learn that if they get it for free atleast have the decency to share it for free… alot of ppl say that big sites are pay2leech but they don’t go out and do this subscription package thing… so i’d rather donate to any big tracker that can be thought to be a p2l because of their income caused byy there large DB than actually paying to leech which is the example here… I haven’t even joined yet and don’t plan to… I have been a user at scam sites and left as soon as I’ve found out.. This place though sounds like the biggest scam there is… I say stay away… Thank you Ernesto for keeping the community informed :)…
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