Since, as i’ve said, there’s been no user civilly sued for using torrent at all, and only one user in total actually gone through court, and that’s goign to a retrial, no-one’s been prosecuted whilst using blocklists, in the US where the majority of these suits hapen.

However, as far as notices go, yes, lots of them. just 2 minutes on peerguardian’s forum got me this link, where someone has had 3, and there are others on there. Don’t bother looking on bluetack’s forum though, you can see them, if they’ve just been posted, but then they seem to mysteriously ‘vanish’ – strange that.

what u say?

marred only on a single point, i disagree with your position on blocklists. yours is a counsel of perfection. there is no anonymity for internet users and it works both ways. it is not a reason to abandon blocklists because the bluetack lists are not perfect, on the contrary, if the major issues are the completeness or accuracy of the lists then let’s work with that and find a solution. knowing the limitations of a system is part of understanding the system

the blocklists perform an important function and they do that well. they make it more difficult, more expensive, to fuk with p2p systems. if you asked the anti-p2p lobby which they would prefer they will answer “a world with no blocklists”

that is where your credentials as a spokesman for p2p are not good. criticism is all good but throwing the baby out of the window with the bath water is nonsense. the enemies of p2p are anti-blocklist

i prefer to block 64% of the internet than permit a single bad ip to access my system

You argue that blocklists slow you down and increase the time you are on the torrent, thus increasing the chance of being logged. You then argue against using private sites later on.
Just in case you are one of those who still believes TPB is faster than private sites, here’s a news flash:
Using TPB can increase the time you are downloading from minutes to days!

Piracy is…well…wrong, and we all know it. But the RIAA, MPAA and their ilk are utterly evil in their actions on this. Basic rights are at stake, and these capitalists-run-amok need to be stopped.

Off the soapbox…

First i wanted to track hits. For this I used peer guardian to create a list of all connections in and out.

The Dns reverse host names that appeared shows that monitoring of torrents has been stepped up greatly.

Ben Jones’s just trying to remove the misconception that bluetack provides safety against anti-P2P. You might be right about the trojans, data-mining, etc but the noobs you don’t want that. They want P2P immunity.

So basically you two agree with each other so no need to throw cups full of STFU at each other.

So here goes.

In the U.S (whose laws the article is based on), entrapment is not only applicable to law enforcement officers (those with powers of arrest).

supreme.justia.com/us/360/423/
3 convictions ruled to breach the 14th amendmant because of entrapment by state officials.

supreme.justia.com/us/356/369/
Conviction reversed because of entrapment by an unpaid informer.

There’s a slight issue with the entrapment part of the article though, so may email you about it.

I get strange names trying to connect sometimes. “south Korea blah blah blah”, just random obtuse sounding shit.

A lot of it sounds fake to me.

Also, ‘Anarchynow’:
“NUKE U$A NOW !”

you can suck my American dick, you douche-drinking asshole.

Look I stated an insult without being a addle-brained fucktard, and without using a blanket statement condoning mass murder on a whole nation, just because I dont like their bullshit politics.

That is a hell of a run-on sentence though. But yeah, go fuck yourself, “anarchynow”. Just you…..not your whole country (which is obviously blessed to have you as a citizen).

Ive been using peergaurdian for a year or so now, and recently I switched browsers over to firefox (from IE). Now when I run peergaurdian, it wont update the lists, it tries and fails.

Is this a firefox thing. Is there a reason I should switch back to IE?

In the ever encroaching big brother surveillance state (at least here in the US), Id imagine folks under surveillance for the sensitive stuff that they look at (or more accurately, outspoken dissidents), would have more to fear from being targeted. If they monitor everything you do, illegal DLs are a good a place as any to start fucking with you, if youve angered ‘the man’.

Its curious that PG wont update now. Anybody else notice this?

any advice is appreciated….

thanks,
RC

Where ever you go peerguardian/bluetack/blocklists are always hot topics of debate, this is an area I am especially interested in as I run the blocklists used in our small WinMX World.
I’ll bite my tongue for the most part on that subject here, because it seems to me that’s taking over from the intention of the article. I will say this about default blue tack lists, I think its important to note that in most cases if you actually investigate the IPs yourself, you’ll soon see that most of them are inaccurately labeled (not all just most). When you see something like “Horrible evil doers 1.xx.xxx.xx”
This is only shows up as Horrible evil doers BLOCKED, because whoever wrote the list named it that. It would not be in their interest to label them things like “Innocent user trying to share on an IP That used to be an evil doer 1.xx.xxx.xx” Further more once a IP address is put on that list it NEVER comes off, as has been pointed out in the article MediaDefender and even more so Macrovision until recently, changed IP ranges and addresses sometimes at exponential rates. Don’t even get me started on how a informational post on the bliss site about inaccurate lists gets your own IP added to the list.

My problem with the above for the new user, is this only gives a false sense of security. As wisely mentioned earlier by a commenter Pg2 with default lists for the newer users offers a sense of security, that’s a bit like saying i have a tin beanie, it makes me feel better, which is fine for those that know its only tinfoil.. lol.

Maybe I didnt bite my tonge hard enough on this one, but I’ll also mention that if I was a name dropper, I could name at least 5 p2p users that recieved letters, 4 of which received those while using pg2 and default lists, and 4 of the 5 where using bittorrent, of those 3/5 where aware enough not to reply.

I think the article was nicely laid out and well written and thank you for it.

Unlike the more recent ones, this one goes a bit further than just scratching the surface but not too deep to drown the person reading it… plus gives average Joe a chance to search for more info on their search engine using the info provided.

One thing that a lot of readers (me included) hate about sites like slashdot is that they have a 2 or 3 lines of of text and then the link to some external site… TF was getting that way with shorter and shorter articles… good to see one that was researched and taken time to write, very nice indeed!

Cheers!

http://www.ezee.se/

(P.S now if only TF would fix the “You are posting comments too quickly. Slow down.” error, it would be FAN-TASSS-TIC…GRRRR)

Nicely done. :)

One of the things prompting the disclaimer, was the recent modshack court case in the UK

NUKE U$A NOW !

6. downloading music is hurting artists.
7. that downloading from torrent sites is stealing, or to say, that you doing a crime.

ok so lets see.

6. how come art sharing on internet can hurt artist when big companies sell more and more cd’s every year? that is a fact. i’ll repeat. They sell MORE AND MORE CD’s every year. so we can argue that its actually benefiting artists when their art is spread to fans all over the world.

7.crime is when someone is selling pirated cd’s and dvd’s on the street. those people are doing crime. when you download something from the net, and share it with others for free, it is not crime. you dont earning money from it. its a new way of living. sharing is caring.

Also toward the regard of the bluetack comments I found those seemingly considerably unaware of the nature of the block lists particularly the example:’The first example I linked you to has the godaddy email server listed as Mediadefender’
The reason that is is due to that fact that many anti-p2p ranges included are not limited to merely one anti-p2p co. or org. However you can produce your list to have the ranges seperate each co. or org. to there own range. Plus with many corp’s affiliated and mergers as such you are going to find that.

I did enjoy the article but really found very little to take from it which could mean as Anonymous#2 stated ‘this article seemed more like a scare tactic produced by the anti-p2p orgs’ which running on much of the logic in much of this article one could even argue whose to say this site doesn’t log for such an agenda, jk but who knows huh…..lol.

What should you do if you DO get sued? I’ve given it some thought and I offer the following as untested, purely idle speculation;

At the time the lawsuit is started, all the content companies have is an IP address, maybe a list of files and possibly a username (hopefully you were smart enough not to use a name that can be linked to you) for the P2P network.

The major evidence will be your hard drive, which a judge will probably order you to turn over to the content industry so that they can have experts examine it with a fine-toothed comb, looking for infringing files, or P2P software, or even an email that talks about file sharing.

If they don’t find anything, well… They’ll still drag you into court and make your life miserable, but at least they won’t have any hard evidence.

You could turn over a new HD, but they’d immediately see that it hadn’t been used for any length of time. So you need to give them your real drive.

Of course, if you just delete the files, they’ll recover them in about 5 seconds. You need to use a file shredder program. Don’t go overboard though, you really don’t need 50 passes, just one is usually enough since they’re not going to take the drive apart, but uese 2-3 if it makes you feel better.

You need to delete; All copyrighted files, all P2P software, all bookmarks/favorites pointing to P2P sites, browser history, cookies, cache and any saved passwords for such sites. Any email talking about P2P or files you’ve downloaded. Any data left behind in the App Dir where programs might have stored their settings. Any downloaded copies of P2P software. The most recently opened file lists in every media player you have, in Windows, in any editing software, etc. Run a registry cleaner, then delete the old registry backups and create new ones, one per day until you have to turn the drive over. Delete any system restore points that might contain evidence of copyrighted material. Use a browser history eraser that can delete those index.dat files that IE insists on creating and which can’t normally be deleted. Turn off virtual memory and delete the swap file, then turn it back on. Search the drive for anything you might have missed. Search it again!

Run a free space shredder to overwrite all the stuff that you deleted. Finally, fill up the free space on the drive with games or other programs. If you can record video from an external source, record a huge video of you and your family acting silly. The point is to fill up the space with legal data so it doesn’t look like you intentionally shredded the free space on the drive, rather it got filled up with various legal files.

You should end up with a drive that looks used, but which contains nothing that can be used against you.

Of course, you should NEVER do any of the above, since that would be destroying evidence which is illegal!

Personally myself i had peer guardian and i was using some good private sites, i had max 50-60kb/s from my 20Mbit connection.

I removed peer guardian, now i get full speed.

peer guardian is blocking lots of good IPs and servers which are giving high speed.

Just uninstall it and use private trackers.

Mr.Ben Jones, please don’t encourage people to use PGs, it really sucks.

It increases your chance “by exclusion”.
Ben had it explained in his own blogpost quite some time ago.

“[...] Thankfully, blocklists to the rescue!. The easiest method is use the blocklists themselves to identify the heavy users. Its very simple and uses two groups of systems (doesn’t have to be a group, can be just one system in each). One group uses IPs on the blocklist, the other doesn’t. Collect peer data from both, and after a while, compare lists. the major differences will be the blocklist computers will be on only one list. Voila, IP addresses obtained. Your ‘protection’ has been turned into identification.[...]”

http://neuron2neuron.blogspot.com/2006/05/blocklist-balderdash.html

HTH

Smart companies will find you no matter what, you just can’t hide, and I don’t think what was said is bogus at all.

Only listed ips will be found and if you think it’s helping, you’ve probably have just been lucky in not downloading heavily watched torrents.

There is offcourse no 100 % way to avoid detection on torrent trackers i.e why many ppl I know of have started switching to RS (not that that is 100 % safe, but still a hint safer than torrents)

Plus therz an added advantage if ur living in a 3rd world country where copyrighted stuff doesnt is being sold on the streets let alone talking about net piracy

There is an BT alternative that takes care of that for you, Dargens http://www.Dargens.com . You can send invites to you friends and they can do the same. Then you can share with everyone, friends of friends and so on, everyone while connecting to ONLY FRIENDS.

I did indeed skim that part too quickly :) My mistake.

As for the other part. Most of the time I only know that it is correct based on the likelihood that the particular company has an interest in having been on the torrent in question. In the cases I’m referring to it is their actual corporate network not the hired lapdogs like MD. A few times I have checked whois records (just out of curiosity). In those cases I would consider that adequately confirmed.

Maybe they are just there to help seed. Personally, I’m not willing to give them the benefit of the doubt.

The lists do indeed block many legit peers (and even a couple of torrent trackers/sites that happen to be on the same networks as members of the anti-p2p crowd). As far as security goes the whole IP blocking model is well out of date and could even be said flawed from its inception. But that doesn’t render it entirely useless. Like any tool it has a time and a place.

As a nonsensical hypothetical example. Say you are downloading a bowl of Corn Flakes as a torrent. If Peer Guardian happens to report that it is blocking connections to/from Kellogg’s then it seems reasonable to believe that it is correct.

Many companies still do things in house without resorting to the “professionals” who might actually know what they are doing. In the corporate world many times half-assed is good enough. They just go for the low hanging fruit as it were. Some of them don’t even bother to mask the fact that they are using their own network to do the tracking. Those are the ones blacklists will protect you from.

I could make the example a lot more relevant using an actual media company/torrent name I’ve experienced and not a company that makes cereal. But prefer not to be posting any info that could eventually come back to bite me.

Anyone who thinks blacklists make them immune is of course nuts. But I do think there are times when the benefits still outweigh the costs.

It may be “broken” but often broken is indeed still good enough.

The copyright loby mess-up our laws?

Fine with me. As far as I am concern there is no law then and the music parasites will face the dear consequences of the situation they created.

While much of the generalities in the piece are good, there are two glaring errors I see right off.

1. If you don’t like PG or blocklists, then don’t use them. But kindly have a big cup of STFU when it comes to voicing that ill-informed opinion to noobs who will read that and be dissuaded from using such measures. I don’t give a damn if Bluetack TRIPLED the number of blocks they currently have. I still max out my connection anyway and if a legitimate filesharer can’t connect because they’re using a school or work computer, too bad. Get your own ISP account like everyone else.

PG not only helps while filesharing but also when you’re not. New users will be very surprised at the number and type of bad sites that are blocked for malware/trojan infestation, or various corporate and govermental agencies trying to probe your machine while just doing some regular surfing. If someone is too retarded to learn how to configure it properly then I suppose they wouldn’t like PG. But for those who take responsibility for their own online security and are willing to put in the time to learn how to properly use the tools available, the rewards are great.

2. “The RIAA and the MPAA never get involved in anti-piracy evidence collection directly.”

Bullshit. Time and again they have directly participated in such matters. For instance, it was the MPAA themselves who directly hired and paid a hacker $15K to break into TorrentSpy’s system. Sounds pretty directly involved to me.

“Don’t do the crime if you can’t do the time”

I think the main focus of this article is to make people aware that you’re never truely safe. Sure, taking precautions and other steps can help prevent you being caught but in the end, they can find you if they want and if you’re worried, then don’t do it. Simple as that.

The claim is that the aforementioned recording is illegal, but the industries never pursued it with individuals. Now however in the age of mass digital distribution they have decided to act.

This is BS and denying the law does not make it so. What’s legal for one must be legal for the other, as it’s merely another format. If not then it should be, and at worst it’s only a grey area which the law hasn’t yet fully come to terms with.

Having an agent download something is NOT admissible evidence. For a start they are unreliable and biased witnesses. Mediasentry was banned in one state. They operate outside the law.

“None of what is said is legal advice, nor should it be used as any basis for defense”
-Why not, if it’s a valid argument? Of course discretion is needed. You wouldn’t be giving a speech on why you believe copyright infringement is fine if you were claiming you hadn’t done it.

“We at TorrentFreak would like to remind you that we neither support or condone copyright infringement or theft”
-What th???????

I think the best thing to do nowadays is to only use services you can trust. For me, that means using Azureus only as a BT client, and using only certain trackers. TPB is the only public tracker that can be trusted anymore. As far as I can tell, the TPB crew has our, the users’, privacy as their top priority (next to ad revenue, of course). Only private trackers that are actually private are really trustable… as far as I’m concerned, if you’ve heard of one, you shouldn’t use it. Private trackers used for very exclusive kinds of content by exclusive users would be good, but… not good for the general public, as we can’t find them or use them.

I definitely support the EFF. If pirates were selling bootleg movies online, then hell, I’d probably support the action against them. But no profit is being made here, only entertainment is being traded. And they have the audacity to freaking watch us, and watch exactly what we’re doing with our computers. This is an invasion of my privacy, and I won’t stand for it. The EFF is out there fighting for us on this front, and so many others. Buy a hat or something from them and help them out.