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Are Private BitTorrent Trackers Safe?

torrentfreak.com — There is a statement you'll often see on p2p forums, and in IRC channels. It usually comes in a discussion about “getting caught” or “letters been sent” and it goes something like “the safest thing is to join a private site.

Who dugg this? Made popular Mar 27, 2007

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  • inactive, on 10/12/2007, -9/+109It would be nice if people kept their mouth shut about the good sites...
  • NoOneButMe, on 10/12/2007, -0/+62Well mentioning it publicly is a _brilliant_ idea in terms of safety..
  • JermWerty, on 10/12/2007, -6/+40I use all public trackers.

    But I use my favorite ISP - named 'linksys' - has pretty good national coverage :)

    Seriously: get a 24dBi grid dish, a 500mW wireless lan amplifier, and go to town! I pick up over 30 networks from my computer room. I plan to move the dish to the roof and hope to get about 50% more networks :) Too much WEP in your area? Don't worry, its easy to break!

    Now if only most of these idiots would have something faster than a Verizon 768/128 line it would be nice.
  • rstarr, on 10/12/2007, -0/+32All I know is that librarians are hiding something....
  • Afreyt, on 10/12/2007, -0/+30If its easy for you to join, its easy for paid RIAA/MPAA drones to join. So thats how safe it is.
  • Navitron, on 10/12/2007, -7/+35I do my downloading in this order…
    Newsgroups -> IRC and Forums (via Rapidshare, Megaupload, FTP ect) -> Private Trackers -> Public Trackers -> ed2k
  • AeroSquid, on 10/12/2007, -1/+25it really helps private sites stay below the radar being on the front page of Digg

    /sigh
  • spyrochaete, on 10/12/2007, -2/+22That's a fantastic idea, actually. Check out The Politics of Ecstasy by Timothy Leary for information about how to legally declare your own religion.

    On on the 8th day, God said "Let there be 0 day warez. And there were 0 day warez. And it was good."
  • Wandel, on 10/12/2007, -2/+18If you think private sites are safe, you're just being naive.
  • rzrshrp, on 10/12/2007, -1/+15So are you proposing a new religion?
  • acceptab1euname, on 10/12/2007, -0/+131st rule of USENet, please.
  • hukedonfonix, on 10/12/2007, -1/+12Not to mention the genius that submitted this to digg of all places.
  • gossipninja, on 10/12/2007, -2/+13Im curious, what if the site operator was a priest, and all those who join the torrent site were parishoners. I ask because communications between priest and his followers is legally secure. Just have the servers run under his user ID and then its a communication.
    This probably wont work but I dont know the confidentiality laws regarding this.
  • PaulC, on 10/12/2007, -0/+11...so then I guess there weren't very many a's f'd.
  • FreddieD, on 10/12/2007, -0/+10The chances of someone's Digg comments being usable in court are about the same as any pirates being motivated to change their ways by your rant.
  • PureGamer, on 10/12/2007, -1/+9I thought I was pretty safe when I was on elitetorrents, but when it got shut down I got f'ed in the a.
  • crossmr, on 10/12/2007, -0/+8It depends on how private they are. IF they allow unsolicited registration at all, they're not safe. However if they're truly private where you have to be invited, recommended, etc they're much safer because its hard for a snitch to weasel their way into that.
  • neutrascrub, on 10/12/2007, -1/+9i have a bad *Feeling* about this
  • darkamster07, on 10/12/2007, -0/+7if you are starting you're own religion of torrenting, I'm in.
  • MrFatalistic, on 10/12/2007, -0/+7uh..what's an assclown like you doing on digg anyhow?
  • leftfield, on 10/12/2007, -2/+9I tried the free run around about 3 months ago when I went from cox to ATT(which has ***** nntp), it's worth it to drop $20 at a good server if you get a lot of files and dont have much free time.
  • tokyomonster, on 10/12/2007, -1/+8It's obvious what happened: PITA federal prision.
  • dbr_onix, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6"A lot of the good private trackers are invitation only, so they are not easy to join"
    That's not the point - If you (some random person) *can* join a private tracker, whats to stop you being a member of an anti-piracy organization, using a standard residential connection?
    Private sites are safer than public trackers, but as the article states - If you have to login, and generally supply an email address, it's far easier to verify who was using the account. A public tracker where you can grab the torrent (Conceivably though any amount of anonymization) while supplying no personal details (Username/nickname/password/email address), or trying your account to a specific IP address/range or email could very well be safer than a private tracker.
    If your a member of a single private tracker (Which you upload lots too) who's server gets seized, it'd be far worse news for you than if a public tracker you occasionally use gets seized.

    Actually, I'd go so far as to say unless you use an *extremely* paranoid private tracker, most people would be safer using a bunch of public trackers - Your upload amounts will be lower per-tracker, the amount you download will be lower per-tracker, and all your torrent'ing wouldn't be logged on a single server, so your less likely to be flagged as "someone we should sue".
  • gharding, on 10/12/2007, -7/+13Yeah, because nobody knows about scenetorrents. Just because sites are private, doesn't mean people don't know about them.
  • xtmno3, on 10/12/2007, -2/+8I see what you did there.
  • meshman, on 10/12/2007, -2/+7"Is there a free way to access and download from Newsgroups?"

    Not really. Most ISP's that do carry them either don't carry binaries, have horrible retention/completion or have limits. There's a few $15/mth unlimited providers out there that have been everything I need.
  • TEIK, on 10/12/2007, -5/+10***** torrentfreak, worst site ever. all they do is post stuff which is meant to be private on the front page of their damn site and post it to digg and all the other news engines, even though this is 100% against the wishes of the operators that run the sites. They claim to try and help the torrent community, but at the moment all they do is make it a bigger target, and grab themselves a quick buck while they are at it.
  • stipes, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5@sirwhilms: Comcast has a 2GB per month cap on USENET traffic -- he wasn't talking about all internet traffic.
  • heavensblade23, on 10/12/2007, -5/+10http://duggmirror.com
  • Afreyt, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5So they're going to subpoena digg, to get my IP address and an anonymous email account name, track me through my IP to my rotary DSL, subpoena my ISP to pull the logs, figure out who had that IP address at that time, get my name and address, initiate legal proceedings against me for unknown damages, just because I said I know a little something about piracy.

    Are you daft? Pardon me. Are you ***** daft?
  • zouhair, on 10/12/2007, -3/+7Hey guys the World is not limited to the USA, so they can harvest as much info as they want, i'll buy some hardrive's manufacturers stock options, 'cause those RIAA/MPAA ***** must use a lot of HDs lately
  • Reese268, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4Nothing happened to the general users of Elitetorrents... there were charges pressed against 7 or 8 of it's staff members (I can't remember an exact #) and that was it.
  • Afreyt, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Additionally, if you provide personal information to join a private tracker, all the RIAA has to do is subpoena the owner of the tracker and get a list of everyone who ever used it. So you don't even get to rely on the fact that tracker logs are occasionally purged; they immediately have documentary evidence against you personally that you were engaged in piracy; the only question is how much.
  • inactive, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3Yes. You're the first peer, and the second is your news server.
    Check this out for more info on Usenet (newsgroup, nntp, whatever)
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet
  • PaulC, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3What happened to you?
  • ChicksWithDiggs, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Invite only makes things a bit more safe but, but the bigger and more general things get, the sooner the RIAA arrives which more or less recent events of torrent site and top user busts showed.
  • inactive, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3use a private vpn such as secureix.com in combination with peerguardian 2 and you will be far ahead of the rest of people out there downloading on public trackers.
  • rstarr, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2I'm not emulating, I'm imitating.
    And I'm also using these quote for a documentary called 'Moving On.Up' so watch it Viacom or I will sue.
  • Phil246, on 10/12/2007, -2/+3No, they arent that much safer really. All the 'copyright-police/nazis' need to do is register on them themselves and they can harvest data the same way as they do on public trackers.
  • DrewBlood, on 10/12/2007, -2/+3Grabit slowed my core2duo to a crawl and spent a ton of time on decoding that I've never seen in another NNTP app. I switched to NZB-O-Matic+ which is extremely simple (probably too much so if you're doing more than .NZBs) and I've been perfectly happy.
  • daskro, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1These kinds of private torrent sites are safer than their public counterparts from civil suits which is what impacts torrent users the most. semi-private torrent sites like scr, tl, oink, doid, btv, btm, ct, x264 are safer in that content specific civil lawsuits typically don't target private sites. You don't see the RIAA/MPAA going after joe user with a civil suit in the scene (or any lesser p2p equivalent), you see a criminal suit by the FBI at the behest of the MPAA. Likewise you don't see criminal charges pressed on casual torrent users because the quantity and value of distributed content is neither worth the resources or manpower. Absent of transferring multiple terabytes of data a month, you shouldn't be worried about criminal charges due to your torrent activity. More on the topic, the safest in the torrent world are truly "private" torrent sites that are so select and secretive that it is neither known to anyone outside of its community nor can be found through any search engines.
  • BeardedTacoFish, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Well written with some good info.
  • kiddsickuras, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2Someone has his panties in an uproar.
  • FogDogg, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I'll keep uploading like the whore I am :).
  • TRUEPATRIOT, on 10/12/2007, -3/+4i know for a FACT that collateral on torrentbox tracker is being watched lol. got my warning from comcast
    and i have downloaded ALOT of stuff from sites but torrentbox was one i got letter from.
  • Vazel, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1"semi-private" I take it you mean Demonoid. That site isn't private just because it has registration, anyone can join their torrents as you don't need personal passkeys to ride on their network.
  • illt, on 10/12/2007, -2/+3all you need for using usenet:

    giganews+newsleecher(free) deal package.
    expensive, but it takes the guess work out of loading headers, browsing for nzbs etc.
  • DrDabbles, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2@sirwhilms

    Uh, he means NEWSGROUP limits him to 2gb. In the event you haven't caught the reference by now, NNTP = NEWSGROUP. Welcome to last century.
  • beeboy, on 10/12/2007, -2/+2I don't give a ***** if the private ones are "safer" as the chances of getting caught are minimal.
    The best things about them is the speed of release (seconds after pre) and the speed of downloading due to well seeded files. I can often max out my 8 meg line and have a full DVD an hour and a half after it appears on "the scene". ahem.
  • garf12, on 10/12/2007, -3/+3I'd recommend grabit for newgroup downloading. Its free and works great for me. Also for like 4-5$ a month you get unlimited access to the search database.
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