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A years-long investigation just unmasked a major torrent pirate, the how remains unclear (www.techspot.com)
submitted 2 months ago by to c/piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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Kyoto Prefectural Police have arrested a man accused of uploading copyrighted TV programs to the torrent site Nyaa, following an investigation that began several years ago.

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[–] 59 points 2 months ago (13 children)

Trackers can show which users are active in a torrent at a given time. They may indicate whether a user has a complete copy of a file or is still downloading it. If investigators followed newly posted torrents over a long period, they may have been able to identify an IP address that repeatedly appeared as the first source with a complete copy.

That's some dedication

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  • [–] 73 points 2 months ago (3 children)

    That’s some dedication

    I mean, what you call dedication sounds like an auto scraper vacuuming IP's with time stamps and correlating it with torrent go-live dates after looking at a spreadsheet for a couple hours.

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  • [–] 21 points 2 months ago (1 child)

    Yeah, that's what it would be. I am old have visions of people poring over the data manually :)

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  • [–] 2 points 2 months ago

    Now we just pipe the data through tools that can summarize it and give it to a llm. No sane person is staring at logs. Even when we did, we would grep, sed and awk the fuck out of it so it wasn't so miserable.

    Those were the bad old days. Do not miss fighting with a command line because you didn't get the syntax perfectly right and have to mess around only to find out it was a permission issue.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 months ago

    that's way beyond Jgovt technical skills. they're at "eye pee add.... less? what's that? is it tasty?" level.

    took them until last year ish to upgrade from 3.5" floppy disks.... they weren't using them cuz of retro trends like zoomers, either. they used them **UN**ironically!

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  • [–] 5 points 2 months ago (6 children)

    I wonder if they're using any of the *arrs to do this since its a faster response time to get into the peerlist as quick as possible before anyone can complete the initial download.

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  • [–] 6 points 2 months ago* (2 children)

    I doubt it. It's likely custom code that's better suited to the task.

    The *arrs watch RSS feeds to find new torrents. It wouldn't be difficult to write a script that pulls the RSS feed and polls the tracker to collect data on the initial seeds/peers. They might use an actual torrent client for some of the data collection, since I'd guess they have to prove the person is actually uploading, rather than just being connected but not actually uploading or downloading.

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  • [–] 4 points 2 months ago (1 child)

    Sounds to me like they just own one of these trackers. Just like the NSA controls nodes on the tor network.

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  • [–] 6 points 2 months ago*

    I think that'd make sense. The trackers for public torrents are often at seemingly random domain names and nobody really pays much attention to who runs them.

    The US military created Tor, so I don't doubt the US government still runs a lot of the nodes.

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