Torrents, a peer-to-peer file sharing system that almost
everyone is familiar with and uses. There is no denying that you have not used
it yourself. Maybe you shared a legitimate file within a group of people, but
chances are you used a torrent to pirate something off the internet. Maybe you
pirated an overpriced school textbook or maybe some song. Either way we have
all used torrents for whatever reason, I’m not here to judge.
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| Logo for uTorrent. One of the most popular torrent clients. |
In 2012, the University of Birmingham of the United Kingdom
studied the monitoring of BitTorrent clients and found out something
interesting. Through hours and hours of data gathering and tracking of torrent
monitors, the university had found that it took about three hours to capture
your I.P. address. The torrent monitors were most likely owned by the U.S.
government and were looking to find people illegally downloading files.
However, this three hour time only applied to the top one hundred most popular
torrents in the present time and could be significantly faster in less
populated torrents if such torrents were being monitored. A popular torrent
might be something like media files such as TV shows, music albums and such.
The reason for the three hours is because each monitor had to either connect to
a peer or request to be connected which takes time. A popular torrent could
have thousands of peers each disconnecting and reconnecting frequently. Overall
what this means is that the popular torrents are monitored and you if you happen
to use one, you should probably limit your download to three hours.
Interesting statistics about torrenting you presented.I was not aware of this three hour rule in my limited exposure to torrenting. Perhaps you could have elaborated on how torrenting works. The way files are transferred and the seed and leech aspect for those that are not familiar with the concept. Good post.
ReplyDeleteHi Matthew, I like your three hours torrent rule. It is interesting and definitely good to know. Your post effectively illustrates the potential risk of file sharing, and how government invades our privacy. After reading your post, if I choose to download stuff from popular websites like BitTorrent and Torlock, I will definitely limit my download to three hours in case my I.P. address gets captured. A piece of advise is that you do talk about the reason of three hour torrent rule but I think it is better to add more details on why exactly it is three hours only.
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ReplyDeleteThis is something new to me. The three hours rule seems like a good rule to follow. However, in my opinion, I think that a better rule to follow is not to use torrent for pirating any illegal files at all. Currently, there are many services out there that trying to get people out from pirating. Services like Netflix, Hulu and Spotify are some of the services that would help lower the amount of people who is pirating movie, and music.
ReplyDeleteI agree. The safest bet is to not commit any illegal acts at all, but we all know it is never that simple.
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