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Music

The Trouble WIth Stealing Real Shitty Music

If you're using any of the Top 100 torrents, you're probably being monitored.

You’re a fool if you think your torrent downloading behavior can’t be tracked, but with so many people swapping movies and music through BitTorrent et al, it’s not likely that little old you, ye of occasional downloads, would be singled out, right? Wrong, says a new study from Birmingham University in the U.K., which found that people will likely be monitored within hours of downloading popular torrents by at least one of ten or more major monitoring firms.

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The team, led by security research Tom Chothia, ran software that acted like a BitTorrent client for three years and recorded all of the connections made to it. At SecureComm conference in Padua, Italy this week, the team announced that they found huge monitoring operations tracking downloaders that have been up and running for at least the entirety of their research. According to the team’s presentation, monitors were only regularly detected in Top 100 torrents, while monitoring of more obscure material was more spotty.

“Almost everyone that shares popular films and music illegally will be connected to by a monitor and will have their IP address logged,” Chothia told Paul Marks at New Scientist.

Read the rest over at Motherboard.