Piracy is bad, mmkay? And while you think you may be covering your tracks, a new Russian website called YouHaveDownloaded.com shows just how easy it is for the litigation-hungry lawyers of entertainment companies to track what, where and when you download their content.
Visitors to the website will immediately be given a quick summary of the stuff they have downloaded over bittorrent recently. Mostly. The problem with the service is that it doesn’t factor in dynamic IP addresses, so if you’ve restarted your router since pirating the complete works of Metallica in memory of Napster, chances are the page will give you a completely unrelated list of torrented files. For instance, my IP address told me I’d downloaded 2.2GB of Ricky Gervais this month. At least that particular pirate has a good sense of humour…
That said, even though the site itself doesn’t track dynamic IP addresses, that doesn’t make your pirating safe. As one of the founders of the site, Suren Ter explained:
we don’t bother ourselves to separate dynamic IPs. The site is just for show. However we have time-stamps. 3.3.3.3 might be a dynamic IP – however it belonged to a certain person at 12:12am 12/12/2011. Besides DHT allows us to get a user’s machine fingerprint. So even if it’s a dormitory…
Still, it’s fun to check out what your kids/family members are downloading while you’re sleeping…