I Know What You Download on BitTorrent - <AUTHOR> http://iknowwhatyoudownload.com <comment><USER2> An intern once thought it was a good idea to torrent a couple of Game of Thrones episodes using my startup's Digital Ocean box.

We found out after Digital Ocean forwarded us an email from HBO (who presumably tracked Digital Ocean down via the IP) that we were engaging in piracy. We sent an email to everyone with access, saying whoever was doing it to stop. Then we got a second email (a final warning).

Everyone denied doing it, so I had to find the offender via checking the bash history of the box for all users.

Sure enough a couple of mkv files had been downloaded and deleted by an intern :( Making the mistake of downloading it was forgiveable once, since we lived in a culture where piracy was rampant / normal (this was before Netflix et al were available in my country). But repeating the offense, failing to come clean and making us waste our time to locate who did it was not. (This was a small 7 person startup so trust was super important).

As for why the intern needed to ssh into a digital ocean box to run a torrent? The college internet (where he was working from) blocked torrent connections and he wanted to be the first one to download and release the episodes on the college intranet. Smh.

<comment><USER3> The problem here is not recognizing that the piracy was actually the problem. In what way was it forgivable? Because everybody does it, that makes it okie dokie? Because you don't have a Netflix account? If everyone treated piracy as theft (it is) then no one would have to waste their time investigating it because the collective will would exist to prevent it.

<comment><USER4> Piracy is copyright infringement. There's no reason to call it theft. They are both bad for society, they are both illegal, but they are distinct.

<comment><USER5> While literally true; I have always found this argument to be petty and pedantic.

I've heard every argument in the book; but even the old ads said 'you wouldn't _steal_ ____'.

The fundamental principle is so similar to the point that discussing it quickly devolves into pedantry.

I am one that has had this discussion probably a dozen times; half of those on this forum, and I've just decided to stand by my educated opinion that it's absolutely a type of theft.

<comment><USER6> Maybe a very distorted type of theft but from my perspective the main immoral thing about theft is that it deprives someone of what they used to have, or takes the place of a sale. From the limited research I've seen the evidence is, at best, mixed that corporations are losing sales due to piracy.

If it was a clear choice between buying something or pirating it, equating piracy with theft would be more reasonable (though the owner still has their good so not entirely identical) but that doesn't seem to be the typical scenario. The ads only make that equivalence because it's better for the companies if they convince people it's theft.

From a moral perspective I think whether it is theft really depends on your motivation/what you would do in the absence of piracy.

<comment><USER7> > the main immoral thing about theft is that it deprives someone of what they > used to have

You should have just stopped there. That "or takes the place of a sale" rider is a very recent invention. You know what else takes the place of a sale? Spending your time doing anything else and ignoring the fact that the work even exists. If I could have paid to listen to a song from artist A and instead I listen to a song from artist B (free or paid, but we'll assume it was with permission either way) then that "takes the place of a sale" for artist A, but there's absolutely nothing immoral about choosing to listen to artist B's song instead. Or reading a book, or sleeping, or whatever. You could even write your own songs and give them away for free, directly _competing_ with artist A and taking the place of _many_ sales, and there still wouldn't be anything immoral about that. Artist A was never guaranteed sales, so they haven't lost anything simply by not making a sale. They still have their copy of the work, so they have not in fact been deprived of anything.

Complaints about piracy always read to me as: "You aren't complying with this monopoly which was promised to us in a rather one-sided deal with a third party (government) which (unilaterally) claims to represent you. If you don't shape up—or even if you do—we intend to sue you for everything you own in courts run by our beneficiaries and otherwise do whatever we can to ruin your life, just on general principles and not because we suffered any actual damages." And yet _they_ have the audacity to pretend to claim the moral high ground…

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Well my ISP gives out a dynamic IP address each time my DSL modem connects to them, so this tactic only reveals who downloaded what when they were assigned my current IP. Nothing much can be inferred from this data unless you _are_ the ISP or govt and can tie the IP to the subscriber.

And yes, it shows my IP downloaded the movie Zombieland, which I never did, so it is some other subscriber of the same ISP.

<comment><USER9> Nowadays internet users on cable often keep the same IP address for weeks if not months. Who knows, your ISP could change its configuration tomorrow and always re-assign the same IP address to you as long as its available.

I think the point of this website is to show people that using torrents is far from anonymous and invisible.

<comment><USER10> My IP hasn't changed in about a year, although it is supposed to be dynamic.

On the other hand I use extensively a torrent tracker and the site shows nothing.

<comment><USER11> Mine changes every few weeks.

I found it amusing to see that the OP web link stops showing what my IP has been downloading at the same time that I got the IP only about a week ago.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This kind of thing is already done heavily by content rights-holders. If you torrent movies or games in Canada without a VPN, you will get nastygrams in your email from the rights-holders via your ISP. They're legally required to do so AFAIK, because even consumer-oriented ISPs that are very privacy driven also forward on those letters.

Apparently if you don't reply to those emails you're fine, because they can't escalate the process unless you reply - I've heard stories of people receiving dozens of these "we saw you downloading pirate stuff, stop doing that" emails.

<comment><USER13> What, you only get _emails_? In Germany you straight up get snail mails from lawyers demanding you to pay for the damages.

But in Germany the only real bad thing is uploading, downloading by itself is more of a grey thing.

<comment><USER14> Canada currently uses a "notice and notice regime" [0], meaning the rights holder notifies the ISP, who turns around and forwards the notice to the infringing customer, but does not give the rights holder the account information, nor do they take any punitive action towards the customer.

However, the ISP must retain historical data on these notices, so if in the future the laws change, rights holders could in theory request information on past notices and go after subscribers once they have their personal information.

so yeah, don't pirate stuff...

0: [https://www.ic.gc.ca/eic/site/Oca- bc.nsf/eng/ca02920.html](https://www.ic.gc.ca/eic/site/Oca- bc.nsf/eng/ca02920.html)

<comment><USER15> >if in the future the laws change

Almost no legal system works this way. You can't suddenly be found guilty of violating a law that didn't exist.

<comment><USER16> Haha, that's a funny take along the lines of "it's not illegal if the cops didn't see." The reality is that the sharing is the infringement one gets prosecuted for. Copyright law already exists.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Luckily my router only supports IPV4 and I'm assigned a vague IPv4 CGNAT IP every time I switch it on. I used this site to do some OSINT on my IP and you guessed it: It looks like I'm sharing my IP with 1000s of other subscribers so doing attribution to 'me' would be hard and also wouldn't hold up in court. Also see:

[https://www.eff.org/de/deeplinks/2011/08/why-ip-addresses- al...](https://www.eff.org/de/deeplinks/2011/08/why-ip-addresses-alone-dont- identify-criminals)

[https://www.securityweek.com/eff-warns-police-courts- about-u...](https://www.securityweek.com/eff-warns-police-courts-about- unreliability-ip-addresses)

<comment><USER18> Be careful with this, your ISP can easily record the NAT translations and going to your ISP with a connection 5-tuple would be enough to track it back to you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> \- Was 26

\- Moved into company apartment

\- Torrented stuff

\- Company received a $30k lawsuit for downloading porn on company network

\- Hear CEO talking to lawyers (open office)

\- 99% sure it was me

\- Come clean to CEO

\- Was actually another c-suite who forgot they were logged into the VPN

<comment><USER20> Explain the lawsuit?

<comment><USER21> A few years ago there was a legal firm that specialized in tracking down people from their IP on porn torrents on the assumption that they wouldn't want their name in the public record and would settle for 5 figures. The law firm doing it was so shady they ended up losing the suits and having a judge tell them to knock it off.

<comment><USER22> Note that the conduct of Prenda which the judge objected to was that they were both the legal representation and the copyright owners, but didn't admit that before the court. There was no suggestion that their tactics posed any problems.

<comment><USER23> There's also the problem that if the copyright owner themselves made the torrent available, it's not actually illegal to download it...

<comment><USER24> [X] Doubt

<comment><USER23> I don't know what's there to doubt really.

You have been provided the work for free by the entity whose prerogative it is to choose the manners of distribution.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Laughs in Usenet. The proliferation of streaming services and restricted content has me investing in alternative options more these days. It's not about paying for content, it's about content becoming less accessible again.

<comment><USER26> Usenet has its own issues though. The past couple years there's been a massive jump in DMCA takedowns.

On certain things you now have download as it becomes available, in a week it'll be gone. For things that no one cares to pay for monitoring of, you can go back years.

So, pros and cons to torrents that don't get taken down specially but torrents "die" of old age when no one seeds them.

It's odd to me that file sharing seems to have hit a wall after torrents got popular. Doesn't it seem like Usenet shouldn't be the best option considering it's age?

<comment><USER27> I believe it's only really a good option for files because it's old and there are many obscure providers. I don't see anything about Usenet itself that makes it well suited for sharing files. In fact, quite the opposite. The fact that each file needs to be split and reconstructed after download results in an esoteric user experience.

All that said, I love (or loved) Usenet for communicating on Newsgroups. I'm glad that they still are around. I hope Newsgroups and IRC never die.

<comment><USER28> You can automate it all. Nzbget and sonarr, radarr makes it transparent to the user.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Off topic but this raises a question about iMesssage parsing of URLs. I copied just the base URL (without my IP, so he would get his) and sent this to a friend. The preview in iMessage lists _my_ IP, because iMessage actually visited the link. Does the message he receives show his IP or mine?

e: Just tested this, it shows my IP on the receiving end. It appears iMessage creates the preview text on the _sender's_ side so this will leak your IP. I tried it in Slack too and it leaked whatever IP Slack used to fetch the URL which interestingly is not my IP.

<comment><USER30> The web preview in iMessage is performed by each client. So your friend should see their IP in the preview since it's their client making the connection on their end.

This is easy to test if you've got another device with iMessage. Take your phone off WiFi and send yourself the link. The device on WiFi should show your home ISP address while the device on cellular should show the cellular provider IP.

<comment> kalium-xyz Interesting, I didnt realize I could get people their IP by simply sending them my website without them even ever having to visit it themselves

<comment><USER29> Based on my limited testing you can't. And that makes sense because I could make your device visit a URL just by sending you a message.

<comment> kalium-xyz Thats what I said: I can send you my website and I will see your device visit it even if you dont want it to.

<comment><USER29> And what I said is that's not how iMessage works. The receiver only visits your page if they click the link.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I've been using a Seedbox since December 2014.

Best 15$/month I pay. You can even pay with Bitcoin, tho I just use PayPal.

2 TB of storage, very fast speed with caching (i.e. some torrents finish immediately if someone else has it downloaded). An uncached Blu-ray ~4 GB movie gets finished in 15-30 mins.

They also have auto-delete feature. If they get a legal complaint they just delete the offending torrent and keep my account the same, no "strikes" or anything like that.

I then download the actual content either from FTP or HTTPS. If its a movie, I just download the single .mp4 file from the portal itself (and skip the subtitle/cover files) with HTTPS straight from Chrome, or even stream it directly through VLC! I only use the FTP if there is a large number of files (e.g. series or non-ISO-packaged software).

They have servers in US, Netherlands and Singapore. I always use the Netherlands server. I doubt anyone uses the US ones.

Even better? I can use the 2 TB for whatever I want, not just for the torrents. That's cheaper than most cloud storage plans for just dummy storage without any torrenting features!

Only problem I have with torrents are unpopular movies/series usually have no seeds, but there is nothing that can be done about that. Only older clients like LimeWire/eMule didn't have that problem, but those had endless malware issues because the content wasn't verified.

Pro-tip: Do not download the actual .torrent file. Many websites are setup to redirect you into an endless loop of shady .exe downloads. Always, always just copy the magnet link to your clipboard. This also makes you safe from any network monitoring that checks for .torrent downloads. No one can prove anything if you just copy a magnet link to your clipboard then paste it to a seedbox since they don't/can't monitor clipboards. Just browsing the page which has the link is perfectly file and doesn't prove intent, vs actually downloading a .torrent file.

VPNs in comparison are quite dodgy. They have slower speeds, no torrent- caching, its possible (and happens more than it should) that the software has a bad config and skips the VPN and uses your actual connection.

Also, I can never trust that the VPN company won't share my details if they get a legal request, specially when most of them are in the US.

VPNs are useful for bypassing censored networks in a university campus or corporate network, but for torrenting they're infinitely inferior to seedboxes.

<comment><USER32> > Only problem I have with torrents are unpopular movies/series usually have > no seeds, but there is nothing that can be done about that.

> Pro-tip: Do not download the actual .torrent file. Many websites are setup > to redirect you into an endless loop of shady .exe downloads. Always, always > just copy the magnet link to your clipboard.

A better pro-tip for these issues: if you're anyway using a seed box, figure out and switch to private trackers and follow their rules. With the good ones around, you won't have to worry about shady downloads. Some of the unpopular or older content may also be available on those.

<comment> blaser-waffle Getting access to private trackers is non-trivial. Hell, I used to be on waffles.fm and lost my invite and getting access since then has been impossible.

Usenet and sickbeard have been adequate replacements since then.

<comment><USER33> I'm sad to report that waffles.fm is no more.

Agreed, getting on private trackers - and surviving - is non-trivial, and don't think I could do it today (uploading, contributing). But once you do on the really big and important ones, you are set for life.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Apparently Blindspot, Warrior, Hanna and the Twilight zone is pretty popular for my ip address. I've never downloaded any of these and Twilight zone is the only one i've even heard of. I also can't torrent things through my service provider, they throttle them, so i've never actually used a torrent program at all from this IP. So, that I guess...

<comment><USER35> One of my neighboring IPs distributes child pornography according to this site, which is just fan-fucking-tastic. Anyone know how far Comcast distributes IPs on the same subnet geographically?

<comment><USER36> Drop a dime: [https://www.fbi.gov/tips](https://www.fbi.gov/tips)

<comment><USER37> Not to discourage reporting (seriously).

Simply as an observation, I would be legitimately shocked if the FBI didn't use these same techniques with automation to find suspicious torrents and get data from ISPs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Another interesting one is to hit the "My Contributions" button on Wikipedia when you're not logged in. This will show you anonymous edits that have come from your IP address.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:MyContributions](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:MyContributions)

There are a lot of weird people who share my IP address editing a lot of weird stuff!

<comment><AUTHOR> Very interesting! Thanks for sharing this, I also got some interesting responses from a VPN.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> It lists a bunch of crap especially porn and Bollywood movies and some chines stuff I cant identify what it is but certainly no one in my household torrented it. Meanwhile it does not list a single distro iso that I have been seeding for months. The IP and torrent client is correct tho. Strange.

<comment><USER12> Dynamic IP? I doubt you're the first one to use that IP address.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> I do give you credit of giving people a quick shot how accurate torrent detection can be if you are a casual user not using VPN. Or not using private trackers.

But.

You dont know and you are clueless that this is not my ip.

Furthermore, I have also checked my phone where I have never downloaded any torrent and you are showing 3 movies.

This is just scaremongering.

I did a few more tests.

For multiple private trackers you didnt detect anything (except your false positives), you have failed to detect there is more than one user of IP, you didnt detect VPN (but you could).

Not accurate at all.

A sane advice from this example - use VPN (from other jurisdiction than you are in and not massively well known or free), stop using public tracker.

<comment><USER41> > Furthermore, I have also checked my phone where I have never downloaded any > torrent and you are showing 3 movies. This is just scaremongering.

Not sure if this is the same in every country but mobile phones in UK jump around the same IP block pretty frequently (i.e all day long) even when standing still - i'm using this as home internet so i notice.

IP addresses are re-used all the time, this is why it's not usually permissible as evidence in court.

The down side of such frequent IP changes is i'm pretty much permablocked by google and captcha'd to death by them due to frequently swapping IPs with in pool of users with malware (now i've completely given up using google.com).

<comment><USER40> Yep, typically phone companies put mobile internet behind NAT, exactly this is why I tested it, as I knew it will be false positive. ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Anyone had to trawl through a daily access log list looking to establish proof something happened? I have, it sucked and the effort in wasn't worth what we got out of it in the end.

I'm pretty confident my ISP is doing the least amount of work possible to fulfill its logging and archive requirements. Keeping track of this stuff is like cleaning up industrial waste. It's not core the money stream for ISP's so it's going to be daily logs, zipped up on glacier storage, or better just hdd's that get thrown in a container and cycled out each year.

People gotta do something these days, there's talk covid may go for 24 months!

</comment><comment><USER32> Previously (December 2017): [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15971020](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15971020)

Previously (December 2016): [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13249578](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13249578)

<comment><USER43> And January 2020: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22102806](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22102806)

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> Wow, people at my apartment must download a LOT. Including several items listed as child pornography, about which the site declines to provide additional details; as well as this listed as regular pornography, but which I believe is actually malware-ridden audio editing software. [https://iknowwhatyoudownload.com/en/torrent/?id=a8579ced8872...](https://iknowwhatyoudownload.com/en/torrent/?id=a8579ced887218b21b6d2cf276c057346e66a0c03e350c0abcea8f0d31480c219ed9e47e957ea76a3f96347587275da0)

</comment><comment><USER45> Please do not visit this site unless if you want to be tracked.

In addition it is extremely inaccurate, it used to say that 126.96.36.199 was torrenting anime.

</comment><comment><USER46> Funny to see how many movies are torrented on a mobile 4g network. What a waste of bandwidth.

<comment><USER47> I tried from my phone's 4G and saw someone had downloaded a movie bigger than the typical data cap for my carrier. Yikes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> Interestingly, I used to download a lot of torrents years ago. When Spotify came along, it dropped at least 80%. Add Netflix and Steam and I haven't used torrents in a very long while actually. Simply because everything I need is available at an affordable price.

However, seeing how many streaming services are popping up lately, each with their own specialty and each wanting my money, (and seeing how crappy free Youtube is becoming) I feel more and more like coming back to my old habits . . .

<comment><USER49> As Gabe Newell once said,

"We think there is a fundamental misconception about piracy. Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem"

<comment><USER50> That is 100% correct. Soon as Netflix and Steam became a thing, I pretty much stopped pirating. They are so convenient that pirating is actually a subpar experience. If you download a game, maybe there's a miner or malware in it. Download a movie and maybe it doesn't have subtitles or has visual artifacts aplenty. The only cases where I do that is if it's a media property that I particularly love. I download a copy and store it on an SSD to make sure I never lose it in case Steam loses the rights to the game or Netflix decides the movie isn't popular enough and takes it off streaming, etc. However, now that everyone and their grandma is going into streaming, it's turning into cable. So I'm really starting to eye the idea of pirating series and movies simply because I don't want to pay extra money to Disney just to watch Hamilton.

<comment><USER51> It's easier to grab all the shows I watch from one spot a couple times a week and watch from my nas via kodi on a shieldtv box. Bonus, not commercials and I don't have to care about which network(s) are on what services.

I do pay for Hulu + TV for the fiance, and though I do use it sometimes, I'll tend to prefer torrents.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> You can turn it into a recomendation system! "People who downloaded this, also downloaded this"

<comment><USER53> This website used to contain all the information to generate a magnet URL for every torrent. With a simple combination of Google and a quick browser addon I've used this site as a nice way to find torrents for a while.

They've taken down the hashes now, which means the trick doesn't work anymore. Using other people's interests as recommendations was pretty useful though!

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> I have a static IP and it shows a whole bunch of unfamiliar torrents. What am I missing, how could it show false positives for a specific IP?

<comment><USER55> Good thinking to cya by posting a comment here that you can point to later. It's quite believable, actually.

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> It says they scrape torrent sites and then listen to DHT.

But even assuming they scrape "all" torrents, what percentage of users use DHT as opposed to just trackers, and how often will a DHT request hit their server as opposed to someone else's? And are they really able to simultaneously function as part of the DHT for _all_ torrents they've ever scraped, or is it only some small percentage at a time?

I'm just wondering if they're managing to grab something like 90% of torrenting activity, or more like 1%?

Legality aside, I'm just really curious about the technical accuracy here. Also why they chose DHT instead of connecting to trackers directly.

<comment><USER57> Given that DHT means websites hosting magnet links are in the greyest possible of legal areas, as opposed to websites that run their own tracker, which makes them pretty much guilty of aiding and abetting by default: DHT is by far the more used technology these days.

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> Given the numerous examples of false positives / false attribution able to be extrapolated from this website's claims, I wonder if it is giving its owner(s) / operator(s) considerable legal risk.

By calling itself "I know what _you_ download, dot com", it's potentially suggesting that "you are your IP address", thus suggesting that it is usable evidence for others to use against "you", when it actually could not be the case at all. IANAL, but this site seems legally problematic.

</comment><comment><USER59> Smart thing to do is to use this as a content recommendation service! Or netflix can improve their catalog by knowing what content people are going off-service for.... Nevermind enforcement, this is a huge data source for marketing purposes... Wait a minute :(

<comment><USER60> When customers switch over to torrenting Netflix can keep their 'watched' list updated in case they come back.

</comment></comment><comment><USER61> It doesn't know what I download on BitTorrent. I only download from a private tracker that is 15 years old, nice try :)

<comment><USER62> _cries in demonoid_

<comment><USER61> The destruction of what.cd was similarly terrible.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER63> It correctly identifies my torrent client version and the fact that I have a static IP, but none of the things I know I _have_ downloaded are on the list, and a bunch of stuff I _haven 't_ is (EDIT: it correctly identified one torrent).

Edit: Could this be due to me having a static ipv6 range, would my ipv4 address that this is looking at be shared by other people?

<comment><USER64> You client is politely sending items your peers are requesting, to try to find peers for them in your peer network, without having to flood everyone with irrelevant peer lists.

And this site (which i guess is just a couple lines of python collecting the data) is not bothering to distinguish any of the finer details.

<comment><USER63> Ah, this makes sense because the first seen and last seen columns are the same for all the stuff I didn't download, but for the one thing I noticed that I do actually recognize there's a gap between first and last seen.

Of course I imagine if two peers were looking for the same thing a few hours a part this wouldn't work to identify stuff either.

EDIT: Is there any way to stop it from doing this? I don't want law enforcement to mistakenly use this as evidence that I actually downloaded anything.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER65> I can see this being used by law enforcement in countries where IP address = person that rents it.

<comment><USER66> This is a long term practice in Germany. Lawyers connect to the swarm, collect peers and then send letters in an automated way to "shake down" people.

The solution is to use VPNs or private trackers and it's pretty widely known. If you move into a flat / AirBnB one of the first things people will tell you is to not torrent on the connection.

<comment><USER67> Heck in the US one law firm actually seeded the porn themselves ... then sued the people who they accused of downloaded it ;)

Didn't work out for them long term though....

[https://arstechnica.com/tag/prenda-law/](https://arstechnica.com/tag/prenda- law/)

<comment> lone-commenter Pure Saul Goodman style.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER68> Since everyone is taking about their experiences seeing workmates torrent, and no one is posting how this works -

Torrents are peer to peer. Bit torrent is a type of application. Bittorrent are not inclusive to torrents anymore.

Since everything is public, you can load several torrents, and watch for the handshake to occur and record the time/date and ip address.

Do it on a large enough scale and there you go.

There are many ways to secure against this, usually USA IP holders use USA cloud services or USA IP addresses. Some are public, but even if not, you can block the entire USA , so geoblocking by a simple tool such as: [https://www.countryipblocks.net/acl.php](https://www.countryipblocks.net/acl.php)

And you're pretty much in the clear. Not perfect, but pretty much.

<comment><USER69> You are very much not in the clear if you block like this. That's just delusional.

Copyright monitoring firms have many endpoints that look like consumer ADSL/cable... because they are consumer connections.

<comment><USER68> Yes, but consumer ADSL/cable..are still..within the USA IP Address list block.

By blocking the entire continent, if you are paranoid, you won't be on that list.

I doubt they will engineer much of a solution for non-local markets e.g. UK instance catching USA Ip address, though in the end it is _not_ that hard to move that metadata around.

<comment><USER69> They have many non-American endpoints, and local front companies, and they collaborate and pool data. They definitely had endpoints on a local ISP here, it was in the detail of some of the submissions that the IP they used was from the ISP.

[https://delimiter.com.au/2011/08/30/wikileaks-cable-outs- sec...](https://delimiter.com.au/2011/08/30/wikileaks-cable-outs-secret- iitrial-background/amp/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER70> Why are all the porn entries highlighted red? Is it meant to shame people?

<comment><USER71> That's the colour of visited links.

<comment><USER72> <tr class="danger">?

<comment><USER73> That is a Twitter Bootstrap class for "make it red".

The above poster is wrong though. It's quite obvious that porn=red and it's easy to test. Anything with "XXX" in the category column is red.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER74> I have no VPN and download stuff sporadically, stream video via torrents daily, I get nothing on this site. I guess I'm good.

<comment><USER75> Me too

</comment></comment><comment><USER76> I am paying for whatever I can I pay where I live - hbo, amazon prime, netflix, local services, spotify.

I think about stop paying and switch to torrents simply because of the horrible UI each of these providers has. It will probably will be more of an effort, but enough is enough.

What I want: VCL interface - start / stop / pause. What I do not want: the rest of the crap like extra info (Amazon), bad search interface (hello all), buffering issues (hello HBO, Netflix), dark patterns where you can not stop at the end of the episode, but they may let you to continue watching credits (FY everyone).

<comment><USER77> Are you using custom DNS? If so, you may be bypassing the netfix appliance at your ISP, leading to worse performance.

It is also possible, of course, that your ISP doesn't have one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER78> Submission from six months ago: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22102806](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22102806)

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, I wonder who flagged this or why. It didn't come up in the search (most recent post was 3 years ago from what I saw) so I figured it would be worth a repost.

</comment></comment><comment><USER79> These sites are never accurate I don't know why they make the frontpage every couple years

<comment><AUTHOR> These sites are sometimes accurate, especially for those with static IP addresses or that are on a defined range (universities, organizations, etc). It's far from a silver bullet, but it's an interesting way to look at what people are torrenting in general.

</comment></comment><comment><USER80> The phishing link they have set up to get your friends IP is pretty shady, obviously this stuff is easy to do, but pretty weak to make it easier for folks. [https://iknowwhatyoudownload.com/en/link/](https://iknowwhatyoudownload.com/en/link/)

There are people with abusive and stupid partners who wouldn't be able to get this information without doing more work or paying money.

<comment><USER81> Not minimizing your point but I like the obvious reminder of what's possible.

Also, the what-bad-guys-might-do klaxon is a powerful tool, is too often used to restrict everyone's abilities.

<comment><USER80> Yep - I don't mean to admonish the creator of this - it's great to surface this information so people are more informed of how they are monitored online. We all make mistakes, and the world has a lot of good people in it as well as bad ones :)

I also think that without actual regulation/oversight, sometimes the best way to deal with it is absurd overreach, it sometimes is the only thing that wakes people up.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER82> What does it mean that I can see there are 256 comments on this article from the comment count, but only one (from flak48) is visible to me?

<comment><AUTHOR> I also had this problem, on my end it appears to be resolved now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER71> I wonder how long before scam extortion emails link directly to this website in an attempt to add legitimate data to their extortion attempt

<comment><USER83> The beautiful part is that they may have no idea which IP address corresponds to your email until you click a unique link in the phishing email (or load a tracking pixel?).

<comment><USER71> The scammer doesn't need to know the IP, they just send them to the root domain which automatically loads the ip of the viewer.

<comment><USER73> The website even has a utility to generate a URL that, when clicked, will log the victim's peer results while forwarding them to a harmless website:

[https://iknowwhatyoudownload.com/en/link/](https://iknowwhatyoudownload.com/en/link/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER72> Impressive! Perfect match for the few things I download from public swarms :)

</comment><comment><USER84> Not only does this highlight the non-anonymity of BitTorrent, it also highlights what's wrong with link shorteners!

Jsut click the "Track Downloads" tab or go to [https://ikwyd.com/r/QgHP](https://ikwyd.com/r/QgHP) to generate a short URL that lets you get the downloads for someone's IP address.

</comment><comment><USER85> Since we're doing Tales Of Stupidity, I knew a guy who was reasonably highly placed in the UK side of a non-trivial multinational. At home he set up a kodi(?) box to play stuff he torrented. At least he did it at home. If he'd been caught he'd have lost his job and possibly got a black mark on his record that would have prevented him getting another managerial job. I don't think he considered the consequences, he just wanted stuff so he torrented. He could have paid for it, but he didn't.

In another place I worked for I had a guy from a _very_ rich shipping family ask me about torrenting stuff illegally (soz M8, not helping ya there). This guy could have afforded to buy the media remotely, say in the US (we were in the uk), and have each disk individually couriered to him cushioned between the warm thighs of high-class call girls. He had the money but he preferred to... be stupid I suppose.

</comment><comment><USER86> How does it know whether certain IPs are static? It labels XS4ALL's residential range correctly as static but surely the owners of this site didn't investigate a random Dutch ISP to find out whether they rotate IP addresses. Is there s registry for this sort of thing? It's not in the whois info that I can see.

<comment><USER87> I'm also curious whether this is legal in the Netherlands. Certainly strange that it's encouraging me to check on my neighbors to see what they've downloaded.

<comment><USER86> I'm not sure about the legality. Pretty sure that GDPR says you have to inform people before you process (store, transmit, etc.) their personal data (like IP+timestamp), but in practice it's often afterwards or not at all. The speed camera doesn't have to tell you what data will be collected and what your rights are before giving you a ticket and the trajectcontrole doesn't tell you anything at all (if you didn't drive too fast) despite processing your license plate.

I'm not sure why that is legal, so then perhaps collecting this without a legal basis (consent, fulfillment of a contract, vital interest of the data subject, etc.) is also legal, but that doesn't exempt the site from the right to view your data or the right to object to having your data processed if there is no grounds for it.

Of course, there are no repercussions if the domain is registered and hosted in a country that doesn't tell the EU who's behind it or doesn't do extradition and there are no European assets to cease. Worst they can do then is block the site from Europe like they did with The Pirate Bay and similar sites.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER88> Of course, "The Man in the High Castle" would be the most pirated series in North Korea [1]!

[1]: [https://iknowwhatyoudownload.com/en/stat/KP/annual/2020](https://iknowwhatyoudownload.com/en/stat/KP/annual/2020)

</comment><comment><USER89> The data is garbage, i am sure my IP did not changed and it shows things that I am sure nobody downloaded. I am wondering if the data is just randomly generated or the algorithm is just broken/guessing. You could create some stress for some people if such websites get credibility.

<comment><USER90> Who has access to your WiFi though, how do you know it's secure, do you check; perhaps an authorised person has some secrets from you.

<comment><USER89> I have a good password and I am sure my son is not able to run bittorent on his console or phone. My parents only have phones and they are not technical enough to install bitorrent also won't download a PC video game.

I also do not see the shit I torrented, probably because it was not the latest movie or video game.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER91> An org name search would be great. I'm sure there are plenty of gems like this one. [https://iknowwhatyoudownload.com/en/peer/?ip=220.127.116.11](https://iknowwhatyoudownload.com/en/peer/?ip=184.108.40.206)

</comment><comment><USER92> So VPNs nowadays are meant to protect from this, but how can someone trust a VPN not to sell the details of what you've been downloading? Is it really worthwhile to use one when the VPN provider may actually in some cases be more likely to sell this data?

<comment><USER93> I mean, it pretty much comes down to how much you trust your VPN. Depending on your jurisdiction, trusting someone that is legally forced to keep logs vs some who's income and reputation depends on not doing so might the best bet (through VPNs definitely have survived giving out shady data).

Also, if your VPN is located somewhere exotic and just somewhat uncooperative, the bureaucratic overhead of getting the logs, getting the IP, sending the request to your VPN and then matching the result with your ISP might be long enough for the logs to expire.

</comment></comment><comment><USER94> This thing seems pretty inaccurate. It says i tried to download fast five and Fast.And.Fierce.Death.Race. for under a second on july 1. fast and fierce is 720p and weighs in at only 800MB making it terrible quality so i know it wasn't me lol.

<comment><USER95> You probably have a dynamic IP address so someone else downloaded it on the address you are using now. I have a static IP and its showing all kinds of linux ISOs and other random crap that either I or someone else on the network downloaded.

</comment></comment><comment><USER96> My IP comes up clean, which is unsurprising because I don't use Bittorrent (at least not for piracy, anyway.) Even if you are going to torrent unscrupulously though, you may as well use a VPN or, if you can justify it, a seedbox. Paying to pirate stuff alone is probably a bit illogical, but OTOH having a VPN for general usage is probably wise for any questionable P2P things. (I am not affiliated or anything but I always feel obliged to throw a recommendation for Mullvad in that regard. Even if you don't care about VPNs, they do some pretty interesting stuff, like working on Coreboot for a server platform.)

</comment><comment><USER97> Someone commented that it almost feel impossible because of how stupid some of these situations are. I did tell my entire department,staffed with primarily young people, who just started their professional lives,that private mode in browser will not stop the company ( or me personally) from finding out what they are browsing. The horror on se of those faces!:) Then I did repeat it again to make sure everyone got it. And then, someone asked " and what about our mobiles connected to WiFi?". Yes,those too. Every single website.

</comment><comment><USER98> It was worth the VPN investment I guess.

<comment><USER99> I also have a VPN but guess what, my torrents are nicely showing. I've recently been using BiglyBT, a clone of the old Azureus torrent client. But apparently if something is wrong with the SOCKS proxy, BiglyBT defaults simply skipping the proxy :(

</comment></comment><comment><USER100> Eh, this site is bullshit. It just lists random content in a scareware fashion.

I've already tried it from a few different IPs, and not only did it list _none_ of what I actually torrent, but it also listed shit I've never even heard of before. Mostly porn. And identical content across different IP's (home static and cell LTE).

As in, I don't torrent through my phone, and even on that (wifi turned off) I got a list of torrents with a completely different listed IP.

</comment><comment><USER101> Is this supposed to be a hoax?

Just tried my home Internet, static IP, secure WiFi, in COVID lockdown, so no visitors.

Myself and my wife only (besides a toddler and baby). Wife doesn't normally use a computer (just mobile) and has no clue how to torrent. Site claims we torrented some MP3 three days ago; I had to Google the name of the artist.

If it's not a hoax then my best bet is some seriously impressive JS malware on a site my wife visited.

Does seem extraordinarily unlikely though.

<comment><USER102> It's based on IP addresses. If your ISP recycles yours, it could very well be another customer that got your current IP days ago.

<comment><USER101> I said static IP in my comment above, although that's not quite accurate. They're "sticky" IP addresses so don't _normally_ change. No CGNAT either, but there was downtime a couple of days ago. I suppose my IP could have changed, as I've made no attempt to remember it.

I think I'll actually follow up with my ISP. Cause if there is some rogue software/hardware on my network I'd love to know about it!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER103> No you don't, there might be one I dowloaded in there but most of them were definitely not downloaded by me (and no one in my house). I guess that's a good side of getting a very dynamic IP from my ISP...

And yes I know, that doesn't mean I'm protected from getting into trouble if I did something wrong since my ISP could probably link an IP and timestamp to me if asked by a lawyer.

</comment><comment><USER104> I think it is malfunctioning. I'm sure I downloaded some Linux ISO files and all I see is a blank list. I have a static IP4 and IP6 connection

<comment><USER105> It's not malfunctioning, it's that monitoring all torrents in the world is not as easy as it looks.

Still, using a VPN remains the safe option. My IP is as clean as a CPU factory.

</comment></comment><comment><USER106> It says I "like porn", but the porn torrents it shows are not thing I've ever downloaded. I don't download porn at all. It shows things I've torrented, but the list is very inaccurate. I sure hope law enforcement doesn't one day decide to use the same information source and frame me for viewing something I didn't.

<comment><AUTHOR> I can't speak to every LEO but the gist in US law at least is that IP != person, unless some other outside proof corroborates it is. You could in theory be framed but it probably wouldn't hold up court. It definitely could throw you into court, though, and that can be damaging enough.

</comment></comment><comment><USER107> This part is outright creepy:

> We cooperate with Right Holders, Law Offices, Internet Service Providers, > Advertising Agencies and National Police. We provide information about > sharing/downloading content via Bittorrent Network all over the world.

It's one thing to collect this as some sort of research, but another to feed MAFIAA [1] with this data to make their job easier. The fact that they process the data without disclosing who they actually are doesn't make it any less fishy. Doesn't it violate GDPR or something?

1: [http://mafiaa.org/](http://mafiaa.org/)

<comment><USER57> I'm struggling to understand what's creepy about this. If seeing your entire download history on that website was shocking, that's really more a measure of how much you know you've been breaking the law than anything else: there is no PII anywhere in what this service does, it just retains information about which IP (which on its own doesn't identify anyone in the slightest) was seen connected to which torrent payload (which on its own doesn't imply actual data exchange happening).

<comment><USER107> They flat out encourage you to spy on other people's downloaded torrents. How's that not creepy? The argument that they only display what they collected and everyone could do that doesn't change the fact that it's them that do that and they're really indiscreet with this data.

<comment><USER57> Because it doesn't, it lets you look at what other IPs have been doing.

(certainly not "spy", this is literally public information that anyone connecting to torrents over DHT gets to see. And if you didn't realise torrent connection was public information, then this should be a moment of learning)

It doesn't become creepy until you can identify individuals, or groups of individuals, based on _your_ knowledge of which IPs they use, so as much as you probably don't want to hear this: if you look up not-your-own-IP, you're engaging in creeping. Not the service.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER108> s/you/yourIpAddress/

IP addresses are not people

</comment><comment><USER109> This is why I am only using torrents in I2P.

<comment><USER110> How slow is it ?

<comment><USER109> When you have many seeders, it can be hundreds of KB/s, but usually slower. Anonymity and privacy are worth it anyway for me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER111> My oh my... I seem to have downloaded a lot of torrents on my phone.

And I have such eclectic tastes.

Shared IPs are still very much a thing you know...

<comment><USER112> Conversely, mine doesn't show anything even though I have a static IP and download frequently...

odd.

<comment><USER113> Yeah I found that odd as well.

<comment><USER112> Maybe it's because I only accept encrypted connections? Has my paranoia finally paid off?

<comment><USER111> I think they only track popular movies and some open source downloads (apparently my phone has downloaded the gimp port for windows). For my fixed IP it has nothing.

I've given up on torrenting long ago, but not the way the movie industry would like. If it's not on Netflix they can just keep it.

<comment><USER113> Someone else commented about a White House staffer downloading cracked copies of image editing software - so it's definitely not FOSS only!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER114> Here's your free startup idea: content owners create targeted advertising based on real-time torrent downloads. The ad is a one-time use stream link in the local user's currency for a reasonable fee. Not realistic for implicitly condoning the download, but it would make me a huge fan of the company.

<comment><USER115> You want to actually kill piracy? You need two things, and probably either one of them would work on its own, too:

1\. A streaming service with a reasonable monthly fee that has _all_ movies and TV, not sharded between multiple different services.

2\. The ability to buy and download movies and TV shows, DRM free, for a reasonable one-off fee. I know that the entertainment industry is allergic to no DRM, but I promise you, if they did this, piracy would go down, not up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER116> i picked a random PIA Montreal Node (which supports Port forwarding) for some interesting results: [https://iknowwhatyoudownload.com/en/peer/?ip=22.214.171.124](https://iknowwhatyoudownload.com/en/peer/?ip=184.108.40.206)

<comment><USER117> "MommyBlowsBest.18.10.31.Marie.Mccray.Story.Time.XXX.SD.MP4-KLEENEX"

Haaaarrrr

</comment></comment><comment><USER118> How does it work? Do you connect to every open tracker in the planet and store all the IPs they give you?

</comment><comment><USER119> AFAIK this site only uses DHT (Distributed Hash Table) sniffing to track IPs.

Disable DHT in the torrent client settings.

</comment><comment><USER120> Somewhat surprisingly, it finds nothing for mine (likely some rando IP from my ISP... though that only makes it _more_ surprising).

I'm not sure what conclusion to draw from this. Am I not torrenting enough? Do blocklists work? Did my ISP recently acquire an Amish IP block?

</comment><comment><USER121> Neat, now I know what everyone using my vpn provider has downloaded!

I will happily recommend that everyone buy a router that can be flashed and pipe all your traffic through a VPN. It doesn't give you perfect security, but it defeats a lot of attempts to deanonimize like this.

<comment><USER26> For reference that is not a fool proof model.

Even if you do everything right all your traffic goes through VPN...

This create a case where the "bad thing" you do woth the PC, is also on the same address as all your "good things".

Let's say with Google, your thermostat, your Wi-Fi enabled coffee maker, your game console, your phone, every website you connect to with any other device that runs through that router/VPN - they all know your VPN IP at that time and your account info at that time.

Let's say your WiFi refrigerator mfg sells IP and account detail information as a service to a data mining company - as I'm certain some do - in order to "get around" your home VPN, someone might need relatively cheap access to this data.

Putting everything on a VPN gives a lot of devices and accounts to tattle on you.

A VPN for the PC alone might be a decent idea if you are downloading things on the PC.

<comment><USER122> Probably better to run a container or VM behind a VPN to do "VPN" things there, and normal stuff on the host.

<comment><USER123> On Linux (not sure if other OSes have this) a more lightweight solution would be to put the VPN in a network namespace; e.g. [https://github.com/slingamn/namespaced- openvpn](https://github.com/slingamn/namespaced-openvpn)

Also handy if you want to do work stuff on a company VPN without letting the employer see all network access.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER124> Since I go through a VPN, I'm more accurately seeing what other people who use my same VPN are torrenting. Surprisingly not as much porn as I would have guessed?

A pity that the output columns seem to be fixed, or else I could probably do some fun analysis.

</comment><comment><USER125> This appears to be scraping the distributed public peer mechanism (PEX), distributed torrent metadata distribution system (DHT) and public tracker announces (which, by necessity, contain peer IPs for locating other members of a swarm).

</comment><comment><USER126> I always find it funny to see what shows up when I switch to mobile and see what gets tracked via CG-NAT.

As a Canadian, I guess others have much much much better plans that I do. We pay $5-$10/go here. Maybe telecom employees get unlimited plans?

</comment><comment><USER127> We were hosting an Au Pair from sweden. One day comcast sent us an email saying our IP address had been used to illegally download content.

I confronted her about it, and she lied denying it was her.

Needless to say, we never received another complaint.

</comment><comment><USER128> Off topic: I was trying to see the comments for this link - there are 258 of them apparently - but all I can see, in multiple browsers, is 1 comment from "flak48". No other HN topics are behaving like this.

</comment><comment><USER129> I switched my phone off of wifi to cellular and got some entertaining results

</comment><comment><USER130> Hilariously I hadn't even heard any of the things listed and I even went through the whole subnet!

I think if anything this website is a good illustration of how IP =/= person and should never be assumed it is.

</comment><comment><USER131> Ouch... my town is on the same IP range, so I can see my neighbours' activity. I could probably even tell who it is.

On the up side, static IP makes it easy to quite reliably host stuff on my own computers, in my home.

</comment><comment><USER132> Great idea, Ads have to go from the top. It made using the tool with interest turn into a negative experience.

If ads must exist, they should be at the bottom where users, after being delighted can decide to click on it.

</comment><comment><USER133> Interesting, for the dynamicish ip my ISP gives me nothing at all. Turn on my cheapo vpn provider and rather a lot.... Virtually all video both clean and dirty, tiny amount of music, no apps at all.

</comment><comment><USER134> Just checked on our company vpn. Sure enough, someone has been downloading gigabytes. The legal issues are one thing, but screwing up the speed and stability of our shared internet is even worse!

</comment><comment><USER135> Opened this junk from my home ip. Site says I (or somebody from my address) downloaded several soapy shit. It's pretty stupid to say that "you downloaded" those movies. First of all, torrenting is hell expensive in most of Europe. In Germany any ISP will immediately pass every bit of information they have about you to companies like ip-eschelon (and others who talking lawyer-ish) after first letter with mention of piracy. Next letter will land in your mailbox and resulting summ will surprise you. If you have lawyer insurance of personal lawyer, total pay me be decreased but not avoided. So, I will ask author of this site to avoid this kind of provoking stressful and insulting and puzzling wording.

</comment><comment><USER136> I'm on dynamic IP, so it doesn't show me anything relevant. Only an update for World of Tanks downloaded a week ago... I haven't played World of Tanks in three years.

</comment><comment><USER137> Joke's on you. I'm behind CGNAT.

Joke's on me. I'm behind CGNAT.

</comment><comment><USER138> This is why all torrenting should be done with a throw-away device (ie. cheap second-hand android device) on a public internet access point (ie: the library or a coffee shop).

</comment><comment><USER139> Jokes on you, my ISP has double NAT and I'm pretty sure 1000s are sharing my IP. Good luck finding what I download.

Sadly it's also the same thing that I absolutely hate about my ISP.

<comment><USER140> So NAT is happening before the connection comes into your house? Typically double NAT happens because your ISP does not allow that to be disabled on their modem and you have your own router hooked up through lan.

<comment><USER139> Behind double NAT without a router. With router it's triple. Its nuts.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER141> Someone who use the same VPN as me really loves classical music.

</comment><comment><USER142> I wonder how this API could work in terms of travel prep. If you wanted to watch the most torrented films in a given city before coming, seems like it could work out well.

</comment><comment><USER143> Piracy benefits us all.

It brings art and knowledge to millions that wouldn't otherwise have access to it.

The rest of society benefits indirectly too, by having these enriched persons in their midst.

</comment><comment><USER144> > I Know What You Download on BitTorrent

No, they don't. They don't know anything I've torrented.

I've been using the same _private_ tracker for about a decade. 10 TB downloaded.

</comment><comment><USER145> Obviously stupid to use work resources to do it. But from home there simply are no real repurcussions. You get a letter and it goes in the trash with no followup.

</comment><comment><USER146> I like connecting through a VPN and then refreshing the page

</comment><comment><USER147> I use a VPN on my home network and do not see any records via this website.

Am I missing something, or is my impression that this tool can "see through" tunneled traffic false?

<comment><AUTHOR> You're not missing anything, this service shouldn't be able to see it if it's through a VPN. If you're connected to your VPN when you check, then it might be able to see what is going through that server, which of course might not be you (if you're using a commercial/shared VPN server).

</comment></comment><comment><USER148> interesting, I have not downloaded anything from my IP address. Also, my partner has doesn't even know the existence of the Bittorrent. Yet, we have a list of all kinds' of interesting files that we have apparently downloaded. Either someone is using our IP address to download things by hijacking our wifi, or something else is going on. As far as I know we don't share our IP, something to investigate here.

</comment><comment><USER149> The good news is that it doesn't see any of my private tracker linux downloads and since I only download linux on private trackers the list is empty.

</comment><comment><USER150> I just checked from my (government) building's connection and, well...someone has been downloading some Lovecraftian horror movies. Not what I expected.

</comment><comment><USER151> I've got a fair number of torrents I've been seeding for who knows how long.

And this site says I don't have anything.

I don't use a VPN, but I use an invite-only tracker.

<comment><USER86> The site is indeed very inaccurate, and I'm not using private trackers. Seeing as there is a previous HN thread about it 6 months ago, it should have some historic data in which I occur... it just doesn't capture everything.

</comment></comment><comment><USER152> Meta-question: There are supposedly 274 comments on this article as I write this, yet I can see only 1. Is this an error? Has the discussion been locked?

<comment><USER153> I also experienced this, the footer was missing as well. I tried from different devices and there was only one comment. I'm not sure how long it lasted but at least a few minutes, seems back to normal now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER154> Uh Oh looks like one of Trump's interns is using cracked software and pirating movies

[https://iknowwhatyoudownload.com/en/peer/?ip=22.214.171.124](https://iknowwhatyoudownload.com/en/peer/?ip=126.96.36.199)

<comment><USER155> There's also one porn entry:

[https://iknowwhatyoudownload.com/en/peer/?ip=220.127.116.11](https://iknowwhatyoudownload.com/en/peer/?ip=22.214.171.124)

</comment></comment><comment><USER156> IP being dynamic, I don't really know how this affect end users. The list for my (current) IP shows a bunch of stuff I never downloaded.

</comment><comment><USER157> Tried it from my phone. I guess cool to see people torrent from their mobile connections? I'd have to ask for a loan in order to do that.

</comment><comment><USER158> I tried connecting to NordVPN and loading up this page. Hundreds of results show up, and surprisingly less than half of it is pornography.

</comment><comment><USER159> Guess they don't know about private trackers.

</comment><comment><USER160> I torrented CentOS 8 in December; I must have been given another DHCP address since then, since the site shows an empty list for me.

</comment><comment><USER161> According to the results, they know what a housemate of mine downloaded... I don't think I'll bring it up in conversation.

</comment><comment><USER64> With encryption, if anyone join as a peer NOT to join the torrent distribution, is that considered computer hacking under the DMCA?

</comment><comment><USER67> I had nothing for my actual home IP, but if you want to see something fire up your VPN and see what they have listed for that IP ;)

<comment><USER162> Had to try it, surprisingly zero porn?!?

Actually...for a free wireguard server there wasn't a whole lot of bittorrent traffic at all.

<comment><USER67> The VPN endpoint I picked was only ~10% porn.

I too was surprised.

A lot of TV shows.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER163> Not really. It shows what people using my current VPN exit have downloaded. And seriously, TPB warns people to use VPN services.

</comment><comment><USER164> This list must be violating integrity-policies and be illegal. This is similar to publishing DNS look-ups related to IP.

</comment><comment><USER165> How does this work? I thought the whole idea of the torrent protocol was to prevent identification of who downloads what.

<comment><USER166> Not sure where you got that idea, maybe you're mixing up torrents with Tor or with gray area VPN services that people use while torrenting to anonymize themselves.

The whole reason you can google "____ Torrent" and get results is because there are torrent trackers out there that, well, track which IP addresses have which files. The same thing that allows those to exist allows someone to watch and record who is downloading which torrents. Which is what movie studios and the like are doing as well when they send out copyright warnings based on torrenting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER167> How is this usable in any legal system ? There is a huge difference between downloading content and clicking on a link.

</comment><comment><USER168> Interesting - I have a fixed IP at home and this shows me having downloaded a Debian ISO recently, which is correct.

</comment><comment> coddle-hark Might be worth keeping in mind that carrier grade NAT and dynamically allocated addresses are both pretty common.

</comment><comment> mr-ron List is blank for me, but definitely shouldnt be, so no it definitely does not know what I download on BitTirrent.

</comment><comment><USER169> a) this is creepy b) I have wondered this... you know those letters some ISPs send to people telling them what they downloaded illegally? Do they send that stuff to VPN providers? Because it seems like they would just get flooded. I connected to my VPN service and there are thousands on that IP range.

<comment><USER73> The ISP is looking for IP addresses in its address range in the peer list, looking it up in its customer database, and sending its own customers a letter.

<comment><USER122> Is this true?

As I explained in another post, I used to work at a small ISP many years ago. We did not monitor anything, but we did get emails from MPAA people (my memory is a little fuzzy) about an IP downloading a something. We would then pass it on to our customer.

<comment><USER73> It was at least true for Comcast in 2007-2011. They were using a third-party agency for this info and then moved it in-house when I was doing contract work for them.

No clue how MPAA letters interfaced with them. Could have been an agreement with them for all I know.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER170> Too bad my place is assigned behind layers of NAT, ( or basically CGNAT ) which is basically useless to trace.

</comment><comment><USER171> This mostly shows me what other customers of my VPN in various countries like to download.

</comment><comment><USER172> I'm on a personal 4G sim wifi router currently and the results are completely wrong.

<comment><USER46> It's unlikely that you have a personal public IP from a telecom provider. Everyone connecting to the same tower(s) will share that IP.

</comment></comment><comment><USER173> Great, you just reminded me of my favourite trash TV series which is stuck at 80% :(

</comment><comment><USER174> It is interesting. I was expecting to see blue data leak, but nothing showed up.

</comment><comment><USER175> I have not downloaded any of these, how are these associated with my IP address?

<comment><USER176> If your internet provider dynamically assigns IP addresses, they may have been downloaded by people who previously had your current IP address.

</comment></comment><comment><USER177> It shows the linux distros I have torrented but not any piracy lol

<comment><USER178> Oh, I thought it filtered out legal content. Doubly confused why it doesn't know anything I have since I've left my very infrequently changing public IP seeding arch linux isos reasonably often.

</comment></comment><comment><USER179> That "Track Downloads" feature seems highly unethical.

</comment><comment><USER180> Why does this appear with 272 comments but I can only see one?

</comment><comment><USER181> Just checked while on mullvad, that's a lot of porn....

</comment><comment><USER182> Interesting... shows me a list of things I didn't download!

</comment><comment><USER183> Makes me glad I have never been tempted to use BitTorrent.

</comment><comment><USER184> Not really with carrier grade NAT that has a dynamic IP.

</comment><comment><USER185> How does BitTorrent handle Carrier level NATs with IPv4?

<comment><USER186> Depends on one of two factors: 1. Does the CGNAT use EIM for TCP or UDP? 2. Does it, your CPE and your torrent client implement PCP or forward UPnP mappings as PCP?

</comment></comment><comment><USER187> This is honestly fascinating if you're a VPN user.

</comment><comment><USER188> I can only see one comment for some reason?

</comment><comment><USER189> Funny it categorizes Big Buck Bunny as XXX.

</comment><comment><USER81> blackarch-linux-live-2020.06.01-x86_64.iso 14.37GB

I'm totally outed.

Those other IPs in my subnet do like their porn. Well, someone's porn.

</comment><comment><USER75> Does this really work?

Not seeing any torrents of mine.

</comment><comment><USER190> ...last summer.

</comment><comment><USER191> The info on my IP is not correct lmao

</comment><comment><USER192> It matched my downloads 100%. Wow.

</comment><comment><USER193> It has things I didn't download.

</comment><comment><USER194> Regretting that static IP now :)

</comment><comment><USER195> doesn't work for me ..

</comment><comment><USER196> Thanks for recommendations

</comment><comment><USER197> Completely innacurate information and doesn't even know what is being torrented right now.

</comment><comment><USER198> haha, no you don't.

</comment><comment><USER199> No you don't. :)

</comment><comment><USER200> VPN is working :)

</comment><comment><USER201> > nothing

nice :sunglasses:

</comment><comment><USER202> just check it out mine then :P

</comment><comment><USER197> Completely innacurate information.

</comment><comment><USER203> lol....no you don't

</comment><comment><USER195> not working

</comment><comment><USER178> Apparently not.

</comment><comment><USER204> weird

</comment><comment><USER205> I currently have 44 active torrents, this site doesn't show any of them, none of my friends torrents either. Cool concept tho.

</comment><comment><USER206> Looks like my neighbors are huge fans of some nasty pr0n.

</comment><comment><USER207> Is Torrent still a thing? I'm not sarcastic here, just not downloading music since Napster. Is it common for you to install a torrent client on your machine?

<comment><USER208> Mostly for Linux ISOs. :-)</comment></comment>


A shared file system for  lambda functions - <AUTHOR> https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-a-shared-file-system-for-your-lambda-functions/ <comment><USER2> I'm curious what people actually use Lambda for?

I tried Lambda for a use-case that I had in 2018:

We published Polls and Predictions to people watching the 2018 World Cup. We set the vote callback URL to a function on AWS Lambda.

It failed spectacularly during our load-testing because the ramp-up period was far too slow. We needed to go from 0 to 100,000 incoming requests/second in about 20 seconds.

We had to switch to an Nginx/Lua/Redis endpoint because Lambda was just completely unusable. It would have cost us $27,000/month to pre-provision 10,000 concurrent executions...

What is it that people actually use Lambda for?

<comment><USER3> AWS lambda is used in 2 categories:

1) AWS administration-related actions (required for non-trivial mgmt.)

2) end-user actions (optional).

AWS throttles and limits everything, so expecting 100,000 requests in 20 seconds on a default AWS account is unreasonable.

The Cloud doesn't mean unlimited capacity.

Also, I haven't seen anybody version control lambda code, even in compliance environments, so something to investigate.

<comment><USER4> > Also, I haven't seen anybody version control lambda code, even in compliance > environments, so something to investigate.

Huh, how is it any different building and deploying to anything else.

I store the code in git, build it in team city, and deploy it to S3 using octopus deploy which updates the lambda to point to the new versioned off zip.

<comment><USER5> It's different because they put that code editor in the lambda console, and some people actually use it.

I've built a lot of lambda apps and never used it, pretty much everything I do requires dependencies.

<comment><USER4> > and some people actually use it

Sure, I used a lambda to turn on/off a build server during particular hours. I wrote it directly into the console.

For actual applications tho, I don't use the console.

Just because the console exists doesn't mean people are flat out not versioning their code.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I've found EFS enticing in theory but painfully slow and riddled with issues in practice. In the past I've tried it thinking "it's basically an EBS volume I can mount on > 1 EC2 instance," only to find terrible read performance and misc. low-level NFS errors.

<comment><USER7> Dunno your exact requirements or when you last tried it, but they did boost EFS's read speed (they claim by 400% [1]) as of this April, so it might be worth looking into again if you're still trying to find a solution.

1: [https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2020/04/amazon- el...](https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2020/04/amazon-elastic-file- system-announces-increase-in-read-operations-for-general-purpose-file- systems/)

<comment><USER8> That is great to know, thanks. It was pretty unusable the last time I tried it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Serverless is a bit like Stone Soup [1]. This I guess is the point at which the Tramp says: "Now if you just add a few onions it really helps the flavour..."

[1] [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stone_Soup](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stone_Soup)

</comment><comment><USER10> I could see this being very useful.

I recall Joyent's solution to this (similar) problem where you have an object stored somewhere (e.g. S3) and you want to use that object in a container, but you have to copy it over HTTP or something to do any work on it and the object could be very large.

With Joyent's Manta[1] you would spin up a container right where an object is stored (instead of bringing the objects to the container via NFS.) Also has map reduce support.

[1] [https://apidocs.joyent.com/manta/jobs- reference.html](https://apidocs.joyent.com/manta/jobs-reference.html)

<comment><USER11> Sort of. The better analogy would be spinning up compute localized to the s3 object; which would be pretty interesting.

This feature they did release deserves little fanfare.

<comment><USER12> Ummm. Linux's NFS client includes a kernel page cache.

You can just mmap or read the file without doing anything else. That is zero or one memcpy overhead.

S3 clients have to copy the data over the network, assemble the tcp packets, decrypt and checksum for ssl, and then memcpy the result. That's at a minimum. They may be doing other work, like verifying the s3 checksum, or allocating memory to store the object.

They have to do that once per lambda process, again, at a minimum. They might do it once per lambda invocation.

I wonder how amazon bills DRAM if multiple lambdas mmap the same thing read only.

<comment><USER13> Ummm, I'm pretty sure that before data from remote NFS server make it into kernel cache they too have to be copied over network, assembled from TCP packets, possibly decrypted (k5p) and verified (k5i) with NFS over Kerberos (otherwise you would have no confidentiality/integrity), and moved into newly allocated memory. Sure, once it is in kernel cache and data are not modified there may be just "Is this handle still up to date?" remote calls but you could achieve the similar cache with object storage.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This is a horrible idea. This gives lambda functions shared mutable state to interfere with each other, with very brittle semantics compared to most databases (even terrible ones).

<comment><USER15> I need this specifically as a part of a state machine. Most of the steps involve a Lambda loading and unloading csv data between S3, Redshift, and Aurora where no local storage is needed. The last step where we had to download the files locally and compress multiple files together was done manually via a script because they were greater than 512Mb.

We were just about to put the script in Fargate (Serverless Docker) and run a ECS task as part of the state machine. Now we don't have to.

<comment><USER16> This - if you have to fetch data from or output data to outside of the AWS ecosystem, the 512mb /tmp limit pushes you into the additional (relative) complexity of having to run on Fargate pretty quickly. Just had to deal with this for a content ingest job involving pulling a couple GB of data from an FTP server, processing it and pushing it into an RDS database on an hourly basis. Would have been super simple if the file was on S3 already.

<comment><USER14> Where do you need a distributed file system in this use case? Sounds like all you need is some local scratch space?

<comment><USER15> Lambda only gives you 512MB pf local "scratch space". If it had to provision and de provision gigs of space at each invocation, it would probably cause longer start times and shut down times.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I worked with EFS but not lambda in 2017-2018 when migrating an app to AWS - an app which included a bunch of random application code that assumed it could read or write into a network file system. Having EFS as a migration target to replace on prem CIFS was relatively pleasant, which removed the need to rewrite a bunch of the application code. S3 would have been a reasonable replacement but that would have required weeks or months of rewrites to hunt down filesystem calls and rework them to use simpler object store API.

One thing that tripped us up at the time was EFS not supporting encryption in transit: but this was fixed in early 2018 when EFS began supporting using stunnel to wrap the underlying NFS connection in TLS. [https://docs.aws.amazon.com/efs/latest/ug/encryption-in- tran...](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/efs/latest/ug/encryption-in-transit.html)

It reads as if this lambda integrated EFS works out of the box with encryption in transit

<comment><USER18> I'm genuinely curious about the factors that made it OK to have an unencrypted protocol into 2018. Is the AWS infrastructure already encrypting at another layer? Nobody worries about attacks on data that's only transiting AWS?

<comment><USER19> AWS has stated that internal traffic, at least within a VPC, is "tamper proof". I don't recall any specific details about that, whether it is the case across regions, accounts, etc.

<comment><USER17> back when i was working on this (for a large org) they regarded anything in AWS as fundamentally lower trust than their own on-premises corporate networks, so there was a security requirement to do encryption in transit for all TCP connections -- this was for an application within the VPC with no public traffic

<comment><USER19> It's gonna depend on your threat model ultimately. Hard to imagine running on AWS if you don't trust them though.

<comment><USER18> It's not so much about trusting AWS not to pry into your data. More that the attack surface of your data as presented to AWS' other—potentially hostile—customers is (presumably) significantly reduced by not having the bytes flying around AWS' infrastructure in the clear.

To put it mildly, Amazon has a lot more folks a lot smarter than me thinking about these tradeoffs, so I assume they had good reason to think it was fine the first time around. I'm just surprised that the state-of-the-art for cloud- hosted services doesn't presume building on TLS from day 1, so I'd love to know what those reasons are.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Does anybody have a price comparison between this and storing stuff in S3 bucket and loading it all the times?

</comment><comment><USER21> OMG THIS IS SO AMAZING I HAVE BEEN WANTING THIS FOR AN ENTIRE YEAR NOW. (I've been using Lambda to do massively distributed compile jobs, but had reached the throughput limits I could achieve with distcc-like techniques doing local preprocessing, and so was looking at doing limited synchronization of my codebase to S3 to then either link against the compiler or, for other tools and to let me use the gold standard compiler I want, do C runtime injection to make it so that when files are opened I pull them from S3... but that entire process sucked and doesn't really solve the general purpose problem: this does; this lets me trivially do the moral equivalent of make -j1000 and have all of the random sub-jobs get executed in lambda functions and have the compile complete nearly instantaneously. I can even have those jobs just directly share state and do "exactly what you'd expect" with respect to the inter-dependency stuff <\- which like, is a tradeoff, but one that fits well with how most projects are already designed when using make... I'm so pumped to go back and work on that project again.)

</comment><comment><USER22> Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud.

It wasn't obvious to me if this is somehow mounting EFS over !NFS (since never says the words NFS in the post). My main fear when people say "Should I use Lambda / Google Cloud Functions / Cloud Run against my NFS server" my response isn't "How would you set that up" it's "Be careful. Cleaning up NFS locks held by clients that have gone away is fairly painful, and you have none of the mechanisms to make sure it exits properly".

Alternatively, you can mount without locking, and then you get one of the comments downthread about "and now you've given functions shared mutable state but with bad primitives".

tl;dr: Cool! ... But, how does this handle NFS locking?

<comment><USER23> (PM-T in the EFS team)

This is NFS and locking is fully supported (the blog includes an example). Because EFS implements the NFS 4.0/4.1 protocols, locks are lease-based and there isn't a need to clean them up. In the unlikely event of a client crash where the client still held locks, they will automatically expire once the associated lease expires.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Pretty sweet.

Is anybody using Lambda to run huge MapReduce jobs? Do people still use Hadoop?

Doesn't this basically just let you have something like HDFS for running large distributed computations with some shared state, without having to reach for S3 or redis?

<comment><USER25> I know at least one team at Amazon that does runs map-reduce style jobs with Lambda, but now that Athena supports user-defined functions, I'd personally be inclined to use it instead over EFS or S3 + Lambda.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> sharp knife to hand people -- because EFS is just NFS, it uses NFS for security / isolation. Everything that can mount a given volume needs to agree on what unix users are what, and you need to make sure to completely lock down root access, otherwise you can't enforce any kind of data isolation.

If your use case can deal with one EFS volume per isolation boundary, you can use IAM to control who can mount what volume, which might be easier to reason about.

Cloud-y DLP tools don't know about EFS.

<comment><USER23> (PM-T on the EFS team)

The EFS/Lambda integration uses EFS Access Points, which allow you to enforce a specific POSIX identity and directory for NFS operations. You can also use IAM policies to require that specific IAM roles/users use a specific access point.

<comment><USER26> Ah, didn't know that part, that's very good to learn. Thanks!

edit: ah, EFS access points are general and you can mount them from EC2 instances ? MUCH better.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Very cool functionality, but so much complexity to set up, connect, and manage all the various services.

<comment><USER28> There is certainly some additional complexity here over the basic Lambda serverless setup. But I think the console-driven configuration as outlined in these posts often makes it harder to see what the core concepts really are.

With infrastructure-as-code tools, this can be a little clearer. At Pulumi we wrote a post earlier today on configuring the infrastructure needed to use EFS with Lambda, and it boils down to just a few concepts and a couple dozen lines of infrastructure code.

[https://www.pulumi.com/blog/aws-lambda-efs/](https://www.pulumi.com/blog/aws- lambda-efs/)

Some of the complexity here also comes from the fact that EFS is a general purpose managed NFS service, instead of a fully-abstracted Lambda-specific feature. That does add a little additional up-front complexity, but means you can use EFS across all sorts of different compute in AWS - not just Lambda.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Ooh. I wonder if efs is compatible with sqlite's nfs mode.

More seriously, this is huge. Unix pipes over shared nfs has always been my big data platform of choice (since before the cloud, or even google map reduce). Things finally came full circle.

</comment><comment><USER29> Cool, so we're staring to curve more sharply around the full circle we'll eventually go on.

So now lambda functions can mount persistent block storage.

Next up: allow your lamda functions to run for longer

Then: allow multiple lamda functions to execute concurrently, and indefinitely, as a group, while having block storage mounted

And finally: use your EC2 instances as lambda functions

<comment><USER19> I agree that we will see all of those, except the last one. It's no surprise that we're bending around, that's normal. But when we get back to the "feature parity with the past" things will still look very different. We're talking about fully managed systems here that you can compose together to get parity with what you have today with unmanaged systems.

I also don't think the time limit on lambdas will extend much further than it is today. Not sure on that one.

<comment><USER29> I'm imagining the full circle looking like web frameworks "compiling" their controller methods down into lambda functions. e.g. you deploy your Django application to AWS Lambda and it automatically fires a lambda function when a view method is hit via a route. This is already happening where people are deploying static sites backed by lambda function APIs.

<comment><USER30> > e.g. you deploy your Django application to AWS Lambda and it automatically > fires a lambda function when a view method is hit via a route.

Is that a bad thing in your opinion? Examples like that were very much a Day 1 use case, or at least intent, for a lot of AWS Lambda. When we were working on CloudFront Lambda@Edge it was explicitly the intent to move the compute out of the traditional data center or EC2 instance. We wanted to enable customers to run their entire application in this fully managed 'serverless' aspect where AWS can optimize along multiple axes on their behalf.

Internally Amazon is a land of APIs, RPC, and federated services/business logic. Getting to the point where each API action, or internal method, would be hosted as a Lambda was entirely a goal.

Source: Principal at AWS. Not in this space directly anymore, but spent time working on CloudFront & Lambda@Edge.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> What is the advantage of using this over S3? Is it just the speed & latency difference between S3 and EFS?

<comment><USER32> You have the ability to seek() without downloading first.

<comment><USER33> You can seek with S3 using the Range header. The latencies are poor though!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> This is misdirection by naming, like how University of Phoenix is similar to Arizona State University, Phoenix. "Lambda functions" sounds like anonymous functions, but is actually referring to a proprietary interface to AWS Lambda™. They named it this way so that readers confuse AWS Lambda™ for programming lambdas.

<comment><USER35> One of AWS's core competencies is being bad at naming things.

<comment><USER32> with useless logos.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Curious if it adds significantly to cold start times.

<comment><USER37> They've already reduced cold starts significantly [0] for Lambas in a VPC, I can't see them tossing all that good work for this.

[0] - [https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/announcing-improved- vpc...](https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/announcing-improved-vpc- networking-for-aws-lambda-functions/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> This is going to be a really interesting way to benchmark EBS performance.

</comment><comment><USER39> Can we please change the title? I was really afraid that AWS might have lost it and called the new file system "new", which must be the least practical name for anything from an SEO standpoint.

<comment><USER40> Amazon New will be the worst name for a AWS product, since they announce TONS of products every year, nothing is really new.

<comment><USER41> Amazon New, a full-featured and elastic system for releasing new products.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> "lambda functions" not "lambda expressions" \- It is funny (or not) how Amazon redefines how a term is used by naming a product. The words actually make no sense, but people do not care and say It anyway "lambda function".

<comment><USER43> I just glanced over the Wikipedia article for lambda calculus and there is at least one mention to "lambda functions", right in the intro.

What's wrong with "lambda functions"?

<comment><USER42> To me it sounds like you say twice, that you have a procedure or lambda.

A lambda ("expression" is often not even said, instead simply "this lambda here ...") in many programming languages is already an anonymous procedure and often an anonymous function. So saying "lambda function" makes it sound like "procedure function" or "function function" or "lambda lambda".</comment></comment></comment>


JSON Diff Released - <AUTHOR> http://ajaxian.com/archives/json-diff-released <comment><USER2> Interesting. Unfortuantely JSON can't distinguish between lists and sets. So you can't get a good diff of arrays.

Does:

        ['foo','bar','baz'] -> ['baz','bar','foo']

Diff to:

       @@ -1,3 +1,3 @@
       -baz
       +foo
        bar
       -foo
       +baz

Or are they the same?

<comment><USER3> It's easy enough to check, and they do in fact diff to the above.

<comment><USER2> Sure, but that's decided by the diff tool, not by the data.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Why does everyone hate Electron? - <AUTHOR> Is it really that bad ?
The argument that it's too memory hungry does not sound strong enough to me since most of us (I'm making assumptions here, but I don't think I'm way off the mark) run powerful hardware (at least 8GB of RAM).
I don't know, maybe I'm just in my own bubble but I'm interested to know your thoughts.
And if you have built a successful Electron product, what's your experience ? Would you do it again ? <comment><USER2> You are in your bubble indeed.

\- Sure, _my_ computer has 16GB. The computer I develop on, plus run a couple VMs, containers, etc. That is not the case for the common user, who has to make do with less. This is especially palpable on mobile, with less RAM, fewer cores and more throttling.

\- And those 16 GB? Nope, I do not intend to squander them _on your app_ , and neither do the users. We _use_ the computers, y'know. Perhaps to run an IDE, perhaps to watch a movie, perhaps to make a spreadsheet, but most apps are an _addition_ to the main task. This is the epitome of arrogance: "you have X of resource, AND IT'S ALL MINE!" And you have 30 such intents-to-munch competing.

\- Most of the time, it's a massive overkill: case in point, Slack: 2 billion bytes of RAM to show a chatroom, i.e. a few thousand bytes of mostly text? EXCUSE ME?!

\- Apart from that, and the overhead of bundling and running a separate browser for each app, with all the issues it entails, the _theoretical_ idea of desktop-web apps is quite appealing, as opposed to its actual implementations. For prototypes, excellent; don't shove prototypes to production though, that passes the buck onto end users.

I have built a major app in HTA (way before Electron, similar in principle). 1*, would not build again: easy to build, and that's about it.

</comment><comment><USER3> Electron hate is an entry in the genre, "modern software is inefficient and bloated because devs are lazy"

This genre will never want for new entries because, devs will keep getting things done and critics will keep complaining.

Electron hate is a moral argument, "devs are wasteful." It's not a technical argument. People confuse their ability to conceive of software which has the same behavior as shipped software, but improves on arbitrary figures of merit, excepting "date of RTM."

<comment><USER2> Modern software is inefficient because this is a cost-effective approach to building software. Wherever you can't pretend you have infinite resources, this attitude instantly evaporates. In other words, bloat matters to users, but not to whoever directs development (spoiler: that's rarely developers).</comment></comment>


I have a Ph.D. in Computer Science – now I sell coffee online - <AUTHOR> http://blog.moustachecoffeeclub.com/2013/08/29/i-have-a-ph-d-in-computer-science-now-i-sell-drugs-online/

<comment><USER2> Am I the only one who was really excited until it turned out he was selling coffee?

<comment><USER3> I thought I was going to read an article about the founder of Silk Road..

<comment><USER2> Yea that or just some dude selling K2 out of his basement would have been fine by me

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Promotional article with no content and a link bait title. Carry on.

</comment><comment><USER5> _Perhaps I did write a great protocol for communicating among nodes in a network, how would I go about marketing that and selling it to somebody?_

It makes much more sense to work in the opposite direction: start with an idea for a product and use your specialized knowledge in the implementation details.

On a related note: I think it's a mistake to do compsci R&D in a startup. If you run into a problem that can't be easily solved by today's common algorithms, data structures, and protocols, it makes more sense to "weaponize" an existing PhD thesis than to build something from scratch.

After all, startup rule #1 is "Make something people want." People want products. They don't care about the underlying technology.

<comment><AUTHOR> Right, so I guess that's the point I'm making. People want coffee. Large companies want computer science R&D.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Hmm, I was intrigued by this service until I read the following on the main page: "Just Say no to Dark Roasts. Roasting cheap beans to a dark smoky stage masks the bad flavors in the beans...Anything else would be sacrilegious!"

You just made a mortal enemy! :)

In all seriousness, it doesn't seem like it would hurt to expand the offerings to darker roasts.

<comment><AUTHOR> So, my preference for lighter roasts is related to the fact that we only offer single-origin beans. Basically you can nuke any bean into taste oblivion (much like starbucks do). The opposite of this is roasting as light as possible and letting the subtleties of the bean shine through. You can only do this though with really good quality green beans. So to answer your question in another way, plenty of people are burning the crap out of cheap beans, we are differentiating by not doing that and focusing on lighter roasts.

<comment><USER6> I don't like Starbucks' beans but for two exceptions: their "reserve" single- origin line ([http://www.starbucks.com/coffee/reserve](http://www.starbucks.com/coffee/reserve)), and their espresso roast. I'm actually surprised I haven't found a better espresso roast...Lavazza, Illy, surprisingly nothing else measures up. Their reserve line is also dark roasted (or nuked to taste oblivion, depending on your viewpoint :P), but those are generally still my favorite for the French press or Aeropress or Clover machine. I've tried plenty of lighter-roasted single-origin beans from a local roaster in my town who has the same opinion as you. I always give them a fair shake, but it's just not my thing.

I guess my point is, you may be turning away paying customers based on personal preference. My local roaster also thinks dark roasting is sacrilege, but does it nonetheless because ~half of his customers prefer it.

<comment><AUTHOR> For espresso roasts have you tried the Dapper from Handsome Coffee? Probably my favorite espresso at the moment. Regarding the dark roasts, a large part of my service is the curation angle. I'm promising people that I will find them a great coffee. I really only have my taste buds to rely on for the curation, so I'll end up recommending coffees that I like.

<comment><USER6> I haven't tried Dapper, thanks for the recommendation. Just ordered a pack. My espresso machine's getting back from repair tomorrow after several months on the DL...can't wait.

OK, I get your angle. If you do ever get into some darker roasts though, let me know...e-mail's in my profile.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It's me or more and more upvoted articles here try to sell you something ?

<comment><USER8> I think it's happening more as HN readers recognize the (personal) benefits of having something hit the front page.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> bah, disliking other human beings never stopped misanthropic professors getting stuff done!

Collaborating with other humans is a requirement to do anything big/significant. There are billions/millions/thousands in your planet/country/city block, go find one or two who you can just about stand and do the worthwhile thing you want to.

Or stop moaning about doing boring things on your blog and continue making a living selling coffee, your call.

</personality clash>

<comment><AUTHOR> I never said I disliked other humans, just that I dislike working for other people. Two very different things.

<comment><USER9> 'for' rather than 'with' \- you got me, that's a difference. Carry on! :)</comment></comment></comment>


Will you use the cyclops app - <AUTHOR> http://www.cyclops.cc <comment><AUTHOR> I am working on an app that lets users find a digital version of physical books(www.cyclops.cc) I will like to know the following 1) Do you find the app useful 2) Will you pay to use it? 3) How likely are you to delete it from your phone when you running out of memory 4) I will like to know your thoughts and ideas</comment>