Kyoto Prefectural Police have arrested a man accused of uploading copyrighted TV programs to the torrent site Nyaa, following an investigation that began several years ago.
All the guy needs to do is say he was only torrenting to train his AI models, and he will be off the hook.
Or does that work only for multi-billion dollar corporations?
Thats the most awesome point I seen someone make on the internet in a long time haha. Lets call the kids lawyer and get him off the hook!
Pirates are the new white hat heroes of the world now that all entrenched authority are the bad guys.
I mean I’d argue there wasn’t really ever a time when entrenched authorities weren’t the bad guys
The best thing you can do with anime is to stay away from the popular commercial jabrony shit like Demon Slayer and Re: Zero, which are stupid shows imho anyway.
damn if i worked for something called the “japan hacker association” and helped the government catch a torrent seeder, i would do the only respectable thing and walk into a sewer drain
Ahh seppuku was right there though…
Too honourable for a class traitor like that
I approve this message.
This comment is making my head spin, yeah your account is a day old, but this one was made well after that
probably timezone stuff tbh
It’s a pretty consistent theme with these guys that get caught that they’re not even taking basic precautions. Many pirates have openly bragged about seeding or even selling pirated material under their real name prior to their arrest. I don’t think we have to brainstorm a million different ways the authorities might have tracked him down - he’s probably just stupid like all the others before him. Uploaders and providers often seem to develop massive egos that become their eventual undoing.
It’s also possible he got sloppy. If you’ve been doing something for a long time, that can happen. Like forgetting to double check if your vpn is connected for the 10000th time after 10 years of not facing issues.
That and you get cocky, because you’ve been getting away for it so long, that you think you’re unstoppable.
This applies to all repetitive tasks, for example as an experienced driver there comes a point where you get sloppy about checking mirrors, because 99.999% of the time it’s ok. And then bam.
For this very reason, I have my VPN set up so that if it’s off, the whole internet connection is shut off. And as a backup, my torrent app will only work through the VPN interface, not the general network. I know what I’m like, and would definitely forget this all the time lol.
There are other ways investigators could have connected activity to Ono. He may have used Nyaa without a VPN while logged into an account. Data from website cookies or content-delivery-network logs could also have been matched with Nyaa activity and tracker records. CODA has not said whether any of those methods were used.
VPN isn’t enough, you gotta worry about fingerprinting and cookies too. Recently it was revealed that Windows 11 has strong fingerprinting options that could be used to track you.
I wonder if they were using a VPN or seedbox. You could even do remote desktop into seedbox and browse the sites from there.
A VPN is about as useful as an ashtray in a convertible. They can just have a judge issue a court order and that VPN will have to give out your real IP.
Was always wondering… what is the best way to get access to a seedbox that is not linked to you through a financial trail?
Some seedbox services seem to accept cryptocurrency, although if they don’t accept an anonymous one like Monero then you’ll need to do some extra steps to remove the ability to trace the transactions. They may use a third party crypto payment service that will try to ID you so that’s another potential hurdle (after some googling I found a seedbox service that’s using bitpay, and bitpay has hassled me for using a VPN before). Possibly there’s a wider range of options with VPS providers.
Trackers can show which users are active in a torrent at a given time. They may indicate whether a user has a complete copy of a file or is still downloading it. If investigators followed newly posted torrents over a long period, they may have been able to identify an IP address that repeatedly appeared as the first source with a complete copy.
That’s some dedication
Or you could just look into newly uploaded torrents by user X (on nyaa there is no anonymous upload)
That’s some dedication
I mean, what you call dedication sounds like an auto scraper vacuuming IP’s with time stamps and correlating it with torrent go-live dates after looking at a spreadsheet for a couple hours.
Yeah, that’s what it would be. I am old have visions of people poring over the data manually :)
Now we just pipe the data through tools that can summarize it and give it to a llm. No sane person is staring at logs. Even when we did, we would grep, sed and awk the fuck out of it so it wasn’t so miserable.
Those were the bad old days. Do not miss fighting with a command line because you didn’t get the syntax perfectly right and have to mess around only to find out it was a permission issue.
Interesting. I never thought of it like that. Now I’ll have to be more careful
I wonder if they’re using any of the *arrs to do this since its a faster response time to get into the peerlist as quick as possible before anyone can complete the initial download.
Just monitor the RSS? Many users also tag their releases so you could just grep the rss feed every 5min and grep the release names.
someone has to be the first one with the file. That’s the same person who created the torrent.
(Assuming its new and not cross-seeded)
I doubt it. It’s likely custom code that’s better suited to the task.
The *arrs watch RSS feeds to find new torrents. It wouldn’t be difficult to write a script that pulls the RSS feed and polls the tracker to collect data on the initial seeds/peers. They might use an actual torrent client for some of the data collection, since I’d guess they have to prove the person is actually uploading, rather than just being connected but not actually uploading or downloading.
Sounds to me like they just own one of these trackers. Just like the NSA controls nodes on the tor network.
I think that’d make sense. The trackers for public torrents are often at seemingly random domain names and nobody really pays much attention to who runs them.
The US military created Tor, so I don’t doubt the US government still runs a lot of the nodes.
Free him!!
What’s funny is, if piracy is removed as an option, collectively we would all focus on the stranglehold movie production companies have, and break it up, to essentially produce the same effect. Utilising and focusing all that technical skills and ability to how do we cause things to change. By upping their game, they’re shooting themselves in the foot.
They have been since Napster. Netflix almost killed movie/tv torrenting. It was so cheap with so much content, it was more expensive to run an HTPC setup than pay like $5/month for NF streaming. Then every company wanted their own streaming service and ships reappeared.
It’s seems like every time someone figures out the supply issue, they come along, put in a few road blocks and charge you money to get though to what you had before for free or way less.
To this day I still blame Lars. No talent drummer who’s entire band was a success off the back of sharing their first EP which they SAID TO DO only to turn around and sue.
