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.

  • PortNull@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    4 hours ago

    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

    • empireOfLove2@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      3 hours ago

      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.

    • Snot Flickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      4 hours ago

      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.

      • Björn@swg-empire.de
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        4 hours ago

        someone has to be the first one with the file. That’s the same person who created the torrent.

      • dan@upvote.au
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        3 hours ago

        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.