Fake torrents flooding Mininova
The battle against p2p users is on the beginning and it may conclude into serious problems. Probably the most used BitTorrent indexing directory, Mininova.org, is flooded by fake torrents in the last time. I’m also one of these daily visitors and I can see at least 2 or 3 confirmed fake torrents a day. It’s almost impossible to find out which one is real and which isn’t for normal visitor, because the creators of these fake torrents use very advanced methods to hide this cheat.
There are basically two groups of fake torrents - these shared to attract people and the others to bust people. First category is not that bad, but still pretty annoying. Ideal example is today no.1 in TV section - Episode 17 of Prison Break. This famous tv show is aired on thursdays, but sometimes happen that there’s a dvd screener released sooner than it’s on TV. This was also the case of episode 18, which appeared somehow 2 weeks before official launch. The problem is, that there’s episode 16 and then episode 18, nothing between it. So people didn’t want to watch it until the missing part 17 will be here.
And that’s the place for these creators of fake torrents - they make some avi file with same size as normal tv shows, put it on public tracker (Pirate Bay in this case) and upload to mininova. Although it’s very clear it’s fake and it’s also written in the comments, more than 6000 people already tried to download it. They can’t succeed, tracker returns only tons of peers with 0% downloaded.
But as I said, this is not the main problem. Much worse option is the second case - fake torrents published by some RIAA or MPAA related company, in order to catch the peers in the swarm. BitTorrent is completely transparent and you don’t have many chances to hide your IP when you want to download something So if you try to download such a torrent, you can expect a nice letter in your mailbox pretty soon. The way from your IP to your personal details isn’t that complicated, and especially in the USA very common.
The chance of recognizing fake torrent is very low. This second category fools you even more with unreal amount of peers in the tracker - so it reports something like 200 seeders. I’ll show this on one example: Little.Manhattan.2005.LiMiTED.DVDRip.XviD-LMG
When someone see this, he can’t have any doubts about the quality of the movie. Quite a well-known release group, proper name with the codec used to encode the movie and 15 MB RAR files. The tracker is also OK - reports number of seeders and leechers. But when you look carefully, there is something wrong. New torrent, dvdrip, and already got over 200 peers and almost no leechers? The tracker URL is also totally unknown, but you can’t recognize this unless you are deeply experienced within the BT community. All of this is just a trick to get your IP. When you connect to tracker, there’s noone with 100% complete files (although the mininova says 200+ seeders) and you will not download single byte. This release also wasn’t ever released, in spite of correct scene release name. But again, you can’t find this out, if you don’t have access to some pre bot or archive of all scene releases.
The addresses of these fake trackers change very often, I can’t give you some huge list, but there’s one very dangerous announce url, used in last few days in many fake torrents, so you had better to stay away from this: http://www.commonbits.org:6969/.
The conclusion ? As the BitTorrent world is very popular, it also brings a lot of potential danger for common users. Hollywood studios hate to see their movies being shared before the first night over the internet, so they pay for these IP hunters, who really know how to make their work good to fool you. So to beware this danger and download only proper scene releases with no risk of being catched, I highly recommend you to think twice before you click on download link. The best option for you is to download only from trusted private trackers - or trusted public sites as NewTorrents.info. We do our best to serve you only the top quality…
how hard it is to go to your site, leech and log IPs?
but if you download a fake technicaly you are not pirating anything. for instance if somebody sells you a “gun” and you rob a bank with it .. but it turns out that it was just a “banana” would you be charged with armed robbery?
COMMONBITS.ORG registered to:
Registrant Name:Jeff Reifman
Registrant Organization:ActionStudio
Registrant Street1:700 North 67th Street
Check actionstudio.org
Fun…
yeah zoso, that’s of course not a problem, noone can guarantee 100% privacy in BT, but you at least know it’s not a fake with only target of getting your IP and besides it, it’s quite easy to hide into these thousands of peers
Urban, you would be charged. there is mens rea and actus rea, the criminal intention behind the crime and the act of the crime itself.
So the film companies could have you up for “trying” to get their copyrighted material. But since the compensation the film companies are trying to claim are damages when you succeed, you will not be faced with a stupid compensation bill. I suggest anyone getting fake files burns them to disc, so if in a week or a months time you get pulled on it, you can state that “heres the file, it isn;’t what the film company are saying it is, therefore they have brought incorrect charges against me and everyone else that supposedly breached the copyright on this film”
the film companies will get too smart for their own good, they need to share the real copyrighted material, not fake files with no copyright.
Yea… theres something a little odd about this scenario… If MPAA/**AA were trying to capture users to take legal action agaist, they would be MUCH more successful sharing the actual copywrited material… maybe they cant actually share it though because.. well.. that would violate everything they are suing for
haha… That aside, perhaps the solution is to go private. The private sites im part of are very unlikely to have issues like this (as the user in question would be banned asap) and well, sharing is much more enjoyable there. My advice: Try and find invites to private sites.
Thanks Martin for that usefull information. I trust Newtorrents.info site and i only download stuff from this tracker.
Thanks again.
Simon
that why private sites is better then mininova and some other shity sites
No… That’s why newsgroups are a billion times better then any P2P shit.
A slight correction.
@simon
Newtorrents.info isnt a tracker, it’s just a torrent lister.
hope this public upload thing on NT wont get ppl in trouble,,i say close the public uploading on NT,just leave it for trusted uploaders
mininova isnt shity btw,,the ppl who are doing this are shity
we should hunt the fake uploaders and hang’em :@
Those fake releases are absolutely not the work of the MPAA. Probably just some kid who likes to fool people or a messed up tracker. The MPAA don’t need fakes to get your ip, they just connect to the regular torrents if they want to.
i dont think so torrentfreak. if we are talking about this category #2 which i mentioned in the article, i trust its work of some company connected with MPAA - becuase exactly as Justin said, they would be sharing copyrighted material, which is illegal.
and about public uploads on NT, we check every torrent very carefully to avoid these problems…
They can indeed connect to the tracker and get your IP. Protowall et al are also useless to stop them getting your IP from the tracker. I wouldn’t be suprised if they did make fake torrents but there’s always messed up people out there that like to screw things up for people. Personally I don’t see a problem with TV Torrents, just these buffoons (mpaa etc) haven’t caught up with the technology yet, you can record things to DVD and VHS using a standalone player but you can’t d/load and watch them on your PC. They need to get a grip.
I only use NT for new stuff, but every now and then I search mininova when I’m looking for something new. Are there any old fake torrents popping up, or just 0-day stuff?
And did any1 noticed the .nfo ” LMG/imdb.nfo” never knew the internet movie database released nfo files
i dnt get one thing wht do these ppl get out of uploading fake torrents ok its not as oiif their ratio is being done any gud only their uplaod speed is gettin fc**ed up so wht is the whole point?????/
Whois sending the FAKE files is NOT R_I_A_A or M_P_A_A….
that what i think….
everyone knows BT is No.1 p2p program=lots of other p2p programs are empty=The oweners of them gets angry=war on BT
that what i think….coz R_I_A_A or M_P_A_A they can get ips fast no need to do nothing fake trust me guys i know this sure 100%
R_I_A_A or M_P_A_A is trying to find the users(the groups) who upload the files.
i dont think someone will come and say to users who is 12 or 14
you will go to court for downloading psp games……..
thats what i think…..
@vinkingurl
imdb.nfo is used all the time on ftp sites for dvdr releases, it contains the imdb info of the movie, which many ftp sites has scripts for that automatically fetches from imdb.com and stores in imdb.nfo … so its actually useful
@martin.
1. There are several ways to get ip’s without actual downloading the file
2. These companies are the copyright owners! so they can legally download their rips!
3. This is a confirmed release (the filename). Check your sources again
If those are from the MPAA or RIAA then it’s more likely to be a “spoiling” campaign, backed up with the terror-tactics of releasing news stories like this one.
Seems like P2P is under fire on several fronts, and nobody knows who is firing the bullets any more.
We won’t know what’s really going on until the smoke clears.
Just everyone be as careful as you can, and help the guys who run the trackers to get through this shit.
now the faking of torrents is goin to happen on most of the sites …u cant do much about it…just gotta be careful
umm, yeah, downloading a fake is just like buying a bag of oregano from a “dealer” thinking it’s pot.
You still get nailed. It’s just like a sting, you didn’t know it wasn’t the actual release, therefore you are expecting it to be the actual release, therefore you are technically breaking the law.
Don’t flame me, i think it’;s retarded, but that’s how it works.
I noticed a torrent claiming to be Alcohol 120% version 2.0 on mininova just yesterday.
A 5 second check of Alcohol’s homepage (www.alcohol-soft.com) will verify that the torrent is fake as hell, but unfortunately, the average BT user is too stupid to verify things like I did and it serves them right.
Torrents are for the unwashed masses. Lucky for me I have distro access to several large IRC dumps >:)
Hey SyntaxError were you never a newbie? Get off your high horse and stop being such a twat! Instead of posting such I am so high and fucking mighty stuff why don’t you try helping people? and if you don’t fancy that just shut the fuck up cause nobody is interested in how clever you think you are.
Oh and by the way. A five second read on this post told me how arrogant you are.
Hi i’m a moderator at mininova and would just like to say we do try to remove these fake torrents straight away, though we do need users to post these fakes in the forum, you don’t need to register or anything to post a link to the fake/forbidden torrents thread . If users do this it will greatly help us keep the site free of the formentioned types of rubbish + check comments before downloading it may save your temper as we are only an indexing site it is hard to moderate all of them as i am sure you can imagine
f88k teh m88a/r88a
Has anyone heard of any individual torrent users being sued by either the RIAA or MPAA? all i have heard of is torrent sites being busted, and the occasional empty threat directed at users on front pages. What sense does it make to bust individuals, when you could go after their torrent file sources?
The MPAA and RIAA pay specialist companies to post fakes up on sites such as Limewire, and having learned the architecture of BT they have now started to target the Torrent community. This is aimed at annoying, frustrating, and closing down the average downloader and discouraging him from doing so again. These companies have an endless pot of money, so you can imagine how hard your job of getting a “new” torrent is now, especially with the paranoia of private trackers not letting you in, or being full etc. It’s much easier to just buy the normal DVD. Wait a couple of months and save your money and buy it…That £20 dollars for the DVD could save you $1000’s in a potential lawsuit….
to guido22,
about 90% of the fake torrents are named almost exactly the same as others, so it is hard to know/remember exactly which one you downloaded.
Got here and seen your stuff - way to go!
[...] the misattribution is intentional. Both movie studios and record labels are known for flooding the file sharing networks with false files in an attempt to hinder the downloading of pirated material. Most of the time though, the [...]
>Urban wrote:
>but if you download a fake technicaly you are not pirating >anything. for instance if somebody sells you a “gun” and you >rob a bank with it .. but it turns out that it was just a >“banana” would you be charged with armed robbery?
Great point, urban!
I thought the fake torrents were a recent phenomena. Having read this post, i see it’s being going on for over a year. Having spent 17 hours downloading Aliens.vs.Predator.Requiem[2007]DvDrip.AC3[Eng]-aXXo
and an other 17 downloading
Alien.vs.Predator-Requiem[2007]XviD.English[DVDRiP]-aXXo
really makes my day. I’ll spare you what i think of doing with such an uploader.
I guess it was fun while it lasted.
(And no… i’m not from any english speaking country)