September 27, 2008 by sharky
As a rule, private trackers are more secure than public ones. However, what many members of Demonoid don’t realize is that most of the popular torrents are using public trackers - which is just about everything that has a huge swarm of seeders & leechers. Thus, you may as well just be downloading from ThePirateBay or Mininova; essentially it’s the same thing. So why is it that Demonoid users are shocked when they receive nasty eletters from their ISPs admonishing them for downloading copyrighted content? That’s exactly what’s happening, and the complaints are rolling in on many of the torrents.
It didn’t take long to find clear evidence of this - one such example is Demonoid’s "Leatherheads[2008]DvDrip-aXXo” torrent. Users started complaining about a month ago that they’ve been "tagged" by their ISP for downloading it.
Of course, none of this is actually any of Demonoid’s wrongdoing. Aside from running their own tracker, the Demon is simply a torrent indexing site, amassing a vast selection of torrents from other (public) sites.
Preventative Solutions:
One obvious way to cut down the risk factor is to avoid torrents tagged as "external". Other simple solutions would include the use of a seedbox, or a VPN service (such as VPNGates.com) if you download torrents on your home PC. Others swear by using PeerGuardian to block bad IPs - although there really is no conclusive evidence to support this. Another lesser-known option is to use a hacked BitTorrent client that will keep your IP address out of the torrent.
A Note About aXXo Torrents:
Due to their heavy popularity, aXXo torrents have forever been manipulated by anti-piracy agencies to track users. To some degree, this "works" - the IFPI or MPAA throws a spy into the swarm, and everyone else in the torrent is caught in the dragnet. However, what’s troubling is that some aXXo fans falsely assume that using only ‘official’ torrents from the aXXo RSS feed (or, the mininova aXXo user folder) will keep them safe. Nothing can be farther from the truth. The only thing that this may guard against are the torrent scams where people password-protect the RAR files, or from PPI-installers. Anyone using any torrents (aXXo or not) from public trackers will be just as vulnerable to being identified in the torrent, regardless of the source.
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