February 02, 2010 by sharky
Today, FSF received what could be interpreted as an alarming email; one private tracker in particular is offering the opportunity for Facebook members to request invites through their tracker’s official Facebook page. At first glance this plan seemed innovative & unique - but is all this really a good idea? Our hunch is that it’s probably not in anyone’s best interest to connect a Facebook account to a private tracker. But what do we know? Reader feedback on this is encouraged, but we’ll outline some key points.
A verified admin (the sysop?) from Movie-Torrentz.com contacted FileShareFreak with the message below.
Subject: Private Movie-Torrentz Site Invites Handed out on facebook.
We are handing out invites if they request them on our facebook account:
http://www.facebook.com/MovieTorrentz
Our site as recently grown with a max increase of big release groups such as fxg, noir, release-lounge, bluelady.
We are a quality movie, tv, bluray & mp4 torrent site.
Regards,
With an Alexa Rank of 159,637 - Movie-Torrentz certainly has a decent following; this is no "unknown tracker". Personally I know very little about this site since I don’t have an account there (registration is currently closed), nor could I find a tracker review (either public or private).
But I know a thing or two about Facebook. Adding other/new members as friends can easily expose your own Facebook profile to their friends, and so on. This networking phenomenon for friends-of-friends can become amazingly wide-reaching in no time at all - which is also why it’s so popular. But in reference to torrents, P2P and the sharing of copyrighted content - it’s probably not such a great idea.
Here’s our take on it:
• It’s unknown whether or not potential invitees need to make Movie-Torrentz a ‘friend’ before being able to request an invite - perhaps this transaction can be accomplished just by sending a message to them. Either way you’ll still need to be logged in to your Facebook account, though. Read on…
• If you’re accustomed to logging into your personal Facebook page whereby you’ve used your real name on the profile - and many people do just this (to be available to that long-lost high school buddy or ex-boy/girlfriend) you might want to rethink using Facebook to request an invite to a tracker. Then again…
• Even if you don’t use your real name on the Facebook account, you still may be (and likely are) exposing your Facebook friends & family to the Movie-Torrentz network. Not everyone uses the same levels of security as you do. And Movie-Torrentz has an impressive collection of friends…
• Movie-Torrentz presently has 432 friends, where you can add any/all of them to your own Facebook network. To me this sounds like easy bait for MAFIAA who can now infiltrate a simple Facebook profile without even joining the tracker. But wait, there’s more: they can also amass even more evidence by requesting an invite to the tracker (and thus obtain IPs from the torrents), as well as connect Facebook profiles. Even some of Movie-Torrentz’ torrents are hosted on public trackers…
• Public trackers - the last thing you want to do is make it easily known to the connection between your Facebook profile and public torrents. IP address ‘dragnetting’ is much more popular on public torrents rather than private - but either way it can be followed back to profiles on Facebook where real identities can be matched to the IPs in the torrents. Surely evidence like this would be much more substantial in a court-of-law; whereby the bad guys have your Facebook profile, your friends list, as well as your IP address and probably the resources to find out your real name.
Call me nuts, even call me paranoid - but don’t call me stupid. All this smacks of an easy-peasy honeypot - probably one that Movie-Torrentz didn’t intentionally intend to create, but did nonetheless without some proper hindsight.
Trackers, if you want to do something funky - offer temporary "open signups" posted through Twitter once in a while. Torrentleech twitter did this very recently for just a few hours, but we missed the gig on publishing that (damn you w00t <3 - gone). :)
Again, comments are more than welcome. It’d be great to read about what others opine in regards to Facebook & torrents.
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