Researchers have devised a way to monitor BitTorrent users over long stretches of time, a feat that allows them to map the internet addresses of individuals and track the content they are sending and receiving.
In a paper presented earlier this week at the Usenix Workshop on Large-Scale Exploits and Emergent Threats, the researchers demonstrated how they used the technique to continuously spy on BitTorrent users for 103 days. They collected 148 million IP addresses and identified 2 billion copies of downloads, many of them copyrighted.
The researchers, from the French National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Control, also identified the IP addresses where much of the content originated. They discovered the the vast majority of the material on BitTorrent started with a relatively small number of individuals.
“We do not claim that it is easy to stop those content providers from injecting content into BitTorrent,” they wrote. “However, it is striking that such a small number of content providers triggers billions of downloads. Therefore, it is surprising that the anti-piracy groups try to stop millions of downloaders instead of a handful of content providers.”
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