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The Internet

Third of Content On Popular BT Portals Are Fake 255

Posted by CmdrTaco from the that-sounds-optimistic dept.
siliconbits writes "A study published by a group of researchers, most of them based in Europe, analysed the publishers of content on two major BitTorrent portals, Pirate Bay and MiniNova, and found out that almost a third of all files on the two sites were fake."
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Third of Content On Popular BT Portals Are Fake More

Third of Content On Popular BT Portals Are Fake

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  • Same ratio as /. (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 25, 2011 @12:34PM (#34996488)

    Same ratio /. has for how many stories are real.

    • Re:Same ratio as /. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by HermMunster ( 972336 ) on Tuesday January 25, 2011 @12:36PM (#34996530)

      I believe the Pirate Bay site has "flags" for trusted content and respected uploaders. Does it not?

      • I believe the Pirate Bay site has "flags" for trusted content and respected uploaders. Does it not?

        Of course, other trackers have them also. And checking the number of seeders/leechers helps, too. As well as having a quick look on the comments to see if someone reported nasty stuff.

        • The comments are a perfect step but need to be more used

        • Re:Same ratio as /. (Score:4, Informative)

          by Firkragg14 ( 992271 ) on Tuesday January 25, 2011 @12:48PM (#34996778)
          Ive seen this news story a few times today on different sites and im as baffled as you. If im downling from somewhere like piratebay i tend to just sort by seeds and see which is popular then read the comments. Just because theres no automated way to weed out the fakes doesnt mean its impossible to find what your after since the crowd sourcing approach means that the best options tend to float to the top.
          • He doesn't say there is NO real content. The fact that you and me know how to filter, look around, analyze and select the real files and ignore the rest doesn't mean the other 99,9% of the files we just ignore because we know better are any good. In fact, I would think most people agree that apart from the one file you found, if you consider all of the rest, some very large percentage is either fake or useless, crap, or is not downloadable.

            • In fact, I would think most people agree that apart from the one file you found, if you consider all of the rest, some very large percentage is either fake or useless, crap, or is not downloadable.

              Sure, and 90% of all e-mail is spam. I'm surprised that this would surprise anyone :) Sturgeon's Law has been with us since 1958 - you figure people would have gotten used to it by now.

        • Re:Same ratio as /. (Score:5, Funny)

          by NFN_NLN ( 633283 ) on Tuesday January 25, 2011 @01:54PM (#34997816)

          I believe the Pirate Bay site has "flags" for trusted content and respected uploaders. Does it not?

          Of course, other trackers have them also. And checking the number of seeders/leechers helps, too. As well as having a quick look on the comments to see if someone reported nasty stuff.

          What?

          Are you saying the copy of "Matrix 4 Leaked - DVDRip", with 1 seeder, 6 negative votes, a comment saying "This is a VIRUS - don't download", a file size of 30MB, a file listing with a single .exe file... that this isn't legit?

          I don't believe it, but I guess I'll find out after I download and EXECUTE the video file myself... now good day sir!

        • And checking the number of seeders/leechers helps, too.

          This has been the best indicator for me, particularly the seed number - people don't waste time seeding bad files.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Z00L00K ( 682162 )

        Most download sites has that - even the popular commercial sites have rankings for files.

        And it's hardly surprising that there is a lot of junk listed on Pirate Bay and similar sites too - it's there either to spread malware or to try to drive off or annoy the downloaders. You are welcome to find other reasons...

      • It can't be. From where I am watching, these boobs, asses, and orgasms look 100% real. Besides, like, there's no fake stuff anywhere in my modern life, there's just too much government, inspection, lawyers, insurance and all that. The movies are not fake, the acting is not fake, the stories are not fake, the news is not fake, the point of profit and money is not fake, the mission statement of my company is not fake, my job is not fake, the reason I get up to work everyday is not fake, the food I eat is n
    • Same ratio as /. comments. Posts like "In Soviet Russia .." and "IANAL but ..." are now automated by scripts.

  • I suggest (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Dunbal ( 464142 ) * on Tuesday January 25, 2011 @12:35PM (#34996506)

    Considering that I have not once downloaded a fake on TBP in the past 10 years or so that I have been using it, I think that either the "researcher" is fiddling with the numbers or has no idea how to download something.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by godrik ( 1287354 )

      on tpb, there is a tag that tells if the uploader is an official tpb member. That helps a lot in my choice.
      You can also check the seed,leech numbers. Thousands of seeders and thousand of leecher are likely to be a valid torrents.

      • the very fact that we spend time and effort to pick through the files choosing which one we want shows there is a lot of crap you will download, if you are not careful. there is no expectation that the first one or any one is authentic, good, complete, etc.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by eln ( 21727 )
      For sites like these, the more important statistic is how much of a chance I have of searching for some random thing and hitting a fake in the first two or three results. In my experience, anything you search for that's even remotely popular will have at least two high-quality torrents with plenty of seeders available. The fakes are all pushed to the bottom because nobody seeds them.

    • Re:I suggest (Score:5, Insightful)

      by IamTheRealMike ( 537420 ) on Tuesday January 25, 2011 @12:44PM (#34996682)

      Or you got a bot on your machine and you don't know it.

      I saw an interesting talk on security/malware once. It had some screenshots of one of the top downloads from TPB (a Photoshop keygen or something). There were hundreds of comments saying it was clean, that the uploader was trusted etc. At time of release no virus scanners flagged it. In fact it uploaded all the passwords it could find on your computer to a machine in China and then generated a Photoshop key.

      I walked away from that talk with the powerful impression that if you trust crap you get off piracy sites, you're asking to be owned.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Dunbal ( 464142 ) *

        Which is why I dual boot my machine, backup my windows to a folder via linux from time to time, and wipe the OS completely every couple months or so. When I reinstall programs I do it selectively, so not everything is installed every time I install my OS.

        If there's ever a bot on my machine, it's not there for very long.

        • Re:I suggest (Score:4, Informative)

          by localman57 ( 1340533 ) on Tuesday January 25, 2011 @12:59PM (#34996970)
          They don't have to be there long... only as long as it takes to type in a password or credit card number. My advice is to use multiple VMs, running linux. One for your naughty activities, and one for your trusted activities. Only use the trusted VM to do banking or personal information related stuff, only accessing trusted sites. And, as you say, wipe it periodically, potentially as often as every use.

          • In fact if you were to do that, you could use snapshots with your VMs to make it even easier. With your trusted VM after each use or every few uses roll it back to the known clean snapshot and you can make new snapshots after important security patches.

            And for your VM for naughty activities you could just roll it back to the base snapshot every once in a while to ensure it hasn't been compromised.

            • Yeah. the only issue with rollbacks is that you also want to get security patches. So, you ocasionally go back to your clean copy, install patches (only, no surfing!) then make that your new clean copy. If you're really paranoid, use the on-screen mouse driven keyboard to enter your passwords/credit card #'s on the trusted machine; This would defeat any keystroke loggers which had managed to infect your host machine.

            • Re: (Score:3)

              by mlts ( 1038732 ) *

              I'd add four things to using a VM for untrusted stuff:

              1: Roll back the VM, back it up if you so choose, then run Windows/Microsoft update and update the other programs at least monthly. Then back up the .vmdk files again.

              2: Buy a copy of sandboxie for the VM. This way, the malicious software would have to get through that before being able to use kernel level abilities in case there is a 0-day to allow malware to get out past the hypervisor.

              3: Run the potentially nasty stuff as a user with no admin rig

      • Well, if all of that failed, you're probably not going to be safe regardless of the website you visit. In addition to viewing the amount of seeders/leechers and reading the comments, you could always just download from a trusted account.

      • Woah now - there's a difference between a fake and Malware.

        Essentially, a photoshop keygen that works while stealing your password isn't a fake, even though its malware.

        Poster might very well have a bot on his machine - but he still hasn't come across any fakes.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by nomadic ( 141991 )
          Yeah, it did what it promised to do; gave you a photoshop key. And it didn't say it WOULDN'T steal your passwords, right?

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by EdIII ( 1114411 )

        I'm surprised that it was only a third. I have used a throw away computer isolated from network to mess around with Kazaa, Shareaza, Limewire, TPB, etc. My computer was a diseased smoking husk in about two weeks. I would not trust a music MP3 from those distribution channels, much less a keygen.

        That's just it too. You can trust the piracy groups themselves that make the cracks and "publish" their releases, since they are in it for their principles (whether you agree with them or not). You can't trust t

        • I would not trust a music MP3 from those distribution channels

          I'm just asking because I don't know, but can .mp3s contain a virus? How does that work?

      • For executables, sure. But for movies and music, no dice.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Ltap ( 1572175 )
        This is why it's generally a bad idea to trust keygens. Both keygens and game cracks are small enough to be easily distributed and are executable files, so they're easy to sneeak viruses into. As well, many AV companies unhelpfully flag legitimate cracks as infected on the publishers' request. The best approach is to rely on mounted ISOs as much as possible and to use serials (you can't infect plaintext) rather than keygens.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Kjella ( 173770 )

      Considering that I have not once downloaded a fake on TBP in the past 10 years or so that I have been using it, I think that either the "researcher" is fiddling with the numbers or has no idea how to download something.

      That, and the fact that including any URL anywhere is a sign of "financial profit". Who cares if it's called "Some.Popular.TV.Show.S02E23.x264-L4M3.[btjunkies.com].torrent"? As long as they deliver who cares? And particularly trying to lump those together with the relatively few that try propagating malware - for example unheard of in movies, tv, music and a bunch of other categories. Yes, downloading random executables off the Internet is still a bad idea but not hardly as big a problem as this makes it so

    • The fakes are rarely reseeded, so that makes their seed numbers and thus their ranking in search results lower. You might as well conclude the majority of pages indexed on google are spam, fake or malicious, which is probably also true, but they are usually low ranked.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by putch ( 469506 )

      The methodology says that they monitored for new torrents via rss and immediately scraped the .torrents and processed the files. And, if you've ever tracked a category on TPB via RSS you'll know that there's a TON of spam that constantly comes in and is usually flagged for deletion and removed fairly promptly. So, really, it's more appropriate to say that a third of all .torrents uploaded to BT portals are fake.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Luckyo ( 1726890 )

      Indeed. The easiest way is to search for something, and then sort by amount of seeders.

      Essentially every single torrent that is posted by a registered user and has decent amount of seeds is a real thing.

    • I agree that true "fake content" is rare, but the researchers never define the term, so it could mean any of:

      • real content with extra malware (e.g., actual Adobe Photoshop with malware in the crack)
      • real content with unremovable malware (e.g., patched Adobe Photoshop that contains malware)
      • fake seeders (e.g., seeders == 1, leechers == 10, availability == 1.996, and no one ever finishes)
      • mislabeled content (e.g., torrent claims HD content when it isn't)
      • broken content (e.g., RAR file is corrupt)

      All those are com

    • Does the researcher take into account the metric asston of dead torrents with zero seeders? What about torrents that are being downloaded and actually seeded to some degree, are they still highly faked?

      Fake stuff gets deleted from peoples systems once they realise it's BS, it doesn't get left seeding, therefore it just could not possibly have thousands of seeders as some torrents apparently do.

      While the MPAA and others undoubtedly spam the portals with enormous quantities fake torrents, but they very

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by mcgrew ( 92797 ) *

      It depends on what you're trying to download and what you consider a "fake". There was a really good short nature piece on YouTube named "the bear" that I wanted a higher resolution, permanent copy of that I looked on BT for, but there was an apparently more popular (and I couldn't figure out why) flick with the same name.

      I tried for a couple of month to get a real copy of the last episode of Voyager (I hadn't seen it; the local station that carried it switched networks in the olast season). BT was full of

  • The point.. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by minorproblem ( 891991 ) on Tuesday January 25, 2011 @12:35PM (#34996512)

    One of the biggest benefits of torrents is that the fake crap gets weeded out quickly and the real torrents rise to the top with a high number of seeders. So it doesn't matter if its fake because it dies off quicker, than normal as people stop uploading it.

  • So I get sued for downloading a fake file can I be (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Joe The Dragon ( 967727 ) on Tuesday January 25, 2011 @12:36PM (#34996532)

    So I get sued for downloading / uploading a fake file can I beat it based on that they are calming that I downloading / uploading the real file?

    Is this like that professor sued for haveing a mp3 file in name only?

    • So I get sued for downloading / uploading a fake file can I beat it based on that they are calming that I downloading / uploading the real file?

      I am betting "No" - unless you are willing to submit to an independent forensic examination of all your storage media. The fake file is, after all, an admission that you were looking for the real one, and, quite probably, others as well.

      The uploader/downloader is the guy who tried to eat one potato chip. What the plaintiff wants is the whole bag.

      • I am betting "No" - unless you are willing to submit to an independent forensic examination of all your storage media. The fake file is, after all, an admission that you were looking for the real one

        But looking for the real file isn't a crime. Sharing the real file is the crime, and if you never got it you couldn't share it. Obviously, if there are other copyrighted files that you were actually sharing, and they can prove it, then you may still have a problem.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Jonner ( 189691 )

      ??AA attack dogs may be many things, but seldom are they calm.

  • Don't have a problem (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Enderandrew ( 866215 ) <enderandrew&gmail,com> on Tuesday January 25, 2011 @12:37PM (#34996536) Homepage Journal

    Ultimately I don't have a problem with leaking fakes, so long as you're not intentionally trying to distribute viruses or anything like that.

    Apparently Batman: Arkham Asylum had a leaked version that was basically a demo. There was a level you couldn't get past because of an intentionally crippled feature. When people were screaming and complaining about a "bug" in the product they purchased on the support forums, they were informed that "bug" was only present in an intentionally leaked version on torrent sites. They knew people were going to pirate their game, and they tried to get in front of it and turn it into a scenario where the pirated copy did act as a demo, perhaps convincing people to pay for the real thing.

    But the bigger issue is that game studios, music companies and Hollywood still haven't seen the bigger picture.

    It is to your benefit to pirate rather than deal with DRM nightmares. And corporate America is more focused on punishing their customers than trying to attract new ones.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Dunbal ( 464142 ) *

      perhaps convincing people to pay for the real thing.

      Considering the deafening quiet I would venture to guess that this strategy did not work. Furthermore it goes a long way towards defeating the "every pirated copy is a lost sale" excuse that is used to claim ridiculous damages.

    • Re:Don't have a problem (Score:4, Interesting)

      by The MAZZTer ( 911996 ) <megazzt.gmail@com> on Tuesday January 25, 2011 @01:01PM (#34997006) Homepage
      I find it amusing people go to official channels for support for their pirated products.
    • So you're suggesting that the movie studios intentionally leak copies of their movies that when it gets to the "good part" suddenly cut off the audio and/or video? Hmm... that does sound perfectly legal and even moral. The question is, would it increase movie sales?

      • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

        by WeatherServo9 ( 1393327 )

        when it gets to the "good part" suddenly cut off the audio and/or video?

        Ah, so most movies play all the way through with no problems then!

      • So you're suggesting that the movie studios intentionally leak copies of their movies that when it gets to the "good part" suddenly cut off the audio and/or video? Hmm... that does sound perfectly legal and even moral. The question is, would it increase movie sales?

        Not sure - I remember hearing about the Barenaked Ladies releasing a torrent of one of their songs that stopped mid-verse, followed by them telling you to go buy the album. Couldn't tell you if it helped or not (although the fact that they sell memory sticks with their live concerts says they're not afraid of the Big Bad Net.)

      • So you're suggesting that the movie studios intentionally leak copies of their movies that when it gets to the "good part" suddenly cut off the audio and/or video?

        This certainly explains "The Crying Game"...

    • It is to your benefit to pirate rather than deal with DRM nightmares. And corporate America is more focused on punishing their customers than trying to attract new ones

      About 20% of the Blue Ray disks I get from Netflix don't work on my PC because of DRM. Not much better then pirated files. In fact TPB is what I use to so that I can still watch the movie I paid Netflix for.

    • I love that story - they got all the benefits of the demo, with none of the downsides of DRM, while avoiding the problems of day-1 cracks (my understanding is that since the game didn't do the "legit" check until later in the game, crackers either had more trouble finding it or didn't think to look in the first place - since the game "worked", after all).

      I really should have picked up a copy of that game as a show of support. (No, I didn't pirate it - I'm just not a big Batman fan.)

  • Not just bittorrent - alt.binaries too (Score:5, Insightful)

    by jaymz2k4 ( 790806 ) <jaymz.jaymz@eu> on Tuesday January 25, 2011 @12:39PM (#34996596) Homepage
    I've become so used to the alt.binaries being polluted with either passworded inner-rars or corrupt/scrambled files that I'm now used to just grabbing the first couple of rar's and extracting them just to make sure. I'm not too surprised to hear this. What does surprise me a little is the amount of people that continue seeding this crap on BT. Do they not open the damn files as they come down? If only for a cursory glance to confirm.

    • Do they not open the damn files as they come down? If only for a cursory glance to confirm.

      It would appear not. Some people are actually "document" hoarders (for varying definitions of "document"). They want a copy of everything even if they aren't going to use it immediately, or ever. Even "trusted" torrents are often bogus. I think this might be a weak attempt to prevent piracy, which of course, doesn't work that well. After all, the price for a "document" is the same if you have to download one vers

    • Do they not open the damn files as they come down? If only for a cursory glance to confirm.

      I had a room mate who was obsessed with downloading everything and burning it to DVD. He literally had hundreds of burned DVDs in his closet on spindles. There's absolutely no way he had time to consume that much media, but he seeded it back while he slept and worked before burning it to dvd. Even if he opened the archive to look at the filenames, who's to say he actually watched and or listened to each file to ver

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

      I've become so used to the alt.binaries being polluted with either passworded inner-rars or corrupt/scrambled files that I'm now used to just grabbing the first couple of rar's and extracting them just to make sure. I'm not too surprised to hear this. What does surprise me a little is the amount of people that continue seeding this crap on BT. Do they not open the damn files as they come down? If only for a cursory glance to confirm.

      Not only that, but all the fake EXE files used to spread viruses and trojan

    • The biggest problem I have on alt.binaries is downloading a completely non-fake movie... only to find that it has been dubbed in German and doesn't include the original soundtrack.

      Most of the problems like these are easily avoided though: just buy the legit version! I pay for my software, and I pay for my music as well, since these days there is plenty of music online, for the right price, without DRM that needs to phone home, and with the ability to play on the device of my choice.

      The reason I still

    • I've become so used to the alt.binaries being polluted with either passworded inner-rars or corrupt/scrambled files that I'm now used to just grabbing the first couple of rar's and extracting them just to make sure.

      Most decent nzb indexers include flags for if there's passwords, or exe's inside.

  • Publishers of fake content include antipiracy groups

    So, if someboy sues those publishers then they have to show to the judge that they have "written permission to distribute, post, or copy" every and each of the files they're using to polute the sharing ecosystem? Because gay porn companies can get millions for inapropiate use of their films ;)
  • ...Isohunt.com because they have a section for reviews and comments. I know the others do as well, but I've had great luck with them and for many years. I would like to see a similar study done on Usenet because unless its a movie, I can rarely get quality downloads. Even then, I have to par those things to fix the broken files.

    • I see complaints about the quality of stuff on usenet with some frequency. I agree that there's a lot of noise hiding the signal. But the complaints about unreliable transfers are something I don't understand. I've downloaded hundreds of things over the last few years and I no longer even have a program on my computer to handle PAR files. I'm able to successfully unRAR everything I download. I take a quick look at things and if there's obviously parts missing, I don't bother. But that's very, very rar

      • I use newshosting.com...what do you suggest? My client is NewsLeecher. I like that one because it PARs and extracts all in one fell-swoop. I'd just as soon not use Torrents because it's easier to detect so if I can find a reliable Usenet then that's one step closer.

  • I sincerly hope (Score:5, Informative)

    by Haedrian ( 1676506 ) on Tuesday January 25, 2011 @12:44PM (#34996690)

    That this research didn't involve taking a random sample, and working out that 1/3rd is fake.

    The strength of Bittorrent is that if there are:

    1. Low seeds
    2. Bad comments

    Then its fake.

    If you have a file with a few thousand seeders, then you can be sure that its real. Nobody is going to continue to seed a fake/virus ridden file unless its on purpose - but that requires a ton of resources.

    And most admins will take down any files reported in that manner.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by savanik ( 1090193 )

      If you have a file with a few thousand seeders, then you can be sure that its real.

      Or it's actually malware propagating through BitTorrent. I've seen a number of torrents with tens of thousands of seeders on relatively small files, usually with something like 'SEXSEXSEX' in the titles - those are zombie botnets.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by MrNemesis ( 587188 )

      Anecdotal, but this isn't my experience. I was trying to find a copy of Four Lions (easily the best comedy about suicide bombers from 2010) to clarify a scene that I'd remembered one way and a fellow TV Troper had remembered another; the DVD wasn't yet out and it was no longer on in the cinema (and in case you were wondering I paid money for both) and was delighted to find torrent sites awash with copies of the film, some with upwards of a hundred seeds. Yay! Downloaded the torrent and it started coming dow

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by VShael ( 62735 )

      Actually, even on The Pirate Bay, a fake torrent can get listed with thousands of seeders.

      The thing is, the company the MPAA are outsourcing this pirate hunt to, aren't the brightest.

      They'll create torrents for Iron Man 3, or The Walking Dead episode 1x07 or something.

      And they'll create a dozen torrents with thousands of seeders each, in under 10 minutes.

      It's really really not difficult to avoid fakes.

      And yeah, anyone who downloads software from a Torrent site, is asking to be owned.

  • Ironically... (Score:4, Funny)

    by Damek ( 515688 ) <adam&damek,org> on Tuesday January 25, 2011 @12:50PM (#34996804) Homepage

    Ironically, it's the two-thirds of US users without fast broadband [slashdot.org] who are responsible for supplying the two-thirds non-fake content. It's a tough job...

  • Not Only (Score:3)

    by DaMattster ( 977781 ) on Tuesday January 25, 2011 @12:51PM (#34996828)
    are they fake but most of the files advertising pirated software or movies are actually viruses and other malware.

  • That's actually a question I've had (Score:5, Interesting)

    by jollyreaper ( 513215 ) on Tuesday January 25, 2011 @12:53PM (#34996872)

    I can understand someone creating spam pages for popular search terms but I've never understood quite how they manage to come up with really obscure shit, like if I type in "three inch frange demodulator" and there's the first hit proudly declaring "Internet's leader for three inch frange demodulators!" I just made that term up two seconds ago. How do they get that cached into google? A few years back they were doing that with porn text and it would be "'Harder!' she cried, and I thrust my three inch frange demodulator deep inside." I have two questions: how did they do that and is it even doing anything useful for them? Surely they couldn't generate real ad revenue off of banner cruft on that sort of page, right?

    I'm not sure of the utility of the torrent spams, either. I know never to download video files that are compressed archives because it's just going to be a scam to get you to sign up for something or pay to get the password but those are few and far between. Pirate Bay and kickasstorrents are usually pretty good. It's the other oddball sites that don't even have the damn file you're looking for but give you a dozen "sponsored links" that pretend like they do and don't. Do they live off of money made from drive-by malware?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Kjella ( 173770 )

      I can understand someone creating spam pages for popular search terms but I've never understood quite how they manage to come up with really obscure shit, like if I type in "three inch frange demodulator" and there's the first hit proudly declaring "Internet's leader for three inch frange demodulators!" I just made that term up two seconds ago. How do they get that cached into google?

      Well I don't know how they get them on google, but on P2P it's trivial as you just parse the request and return a fake result using the "Unreleased [search] pics.zip". Same with any "warez search" where they control the search engine and just send you link-chasing through 5 pages of ads before finally hitting a paywall. I don't really understand what you're on about about google though, because if I search for "three inch frange demodulator" the closest it came up with was "Ecoplus 4 inch Flange Kit" and a

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  • If anything, I'd expect more then a third of the torrents to be fake. I'd also bet that if you weighted the torrents by completed downloads, you'd get more like 1% 'fake', maybe more like 2-3% if you include things that are real but include a virus.

  • hmm (Score:2, Offtopic)

    by nomadic ( 141991 )
    I've never gotten a fake or malware-infected file; oh wait, I actually pay for the software, music, and movies that I want to watch. Maybe that's why.

  • mininova? (Score:3)

    by ampathee ( 682788 ) on Tuesday January 25, 2011 @01:14PM (#34997170)

    Mininova has been legal "content-distribution" only for a long time. How old is this research?

  • Apparently, fakes are one of the very few things against TPB policy.

    From http://thepiratebay.org/about [thepiratebay.org] :

    "The Pirate Bay only removes torrents if the name isn't in accordance with the content. One must know what is being downloaded. (accordance with the content also means any torrents which description is made to match a certain search phrase that is not relevant will also be deleted)"

    http://thepiratebay.org/policy [thepiratebay.org] also tries to preclude commercial interference with TPB; the about page obliquely refers to an

  • Fakes have never been my problem with TPB - rare stuff that doesn't get seeded all the way is a far more common and thus far more frustrating problem.

    Once I unknowingly uploaded a file that was corrupted, the comments pointed this out, and I then actually bothered to fix, reupload and reseed.

    As with many other computer-tech issues, it's a PEBKAC problem. :)

  • Don't most torrent sites have rating systems or comments? Don't most downloaders actually check the rating before downloading? Sure, anybody can post a file, but it only takes one downloader to notice that it's crap and alert all the others. The torrents actually downloaded by users are seldom fake. Of course, this report is probably FUD by rights holders in the first place.
  • over here [lelanthran.com] - whats the odds that their data matches mine? :-)

  • So what if they're fake? The fake ones don't have any seeders, and have comments like "WTF fake!!!" on them. They are easily identifiable and easily ignored.

  • It's very easy to browse the comments and see which are fake and which are not. People only download the real ones. How about look at seeder/leecher total numbers for fake files vs real ones?

  • or was there another reason why people stopped using it a couple of years ago? (I forgot) I'm not sure where these guys got the idea that it's a "major bittorrent portal", it hasn't been for a long time..

  • The only "fake" I can recall getting from TPB was one time I downloaded Spiderman 3, and towards the end where there's the fight scene with Venom in the skyscraper frame, someone from an animal rights group had edited over the "breaking news" portion with a really bizarre "meat is murder" clip that went on for about 1 minute, showing cows and pigs being tortured and slaughtered. I wasn't even mad thought, it was so trippy, the whole "wtf just happened??" moment was more entertaining than what was happening

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