See What You Have Used BitTorrent on This Site
If you and your roommates are completely new to BitTorrent, or you’ve downloaded enough Linux distributions, open source movies, and concert recordings to get your ISP very interested in your monthly data cap, there is a great tool you should use to get your check how public your BitTorrent activity actually is.
Why is it important? Confidentiality, of course. There is no reason why you should associate your IP address or any other identifiable piece of information with your downloads and uploads. No one but you should know what interests you, which is why it is highly recommended that you use at least a secure and reliable VPN whenever you use BitTorrent to download and upload files. (And even better, an advanced approach using a seed box to download files over BitTorrent, which you then download over a private and secure connection.)
This is why I love the site iknowwhatyoudownload.com . That’s a great name too, because that’s exactly what you’ll get when you load the page. You will see your current external IP address listed at the top, followed by any BitTorrent downloads that were associated with that IP address below.
I haven’t been to BitTorrenting myself, but other Comcast users using the same local hub were probably busy:
As for how the said unspeakably long title gets its information about your download:
“Our system collects torrent files in two ways: analyzing torrent sites and listening to the DHT network. We have over 1.500.000 torrents that have been classified and are now being used to collect peer-to-peer facts (up to 200.000.000 per day). We do not guarantee that we will be able to show ALL peer-to-peer facts:
- One IP address can be assigned to multiple users. It depends on the internet provider of the user. For example, mobile operators have often used this scheme.
- The IP address can be dynamic. In this case, it changes every time the user connects to the Internet or periodically.
- The user could download a torrent, which we do not have “
Aside from looking at the IP address of my house – which is fascinating in itself – you can also click any kind of media that appears on the listed lists to see how popular it is among all monitored peers and seeds. You can also see what people from all over the world usually download. Sadly, this is probably not much free legal content:
However, the most useful information on this site remains the IP-related logs. If you live alone, this is probably not the most useful piece of information unless you want to triple check if your BitTorrent installation is correctly hiding your identity for everything you download. However, if you’re sharing space with others, it could be a great start to the inevitable: “Could you please stop downloading illegal content so our ISP doesn’t download us offline, thank you,” a conversation in which all roommates. loved ones and friends collide at some point.
And hey, if they refuse to change their behavior, you can always start their downloads. Shame is a new concern.