Homeland Sec., RIAA Torrent lists published

YouHaveDownloaded.com is a gift that keeps on giving

When the online tool YouHaveDownloaded.com jumped onto the hit parade last week, most people reacted with a kind of cautious paranoia, wondering how much of their BitTorrent use was easily discoverable.

That is, after all, what the site is ostensibly about: using the IP addresses published by BitTorrent users (and the files they’re offering) to collate who is doing what on BitTorrent.

The tool, however, is quickly becoming a source of embarrassment to non-individuals, with TorrentFreak and its friends using the site to expose Torrent usage among organisations like Sony, Universal and Fox.

But its tastiest discovery to date came over the weekend, with TorrentFreak announcing that it’s also turned up BitTorrent users behind the IP addresses of the RIAA and the Department of Homeland Security.

“After carefully checking all the IP addresses of the RIAA,” TorrentFreak writes, “we found 6 unique addresses where copyright material was shared.” This, the site claims, included the first five seasons of Dexter, an episode of Law and Order, and a pirated audio converter and MP3 tagger.

The harvest from Homeland Security was even more bountiful, with TorrentFreak claiming that more than 900 IP addresses belonging to the department and through which at least some of its 200,000-plus employees are running Torrents. ®