Trading popular files on BitTorrent? You'll be spotted within 3 hours
arstechnica.com
Users who participate in BitTorrent swarms for popular files are likely to have their IP addresses logged by monitoring companies within three hours. That's the conclusion of a paper being presented this week at the SecureComm conference in Italy by Tom Chothia and colleagues at the University of Birmingham.
To arrive at this conclusion, the researchers observed "1,033 swarms across 421 trackers for 36 days over 2 years." They reported that "monitoring is prevalent for popular content (i.e., the most popular torrents on The Pirate Bay) but absent for less popular content."