Apple Helped FBI Identify Alleged Owner of World's Largest Torrent Site

[rasputin1969]

So the chain of events looks like?

a) The FBI request that facebook hand over the IP address, and other details of the client updating the facebook page.
b) Facebook complies with the request by only providing the IP address.
c) The FBI then contact a multitude of online service providers (MS, Google etc) and request details of any client using the same IP address on the same day.
d) Apple responds with the icloud details of a user.

 

[cancel]

the moral is: holding a torrent site - use goddamn linux and forget about any first world luxuries like iTunes and Facebook

 

[8692574]

Not what you would expect form

 

[webbuzz]

So the chain of events looks like?

a) The FBI request that facebook hand over the IP address, and other details of the client updating the facebook page.
b) Facebook complies with the request by only providing the IP address.
c) The FBI then contact a multitude of online service providers (MS, Google etc) and request details of any client using the same IP address on the same day.
d) Apple responds with the icloud details of a user.

Along with records from:

GoDaddy
Several other hosting providers
Bitcoin
Banks

All with a court order.

 

[thewitt]

Maybe Artem Vaulin doesn't have an iPhone. He's therefore not an Apple customer.

EDIT: Ahhh, but he does buy on iTunes. He is an Apple customer!

Buys a copy from iTunes and then makes money - millions - thru his torrent site giving away software, books and music he does not have the right to distribute.

Why do you guys always defend thieves? I don't get it.

 

[keysofanxiety]

the moral is: holding a torrent site - use goddamn linux and forget about any first world luxuries like iTunes and Facebook

That's right. Though let's not forget that a lot of the larger torrent site owners rake in the revenue from advertising. So although the people who upload to and download from torrent sites can't really get in much trouble, a few people at the top aren't exactly the Robin Hood-type heroes we'd like to think of them as.

That said, a lot of the judges really don't know their backside from their elbow about this whole thing, and ThePirateBay court fiasco with inconclusive evidence and leaps of judgement rubbed a lot of people the wrong way.

 

[Tobias Funke]

The world is on fire, and the FBI is chasing torrent users...

Chasing his money.

 

[Glassed Silver]

What makes you think Apple provided the user information without a court order?

The report on TF depicted in great detail how it came to be, but left that out, so therefore I didn't state that "oh, they must not have gotten one!", but merely assumed they might not have gotten one.

If they did, my post even without edits is automatically rendered void of course.

Glassed Silver:mac

 

[gnasher729]

Bad Apple

Wait a second... There's a criminal, making millions and millions from peddling illegal copies of movies, and you blame Apple for helping to catch him? That's the same as a shop identifying the guy who purchased a knife that was used in a murder the next day.

 

[Ploki]

I really don't like how cyber law enforcement has become only about sheer brute force and trying to get info from companies. At least you needed some skills back in the days.

 

[gnasher729]

Apple values its customers' right to privacy and will not hand over personal details to the FBI and will contest it in court.... (unless you dare to compete with iTunes)

I think you have a strange idea what privacy means.

Apple is a snitch.

Here's what I was told by a (small scale) criminal: If anyone tells you not to snitch, or calls you a snitch, then you know that is the first guy who will snitch on you if it gives them the smallest advantage.

I thought apple cares about customers when they didn't give finger ID to FBI, but looks like apple selects who they want to protect. DON'T TRUST APPLE ANYMORE

Apple cares about customers who haven't committed any crimes. They do that by making sure that nobody can hack into your phone. And Apple says (correctly) that if Apple itself could hack into your phone, then there would be a chance that criminals could do the same. As a consequence, protecting customers who have done nothing wrong has the side effect of protecting criminals as well.

This situation is different. When you make purchases on the iTunes store, Apple knows the credit card, what purchases you made and so on. That's information that Apple needs to do business with people. They need to credit card to charge for purchases. They need to know the purchases so you can restore purchases. And so on. Apple protects this information from being accessed by hackers. There is no reason whatsoever to protect this information if the police comes with a reasonable search warrant. Your right to privacy doesn't include a right to commit crimes without being detected.

They asked Apple to open an iPhone running iOS 7 too which they are fully capable of doing since they hold the encryption keys for iOS 7 and down. Apple refused.

https://www.macrumors.com/2016/04/15/apple-fbi-new-york-iphone-appeal/

This is old information, but you are completely misrepresenting here what happened.

 

[webbuzz]

The report on TF depicted in great detail how it came to be, but left that out, so therefore I didn't state that "oh, they must not have gotten one!", but merely assumed they might not have gotten one.

If they did, my post even without edits is automatically rendered void of course.

Glassed Silver:mac

I am fairly confident they complied with a court order, as did the other providers mentioned in the complaint. Once the case is unsealed, those details will be available on PACER, and hopefully soon.

 

[unplugme71]

Making that much revenue, you could easily create a very large almost self healing mesh network of servers globally that sync torrent files using hash checks and having 15k domain names that all lead to the same thing.

It would take a long time to shut all this down.

 

[S3R6i0]

Wasn't it Apple that encouraged piracy in the first place with services like iTunes Match and album artwork matching? They don't exactly have a history of DRM (Digital Rights Management).

 

[deusx]

Wait a second... There's a criminal, making millions and millions from peddling illegal copies of movies, and you blame Apple for helping to catch him? That's the same as a shop identifying the guy who purchased a knife that was used in a murder the next day.

One question my friend (and food for thought): How does he make all these millions?? Are all these people downloading torrents from his site queuing up to give him cash?

Would it not make more sense to try and stop the one making his job profitable? Just saying.

 

[haruhiko]

I think you have a strange idea what privacy means.



Here's what I was told by a (small scale) criminal: If anyone tells you not to snitch, or calls you a snitch, then you know that is the first guy who will snitch on you if it gives them the smallest advantage.

I think you have a strange idea what (j/k) means.

 

[fitshaced]

Wait a second... There's a criminal, making millions and millions from peddling illegal copies of movies, and you blame Apple for helping to catch him? That's the same as a shop identifying the guy who purchased a knife that was used in a murder the next day.

No it isn't. But, just to explain, I wrote my post as I wanted to use the phrase 'Bad Apple'. I couldn't care either way if this was a good or bad move. It means nothing to me. But, these discussions tend to be very imbalanced so think my effort is warranted.

 

[AntonLee]

Apple is a snitch.

This. MUH IP!

Time to stop allowing our justice department to push for arrests over the globe over petty crap like this.

 

[sshambles]

Here's a pretty detailed account of following the advertising money trail.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-07-21/how-the-us-government-brought-down-kickass-torrents/7649862

 

[S3R6i0]

I don't understand why the sites just don't get removed from Google search if it's illegal. In fact can't they shut the whole website down..?

Because Google owns YouTube and I remember sites like YouTube one day raise a stink against DRM because lot of their content relied on sharing. Although YouTube has recently been cracking down on this type of activity but I'm pretty sure if Google could do what you're saying they would have already.

 

[gnasher729]

So, they matched the IP address from a facebook post and an iTunes transaction. Probably this IP is dynamic so it will be a bit harder to prove that both times it was used by the same person. ISP should get involved, along with Apple, and Facebook.

And please, don't kid yourselves. If google wanted they could wipe the results from such sites, but why should they do so ? Ads from high-traffic sites are their main revenue. They've built an empire out of it.

The matching IP is likely not evidence of any wrongdoing, but evidence that leads the police to finding out who the person is. Imagine the police finding an empty pizza box at a murder scene, and then going to the pizza shop and finding who they delivered pizzas to. The idea is to find the person. In this case, once they found the guy, the rest was likely easy. If by unlucky coincidence the dynamic IP had been reassigned to you, then the police would have appeared at your doorstep and figured out that you have nothing to do with torrenting.

 

[jimbobb24]

It was either this or when they got the court order. Apple still has to follow the law.

 

[joueboy]

Because this company is now ran by a politically correct clown who likes to be in media as much as he could. Apparently this torrent guy is not news worthy to the majority of the public. And those numbers are overly exaggerated.

 

[Ashwin Campbell]

Apple values its customers' right to privacy and will not hand over personal details to the FBI and will contest it in court.... (unless you dare to compete with iTunes)

(j/k)

Competition? Theft is not competition no matter what the product is. Just pay the money and don't use these torrent sites and you won't have to worry about it.

 

[Lycanthrope]

Yeah but, torrents aren't illegal. Illegal torrents are illegal, you know, sharing work with copyright on them/pirating stuff, but torrents themselves aren't illegal.

Anyway, you know the drill by now. 1 goes down, another 50 pop up. It's a lost battle before it even started. Companies should look at why their stuff gets torrented (no, it's not just "because its free yo"), then start looking at ways to reduce the pirating. Especially TV series that don't get a world-wide same-day release are popular on these sides, because people don't want to wait just because they live somewhere else (same with DVD regions which are just retarded).

This...

Although I pay a Netflix subscription, they choose not to release PLL S07 yet in this part of the world, so I go find it for my daughter. Same thing with Formula 1 - British TV stopped showing all races, so I got find them instead.

Then there's films - I think buying a good quality 1080p film in .mkv for €5 would be a reasonable transaction, but overall they seem more expensive the the BR physical copies.

Overpriced and restricted.

And don't get me started on eBooks being more expensive than the printed...