Today I wanted to compose a more technical article on one of the subjects which I take a lot of pride in anonymity.
Pirating
Pirating is ‘unfortunately’ a very prominent and popular term in our modern society. Everybody (or almost) everybody pirates, or have at the very least tried it once or twice. Regardless of this factor, it remains a worldwide dilemma, and hundreds of thousands of individuals are getting a ticket for such crime. However, like we all know, with enough skill you can evade detection from anyone. I personally don’t condone pirating since it prevents creators from receiving revenue, however I cant really stop you.
Understanding the Process
In order to first and foremost evade that ticket from a lawyer who’s obtained your IP address from your ISP (most likely) you’ll first need to understand how they catch individuals. i’ll break down the process of how it works when a lawyer is able to deliver a ticket to an individual who’s downloaded a piece of software illegally:
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First, your ISP is the one who provides the IP to the lawyer in the first place, which means it has to come to the lawyer’s attention that a said individual has downloaded illegally, which means you’re safe for now, unless this particular lawyer has broken the law himself in order to obtain your IP, which would make his case inadmissible.
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Second, if it’s not the lawyer’s product that’s being downloaded, why would he care? Which means the one’s who are the Sherlock Holmes in this scenario, are the film companies who go out and do the dirty work, but how?
These film companies have implemented a piece of software that can detect if it’s being opened/accessed without a type of license so to say, meaning if you haven’t bought the actual software, it’ll know that it hasnt been activated so to say, and thereby it can alert the host being the said film company that someone has now the software downloaded illegally.
What then happens is the film company seeks out the ISP of the IP address by asking the ISP to send the citizen a warning. You get this warning up to 4 or 5 times I believe until you actually get fined.
Technical Aspect
Now, in order to prevent this from happening you’ll obviously need a VPN/proxy, however if you ask me, Tor will do just fine. I presume you know how Tor works, if not then long story short, it establishes 3 hops making it more difficult for an intruder to detect your actual IP address. As far as your ISP goes, they can see that you’re accessing Tor however they wont be able to know what your’re doing. (otherwise it’d defeat the purpose really)
So, once you understand how Tor works, if not already, you then also understand why it’s possible and how its possible to refrain from receiving a fine. I am addressing this to show the importance of understanding how something works and then working around it, since that is the way forward.
