But we took the liberty to take a look on their website to see what this software is all about and really wonder why people distribute this software via bittorrent without buying it.
People, if you really work in this niche television field and if you use this software to earn your money, why not pay $179 or even only $99 (its on sale right now!)? For the package of features and tools you get, thats a fair price we guess! If you are a student, get the $30 discount or better ask your university to buy this software, we are sure the sales people at Pixel Post Studios would be happy to sell a campus licence (Arizona
State University is already a customer of them). If you are uncertain if this software really is for you, get the time limited trial version!

So the price is fair (with on-sale going on even more), student discount is available, you can get a time and not feature limited trial version, the company is small (so we are sure you will get eventual bugs fixed in time) and they even put up Tutorial Videos for the software! Why not buy it?

Really, the only drawback we see is the platform-specific registration keys, the people at Pixel Post Studios should think about that again (if you need to buy it again if you change to a different platform).

PS: No, we don’t get money or anything else from them

Update: They informed us that they provide

free key changes to people who switch platforms.

Nice.

As it seems, this really is enough for them to send out threatening letters to ISPs. While we certainly do not encourage anyone to share files they’re not supposed to, we do not feel well being missused as evidence distributors. Spoofing an IP address is not that hard and knowing that some trackers even parse IP addresses from query strings presented to them is not helpful either.

Whats worse: since bittorrents tracker protocol is based upon http, a webdot like
<img src="http://denis.stalker.h3q.com/announce?info_hash=01234567890123456789"/> on a frequently visited web site can bring an unanware internet user to announcing themself to our tracker.

So we decided to insert truely random IP addresses from known-to-be-used sub nets into all our answers. We do know that this will degrade overall performance and will cost extra traffic and connections. But we are sure that this kind of deniability, when adopted by other trackers as well, will force copy right spies to acquire hard evidence against file sharers. Spread the word.

Anyway, we appreciate this decision! We wish them the best with their own tracker and thanks for all the phish!

What happened? After some debugging and an anonymous tip we found out that the guys at torrenty.org, a large pay-torrent-site in poland, started to use our open bittorrent tracker for their torrents.

Beside the facts that we are flattered by the trust the people at torrenty.org put in our service and that we are somewhat proud how well our software works and scales for that number of requests, we can’t believe how incredibly stupid this is by the torrenty.org people.

First of all, they just changed the IP-address of their tracker “tracker.torrenty.org” to our tracker IP-address:
;; ANSWER SECTION:
tracker.torrenty.org. 1800 IN A 217.13.206.147


This means in all their torrents they still use the hostname “tracker.torrenty.org” in the HTTP header. This is easy for us to filter, just deny all request for “Host: tracker.torrenty.org” and we are all set.

The fun part is, a quick look at the torrenty.org website shows us that they in fact serve warez-torrents and take money for that. Now they provided us with a complete list of IP-addresses of their customers and an easy way to distinguish their customers from all other requests by checking the HTTP-header. If we were some kind of copyright-prosecutor, which we are totally not, now would be the time to send some letters to customers of torrenty.org. That would put them out of business relatively quick I guess, or would you like to be a customer of a warez site which provides your IP-address to copyright-prosecutor for free?

So this post goes to the people at torrenty.org and maybe all other warez-torrent people out there who think about abusing an open tracker, please stop using our tracker for your warez-business and stop putting the risk at us. We will filter requests with anything other than denis.stalker.h3q.com as a hostname anyway.

We will now implement this filtering technique in our tracker, which will take a while. And we will stop serving torrents with “Host: tracker.torrenty.org” in the HTTP header. Of course clients will continue to connect to our tracker because the DNS-record of tracker.torrenty.org will still resolve to our IP address. So hey torrenty.org, please change that DNS-record you’re wasting our bandwidth!