Seed complete - fake detection: failed

As you can see in the following picture, the seed has been completed. Peers can now continue distribution without me serving.



To summarize the experiment. Fake detection failed. Over 3.5 terabytes of nonsense could be distributed using a tiny uplink of 55 Kb/s within three days and some social engineering. The latter included identifying the most wanted piece of software at the time (not hard) and then making people believe in my upload's authenticity despite its dodgy encryption.

While the community work seemed promising at identifying fakes, the technical infrastructure failed miserably. Especially the torrent's automatic and unchecked redistribution has caused much harm. While sites like The Pirate Bay can't do much about the latter, it's up to the users to pay much more attention wether their favorite torrent sources are hosting first-hand or crawled content.

While it took about an hour for The Pirate Bay to remove the torrent after a link to this site appeared in their forum, it took an eternity for TorrentBox comments for a torrentbox moderator statement, and other pages are still serving it. The Pirate Bay also failed to harm distribution by not taking the torrent's tracker offline after removing it from their webpage. Distribution could have continued anyway through DHT, but this way it was even more efficient. Users, who didn't visit TPB regularly, could furthermore get the impression that everything was still fine.

The Pirate Bay could improve its service by enforcing a zero tolerance policy for cloaked content. Bittorrent allows inspection of a package's files long before a download's completion. Any irregularities wether encryption or obscure compression schemes should be banned instantly.

At the bottom line, the project has been much more insightful and extensive than I would have expected in the beginning. Read up on the whole story in the following interesting snippets:

• What is it like to be a fake uploader?
• Requisites
• Legality
• Global leeching charts
• The perfect fake Leopard torrent for The Pirate Bay
• Swarm update (all eagerly sucking zeros)
• Spinning the wheel
• Spinning the Pirates
• 300 new Leopard features and 500 new Leopard suckers
• 850 suckers and almost a terabyte of nonsense sent around the globe
• 'Fürwahrhalten' in a globalized cyberspace
• Dear Pirates
• How ranting for a just cause can cause the opposite effect
• Real Leopard Gold Master Leaked (updated)!
• Almost 300 people still downloading
• The honest jakehexum
• Pirate Bay tracker online again???
• Still new peers joining the swarm
• Robot Invasion
• More than 3.25 terabytes served