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this post was submitted on 01 May 2024
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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ
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Torrent on public access wifi from McDonald's, the local library, your neighbor's unsecured router, etc...
“I’m going to offload my need to be technically literate in order to pirate to my local library and let them deal with the problem because I’m an entitled asshole who shits where I eat and doesn’t realize I’ll get in trouble anyway.”
If you think that will protect you, there is a lot for you to learn..
Pray tell how they would find the user from an IP address that will resolve to a location other than where they live that they connect to anonymously?
I think McDonald's makes you make an account these days to use their WiFi, I could be wrong, however. This means you now have identifying information about you and your connection on McDonald's servers, which can be subpoenaed in an investigation.
Local libraries generally require you to have a Libary Card, which is associated with your library login. Because lots of people need library computers, they need to be able to get people to leave the computer without having to physically remove them. One of those ways is with tracking who is connecting by associating their account with a library card and disconnecting them automatically after a period of time. Your library usually wants you to live (or at least exist in) the neighborhood, and will have your name and address on file. This can also be subpoenaed in an investigation.
MAC address spoofing is trivial, sure, but a lot of folks don't know to do it, and in any one of these cases, if they used the MAC address that was burned in when the product was sold, they have a real opportunity to nail down which specific device connected. They would subpoena the manufacturer for records of where that device was sold, they would subpoena the records of the local retail outlet, and have information on the sale of the device used to connect.
In your neighbors case, you could just be condemning them to civil or criminal liabilities, depending on the laws in your jurisdiction. That's a pretty "not nice" thing to do.
I'm sure there's plenty of others. Those are just off the top of my head. Most of the reasons involve "companies keeping information about who uses their services and how," often called "logs."
There's a lot more information than just an IP being sent in a TCP packet.
To be clear, I'm not the person you were responding to originally and I think OP is fine if piracy is legal where they live, you just asked how it would be possible and so I tried to think of ways related to the suggestions you made. Cheers.
What if my neighbor is an asshole who deserves it tho? :p
lol ya got me
A lot of businesses and libraries block the ports needed to torrent or do much of anything beyond basic web access. Some places, especially libraries, will also have web filters in place to further complicate access to torrent sources. Even if by chance you could find a place that has those ports open and can get past the filters, as others have said, it is still possible for them to have enough information to identify you.