Re: Pick your dates better if you're going to make up a story
So, this is the early 2000's, right, and bittorrent. Ok, I'm going to call 7 kinds of BS on this.
Afraid I'm going to have to call a few bits of BS on your claims of BS..
So, in the early 00's, membership sites worked on IP, so random IP address suddenly showing up, unnusual bandwidth, nope, it'd have been investigated and locked for unusual behaviour, plus it's not like today with passcoded torrent announces.
Back then many users were still on DU, and even those on any form of household broadband still had dynamic IPs and IP changes were common. Few (especially those on 'Telecom" in NZ) could get long periods of uptime.
There was a fair amount of competition in the market in many countries with LLU and Telcos were competing for customers. One of the big offerings was to be increasing data limits, and some were going to unlimited (Europe perhaps was even ahead of the curve there, including the UK). As such, many of us were ramping up our torrenting and seeding, especially those of us who did not fear the RIAA et all. Hardware prices were coming down, speeds were going up, and having a computer doing more stuff in the background was also more feasible. I have no problems at all seeing an account starting to seed heavily.
BUT, at that point every site got a LOT more paranoid (following EliteTorrent's busting) so they'd have been even less likely to accept a random account that's been in such poor condition, suddenly pumping gigs out. flagged and locked out.
No. Not every site, just some you maybe knew of and some who were widely publicised. There were a great many membership sites that were a lot more quiet (in visibility, not in membership ;) ) and also many were outside the reach of the US companies and their abuse of the law.
And that makes it even more likely when he uses XPSP3 as an excuse, because that came out in 08.
Can't argue with that (though maybe he meant SP2 or maybe, since it was more than a decade ago, his memory is out by a couple of years and what he thought was '05 was '08 - I certainly would not be able to state when W1, 2, 3, 311, NT1/2/3/4, XP, XPSP1/2/3, Fista, FSP1/2, W7, W7SP1, W8 (IIRC around 2013), W10 (2014/15?), any version of *nix and any MacOS with even a hint of accuracy. I would've thought XPSP3 was pre-Fista meaning well before '08 but I guess my memory of unimportant dates is inaccurate. (And no, I could not state without going through records which jobs I was at with any accuracy back then, it's all kind of a time-smeared blur today)
So it's a good story, but doesn't fit with the facts of how such activity-logging trackers work (and I've been covering them for 15+ years).
You didn't cover nearly enough of them then.
At the start of torrenting I had dial up. I had a 2nd line and a computer to spare that stayed connected 24/7 and I throttled/paused the torrenting when we were browsing or doing other stuff (originally coax-based LAN then hub then 8-port 10/100 switch which I still have, can vaguely remember running software on 98 that let me throttle the data speeds other LAN users got). In '02 or 03 I was invited to a member-only torrent site and for a wee while was stymied by my lack up uploads till I made my music collection available. That was hammered as I had some rare but popular stuff, and I had my system online 24/7. Then late '03 I was able to move to a suburb that had ADSL available. I still did much of my seeding on DU as ADSL then was in much smaller numbers and you were charged heftily for going over your data limits.
I'm not sure when I signed up with Actrix but at that stage they had a daily limit of 700Mb which was from I think midnight - 8pm, after 8pm you were wide open. If you hit your limit you were throttled back to DU speeds but of course after 8pm you were fine (or maybe 9pm, it was a long time ago). Other providers soon started going with throttling rather than charging big money for over-limit runs (and it was a massive phone bill that caused me to change ISP to Actrix in the first place, when I accidentally left the seedbox on the ADSL rather than DU).
So while you're saying that he could not have been doing this, and while he did get a date wrong if he really did mean XPSP3 it's plenty plausible the writer has some confusion over when SP3 was released. After all, a quick DDG shows SP2 was in 2004. Then again, a Computerworld article copywrited 20071 says that there was a release of SP3 in 2007 at >300MB but when the Windows Update release was to happen later (in "1H '08") it would be much smaller - this ties in more with the original story. SP2 was 260+mb so it would also tie in with the story, if the writer got the SP2/SP3 confused.
So if you take the reasonable assumption the person was writing from memory and got a date or a version confused, and if you realise that your own experience of torrent sites was more limited than you'd like to realise, his story remains plausible. I'm not saying it happened (though I know someone who did get in trouble for killing their work's data allowance in a single weekend with torrents).
Given your history, I'm quite surprised at the mistakes you made in your post! :) Speaking of your history, thanks. I may not always agree with your politics but I appreciate you taking a stand.
1 The article is at computerworld.com/article/2538363/update--microsoft-releases-windows-xp-sp3.html. I'd make it clicky but that triggers a recraptcha hell loop, which I cannot get through because I am even less willing to allow google's spyware on my system these days and thus cannot complete it.