Thread: SERIOUS MATTER !! RatioProofs

Haha I didn't mean to scare members with my last comment. Yes, there are many excellent members. I've invited quite a few and the majority of them have been great invitees. I've only run into a few situations where tracker staffs contacted me regarding my invitees, but none of which turned out to be serious. The only banned members I have on my invite trees are those disabled for inactivity. *shakes fist* All I'm saying is do your proper background checks!

a lot here said what I want to say, safest way is to ask a proof with T-I guide + profile links. Even if you gave him (the bad user) invite he'll be scared to take a risk to do anything make him banned on other trackers specially if you asked for high trackers profile links . of course you must looks into user's background on T-I and there are a lot of users that we know from their activity and actions so we trust them like 75%+ users. Bad users always there, Good ones there also and T-I (and most of good communities and users) there to catch these bad users.

Additionally I don't know if anyone mentioned this but you aren't going to be able to be 100 percent sure. Ever. There's no getting around the fact that the internet can be an easy place to hide almost everything about you, the best you can do is minimalize the risk as much as possible. If you don't feel comfortable, don't do it. e12em has a good point, you're not obligated to give them the invite just because they posted. It's also a good idea to read through the site's rules and wiki/faq. Some trackers are a little more lenient about member base and you won't get in too much trouble (maybe just bumped down a rank for a month or so), and then for the more serious ones really dig deep for info about the person.

Hi everybody,

It seems that after all this years torrenting there really isn't a safe ratio-proof procedure to follow. I still have to start my giveaways at all, because of these reasons you described. I'm thinking over that, beside me, all the users that handed me invites are at risk too in the unfortunate case I've been picking a cheater - as you all said.
Granted that a simple full-screen snapshot can be retouched relatively easily in any of its parts. I am myself a bit of an expert in Adobe Photoshop and I can assure you any pixel of a screenshot can be modified flawlessly and withstand a check even at 800% zoom in with no discrepancies whatsoever. It doesn't take that much of an expert manipulator to pull it off. It's not a photograph where you have to keep close attention to the lighting, perspective, tones to make it look like it belongs. So in the regards of proofing, screenshots by themself are ill-advice and ultimately useless to unveil cheaters.
I'd like to point out that the user IP address doesn't tell half of the story of its origins. There're plenty of ways of obfuscate, change or fake an IP although not anybody can do it, I'll give you that.
Having said so even if you consider the real IP of a user, it doesn't tell you irrefutably if it's been use by the same person all the time. The only things you can tell is the name of the ISP and the ISP location of the server used to generate that IP.
For the sake of argument let's take into consideration a large city where a single ISP has many servers running at once. For each of the ISP servers subscribers can get up to 65536 different IPs every time they get disconnected, they turn off the router or mostly when the ISP itself is switching the IP for private reasons without notice. How much frequently depends on the provider.
My point being two or more different internet users could have been sharing the same IP in their history and nothing but the ISP logs can prove at a given time who was who employing which one.
Even in the country where ISPs are forced to "open their books" you need a legitimate subpoena issued by the authorities to be able to have a long glance at them. Obviously you can get it only in the presence of an allegedly crime. Needless to say nobody in our world would ever get to move authorities. Besides I don't know any ISP nowadays having the resources to store longer than three months of old logs for each of their customers.
The conclusion is looking at the IP alone is unreliable in telling you if you're dealing with the same user. It could be a different user living in the same service served area. In the large city example above they could very well be thousands and the bigger the provider the more users would be involved in the trade.
So you can't blame somebody because he/she has a different IP. Over a six months period all users are switching IP countless times.

it appears as the best way is to come up with some different tricks that requires the invitee to openly give the account link to be checked out. But, as you already said, what if you're not a member? You're forced to ask account links for specific trackers. Would that be enough? How about the invitee privacy?

I too think ratio proofs are too easy to manipulate/fake And being honest here, it does make me wary of inviting someone into so-called "higher level" trackers purely based on them alone.

Have T-I admins considered some sort of a (paid for?) "accredited" status on here? I for one would have no issue with supplying T-I moderators/admins with a bunch of profile links that they could verify. Verification by maybe sending a PM to the account? Or require an entry on the profile page? - A couple of the Swedish DVD-R trackers required a 12+ long digit number to be present on the profile this when I signed up to them IIRC. Something along these lines would make me breathe a little easier re: giving out invites. Knowing that someone at T-I has seen say five "good" (definition to be determined lol) establish user profiles and has given the user "accredited" status.

You could take this a stage further and have some sort of a star-rating system based on TB's uploaded and/or account age. One star for every TB uploaded (amongst all supplied profile links) maybe or half a star per TB? Gold stars for having a private tracker profile that is over five years old, silver stars for three, bronze for one - something like that. Then when people apply for invites you can instantly tell how much data they have uploaded and how long they have been torrenting for.

Unfortunately at the moment, like previous posters have mentioned, you could be giving away a bunch of low-level invites to gain feedback, post wh0re in general chatter to achieve a three-figure post count and then be handy with Photoshop to provide ratio proofs. Do I want risk inviting a trader or a hit and runner to a supposed desirable tracker based on the above activity on T-I? No, not really!

There is really no way to stop someone from cheating if they want to cheat. All you can do is put some stumbling blocks in the way, to slow someone down, and try to discourage cheating.

Ultimately it will be on you to report someone for cheating, and then the community to admonish them. Believe me, I've seen cheaters reported before, it never ends well for them.

I wasn't considering what *Cine said about giving away low-rep trackers invites to pump up your feedbacks. And now that I do I can definitely see somebody taking advantage of it. To build up a sort of "verified" account installment you need to implement a new service running 24/7 in the backend of the web site. Generating unique 12-digits (or more) serials is child's play, but I don't know if T-I has the men power to code out such a program. Concentrating all the users infos into one logic location has tremendous security issues if something goes wrong. And that's just the beginning... You have to speak to all the trackers sysops and get the permission to store all this sensitive data. This alone would be an almost impossible task, mainly because most 1337 trackers they like to be as anonymous as anonymity can go. You will never get their approval. Moreover do you think in the future T-I would willingly take all the heat in being the lone responsible for the users "certified" accounts? I know I wouldn't.
I really like your ideas because they're based on trusting, but they seem infeasible. We need a neatier way do get it done, uncomplicated and shorter.
Getting access to user's tracker profiles is a start. But what then?

In my mind, the easy way to prevent these "frauds" is to take screenshot of your desktop and save them in JPEG with low quality.
This will involve a lot of noise on the image which made impossible to fake it.
My 2cents.
Bye

Originally Posted by wgz

In my mind, the easy way to prevent these "frauds" is to take screenshot of your desktop and save them in JPEG with low quality.
This will involve a lot of noise on the image which made impossible to fake it.
My 2cents.
Bye

Impossible to fake afterwards, but if I modify the screenshot and then save it in JPEG it's going to be a very grainy fake ratio proof.


Truth is, the whole ratio-proof idea is based on trust and as far as torrenting is concerned, it's doomed from the beginning.

The only viable system as described by others above, is to have a "trusted" T-I member (staff?) that has an account on the tracker the proof is coming from.
The potential "invitee" tells the trusted member what his username is and the trusted member confirms the validity of the proof to the "inviter".

You can all see for yourselves that it's a very daunting and time consuming process, hardly implementable.



Another (limiting and unacceptable) way would be to say "I have an invite to this tracker to give to someone with an account on the tracker I'm in, so that I can check myself".