island⁹⁴

2nd rate band’s new single appears on bittorrent sites, band releases press release decrying leak, sleuthing ensues…turns out the band’s manager leaked the track himself. Damning on its own, but the interesting part is the forensic sleuthing that led to outing the guilty party:

With some help of a user in the community, we tracked down some of the initial seeders of the torrent. A BitTorrent site insider was kind enough to help us out, because BitTorrent is not supposed to be “abused” like this, and confirmed that the IP of one of the early seeders did indeed belong to the person who uploaded the torrent file.

It turns out that the uploader, a New York resident, had only uploaded one torrent, the BuckCherry track. When we entered the IP-address into the Wiki-scanner, we found out that the person in question had edited the BuckCherry wikipedia entry, and added the name of the band manager to another page.

This confirmed our suspicions, but it was not quite enough, since it could be an overly obsessed fan (if they have fans). So, we decided to send the band manager, Josh Klemme - who happens to live in New York - an email to ask for his opinion on our findings. Klemme, replied to our email within a few hours, and surprisingly enough his IP-address was the same as the uploader.

I was up at the Abbey Lounge last night in Somerville checking out "Dave Alpert":http://davealpert.com, a local singer/songwriter. I met him a few weeks ago at a video-blogger meetup in Jamaica Plain. I ended up recording the performance on my cheap, iPod fool-you-once-knockoff, defunct Japanese company's mp3 benchwarmer. It's got a crappy built-in mic I used, and a line-in that probably isn't worth a decent microphone that I don't have anyway. Any audio crappiness is the mic and my poor mastering skills, not Dave or the free, open source multi-track audio editor "Audacity":http://audacity.sourceforge.net/ that I used to clean and split the tracks. _A couple tracks from the show:_ # "Other Assholes":http://island94.org/files/Dave%20Alpert%20-%20Other%20assholes.mp3 # "Rude Awakening":http://island94.org/files/Dave%20Alpert%20-%20Rude%20Awakening.mp3 # "Lovesong for the Wrong Person":http://island94.org/files/Dave%20Alpert%20-%20Lovesong%20for%20the%20wrong%20person.mp3 The songnames are mostly wrong, just relating to how Dave described the songs. Lastly, the mic was sitting on the bar, so any thumps or clicks are people setting down their glasses. Any guffawing is probably me--at the jokes, not the music.