If you want to give context, a link to the story would be nice:

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/05/fake-dmca-takedown-n...

Importantly, OpSec (the company doing this torrent-dmca-for-hire stuff) says the DMCA itself was spoofed

> OpSec Security’s DCMA notice sending program was spoofed on Wednesday, May 26, 2021, by unknown parties across multiple streaming platforms.

...who names their company "OpSec"? Are they actively wanting to be made fun-of at the next defcon?

I mean, they're willing to work for ISPs doing torrent detection, which has been a scummy business from the start. Somehow, I would imagine they would be even less respected than the feds at defcon, since the feds actually do technically challenging things occasionally.

Is anything worse than "Web Sheriff"?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Sheriff

https://web.archive.org/web/20090122235038/https://thepirate...

The emails between pirate bay and web sheriff are pretty funny.

https://web.archive.org/web/20090105141217/http://static.the...

> We shall look forward to hearing from you.

We look forward to receiving more of your so exquisitely designed HTML e-mails with the shiny wanna-be-police-star.

https://web.archive.org/web/20081221100050/http://static.the...

> Dear Frederik,

>

> Hello.

Hi! Please, learn to quote properly in your e-mail messages. You can learn from how I do - I promise you that proper quoting is not patented.

Of course it was a false flag issue, it never made sense from the beginning.

In a world where white noise[1], birdsong[2] and someone playing Beethoven on the piano[3] get copyright strikes/takedown notices - I don't think someone getting a copyright notice for downloading Ubuntu is that far fetched.

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-42580523

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3637124

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27004577

There's actually an album called Ubuntu. Quite possible some duncehead set up a bot to download all torrents with Ubuntu in the name and scrape the IPs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubuntu_%28album%29

"Linux ISOs" has been slang for a very long time:

https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Linux+ISO&am...

Anecdote from my MSc year in 2003. In the dorm room I had 10Mbps Internet connection via the University's network which was quite amazing for the time. So among the real Linux ISOs, I tormented also the other kind of ISOs. At some point the Uni NOC reached out telling me that I'm consuming lots of BW for torrents which is against the policy, at which I replied that I download Linux ISOs and I'm happy to schedule it for after midnight, outside of peak hours. After some days I get a reply that please do so from another guy who forgot to remove the quote from his previous colleague which went something like "hey we have a problem with this guy's answer"

So yes, Linux ISOs is an old thing indeed

Thanks for clarifying. I've not encountered the use before, maybe because here in the Nordics piracy has been -is- very normalized.

The other reply told about a uni tale. I've heard about a similar story about someone torrenting actual Linux ISOs on university network. That resulted in a stern warning else the student would be barred from using the network and computers. Basically an automatic fail for future studies.

The sad thing is that actual Linux ISOs are so over-mirrored that using BitTorrent generally has no benefit and may be slower.

High availability (through mirrors) is still a good thing. My experience is that torrent files are sometimes a lot faster, sometimes less so. Just as mirrors.