Remember You Have Downloaded? Its sole purpose was to give the tormenting community a wake-up call about anonymisation services by showing all the torrents that had been downloaded from a specific IP address. It turns out that less than a year after it hit the big time, the site has been boarded up by its owners following technical issues.
Rather than telling you if you’re a naughty pirate or if you’re in the clear, You Have Downloaded now promises to be back after a hiatus.
The sticky note-style sign on the front page tells us that IP address tracking issues were ultimately what the site down:
The admins tell us that they’re currently brainstorming to “come up with something innovative, unique, and fascinating” to bring us in the future.
At the peak of its popularity, You Have Downloaded claimed to track about 20 per cent of the torrents downloaded all over the world with an active user base of over 51.2 million
Just because this clever torrent tracker is off the air, it doesn’t mean that you’re once again in the clear to pirate your little heart out. Torrenting copyright materials is never encouraged, but if you are going to do it, at least make sure you anonymise yourself, for goodness sake.