I read this, and found it to be a disappointing read. It had few details, and instead was more of a social sciences paper, covering basic ideas in academic language.
Roughly it seemed to be suggesting that:
* It's easier to deceive someone if they first solicit for help on a forum
* You can trick someone into revealing sensitive info like which infrastructure provider is used by nerdsniping them: "My mate thinks you should just enable health checking on AWS ELB", and then they reply "Well actually I use Hetzner". Except I'm guessing it was more elaborate than that.
I guess I wasn't the target audience of the article though.
joshmn, what did you think of the article?
Do you find it difficult to trust random commenters online now?
I see you mentioned you can't discuss technical details, but if/whenever that expires (?), that'd be great to hear.
I also found it underwhelming, though I'd like to think I’m the most scrutinizing of the subject matter. There's some nuance between my take on my behavior and the profiler's, but I'll give them the benefit of the doubt—they only had my Reddit posts to go on and had to package that for investigators.
I still tend to trust by default and make witty comments or jabs that sometimes land flat, so the article was accurate in that sense.
As for talking to the undercover, I made a point of keeping no secrets about my site's technical implementation. Between me and some "competitors," I was usually the first to respond to upstream provider changes—I'd even share my findings without expecting anything in return. Anyone could’ve asked about my issues, and I would've told them.
Trust is the most valued currency in the piracy world, and I worked hard to earn it with both peers and customers. Acting otherwise would've gone against that—and against my own morals. My being neurodivergent may also be worth noting in my willingness (or unwillingness from a free-will perspective) to trust others.
Technically speaking, the site worked by reverse-engineering the league's official streaming services—a few curl requests, careful observation of responses, and adapting them to my needs. There's more to it, of course, but my 2016 MVP was barely 50 lines of Ruby and a plain HTML file. TorrentFreak got some of the details right.
