Imagine you’d write a crawler that connects to many torrent trackers for many torrents and then log all IP addresses that are also connected. Now, that’s exactly what You Have Downloaded does: it aggregates all public data and then exposes it.
We came up with the idea of building a crawler like this and keeping the maintenance price under $300 a month. There was only one way to prove our theory worked — to implement it in practice. So we did. Now, we find ourselves with a big crawler.
Although the site doesn’t track all traffic (and thus doesn’t have a list of all IP addresses — I for one have downloaded nothing according to the site … could swear I just pulled in a new Linux distro) it works rather well. The results aren’t surprising either. Typing in a IP address from one of the trolling commenters here on bram.us gives me …
Ouch! 😀