I saw this reported today in The Straits Times and on a blog by a fellow Singaporean: ODEX is seeking legal action against those who download anime.

From a scan of the letter posted at the blog, it was evident that bittorrent was the source of the evidence against the downloader. I reckon that ODEX must have done one of the following:

• By getting the ISPs to monitor and sniff the Internet traffic of some of their high traffic volume subscribers, they probably analyzed the traffic data and from there deduced that the traffic was some bittorrent traffic transmitting anime content. In this case, Transport Encryption of your torrent traffic might help.
• I think it is more probable that ODEX participated as one of the “downloaders” of the anime files they accused the downloaders of downloading. When the clients of the downloaders “sent” a piece of the data to ODEX, they took this as a cue that you are downloading or have downloaded said infringing file and mark you down. In this case, Peerguardian (manifesting in Azureus as Safepeer might help.

I must emphasize that the “solutions” I have suggested above might and are not guaranteed to work. Of course even though I believe that there are certainly ways to defeat these organizations, there is no foolproof way - this is analogous to the ongoing fight between the hackers and the so-called security consultants.

As for myself, I have hardly been downloading any anime for a long time and though I do download some other stuff occasionally, I think I’ll have to cover my tracks better in the future. You might want to check out that post I linked to. There is an interesting debate going on in the comments of that post.

Anyway, tomorrow is SAT. I’ve tried out some practice tests and I am not even amused at how the test is administered. Some of the answers to the questions are pretty, in my opinion, subjective. As a guidebook says, the SAT does not test you on their so-called “critical thinking and reasoning skills”, it merely tests you on how well you take the SAT. That being said, I hope I don’t get tangled up in the SAT tomorrow. I’m pretty weak at those language sections.