Where are all the Sony documents?

December 15, 2014 2:45 PM

Every journalist on earth seems to be able to search the sony douments. Where are they?? Any search of terms like "sony stolen documents" or "sony hacked documents" brings up links to news stories about the documents, but not the documents themselves. nothing I could find on the smoing gun, wikileaks or wikipedia. I feel like a complete idiot. Where are they hiding in plain sight??
posted by jdkoerner to Media & Arts (9 answers total)

Torrents probably. Note that Sony is busily sending vaguely threatening legal letters to anyone and everyone who might have copies, so putting details here might not be the friendliest thing to do to the mods.
posted by pharm at 2:50 PM on December 15, 2014 [1 favorite]

Having poked about online, it looks like the announcements are going up on pastebin & contain a stack of links to various torrents, so my initial supposition was correct.

The posts are being pulled fairly quickly, presumably as Sony issues DMCA requests as fast as they can send them, but you'll find them cached in various web mirrors if you go looking (I won't link to them here, so as not to put metafilter itself at any risk). Sony are also trying to take down the torrents at the same time, but I don't know how successful they're being with that.
posted by pharm at 2:59 PM on December 15, 2014

Keep in mind that Sony is doing their very best to make it hard to download this stuff - for instance, they are using a 'bad seed' attack on the existing torrents.
posted by destructive cactus at 3:08 PM on December 15, 2014

There are a bunch of links on Reddit.
posted by johngoren at 3:32 PM on December 15, 2014

You could send an email to the email addresses they advertise. They have so much data on their hands that they have to release it all in batches. They have been providing magnet links via random pastebin type websites that others have alluded to. I don't know who these people are, but they're smart as hell about their distribution. I wouldn't want to get on their bad side.
posted by oceanjesse at 5:52 PM on December 15, 2014

Response by poster: Great answers, all. Don't worry: if I am captured I will disavow any knowledge of your existence.
posted by jdkoerner at 7:20 PM on December 15, 2014 [1 favorite]

There is a lot of legal heaviness coming down in this area, and while you're not especially vulnerable I'd guess Metafilter might be.

But adding 'torrent' to your searches might help.

#PartoftheProblem
posted by Sebmojo at 7:35 PM on December 15, 2014 [1 favorite]

Ars: “Sony is not issuing a massive DDOS using AWS on torrent sites—they’re just seeding fake torrents,” Klein said. It’s not hard to tell the digital “bricks” that are delivered apart from real files, “but it’s hard enough for people who are laymen, who are inadvertently reseeding the brick,” he explained. ”And because of the popularity of the torrents, inadvertently, all the torrent users trying to download these files are DDOSing the torrent sites.”

If my understanding of the BitTorrent protocol is correct, this is unlikely to matter. BitTorrent computes a hash for every piece it downloads, and if those hashes don't match what's in the torrent file, the piece is declared corrupt; BitTorrent clients can and do ignore peers that persistently send non-matching data.

The only way to make fake data actually match a torrent file or Magnet link would be to generate a SHA1 collision for every piece of the torrent, which as far as I know is still well and truly infeasible.
posted by flabdablet at 8:51 PM on December 15, 2014

That's not my read that they're successfully generating collisions, it's that they're releasing convincing payloads similar to the leaked stuff... but totally bogus. And people are unwittingly downloading and redistributing it which muddies the water as to what documents are legitimate leaks and where they could be found.
posted by unixrat at 9:27 PM on December 15, 2014