So a few days ago, some of you may have noticed that GS8 went down temporarily. Well, the night before I had torrented The Walking Dead latest episode, but hadn't removed the prior four episodes from my uTorrent and was still seeding. So the morning of, I wake up, check my emails on my phone and see a notice that GS8 is down and am like, wtf. So I check my server computer and its up and running but the server is down so now I'm like, super wtf?!? So here I am trying to log into the forums to see if anybody knows whats up when a Millennial Copyright Protection Act pops up on my browser. At first, I ignore it and try another browser, but same shit. Then I go log into my other computer, and another (I have 5-computers in my house) and all three say the same thing when a browser is opened. So now I know the issue it with my isp. There is a link to remove the block at the bottom of the webpage assuming all "offending" materials have been removed, in this case not the last two episodes, but the three episodes back. So I click on the link to remove the block on my server computer... nothing happens. Okay, so I change browsers and again, nothing. I try it on my sons computer, nothing. I try it on my computer that I downloaded the torrent from, nothing. Hum, strange. I delete my .tor files in appdata, rename the video file, and rename the folder it's in then click on the link and what do you know, my internet returns... How in the holy fuck did my isp know I had "removed" the offending materials? So now I know without any doubt that there is some sort of tracker on my computer, but I never downloaded anything like that - I'm super meticulous and paranoid about what goes on my computers, so it dawns on me about Windows 10 TOS, and it hits me, fucking Windows 10 tracks the data on your computer... I guess I've always known this since the story hit the news, but never took it seriously until now. I mean honestly, I'm still a little shocked and quite appalled that the data on everyone's own home computers is being watched! This is not only scary, but doesn't seem legal to me! I've received copyright infringement notices from my isp in the past due to torrenting which asked me to remove the offending material, and I just deleted the email and ignored the threat, but this was different, and the message was clear that this was due to a new law signed by Obama. My isp was definitely receiving intel from my Windows 10 about the data on my computer. The threat is real, and I guess my hesitancy of switching to a Linux based system has to be overcome if I want any form of privacy, that and I need to start downloading my torrents through TOR.
TL;DR VERSION: ISP taken down for piracy and would only come back up after removing torrented files from computer. No tracking software on computer, so had to be Windows 10 tracking it.