Well... you got that letter from Comcast eh?... Let me tell you that it is rare for that to happen, and 2 main reasons why they have detected you on sharing "pirated movies" is this:
1. You disabled your firewall and opened up your ports making you vulnerable to others to observe what you are doing (ports 6800-6969 are most common).
2. You are using Comcast, which is connected through a cable, not phone jack. Connecting through their cable, they can monitor your cable activies (i.e. how many GB you've dled from where etc). That's cable for you. And generally when you download the .torrent file, the file itself contains information about the files you're about to download (such as Alone came polly 704mb etc). But phonejack is a lot harder to track (Yahoo dsl)
not necessarily will, they will only individually track your progress if they suspect such activities, afterall they are not tracking over a million people, think of the storage...
although they do monitor what people do - i doubt they will watch everyones all of the time - only if its pointed out to them by such activities
Tracking amount of usage is normal for most isps, and it doesn't take an egregious amount of storage; also, being on cable makes you no more likely to be tracked than dsl.
free_me, what has happened is that an anti-p2p group has simply went to a torrent site and started downloading files. They have their programs to log the IP addresses that serve them the files. They then get in contact with the ISP who have this IP registered and warn them of their users activity! So no matter what you are connecting through (unless its through an Anonymous Socks 5 Proxy Server) using Bit Torrent and uploading can get you a letter from your ISP. Some ISP's recieve these letters everyday in a huge amount so they dont even bother to warn.
