Ireland’s connection to reported porn downloads inside Vatican City

10 Apr 2013

If findings from US website Torrent Freak are to be believed, pornographic sites featuring bondage, transsexuals and sadomasochism have been downloaded in Vatican City. The discovery stems from findings about a film club for a group of priests in Limerick, Ireland.

Torrent Freak, which analyses file sharing, began to research whether anyone in the Vatican had been breaching copyright laws by illegally downloading music and films for free.

TorrentFreak embarked on the project with the help of ScanEye, a website that tracks and analyses this type of online activity, after learning about a film club for priests in Limerick, Ireland.

It turns out a priest revealed to the owner of a DVD rental shop that he had watched Lincoln the night before at the monastery’s weekly film club – the thing is, Lincoln hadn’t yet been released in cinemas.

When TorrentFreak and ScanEye then began to look into download activity at the Vatican, they came up with the surprising result in addition to finding TV shows such as The Neighbours and Chicago Fire had been downloaded, The Telegraph reported.

Vatican downloads

A screenshot of a download queue tracked to IP addresses in Vatican City. Image via Torrent Freak

Gerard O’Connell, a Vatican affairs analyst, told the Telegraph it is difficult to tell who could have accessed the sites due to the traffic in and out of the city.

About 3,000 people work in the Vatican and that number had doubled to 6,000 during the recent conclave, O’Connell said.

The Vatican image via Shutterstock

Tina Costanza was a journalist and sub-editor at Silicon Republic

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