

Dare HN: Download/purchase True Blood without BitTorrent or subscribing to HBO - zackmorris

Hi I need your help.<p>I recently had my internet turned off because HBO told Qwest (soon to be CenturyLink) that I was sharing True Blood over BitTorrent.  With the burden of proof in their hands, I resolved the situation and as I am now on their watch list, I don't use BitTorrent.<p>Be that as it may, I feel a certain duty now to -not- subscribe to HBO, even though I would like to.  But I want to support the writers, directors and cast members of my favorite shows on HBO and other networks:<p>True Blood<p>Dexter<p>Mad Men<p>Big Love (girlfriend enjoys it ahem)<p>Californication<p>But for the life of me, I can't find a place to purchase current episodes of True Blood.  iTunes has last season.  I'm told I can go on IRC and just ask for them, but that seems so 1997.  If any of you know of a simple site where I can purchase episodes for download, I'd be grateful.<p>If not, maybe it's time for a web-based BitTorrent of some kind.  Off the top of my head, one could use the compression ratio of maximum URL length (roughly 2048 characters) to the SHA-1 length of 20 bytes or 40 hex characters, to store data in query variables.<p>Basically some kind of spider would go around reporting the SHA-1 of basically every URL in existence, and to upload a segment of a show, people would post a properly formatted request that causes data to hang around on sites like flickr or facebook, and then post the list of checksums somewhere where search engines will find it.<p>It might require a math function to swizzle the URL somehow, perhaps recording the difference between the actual URL and the desired URL in another query variable on the end.  It doesn't really matter how it works, just that mathematically the opportunity is there to store data that way.  The important thing is that file sharing would go back to being a download-only operation which would (ideally) free fans from the threat of disconnects and lawsuits.<p>Then as companies submit takedown requests for these URLs, other spiders would go around and make sure that the chunks are replicated on some number of other URLs, maybe on servers in other countries or in pictures or other persistent data.<p>This is all well beyond anything I could ever do, which is why I ask about it here.  To me, this is the inevitable future of the web.  As I like to say about my definition of inevitable, it's "that which is harder to stop than to start."<p>The endgame is an arms race between hackers and content providers, which mathematically the content providers can't win.  So that means there will probably be legislation of some kind, making the use of certain software or the download of certain material illegal, which will be the end of the free internet because they'll have to monitor you to enforce it.  Maybe this is already happening.<p>The flip side is that if content providers don't tone down their prosecution of their customers, they might piss off one hacker too many.  I kind of feel sorry for them, they just don't know who they are dealing with.<p>Well I guess that's it, am I off base or is this all destined to happen?
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jeffool
Amazon may offer it digitally; you would have to check. Your other option is
to wait for physical media.

My Internet was disconnected a few months back for torrenting. Watching shows
I forgot to DVR, and the OnDemand service was too shoddy to reliably watch
anything. Not that this makes it legal, mind you. Shame, though.

For most shows their entire model is to get as many viewers as possible and
make money from advertising. I find it very amusing they can't figure out how
to make money on the Internet, when it's the same model. I'm confident all of
HN could easily imagine ways to propagate that model if we had the financial
backing that these companies do.

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cjzhang
If not, maybe it's time for a web-based BitTorrent of some kind. The important
thing is that file sharing would go back to being a download-only operation
which would (ideally) free fans from the threat of disconnects and lawsuits.
This is all well beyond anything I could ever do, which is why I ask about it
here. To me, this is the inevitable future of the web.

Don't take this the wrong way but, are you trolling?

EDIT: Also, Mad Men's on Netflix streaming, off the top of my head.

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zackmorris
No I'm definitely not trolling, but I get that a lot :-)

I've seen several papers and presentations about web-based hashing schemes,
where the idea is that you only have to download data once to a city and then
people could download using a hash from a local cache server and avoid trips
over the backbone:

<http://www8.org/w8-papers/2a-webserver/caching/paper2.html>

For example, if they did this with netflix, you'd be downloading from your
neighbors instead of a server somewhere, and the load on your service provider
would drop by orders of magnitude.

Also, since so little traffic would have to go over the whole web, they could
focus more on last mile speed increases and we could all have 100 megabit
lines and cheaper plans, getting charged mostly for our backbone traffic, the
way long distance used to be charged.

