RARBG was originally Bulgarian, like many other trackers and warez stuff. Eastern Europe - inside EU or outside of the EU - has always been major player in this scene. RIP.
I'm still curious how it's possible to run such global illegal operations without being exposed or caught.
How is it still possible to remain anonymous on the Internet, considering in this age the thing is very mature and well commercialised?
The answer to this is easier (and harder) than you might think: just don't say anything.
You can get away with quite a bit just by being silent, and for longer than you'd think. A big way that people get away with things for so long is just by not answering questions. Someone says, "Is this [illegal thing] yours" and you say nothing. Now you've got to burn hours and dollars trying to prove someone owns something so that you can go after them.
You'll find domains, web hosts, countries, and employees who are all onboard with the same philosophy. When everything requires a subpoena at the highest level to move something forward, it can easily take years for anything to happen at all. Some countries are known for having slow legal systems. Stack jurisdictions with slow court systems and you can start with an 18 month window before anything can happen.
You've got a domain in Tonga registered to a company in another country, owned by a large company in another country owned by a trust in a third country. Often small countries with limited resources and archaic or corrupt bureaucracies. And where is it hosted? That's probably another connect the dots. And the site can change hands and then you have to start all over again. Are you going to refocus on the new owner or are you going to spend even more resources trying to track down the former owner?
And any of these entities may lead to nothing more than a mule, fake person, or dead person. Sure, it's someone's fault for having inaccurate records—but who? How long has this been going on? Did they know? Was it intentional? It shouldn't be like this, but it is… what do you do now? Are you going to go after the recordkeeper too?
You can do illegal shit for years or even decades if you just say nothing and respond to no one.
Am a lawyer. This is correct. Drafting subpoenas, motions, applications, convincing a skeptical judge that Twitter posts are "real" evidence, or explaining how DNS records work, not to mention actually scheduling a damn hearing, then multiply that by 4 or 5 jurisdictions (therefore 4 or 5 sets of lawyers), and you got yourself easily a few years' worth of work.
> Someone says, "Is this yours" and you say nothing. Now you've got to burn hours and dollars trying to prove someone owns something so that you can go after them.
The opposite is the German approach. Shower the cuntiest lawyers with money, lobby for laws allowing to easily pick a victim, bully the victim senseless. Lobby even more and if someone uses the word "corruption" in context of copyrights, bully the shit out of them as well. I'm so glad Anglosphere and German copyrights predators have been perfectly impotent for so many years. They know how to create faceless enemies.
Germany really takes the price when it comes to (torrent-based) piracy. The lawyers around it created a nice little ecosystem for themselves. Honeypot torrents and all. They have such a nice system that they don't go for the torrent sites, just milk the torrenters.
It also creates a weird liability where hotel owners have to snoop on their users in order to deflect responsibility. It also stimulates self-censorship. VPNs are likely very popular in Germany.
Let's say I was observing something similar and this is absolutely correct. Stay low profile, say nothing, don't boast to scratch your itching ego and everything will be fine.
A lot of people will be surprised by knowing what kind of businesses is ran from that shabby house in the corner by visibly low life mate driving 30yo celica.
In my experience law firms would not hop through these. That is the job of hired ethical hackers, police and prosecutor's office.
A law firm would be useful in (a) applying to remove illegal content, (b) seize any profit generated by illegal use of clents' content, (c) (if the client requests) horrify users identified of such illegal services, (d) pressure the authorities to crack down on the operation.
Most lawyers do not understand the technical details. We do a hell of a good job of understanding experts' findings and put them in a clear legal structure though.
Most of the boring but billable job I ever made was searching through company registries, google searches, sanctions searches, panama papers searches, reviewing countless pdfs to either (i) mark them as privileged so they cannot be used as evidence, (ii) scan whether there are any documents that may directly implicate the client and if so try to find a way to legally claim it is unusable.
I believe law firms do provide decent service. Billables are there, but no lawyer I know would willingly generate busywork that does not lead anywhere to charge more. OTOH, I HAVE seen instances where a work got reviewed multiple times by different lawyers, because the client was willing to pay more. But even in these edge cases, multiple reviews did benefit the client and they received a better work product.
My advice would be establish a good working relationship with a lawyer in the firm that you trust, continuously send work. Ask estimates if you are on a tight budget. But do not be cheap and try to get things done with less budget. Law firms provide a service you need, if you pay them decently you'll receive your money's worth. Lawyers will literally take a bullet for you to make things happen when you need them.
> My advice would be establish a good working relationship with a lawyer in the firm that you trust, continuously send work. Ask estimates if you are on a tight budget. But do not be cheap and try to get things done with less budget. Law firms provide a service you need, if you pay them decently you'll receive your money's worth. Lawyers will literally take a bullet for you to make things happen when you need them.
What’s the order of magnitude here? There have been times in my life where I would have found having a lawyer on standby to be incredibly helpful (e.g. car purchase gone bad, property usage rights dispute, etc.), but at the same time spending $100k a year to have a lawyer on standby to resolve an issue of $5-10k in magnitude is foolish.
Most of the times you do not pay for stand by. If there is work to do your lawyer charges you in billable hours. That is the point of the billable hours system. For larger projects you can get a fee estimate, fixed quote or agree on a hybrid solution.
I am also talking about corporate law work. Maintaining corporate records, lease agreements, employment agremeents, director changes et.
You could try legal insurance. Costs about 200$ equivalent/year where I live, then I have a place to ask legal questions and escalate as needed. I think they cover the first 150k$ worth of legal costs with any lawyer I pick if it goes that far and their in-house lawyers can’t get the other party to back down.
It's very possible to run such without being exposed, but it involves patience and enough cash.
Most of the time, these services aren't done in direct exchange for money or from people who have a lot of money in the first place.
So what ends up happening is even if they can avoid the shallow legal issues by remaining private, they then run into the problem that nobody can pay for the service (not many options for providing that transaction privately). You might think "just run ads" but the problem there is multifaceted, most are likely going to be using adblockers, on top of that to remain private they'll be locked out of most paying ads and only get the most spammy garbage incentivizing more to use adblocker to visit the site.
Also: ad companies and payment processors are a weak link. They can provide de-anonymizing information to officials and cut off payments when their corporate values shift.
I always wondered this. Many piracy sites have Adsense or some sort of ads. Can't Google just fingerprint which Adsense account is being used and find the person getting paid?
This screams poor opsec to me. Accepting anything other than anonymized crypto (Monero, etc) is basically untenable in this era of mass surveillance. Going through a big tech company is a good way to get caught.
There's an entire industry of buying established accounts set up with an unsuspecting person's identity. Idk about Adsense specifically, but you can get Amazon selling and the linked bank account with docs for like $1000.
AFOAF belongs to the same pvt tracker now for more than a dozen years. The admins amp and push the community feels and have periodic fund raisers. No ads, and if you want to donate, you buy a jpg of a flower on an different site.
Seems to work out well for all concerned and while you have to maintain an u/d ratio, free leach and easy generous ratio reqts contribute to that community feeling.
>I'm still curious how it's possible to run such global illegal operations
Because it is not obviously illegal. A tracker just points to the content, not the content itself. That may seem meaningless, but then so are the arbitrary demands of copyright holders. They want to have their cake and eat it too. So the system works as intended.
Alphabet is valued at over 1.5 Trillion dollars. If they pay 1 Billion USD in fines per year, maybe their lawyers are actually doing an ok job for their client.
I've yet to see Google not return a piratebay link at any point in history. Is it a loophole where they take it down, but their indexer then immediately puts it back in the next pass, lol?
> I've yet to see Google not return a piratebay link at any point in history. Is it a loophole where they take it down, but their indexer then immediately puts it back in the next pass, lol?
No. If you pay attention there can be a message at the bottom of the search results telling you how many results were removed due to takedown requests. IIRC, they used to even link directly to the request, but now I think you have to jump through hoops to see it.
The "loophole" is that a takedown request has to be for a specific URL, so it requires a lot of constant effort to even try to get them all. Pirate Bay always had dupes and a million mirrors.
I'm not being nit-picky or contentious - I'm asking from a genuine point of curiousity ...
but in the case of Google linking to the pirate bay, isn't the pirate bay the one linking to the pirated content? Google is 1 step removed in that node graph because they are just linking to the pirate bay.
I guess if they directly linked to a pirate bay page that had a magent link on it .... maybe (?)
Google seems to refuse removing because, according to them, "Whole-site removal is ineffective and can easily result in censorship of lawful material."
Instead of removing, they just remove links by request.
Isn't this the same loophole that MegaUpload used? Only removing a link to a file, not the file itself with the claim that other links belonged to potentially lawful owners of the file.
I mean, if the subpoena says "remove a link" you comply with that.
But there's also another fundamental difference: even if there's the expectation of removing all copies of the same exact file, it is "trivial" for MegaUpload to know, by using hashes. They do have access to all files, as it is in their servers.
For Google to delete all pirate links to movie X it would be much more complicated, and would put them on a position of being forced to be the internet police.
A court is unlikely to care about the distinction between actually linking to pirated content, and linking to a page with both instructions and a link to the pirated content. To add, enough TPB torrents contain screenshots.
Also, Google's takedown request handling in Google Search is not a matter of DMCA or a legal matter at all - instead, it's like Content ID, where they have their own system for evaluating takedown requests separate from any law. Rights-holders can still send Google legal requests, but it's easier to go through the expedited processes Google provides that also won't increase rights-holders' liability if they happen to submit a false takedown.
It's been 5 or 6 years ago now, but one night I searched for torrents for a particular movie, and Google returned hundreds of results from a dozen sites... and the next evening they returned 0. I think it was an October.
While I don't doubt that a torrent link shows up once in awhile, Google no longer usefully searches for such things. Or really anything, legal or not. It's more like a purchase recommendation system pretending to be a search engine.
At the bottom there is a message that says "In response to a legal request submitted to Google, we have removed 4 result(s) from this page. If you wish, you may read more about the request at LumenDatabase.org" and links to https://lumendatabase.org/notices/27615507
Google will only remove specific URLs, not entire sites/domains. Even if every copyright holder with content on TPB sent a DMCA notice to Google today, new torrents -- at new URLs -- would pop up tomorrow.
Can't speak for rarbg, but plenty of piracy adjacent sites have a DMCA takedown program[0] to operate under this loophole. That way, most content survives but they are "protected"
That’s why magnet links were invented for torrents. They don’t link to any content, just give your client a unique ID to find peers for.
Like saying a site mentioning that you should look for “cannabis” if you want to get high is illegal. Selling the substance is illegal, telling you how it’s called isn’t.
It doesn't link to a file or embed any tracker names but it does name a 1080p HEVC (x265) encoded season pack of season 5 of a US police procedural drama (which is excess and unrequired but humans do like readable names)
What it does provide is a unique hash code that matches the exact torrent ... should you find it.
When you add that magnet link to your torrent client it triggers the act of polling any public trackers your client knows about and any peers that have "hit me up about magnets" enabled.
Ideally word spreads and eventually some other client | tracker hits you back with word of other peers that at least have some cannabis .. (err, bits of Rizzoli&Isles Season 5 HEVC pack).
A magnet URI is a little bit like a web link in the sense that it refers to a particular piece of data, but it doesn't point to any particular host or location. It is merely a hash of the files it describes. So in other words, the link doesn't tell you where the particular content can be found, it only tells you what the content is that it refers to.
To actually find the content in question you take the link, go on a peer to peer network, and basically ask machines if they have the content in question available or know where it is. There's various ways to do that, in some cases your torrent app might know the location of some centralized "tracker" servers, and ask those servers whether they know locations for those files. Some torrents are "trackerless" and use a DHT, a type of distributed database that keeps information about where to find files.
It's deprecated and I believe it only used to work in very old AWS regions for legacy reasons. Not sure what the current status is but it clearly has no future.
beeig edgy and exploring edge cases for the sake of the argument has indeed become somewhat anti-social. i guess it has something to do with the width of the audience, as the bigger the crowd, the more likely it is that someone will take you serious and make a fuss about it.
Who are those people who are offended when you introduce an edge case against their argument? This is very weird behaviour because the whole civilisation is built on finding edge cases to demonstrate that a model doesn't work.
For example, would it be offensive to say that a feather and a hammer will fall at the same speed on the moon to take down the Aristotle's theory of gravity? Is it OK to not talk about that kind of stuff in order not to offend Aristotletes?
Reporter: So, to end the interview I have to ask you about an experiment that everyone's talking about and you must be aware of. It's been said that marbles and cannonballs dropped from a tower at the same time have been seen to land at the same time. If there are any comments you'd like to make about that, I'm sure the public would love to hear them.
Aristotle Scholar: You know, I'm actually glad you asked this, because these kind of "gotcha" questions show everyone the unfortunate state of journalism today, its disrespect for scholarship, and its willingness to peddle whatever trash that people are circulating in order to undermine our institutions. [wrestles wooden microphone off lapel and storms off set.]
The problem is people don't know if you're asking questions to indicate your disapproval (or to cause people grief) or if you're asking to understand. In other words bad faith questions vs good faith questions.
People get offended when you're asking bad faith questions. And it can be difficult to differentiate the two, especially when people discussing don't know each other.
I know someone who is often snippy with me because I ask questions where I legitimately want to understand something, but she assumes I'm asking to indicate she's done something wrong.
it is very wired if you (plural) are looking for truth or consensus or progress.
but normies are generally freaked out, because they are not used to real talk. i often crash into this barrier of non-sense talk for the sake of conversation as well, very painful for both sides.
i'm sure aristotle wouldn't be offended but encouraged :)
Yes, you are a special flower and people are annoyed at you not because you're grating, rude, or arrogant, but because they are stupid and only want to talk about the Kardashians or whatever.
>> How is it still possible to remain anonymous on the Internet, considering in this age the thing is very mature and well commercialised?
Because at the core, identity on the internet is not well defined. Authentication is a hard problem. You might wonder why it's hard, why better more secure protocols haven't emerged. Answer: that makes end to end encryption easy, among other things that give individuals too much power.
AI produced Obits, and death certs and detailed descriptions of the death, and then new documents produced via GPT6+ access to APIs to DMV, Embassies, etc to produce new documents sent to your new PO box in [place] etc...
-
deep-fake assassinations are going to be a thing...
Well, Bulgaria used to be a jurisdiction that doesn't care but this is no longer early 2000s. Are there really jurisdictions that don't care and still have connections to the rest of the world? I guess DPRK, Iran, Cuba and maybe a few more can do that but wouldn't they be a problem to the infrastructure provider to work with in first place?
They still don't quite care though. For example in western Europe it's quite common to get threatening letters as soon as you start torrenting without VPN. In eastern europe this is not happening.
Perhaps because copyright infringement is not really a criminal issue but more of a civil law one. Without a private party starting lawsuits on behalf of the copyright owners there is nothing happening. It could be they don't have one.
> in western Europe it's quite common to get threatening letters as soon as you start torrenting without VPN
What about the right of the privacy of communication? Oh, right, it's the state-owned postal services that have to respect that right, and only with regards to the paper letters, not the privately operated ISPs that can (and obliged to) wiretap at the slightest suspicion of crime.
This isn't the ISPs detecting you torrent. It's rightholders joining a torrent swarm, getting an IP-address, and asking the ISP for the person behind that address. It differs between jurisdictions whether the ISP has to comply or not. In the Netherlands they do not, (but Surfnet, a university focused ISP complies anyway). In Germany they have to comply.
Lobbying is always happening to require ISPs to cooperate though.
Seriously, screw Germany here. The way they oppressively Gestapo your internet traffic just to catch you downloading an mp3 to treat you like criminal menace, is unheard of in the rest of Europe.
Can't believe the so called "privacy conscious" German public are okay with this invasiveness of their internet privacy when they're the only EU country as hardcore on this "issue".
If only they would invest as much resources in digital innovation as they do in catching people download a DVD rip, Germany would rule the tech world.
> If only they would invest as much resources in digital innovation as they do in catching people download a DVD rip, Germany would rule the tech world.
I don't think it's expensive, once you've the software:
1- regularly pull the torrent IDs from the latest releases on most popular torrenting website
2- download and stream the movies
3- wait for German IPs to connect
4- filter out IPs behind a VPN
5- identify the IP provider
6- send the request, probably by Email
7- profit
Not sure how advanced the software, but I don't see much manual input needed, it must be actually very lucrative
> Can't believe the so called "privacy conscious" German public are okay with this invasiveness
Nothing against Germans but there is a lot of hypocrisy in their society:
- Energiewende vs. shutting down Nuclear Plants and turning on Coal
- Green cars vs. 300km/h on the Autobahn
- Go to a restaurant in a big German city, guys tell you they don't accept cards, then hand write the bill on a napkin (...) vs. Greece where restaurants are legally obliged to accept cards and if they don't, then you can just walk out without paying (!..) (all this since the EU driven by Germany bailed Greece out)
Germany seems like they just do what involves the most policing. If it's going after companies for privacy invasions, they do it. If it's going after individuals for infringing on copyright, they do it.
They got rid of the laws that targeted people by race and background, but they never bothered to dispose of the jack boots.
Meh that's why I stay away from German services. People who go apeshit on you for sharing one 64kb chunk of movie have lost their marbles. Service provider is GmbH, headquarters in Germany? Maybe someone from the other side of the world believes in their "privacy" lunatism.
For US, it's natural that they are aggressive to arrest pirates because US have some biggest content holders in the world. I wonder is Germany content sold well?
Resources not as in tech but as in lack of red tape in invading people's privacy for such trivial issues. In any other country this would get you laughed out of court.
Note that in the Netherlands right holders can request ISPs to proxy their letters but those ISPs are not allowed to share the home addresses or any other personal information so it’s neigh impossible for a right holder to get hold of a torrent user.
There's a difference between getting a court order and someone saying - "I saw that X IP address shared a copyrighted file - can I get their name and address?"
It should be noted that (as far as I know) none of those are actually fines. It's private companies that track down pirates, and they cannot give out fines. They send you a settlement proposal, saying either pay this or risk being sued.
Does the UK send letters and fines? I haven't torrented without a VPN for years but the worst I ever heard anyone getting was a letter from the ISP saying "that was very naughty, please don't do it again".
AFAIK they don't actually inspect your comms, instead they leech from you to get your IP address and start the legal procedure. The way I understand it, they don't send you a letter for downloading but for sharing. Correct me if I'm wrong though.
You're correct on the methodology except that (in France at least) they also seed, to get the IP of users that download. And you do get letters for downloading.
Initially the plan was to ban those people from internet for a period of that but it got removed since it was anticonstitutional.
Depending on your jurisdiction, even just downloading might be illegal. But you're right, when you torrent, you publish your IP address, where parties unrelated to your ISP might get it and pursue legal action.
Is it they do illegal thing and then try to extort money from you for doing the same thing? Or have they received a royal blessing nowadays and can do so legally?
Depends on the ISP. Telia will hand out your details to copyright holders, Bahnhof will require them to file the request through the police. Most rights holders just sont bother with Bahnhof or the smaller ISPs and just send batches to Telia and ComHem.
Potential Impact on Major Pirate Sites as Vietnam ISPs Face New Responsibilities, May 12, 2023.
> “Most Voluminous” Copyright Decree Ever Issued in Vietnam
> Global IP services firm Rouse reports that with 8 chapters and 116 articles, Decree 17 is the most voluminous copyright decree ever issued in Vietnam.
> “[T]he Copyright Decree provides significantly detailed guidance on copyright enforcement, especially which disputes can be classified as a copyright dispute, how to establish acts of copyright infringement, and how to calculate damages caused by infringements,” the company reports.
> “The long, detailed section in copyright assessment is also expected to pave the way for the growth of the currently limited copyright assessment services in Vietnam.”
Does Iceland actually care much? I don't imagine they'd let you host an actual warez site a la 2000 or so, but a site just hosting magnet links seems like something they'd mostly allow, and they DEFINITELY have the infrastructure to handle it.
That all said, I'm always amazed that these sites don't just move to i2p/tor. The torrents themselves have been decentralized with DHT and magnet links for awhile. At the end of the day it seems like they've just been hanging on trying to avoid being so in the shadows that they get less traffic as a result.
imo copyright is irrelevant in countries that either can withstand the mpaa's pressure, maybe via good relations to the state department, or in countries that have bigger problems.
How expensive can a link sharing site be to run, genuinely? They're not serving any of the content (unless they are, in which case, yeah...) But if they're just serving up .torrent files or magnet links, these sites should be pretty cheap to run I would assume?
It tends to run a little more when you're using hosting in a country that doesn't respect US copyright (and similarly for most EU) along with keeping your information private to begin with. When I had looked into it, it's been roughly 2x what a typical western dedicated server provider might charge.
This doesn't count the issues with a site that is very popular, from bandwidth to even simple database search overhead. If I were to guess, it's that RarBG probably spent in excess of $10k/month, which isn't much if you're a startup with a runway of VC capital or a revenue stream, it's a lot more if you're in a smaller country or don't have an excess of revenue.
You can still buy pre-paid credit cards in many places, and many places allow you to pay for anonymous servers with cards.
Worst case if they had enough money they could rent somewhere and pay for a decent internet connection and not actually live there, so only the equipment would be seized.
I think the "new meta" is sketchy popup/popunder ad providers that pay BTC/USDT, njal.la/nic.ru/some Chinese registrar paid with crypto or a virtual card, DDOS-guard/Cloudflare to make getting the origin IP annoying, and hosting in an ex-USSR country (and sometimes even mainstream Western providers like Leaseweb or OVH). But that's just the impression I got by occasionally using these sites, looking at domain/IP whois and using one of those Cloudflare deanonymizer sites when it was still up.
I keep wondering all the time why torrent search is based on websites (centralized), which can be taken down, etc., while once you have a torrent file or a magnet/hash everything is distributed.
Is there a main reason why there isn't (AFAIK, even though I haven't really researched) a distributed search that wouldn't have these problems? Is it a tech problem that literally can't be solved? Or it just hasn't been done? It seems like search is the obvious weak link, since the websites keep disappearing or taken down or blocked by governments and ISPs, etc.
There is many search engine that use the DHT to retrieve the metadata and share torrent via the magnet. The main issue here is not the tech, it's the trust and discoverability/curating and also not spreading the seeding capabilities.
When downloading from "reputable torrent tracker XYZ" you can trust the quality of the torrent, that it is virus free, etc ... It is also usually make searching for particular torrent easier (less like searching for a nail in a hay stack) and you avoid spreading the seeding potential to hundreds of similar torrents.
As a extreme example, BakaBT (a private torrent for anime/manga related torrent) has a strict "no duplicate torrent" policy. This means that if you are searching for the OST of a specific show, you will have usually only one result and it's the most up-to-date, highest quality version. Since it is the only option, everyone seed this one. It really diminish the issue of abandoned torrents. To "replace" and existing torrent, you have to provide a strictly better version.
A decentralized torrent search engine could not do that. The real value of torrent tracker are the community.
That is also why decentralized software like eMule/eDonkey lost a lot of popularity to torrent tracker: Lots of duplication, very dodgy download, no curation, virus, ....
This makes sense but...I'm being fully serious and earnest here and revealing my own naïveté:
Couldn't some form of blockchain work here? Like couldn't some form of distributed/democratized community curation and moderation happen by using the blockchain to manage the arbitration of new torrents (and their successors, like when the community decides New Random Anime X encoding to be a superior copy)? Plus you have proof of stake or whatever the leading mechanism is to help combat and filter out fakes/illegal activity (etc)?
Then you'd have blockchain managing the trackers and torrents managing the file sharing.
Bitcoin is going to be 15 years old soon and aside from this original usage, no real usage has really taken off for "blockchain" technologies (and no, I am not counting the occasional pump and dump / virtual scarcity scheme as a real usage of the tech). We really have to stop asking this question. And I say this having had some involvement with some web3 projects/company.
Even if it is theoretically possible, it create a huge barrier for entry, a lot of user friction, issue with governance and distribution of power, exploit, etc. And it is extremely hard to put in place for something that can be replaced by a generic phpBB forum in an afternoon. It is like trying to make a ICBM to kill a fly.
There are plenty of real uses for cryptocurrency that exist in the real world, but most of it is boring stuff: people holding their assets in stablecoins in countries that have capital controls.
This is an example of a real, yet illegal use of cryptocurrency (in the sense that it is used to circumvent the local laws). Also said cryptocurrency has to remain hidden like a treasure in a chest inside a secret cave, or it can be seized, and if the owner does not comply with the seizure, he can be jailed.
Yes, illegal with respect to the laws of the country, but there are many countries where most economic activity is underground/casual, not tracked by the state/outside of capital controls, and crypto is absolutely muscling into those spaces because it allows for complex financial infrastructure & also much better security compared to holding it.
On the 'person supplying crypto for stablecoin' side, my opinion is it is not very useful. It allows you to keep crypto exposure while taking your cash out so you can make leveraged bets on crypto going up.
On the person 'supplying trust & owned property and getting a stablecoin loan', the other side of some Dai loans, there is real value being created there as they can use cheaper credit to invest in their business.
Most of the value goes to people in places like Argentina & Nigeria facing massive inflation who are now able to hold an asset that is backed to the dollar and overcollaterized by crypto, western bonds, & real properties held in the West, which is a better option than pretty much anything they can get in their home country.
If you put up your home or property as collateral, you can still own the property will getting lower rates. Similar thing with the Dai loans I am describing there.
Yes, but it's not quite the same, because both the collateral and the asset being borrowed belong in the same asset class. It's as if you're renting a car but you have to put up the same car that you're renting (only in a different colour) as collateral. It seems a little pointless. Usually, people want to rent a car because they don't have a car. Likewise, they want to borrow money, because they don't have money.
1. There is no restriction that the asset being borrowed and the collateral are in the same asset class - loans can be extended based on whatever criteria the DAO in charge of the Dai votes on. There are a number of loans backed by real property investments in the US, see [0] under RWA. There are a number of loans also backed by large holdings in US bonds.
2. Dai is pegged to the dollar. It can be instantly exchanged with the dollar at a number of onramps. It is not equivalent to holding volatile crypto like ethereum.
Okay, these loans that are backed with real world assets are just traditional finance right? We were discussing loans that are granted automatically to anyone without requiring an approval, remember:
> How I can take out a collateralized loan, anywhere in the world, without having to ask for approval?
Is it traditional finance if it is a backing loan for dollar-pegged assets that can be held by anyone in the developed world (ie. rather than rely on your rapidly decreasing Naira - buy some Dai from a local dealer and you have a stable store of value backed by a global basket of assets)? And if the entities granting the loans are anonymous decentralized collectives?
I agree that the overcollateralized loans backed by crypto are less useful unless you want to be investing crypto, which is what I mentioned at the beginning of my comment. I am not the commentator who said the thing about anywhere in the world without approval.
A complaint about crypto is that it is too volatile to hold. If you can hold AND put at least some of it (up to your comfortable collateralization ratio) to work through lending it out (and borrowing against it), then that can offset the volatility.
What you do with the borrowed funds is up to you and there are an endless stream of possibilities. One example is to re-lend out again for additional interest. Interest arbitrage is a way to make your existing capital, work for you.
Lend BTC +1%, Borrow ETH -3%, Stake ETH +5%. 2% profit on the ETH and 1% on the BTC. Of course, you could then sell the profits for say, USDC, which you can then lend out again (~4%) or use to pay your bills or drug habit or whatever...
At the end of the day, this is what banks do with your funds. But instead of giving them the vast majority of the interest, why not take the interest yourself?
Larger picture, I personally see this as the opposite of credit cards, which are a blight on society [0]. People go into debt that they may or may not be able to pay off in the future. Why not reverse that and teach people to not spend more than they can pay off (collateralized loans)? You're punished with liquidations instead of stupid high interest rates.
If the amount that you borrow is the same amount that you lend, both amounts cancel out. Your net investment position is zero. As I see it, you can't do anything you the borrowed funds because you haven't borrowed any funds. You have the same funds that you had before taking the "loan".
I lend that 1 BTC. I'm getting 1% on it. This is better than the pet rock that it otherwise is.
I can then borrow safely 50% of the value of that BTC, so $13,500 worth of goods. Now, I've magically given myself an additional $13,500, that I didn't have before.
The price of BTC would have to drop 50% before I'd be liquidated (some of my BTC would be automatically sold to cove the loan). Certainly, BTC can drop 50% in value... but if you are paying attention, you should have more than enough time to pay back that loan or add more BTC. In practice, BTC drops that much slowly over time (like a month or two), not in one go. It also works the other way, if BTC gains in value, you have less to worry about.
Let's say I pick to borrow ETH ($1800). I can now borrow 7.5 ETH at 3%. I can then lend that 7.5 ETH at 5%. I can then take those 5% earnings and sell those or even restake them.
Money legos. None of this requires permission or credit reports, just transactions on a blockchain. If you use a chain that has far lower fees (like Polygon, Arbitrium, Avalanche), then the fees are a rounding error in the cost of operations.
I don't think this is correct. Let's say you have one bitcoin. Your funds available for spending are $27,000 (we're assuming bitcoin has perfect liquidity, for the sake of the argument). If you borrow $13,500 against your bitcoin, your funds available for spending are now $13,500. So, less than what you started with. This isn't a loan. A loan increases your funds available for spending, not decreases them.
If you have $13,500 that you didn't have before, isn't that an increase?
I do see the distinction you're trying to make though. That's why I qualified it with the word "collaterlized".
Let me also correct you: "Let's say you have one bitcoin. Your funds available for spending are $27,000".
No, we're not talking about selling the bitcoin. There is no 'spending' here. What you're doing is borrowing against the value of the bitcoin that you're holding. You don't need to sell it, you're using it as collateral. The system can liquidate you.
You started with more than $13,500. You started with $27,000. Then you used those $27,000 as collateral to borrow $13,500. Once you pay back the $13,500, you get your $27,000 back. So, you never have more than $27,000 at your disposal, which is what you started with.
Are you sure? Did it fall from the sky? No, it didn't. You saved up $27,000 and then you bought the bitcoin. So first you had to have $27,000, otherwise none of the subsequent steps would have been possible.
Yeah, I understand... these type of loans exist in finance, they serve a very specific purpose.
The point is that, unlike consumer loans, such loans require that the borrower has savings before they can take the loan. For example, most people who take a mortgage do so because they don't want to save money for 30 years before they can buy a house. They want to buy a house now, and save later. A mortgage loan allows them to do precisely that.
These other loans don't, and so they're less useful. They aren't completely useless. It's just that in most circumstances they aren't useful.
> The point is that, unlike consumer loans, such loans require that the borrower has savings before they can take the loan.
EXACTLY my point. If we actually turned lending and borrowing around so that you had to have collateral first (1), that could actually transform an entire economy, as well as people's minds away from spending what they don't have.
Credit card debt is at all time highs and they are raping people with high APY's on those funds.
(1) In SE Asia, they don't have the concept of credit reporting agencies and thus their 'credit cards' are all collateralized (what we refer to as debt cards). Living there is what turned me onto this concept and how it is a better way to do things. You can't spend more than what you've already deposited and you actually earn interest on it too!
> no real usage has really taken off for "blockchain" technologies (and no, I am not counting the occasional pump and dump / virtual scarcity scheme as a real usage of the tech)
In the Bitcoin world, Ordinals have started to make waves as they are a creative use of unintended consequences. This will likely spur other innovations.
In the EVM world, DeFi is still used all the time. It lost a lot of steam from the last bull run, but trading, be your own bank, interest arbitrage, options, perps, all of that is still going on quite a bit. New sites are popping up all the time. LybraFinance LUSD/eUSD is one of the more recent ones.
This happened in the dutch usenet piracy community.
Downloading happened over usenet, but curation and discussion on a centralised website.
The site got seized and the community moved to a new forum that runs on usenet itself.
Blockchain is overkill here - don't need a coin or stake or whatever
> Downloading happened over usenet, but curation and discussion on a centralised website. The site got seized and the community moved to a new forum that runs on usenet itself.
True, it worked really well for a while but lately it's been pretty terrible due to local copyright representatives suing major uploaders and others stopping because they just got old.
Also the notice & takedown has really killed usenet a bit. Private trackers are hard to get into just like with torrents.
Cryptocurrency could be used here to both decentralize and incentivize such a system. I think a major hurdle would be the fact torrents have been "free" since their inception. PoS is irrelevant here - it's a mechanism that lives "higher up" to protect the entire cryptocurrency ecosystem. Then there's also the social issues and useability issues that plague the space.
My best guess is most bittorrent enthusiasts (and myself) would like to see a more natural solution to the decentralization problem. "Natural" being incentives which arise around sharing / not sharing and similar, vs straight up money incentives.
A reputation system could work but again, Sybil attacks could happen. So some how the network needs to figure out a way to make certain actions more expensive in the large.
I asked because the original question was around centralization (a tracker website) being the weak link in the chain. I suppose you could build a very simple decentralized voting system / index of sorts... but it wouldn't be a centralized hosted online "website" (..right?)
It's therapeutic, people use whatever is available to them. Having a struggle at the edge allows people to do the busy work they bill for while not accomplishing anything meaningful. Technical folk will find new ways to keep their thing going. If to many websites are gone people will move to a new formula (new to them)
The network of sharing software and movies is much older than the internet. Eventually you just purchase a preloaded data carrier from your local pot dealer. The drives are so large, the formula would go dramatically faster than BitTorrent. Shipping [say] 10 kg worth of data carriers is amazingly cheap.
Looking at some random portable drive 10 kg box / 0.265 kg = 37 drives and 37 * 5 TB = 185 TB ? Something like 100 000 to 400 000 hours of film. Good for a maximum fine in "lost revenue" of $ 1 000 000 000 000 for the single box.
There is a lengthy therapeutic treatment program between that stage and the torrent websites.
Eventually some bean counter will discover crowd sourcing Police Academy 8 and people will just give them money provided they desire to see it. Star citizen raised over $569 million. On the most profitable movies list nr 191 is Fifty Shades of Grey with $569 million from a budget of 40 million. I can see the problem, with crowd sourcing it would be like normal work. That extra 500 million would be unlikely. They would have to make 10 movies.
What you propose sounds broadly like it could easily be built on IPFS and Filecoin. I think you find that there isn’t enough financial incentive to go decentralized here; groups get together and host/curate for community and kudos more than for profit.
You could probably accomplish as much just indexing torrents and combining it with an HN style voting system + user profiles. There’s always risk of bad actors but the main thing is having humans in the loop to provide reputation signals.
Not just the technology, if Freenet is still like it was when I tried it years ago (?), the "front page" is full of sites clearly being for pedophiles and fascists. Kind of tends to put you off, you know ?
I once visited RarBG with uBlock Origin turned off by accident. The intensity of the shitstorm of fake links, transparent GIFs on top of the content and other stuff like that was overwhelming. I believe that it is universally stupid to trust torrent sites with anything.
The problem is not search, it's curation. Any system that accepts everything will be overrun with things you do not want (fakes, *very* illegal things), and so there needs to be some authority that determines what is allowed. At that point, you are centralized, and hosting a website doesn't significantly hurt you.
This is also the problem with all distributed social networks. In the end, your options are formal centralization, and informal centralization, because absolutely nobody wants to live in true decentralization.
Here is straw man proposal, similar to cert chains and webs of trust: Say I'm a "curator". I say on HN/Reddit/Discord "here is my key hash 'p2pcuration:185da2bc59167692f596404fd83235f9bcb4e107b041f2e6e8d972da6dba00b7'". Any user that clicks the link or copies it into the search app adds the key to the trusted user list. With my private key I can sign torrents after I download them myself, which would mark the torrent as "good". When anyone who has added my key searches, the system searches for a corresponding signature from me as well. If a signature is found, the UI can chose to elevate that result.
The system could be extended so that signers could also sign other keys, expanding the trust network.
This system doesn't need to be run or maintained by each user. It could be served through a webui that can be run locally or shared with a small community. Migrating the interface to a new host would just require moving the config and keys.
What happens when you do this is that a few or one people in the system become trusted above the others, network effects do their thing, and the whole thing becomes informally centralized around them.
Sorting by number of seeders will probably get you a file that is fast to download because of the number of seeders, but it will rarely get you quality. Let's go take a stroll over to a popular public torrent site and search for, say, a recent superhero movie.
I see 100 (!) results for that movie's name. 49 of them have zero seeders at all. I don't know what even is the point. 29 of the results have one seeder. So already, 78% of the results are pure crap.
Let's look at the top result with 338 seeders: File is 3GB, H.264 video, 1080p, but with a crappy stereo AAC audio encoding... arrggh why??
Number 2 result with 84 seeders: 1.43GB, H.264 video, 720p, no word on the quality of the audio encoding. Even more worthless.
Number 3 result with 17 seeders: HEVC format, 2160p, audio streams include TrueHD Atmos 7.1, DTS-HD, Dolby Digital 5.1, stereo, and three non-English language streams. But, with an eye-watering download size of 61GB. Holy shit! Nice, but wow, what a download.
You have to go a few more down the list to find a good balance of high quality video and audio encoding, but with a reasonable file size. By that point you're in the single digit number of seeders.
Don't get me wrong, it's great to have a few choices and quality trade-offs. I guess there's someone out there who doesn't care about the stereo audio because they watch their movies with laptop speakers. But 100 results, with the vast majority of them either unseeded, poorly-seeded, or flawed in some way. I agree with OP: You definitely want some curation, not just search!
I often pick the 0 seeders results if there is even a slight chance of better quality, and quite often there is.
0 seeders now doesn't mean forever. Some seeders only hook to the network once in a while, long enough for a few leechers to fetch it all. If the content is in demand enough then a few seeders may be left and suddenly a 0 seeder search result becomes an attractive one. Even curating is complicated for the human eye, so good luck automating that.
Yes it sometimes works but usually for smaller stuff like ebooks or music. You dont want to download gigabytes if not more from 1 spotty seeder, the chances it wont take days of 24h online and source being obline too are tiny.
Sometimes disconnect from site seeder count is bigger, and say 1 seeder mentioned is actually 15. But that was never rarbg's case, it was reliable and dependable like no other similar service. It also had IMBD rating so I could quickly weed out not so great stuff and focus on well rated ones, it generated maybe 60-80 movies a day with my filter applied, so quite a stream. After 2 week vacation, catching up took some time.
I used to, including today, to just go there every day or two and check whats new with my predefined filter. Often great movies that I never heard about before, old and new alike, took 2 mins to get 1080p x265 variant. Glad I've still managed to download that highly rated turkish movie this morning.
Great example. Some private trackers have strict rules about quality, e.g. at most one 720p and at most one 1080p (probably 1080p and 4k nowadays), bitrate must be above a certain threshold, whichever was published first stays, unless there is an "official" version published by the same people maintaining the website. The exact opposite of decentralized torrent sites, and works really well. Takes a lot of work, obviously.
It's pretty much impossible to support Anonymous + Distributed + Free from poison/injection attacks. Not to mention, you still largely need at least some known points of entry into such a system.
I seem to remember kazaa being extremely popular (especially after napster was gone) and moreover centralized. The client was local. gnutella sounds like what you're describing?
You can't build a decentralized search because there's no way to trust whatever results you get until you actually build it. If you don't want to rely on a specific community, your best bet is to crawl yourself and search locally: you can do that with magnetico (https://github.com/boramalper/magnetico/). Don't be frightened by the fact that it is archived, it works.
The problem then will be, how do you make sure your content is legit? There's no magic way here, the best thing you can do is compare the number of seeders and aim for the highest. If a torrent is fake, people will delete it and it won't be seeded. I have a thingy for that: https://sr.ht/~rakoo/magneticos/
The problem then becomes, number of seeders naturally selects towards popular content. It doesn't ensure viability of content. But I don't think there's a technical answer to that.
Very interesting, thanks for sharing your project. Magnetico is also integrated into Jackett I believe, which might be helpful to some people who use that
Decentralized search is a complex problem and there exist different approaches to it with different degree of centralization and resource requirements.
DC++ is a bit more decentralized than BitTorrent. There still are central servers ("hubs"), but they don't even host any metadata. Search works by the hub broadcasting all search queries to all online peers and them replying with results if they have any. The file transfers themselves are p2p.
I have an idea that's kind of more decentralized. Initially envisioned as a missing global search feature for the fediverse, but can be adapter for anything that has a similar network structure. A server has a number of peers already established because of the ActivityPub federation. Each server would send to its peers some kind of bloom filter that determines the tags or keywords that this server has results for. Then, when searching, your server would find the peers who are likely to have what you want, and only send your search query to them. If there aren't any, then it would send your query to the peers that have most users (with some random bias for load balancing purposes) because they're likely to have more connectivity, and they would point you where to look based on their own peers and their bloom filters. There would also need to be some kind of reputation system (centralized server lists? p2p exchange of scores/reports?) so that servers that return spam or intentionally wrong results would get punished.
This could probably be made to work in a fully-decentralized p2p network, but I imagine it would be too easy to abuse. Getting a new domain costs money, yet getting a new IP or public key is free and easy.
That's a good question, but the answers are somewhat sad. I see the other commenters saying it's not about the search, but about the curation. Curation or identification (as in, "who's the author?") is essential, but decentralized search is non-existent too. Yes, there is unmaintained, resource-hungry, locally-run, unscalable software out there that you can use, but there really isn't a public search engine for this. Which is a shame. I really hope someone will tell me I missed something, but I'm not holding my breath :(
Edit: found mentions of https://btdig.com and https://bt4g.org. I wasn't aware of the latter. A problem with the former is that it doesn't track number of peers.
r/DataHoarder are sharing their backups of Magnet links and torrent files they backed up for years and are trying to bring the site back from the dead. For torrent sites, nothing stops you really from scraping the site for torrents. As long as the file itself is being seeded, it'll be impossible to take down. It IS decentralized.
What a shame. They could have asked for donations but me as an Eastern European, I get it -- usually if we get to the point of needing donations we feel ashamed and humiliated and just close shop.
I hope somebody picks up the flag. Illegal and copyright-protected piracy aside, there were tons of royalty-free and non-copyright-enforced works of art there and it would be a big hit on humanity's culture at large for all that to be lost.
There’s also a problem for pirate sites specifically that if they accept donations then this fact can be used later on in a trial, where the plaintiff party may use this as evidence that the pirate site is being run for profit, and which in turn may lead to higher fines, more jail time, etc, for the defendants.
If they were to receive funds via Bitcoin or Monero, is it even possible to pay for hosting with those funds directly? Or would they have to deal with shady exchanges that would invite money-laundering enforcement actions?
They did use aggressive popup ads via click-hijacking. So they were monetizing at least to some extent. Unfortunately for them, most people torrenting probably use ad protection.
To my knowledge, they didn't. There were a lot of imposter sites, which were indistinguishable, where you'd be told to download a VPN or similar. But the main .to site never opened any ads for me
It always did for me. The first time a torrent results page opens, the clicks open a new tab with ads. You had to refresh the results page to actually click through to the torrent.
they sure did! every half a dozen clicks! immediately blocked by my adblockers but i would still dig into the dev tools to try and figure it out occasionally
Probably the largest blow to the torrent sharing community since The Pirate Bay got shut down. The impact of content availability will be noticeable for years to come
The problem is that since it became decentralised lots of good actors and bad actors have setup mirrors making it impossible to know which mirror is good or not.
Ive been using 1337x for a few years now and it pretty much has everything I need
I'm very out of the loop at this stage of life, but one thing I have wondered--has software as a service, and all the online gaming, killed off all those kinds of warez? Are most of these pirate sites nowadays just for movies/tv? (One of the reasons I have been wondering about this is that I so f'ing hate windows etc updating and phoning home all the time I would prefer a version cracked a la 2007 to prevent that, over the legit copy I own.)
I genuinely think Spotify and Netflix, and other streaming services, have been the biggest blow to torrent sites. For the average user, it's just so much easier to pay $10/month (or even less when you share your account with friends) and get easy & user-friendly access to the content (in a way that happens to be legal).
10-15 years ago, before Spotify/Netflix, people used to say: "As long as it's easier to acquire things illegally, people will continue doing so," and I think that has really been shown to be true.
There is still no worldwide availability of all streaming services which keeps piracy for media going. For example I have no way to legally access to Disney+, paramount, hulu or peacock content. I'm happy to pay but can't.
Online-only, heavily DRMed games are still a tiny minority of games.
And even if you look at popularity instead, Minecraft (so far as the more open Java version is still popular at least) single-handedly skews the results enough for them not being a clear win for the locked down games.
what metric are you using if not popularity? the raw # of games put out on the market?
I can remember the online game thing starting way back when I was still playing. Quake had an ethernet option, and I remember something called "Unreal Tournament" spreading like wildfire around dorms when I was in school. My first though was "it's really fun shooting at real kids instead of barrels!" immediately followed by "this is going to be really hard to crack!" I figured every developer would move online by now just to kill cracking.
Can I bother you for a RED invite? My email is on my profile, or I can email you (your email is on your profile, but I don't want to bother you too much).
I had a what.cd (and waffles.fm) account in very good standing, but I never got on to RED, because I never really did the interview on account of having to idle on IRC for a long time.
Not really. Only very current stuff stayed seeded, because there was both no obligation to seed back and significant danger. Very little that wasn't available everywhere else (and also highly commercially available) lasted for years on rarbg.
Rarbg was also notable because it was public, you didn't need an account, and it was a lot more accessible (and safer) than other sites. Even TPB eventually required a bunch of JS just to see anything and they'd use that JS for shady things like crypto mining.
"Better" is a matter of opinion, but it certainly isn't a "margin note". Rarbg was one of the most popular torrent sites in the world. Torrent Freak puts it as #4 most popular in the world, ahead of The Pirate Bay, though I am not sure of their methodology.
Of those most popular sites, I think it was by far the best. It offered consistently good encodes, with about the best achievable quality for a given file size, in a variety of formats and resolutions. Its files were well-organized with a user-friendly browser and a wealth of metadata. It was possible to quickly find a good version of anything not too obscure.
Compare to TPB, where searches just vomit a page of often-mislabeled files the user must comb through manually. Compare to YIFY/YTS, which uploads bitrate-starved "HD" schlock that looks worse than rarbg's 480p.
> Compare to YIFY/YTS, which uploads bitrate-starved "HD" schlock that looks worse than rarbg's 480p.
YES. I have always wondered why YTS is popular, as the quality is always overstated and always garbage. sorry but 1 MBPS is not "HD", no matter what codec you are using.
Please indicate which is better. Where can I click on "top 100" or similar, and instantly see a page full of recent releases with screenshots, synopsis, and comments one click away?
Yes, you just have to join a certain private tracker that makes you wait for an interview. Then, once you're in, you have to seed for a bunch of time or fulfill requests that others have. Once you have gained enough reputation (which will be tracked with some weird point system), you are given access to a forum where people give out invites to their cooler secret clubs. Rinse and repeat this a couple of times and you can be in the cool kids club private trackers.
Public trackers have the advantage that they often don't even require accounts. If a private site ever gets raided, they'll have a ton of records like everything you've ever seeded, every IP you've used, the email address you signed up with, anything in your profile or comments that could be used to identify you etc. Way more risky than accessing a public website where all they ever see is a random IP address that viewed a page or made a search. If magnet links are available the site won't even have a record of what you actually downloaded.
Yeah and private trackers often ban VPN IPs because it would allow their 'enemies' to get in more easily.
But indeed it means that you are very exposed if the site ever gets taken down. And what we've seen in the netherlands: The site owners often hand everything over when they're caught because they're threatened with huge fines.
There are still pathways into these trackers, which usually require luck or some amount of work on feeder trackers before you get an invite. I got in through the unofficial Reddit tracker BaconBits (RIP) back in the day—YMMV, but it doesn't change the fact that there are better trackers out there.
That's pretty devastating. This was old reliable for a long time. I could never keep up with the demands from private trackers as streaming made it so I didn't need to utilize them as much.
Checkout sonarr and radarr together with jackett. Plenty of ways to find zillions of sites. Most dark streaming sites use these tools to fully automate everything
Last I checked you can get in IPTorrents and HDTorrents with a donation. Still need to maintain your ratio but you can also boost your upload with donations.
phenomenal site. while the content is upped by users the fact that multiple rips were found on the same page; SDR, HDR, HDR10, 264, 265, 720, 1080, 2160, dubbed, original, theatrical cuts, director's, producer's etc. was all on the brilliant, dedicated folks of rarbgtor and is what made the site the best in the world. nothing else even approaches it. like OiNk wiithout the drama. i'll remember the time spent there with gratitude and fondness. and I just installed two more 20TB drives, less than 18 hours ago...
o7 thank you for your service, keeping the Internet awesome and anti-corporate.
Where one piracy site dies, a thousand spawn from its corpse.
Maybe the media companies will eventually pull their heads out of their collective arses and quit their cartel, allowing the existence of legal, paid streaming sites a-la-Spotify with access to 99% of the repertoire. Until then, torrent is how we protest while they create more and more insular streaming services to milk people $9/mo at a time.
"Piracy is almost always a service problem." — Gabe Newell
(If you need a semi-private tracker that's easy to get into, try TorrentLeech. Also /r/opensignups)
A service and a pricing problem. All cases of piracy I have observed stem from one of 3 reasons
1. Too expensive. This encompasses several varieties, like the media in question being literally priced more than the person is willing to pay, or the pricing is acceptable, but the person can buy only one of several choices and wants to evaluate all before giving one their money.
2. The product is not offered for sale. This is sometimes literally that the product isn't available for sale in your country, or the product is not available in a useful form, e.g. it doesn't come with subtitles in your language, it won't work on your device, it requires a stable internet connection, which you don't have, etc.
3. For political reasons, to avoid supporting DRM.
This is very much a practical reason as well, though this overlaps with "not available in a usable form". DRM is the reason I can't watch movies at the highest bitrates and resolutions on my device from Netflix or Amazon. It's the reason I can't trust that things I purchase will be available to me indefinitely. It's the reason I can't build a collection of media (e.g. with Kodi) that is playable on my TV with one click with a single unifying interface.
> The product is not offered for sale.
This extends to some other cases as well. For instance, where the only available version is a crappy remaster (Terminator 2), and the original is much superior. Or if you want to watch the film with a director's commentary.
There's also, very broadly, a 4th reason - convenience. This encompasses both ease of use (if I know what movie I want to watch, I don't have to search to see where it's streaming), and discoverability (a good torrent site will easily let you see all the movies by a director or actor, and provide recommendations). Or if you're looking for a particular special feature, it's much more convenient to be able to download it than to go looking for a physical media copy and wait for it to be shipped to your door.
With the globalisation, there is actually a 4th reason rising: availability of content in specific regions.
I sometimes want/need content with audio and/or subtitle language X, which is not available legally where I live, but the exact same platform does have it available in the region that speaks this language.
pirating is in this case the best solution as I can pick the quality I want, with the audio and subtitle languages I need.
I think this is just the second reason rephrased a bit differently. And it isn't at all new — pretty much all Japanese game and animation studios have refused to acknowledge our region's existence for about as long as these industries have themselves been around.
For example, Nintendo consoles have been unavailable since the 90s — which is why we've been using these clones:
and are still unavailable now unless you're willing to buy consoles and games on ebay, overpriced and without warranty (which is what some of my friends have been doing, but I refuse to support publishers that consider my American dollars second class to those coming from actual Americans).
So torrents it is, then. 'Fuck you' can go both ways.
Exactly. I dropped out of the torrent scene for probably around 5 years when Netflix had a huge back-catalog and it just wasn't worth the hassle to manage torrents and a media server.
Then the Netflix catalog shrunk to originals, there's now 6 different streaming services I have to juggle to watch the usual content my family likes, and we're constantly using third-party services just to figure out what's available where. I hate having to switch from Netflix to Hulu to finish out a show because the last season is only on Hulu. Or things like Warner and Disney cutting shows because they don't want to pay residuals or whatever dumb accounting BS they feel like pulling.
If you make it more convenient to torrent and shove everything into Plex, why would I pay to get a worse experience.
Disney holding back the second half of the final season of Amphibia.
Released in the US but not here for unexplained reasons. For 6 months piracy was the only way to get a conclusion.
Our Flag Means Death, even though it had a large section of its cast from Britain it wasn't available to watch for far too long here.
I could go on, but you get the point. Any distribution rules are a creation of their own making in the first place.
> Maybe the media companies will eventually pull their heads out of their collective arses and quit their cartel, allowing the existence of legal, paid streaming sites a-la-Spotify with access to 99% of the repertoire. Until then, torrent is how we protest while they create more and more insular streaming services to milk people $9/mo at a time.
I have been hearing people make this same basic argument since the 90s. (I'm sure it's older than that.) During that time the price of video and audio entertainment has decreased while availability and quality have vastly improved. Despite this, piracy is still going strong. The ideological goalposts used to justify it keep moving, but the desire for free stuff is timeless. (Not judging here -- I've certainly done my share.)
Adjusting for inflation: Twenty years ago, a DVD with one recent movie cost ~$30, or you could rent one for $5-8. One album on CD cost ~$20. Buying individual songs for the then-unheard of price of $1.65 (99 cents at the time) on iTunes was brand new. They had limited bit rate and DRM, and you had to buy an expensive iPod if you wanted to use them conveniently. If you wanted good TV shows, you paid something like $60-80/month for cable TV (more if you wanted to watch The Sopranos) and had to watch on a schedule, with lots of ads.
If you compare that to today's world of cheap streaming services, high-quality DRM-free music, and even cheaper physical media, it's not even a contest.
That's a very US centric view of the problem. Because these days if you leave the borders of your country, you'll see that the streaming world is still a fragmented archipelago of crappy B-tier licensed movies, while the good stuff people want to watch is only available in the US through a VPN.
And cable TV or films at the cinema are as expensive as ever.
Which is why Spotify has had an incredible success worldwide and music piracy has reduced dramatically: their repertoire is very comprehensive and mostly the same everywhere in the world.
People really want to believe it is a money issue, and they are just terribly misguided. Gabe Newell is absolutely right here, and he knows piracy, as he deals with the demographic with expensive needs (gamers wanting the latest $70 game) and the least money (as young gamers don't have a job, or don't earn a lot)
>> "Piracy is almost always a service problem." — Gabe Newell
Once again; the media companies are absolutely doing everything in their power to drive even casual media consumers into piracy. I wouldn't be surprised if piracy was already more rampant than it's ever been - but it's only getting worse, due to ludicrous streaming fragmentation.
It'll never happen, but the only thing that can save piracy is an aggregate all-inclusive monthly subscription platform where all the films/shows from all services are available, just like Apple Music or Spotify. I pay $30-40/mo and I have access to all the stuff on Netflix, Prime, Max, Disney...
When you stream a movie from Netflix, they get the credit. Disney? The same.
Nobody is going to pay for all these services, and more and more are ditching them altogether. The response of the streaming services is to increase prices and reduce content. It's hilariously embarrassing. They are asking us to pirate.
> "Piracy is almost always a service problem." — Gabe Newell
I find this an odd argument in favor of pirating movies, because everything that steam offers for games, amazon prime or itunes offers for most tv shows and movies. In fact with amazon prime you can buy content and watch it on pretty much any kind of device out there.
My experience is that 100% of what I see on friends' (and friends' friends') Plex shares is.... movies that they downloaded via TPB/RarBG/etc torrents.
If the supply of torrented content dries up, it seems like many Plex shares will start to become very stale.
Ofcourse, I'm not saying torrents don't have a place it's just that they seem less trafficked these days , online piracy streaming sites , iptv(with vod) and Plexshares have taken the front seat.
Plex Shares (like ones you buy on the internet from a stranger) are mostly fully automated and pull from private/public trackers + usenet. I don't see the supply of torrents really having any effect in this regard.
I love when soulless corporations bribe governments to keep a stranglehold on works of art that have impacted cultures around the world and prevent future artists from being able make more art and prevent the proper collection and preservation of these works and block the access to them, all so they can keep making money off of decades old IP.
It goes both ways. There are no Saints to be found on either side.
I don't care one bit about the pocketbooks of our corporate overlords, and neither should you.
In fairness, somebody has to pay for the actors and the grips and the foley artists, and I'm not particularly convinced that the pirate's stance of "I want it for 20 cents, in 4k, and DRM free and if I can't have that then torrrenting it is my moral right" is either right or sustainable.
> somebody has to pay for the actors and the grips and the foley artists
They are paid. If they're not paid enough then that's on the companies behind the production of those shows and movies.
These corporations make billions. Piracy isn't hurting them. However, these corporations are causing harm to society. It doesn't make sense to white knight for them.
Many corporations make billions. That isn't an argument to not pay for the goods or services they offer.
I'll add, since I'm not the person you were replying to, I don't care about who gets paid what. I don't care if the actors get paid or not. All I care about is some basic consistency if we're going to have morals about anything. Is it wrong to steal? Yes? Then piracy is wrong. (Or, no? Then let's skip this conversation entirely, you are my enemy.) Yeah, piracy is pretty easy. Yeah, it feels harmless when we do it. Should individuals get fined tens of thousands of dollars for infractions? No. But I'd say it's about as wrong as stealing a loaf of bread from a grocery store. To pretend it's a noble cause is transparent garbage, and unless you can pose an argument that doesn't complain about how much corporations make, I'm not interested.
There appears to be nothing underpinning your worldview for why the industry you work in ought not allow open thievery, but this one should. Yes, their corporations make billions of dollars, just like in every other industry where theft is not tolerated. Or perhaps you support open thievery everywhere at any time, in which case, like I said, you are my enemy.
We disagree before your argument even begins to form. I don't believe that piracy, the act of downloading a movie, tv show, or song is stealing.
On the flip side, these corporations take from society and refuse to give back thanks to ridiculously long copyright protection terms.
They take advantage of their workers, paying a fraction of a penny to them that they make.
They screw artists over with bad contracts or lousy residuals.
They defraud investors by purposely producing works they know won't perform well.
They use things like the DMCA to bankrupt anyone that tries to write software that gets around DRM.
They threaten to sue people into oblivion that use P2P software to download something they "own."
They cover up the crimes of pedophiles and other sexual predators because they make them money.
So, again, I don't care about the pocketbooks of these corporations. I don't care that someone can download a movie without paying for it. I don't care that groups like rarbg or TPB exist.
> you are my enemy
This is exactly the type of thing an internet white knight would write. You're ridiculous.
I agree with your plea for moral consistency, but it should be noted that describing the unlicensed copying of data as "stealing" and "thievery" is a metaphor. If I steal a car, I have denied someone else use of the car. If I pirate a film that I would never have paid for, I have enriched myself at no cost to anyone else. If I pirate a film which I would otherwise have paid for, then yes, I have impoverished the studio.
Sorry to be picky, but I think it's important to remember that intellectual "property" rights are a legal construct that societies create in an attempt to make society as a whole richer by encouraging creativity. I worry that overuse of metaphors like "property" and "theft" elevate IP to a god-given commandment (thou shalt not steal), obscuring the fact that we should design our intellectually property rights to ensure they're doing what we want. Enriching creators is not an end goal in itself.
I agree in a sense, it's a grey area, given the only crime is a person is literally copying a work and enjoying/using it. So my biggest issue with IP laws are that the potential punishments for copying do not come close to matching the crime, as they're quite draconian.
And I find it hard to believe that the spirit of these laws was intended to target end-users who copy something to watch for their own personal enjoyment, rather than to target people who copied works in an attempt to earn a profit personally. The only way the punishment fits the crime is in the latter situation, IMO. Yet I assume the laws are applied more frequently to the former situation.
I take my kids to the movies. I subscribe to services like Apple Music and TV+, and HBO Max. We watch YouTube videos where there's sponsored content in them. We buy officially licensed merchandise like clothing and toys. We buy books, both physical and digital.
And, frankly, it doesn't matter what I do personally. Millions, hell billions, of people around the world do as well.
If artists are struggling it's because they're not getting paid properly by the corporations they work for, like Disney, Netflix, and others. It's not because of individuals like you or me or the people that run piracy sites.
If artists are struggling it's because they're not getting paid properly by the corporations they work for, like Disney, Netflix, and others. It's not because of individuals like you or me or the people that run piracy sites.
This is false. Artists get paid residuals, meaning, per sale, so every non-sale due to piracy is literally coming out of artists' pockets.
Not once in the history of my consumption of digital content has me not pirating something turned into a sale.
Sometimes I pirate it, sometimes I buy it. Sometimes I consume something free instead. Sometimes I pay for the stuff I don't consume at all. But the substitution is always in the direction of cheaper, more available solution. Never in the direction of buying something.
There were cases however when me pirating something eventually turned into a sale or even few sales.
And yet, demonstrably speaking, not pirating something leads to actual sales amongst normal people.
It's truly bizarre that so many techies complain about the "cost" of artistic works while they sip their $20 lattes and go to their six-figure jobs with ergonomic chairs and free snacks.
What's bizzare is that some of those rich people you mention actually internalized corporate made morality toward "intelectual property" and proselytize it as if that was their full time job.
To them piracy is and always has been theft, the way that Santa is wearing and has always been wearing red.
Your useless copypasted comments brought nothing to this discussion. You have changed nobody's mind. Have you wrote all that to make yourself feel good?
Uh, because it responded to a comment that wrote a bunch of 2009-era Guy Fawkes mask-wearing redditor bullshit that attempts to make piracy noble.
> o7 thank you for your service
(o7 would be a salute)
> Where one piracy site dies, a thousand spawn from its corpse.
False and nonsense, especially in 2023.
> Maybe the media companies will eventually pull their heads out of their collective arses and quit their cartel...
Okay, I'll stop here.
I'm fine with piracy, personally. I'd prefer we just admit that you're mostly using it to download movies, music, and television shows for free. This isn't some noble fight for freedom. We're talking about watching mindless bullshit content like Star Wars, without paying for it. Piracy proponents, and comments like the one starting this thread, make it seem like we're entitled to this content. We're not. But I'll admit, I don't watch much in the way of tv or movies any more anyway, so the whole debate is lost on me.
I just rolled my eyes at the ridiculous tone of that comment, like they're freedom fighters. It's self-important bullshit.
Creating fake meanings for old words doesn't make them real.
They even had to go through one level of indirection to make people believe what they made up.
They couldn't just say, watching digital copy witout paying for it is a theft because people would just laugh at them, no it's not.
They had to do a two step process through obsure old crime to confuse people. Using a digital copy without paying for it is piracy. And piracy is theft.
Consuming didgital content on your own terms has as much to do with theft as it has with actual piracy that got some resurgence around Africa in recent years.
This isn't a particularly wild claim in the world of piracy. It's very, very common for folks to take high-quality media released by a group X, remove the filename suffix/nfo and then re-distribute that file elsewhere without attribution.
I will say though that from what I hear, RARGB did do some nice value-add work though. For example, once HEVC/H.265 decoding began to become widespread, and its file size savings became very clear, someone on the RARGB side of things went through many hundreds of the most popular movies and re-encoded existing high-quality releases into very tiny (and thus very popular) ~1.5GB 1080p versions then started seeding them back up. They did this in a relatively short period starting in ~2019, and you can tell that it was a single person/group because all these encodes of movies include metadata about when they were encoded and the software used to do the encoding; all those movies had the same metadata and encoding timestamps that were pretty close together.
Funny anecdote; apparently the encoding settings they used caused problems for many people, leading to many complaints saying "why do only movies from RARGB stutter?":
I can't offer any hard proof (especially now the site is down) but I've cross-seeded many files to private trackers after removing [rarbg] from the filename and deleting the additional files they add. Looking at my client now, I have two episodes of a TV show ripped by NTb, the TL version of that is just the video file, the rarbg version appends [rarbg] to the filename (to prevent cross-seeding/re-uploading) and includes RARBG.txt and the infamous "do not mirror" file. Both episodes were uploaded to TL ~4 hours before Sonarr grabbed the rarbg release (which usually happens within 20 minutes or so of uploading). If you visit any of the piracy- or torrent-related subreddits you'll see a lot of complaints/comments/concerns regarding "why bother with private trackers when it all ends up on rarbg anyways?" or "why did rarbg steal *upload* from *site* while claiming it as their own?"
Because they make money off of ads and people who have the skills and resources to do that without profit motive also probably are afraid of getting entangled in legal battles.
they are not searching the indexers, they are searching the DHT directly.
Some private trackers do not set the "disallow DHT" flag, so those will be indexed as well. Most do, however, and it's impossible to scrape those without an account, yes
Yes my heart broke reading this. Likely two young people who worked together around a common goal. All be it illegal. Now they’re hiding in bunkers and told to shoot each other if needed.
I guess mirrors would stay unaffected, because they seem to be up right now. Someone will probably clone their torrents. They might not have been the best quality, but they were always better than YIFI (YTS). I always liked that you could search Rarbg using IMDB numbers. Also, their UI was really pleasing to me, plus, there were many userscripts that extended the functionality of the site. I wounder who will fill up their place, because TPB was always the last resort for me. In the meantime Btdig could be a nice transitory place to find all of their torrents.
> I always liked that you could search Rarbg using IMDB numbers. (...) I wounder who will fill up their place, because TPB was always the last resort for me.
I second this but I'm not sure how much use it is outside of the former USSR. Most movies and TV shows there do come with original English soundtracks tho.
I believe this is what kept it relatively low profile despite the scale. There is far more copyright enforcement and attention paid to English language sites compared to non-English languages. China has had their own crackdowns, and the totalitarian system cannot allow freedom of information, so there are no good torrent sites in China either. This leaves Russian sites most unencumbered, with the high quality moderation on the forum making the directory safe to use.
Copyright in Russia is only enforced for companies in practice. For most individuals, piracy is the default way of getting movies and TV shows, especially now that we no longer have Netflix. Music is more complicated — there's still Yandex and VK offering paid subscriptions (and all kinds of bypass methods to listen for free). No idea what people use for music now. We've had Spotify for like 1.5 years too and many people subscribed to it and were happy with it but then you know what happened.
I mean, it did take a pandemic, war, and rampant global inflation to finally kill it. Testament to the resilience it showed throughout its lifetime. I think it's somewhat poetic that it was unrelated to law enforcement pressure.
The problem with private trackers isn’t availability, it’s getting in the door. You typically need to grind for 3-6 months on newer private trackers before you can get an invite to more well-established trackers.
Unless you know someone already on the tracker and they are willing to vouch for you.
If you want a list head over to /r/trackers and use the search function.
They were hard to get into 20 years ago, and from what I hear it seems to be nearly impossible now. Seems like they've protected themselves by staying small and not inviting strangers. I know some haven't distributed invites to general members (in good standing) for years.
My experience has been opposite, actually. A couple times I got content from Usenet when all torrents I could find were already dead. (Usually I then seed those torrents, if the files from Usenet match)
nope, bitcoin, doge and many others are pseudonymous and as long as you are not retarded enough to buy it someplace which requires KYC, it is stupidly difficult to trace it to your identity. Especially in court.
Wow that came as a shock. I used to check every couple of days if they had interesting movie I could watch with my wife. I wonder what is the cost of running such a site and I guess they must also earn some money in crypto with all the donation and also the advertisements.
Well, that's the end of something
its probably not the money cost, its the effort involved with more manual hosting if you can't risk being cancelled in the convenient data centers or platforms
the "younger generation" (>2k) aren't used to the open net, they grew into moderated groups (fb), hence i suspect there is a massive number of hidden/private trackers
lots of password-protected plex/media servers shared in invite-only discords, like a regression back to the days of knowing the phone number and login of that one BBS you knew about from a friend of a friend that posted cracked software
Hobbies and the social gatherings (both chat rooms and/or in person) that accompany them. See also the phrase Special Interest Groups, with context in both Brin’s “Earth” and Vinge’s “Deepness”.
Streaming is enshittifiying fast, with content fragmentation, and crackdowns on VPN usage and account sharing. People will start to migrate back to good old piracy, just because it's more convenient again.
The "streaming" referred to here referred to pirate sites a la Fmovies or Couchtuner. They're not quite as front and center as they were before Google decided to be the Internet police but there's always foreign search engines to light the way.
Not everyone knows about alternatives to streaming. For the daily 10000 (xkcd for reference), that's all they know. It's up to "us" to show them there are alternatives.
That's not exactly a widely held viewpoint by the younger generation. Besides, it's not like the offshore streaming sites are engaging in revisionism or dropping shows to subscribing reasons.
I have seen several folks on here mention Usenet subscriptions as another option. What I haven't found is any good Usenet tutorial on how to actually get from "I know the name of something I want" to "I have downloaded it".
The irony that I used to run a UUCP node on the original version of Usenet does not escape me :-)
r/usenet has a great FAQ about it[1]. In a nutshell, there are 3 things you need to use usenet. You need providers, indexers, and a software to download stuff.
Providers are companies and servers where the data is actually stored, as opposed to peers in torrenting. Since they are for-profit, you need to purchase a subscription to have access to these servers. r/usenet has some nice deals on those[2]. Frugal is usually the most recommended for beginners since it’s pretty cheap and has most files you’ll want.
Indexers are similar to what rarbg was. They make it easy to search for files stored in the providers. They usually require a subscription as well, and some require invites, but are really cheap and easy to get [3]. nzbgeek doesn’t require an invite and is pretty complete. nzbplanet and drunkenslug have more content, but require invites. You can get invites for those on r/UsenetInvites
Finally, you need something to download the files. There are many options available for that, but I find that the best one is sabnzb [4]. It is pretty complete and has a lot of moving parts, so I recommend following the trash-guides article on it to get started[5]
I haven't used Usenet for some time but I remember probably 15 years ago a lot of the files were DMCA'd or incomplete (even with parity) and it was difficult to put together a complete download. Does it come down to the indexer you use? Have things changed these days?
It's not too complicated. I heard from a friend, that all you need is a downloader like Sabnzbd, a usenet provider like Eweka or Frugal Usenet, and an index like Drunkenslug to find stuff.
I have since switched to SABnzbd from NZBget. I saw a comment regarding hard to find things, I am subbed to two indexers and either I am not looking for obscure things or I am letting the other tools I listed do most of the heavy work. Prowlarr is doing most of the heavy lifting doing the searches for me.
I haven't used Usenet since probably around 2002. It seems like everything is still the same except for the indexer. I assume that is so you don't have to sign onto a bunch of binary groups into your newsreader and then search through them for what you want (part of the fun in the old days for me)? Is that correct, does anyone know?
I also wonder if Forte' Agent still works? Does Newsguy still exist? /s
It's hard to find stuff on Usenet. I subscribe to two different paid (and not super cheap) indexes, and it's still routine that I can't find stuff. If I look over at pirate bay, it will be there about 50% of the time
Wow. Between Mullvad removing port forwarding 2 days ago ago [1] and now this, easy safe fast torrenting just got a bit harder. Talk about a one-two punch.
First heart break was when Kickass was taken down.. Now this. I am literally too sad over a website than my other life choices lol.. Love you RARBG team, will miss you till death. Good luck in your life's.
Not only they had clean, easy-to-navigate UI, they also produced tons of their own releases. As big fan of saving space, x265 1080p releases from them were taking minimal space with good quality, practically always bundled with subtitles.
That's how quality service looks like. Glad I pulled (here legally) all the movies I wanted in my private collection. RIP.
I am not technical so maybe this questions sound stupid. But this topic really interests me.
I read that Rarbg was like thepiratebay but safer. I guess that's due to moderation to check which torrents are safe, right?
This people had a website that offered a nice UI to find torrents. Did they had ads to make money? So they offered their services to maintain healthy piracy in exchange of money and also to pay servers. (I am not criticize or judging I just want to understand how it worked)
Would It be possible to share the same website using a torrent file? Like shipping and actualizing the website and sending to users trough torrent so they can search it locally? Or send a sql database and then create a UI for users to search trough it? Or would be complications because torrenting exposes our ip?
Sites can't be offered as torrents, because generally torrents are immutable once they have been created. You can't say "oops, that version of the file is wrong" and start offering the new version within that same torrent swarm.
However, there was an update to the protocol, BEP44, that did allow you to update the already-in-progress torrent.
Furthermore, there is a protocol called WebTorrent that swaps out some of the other base protocols for WebRTC, allowing a web browser to participate in the torrents. You could just include a link to the library via CDN. The trouble of course is that bittorrent now relies on DHT more and more (you wouldn't want to have to run a tracker, if you did it'd just be a target of legal attacks)... and WebTorrent can't do DHT (of any variety) well. There was a proposal to allow browsers to be able to do native network sockets, but I think that got turned down by Mozilla (maybe they were more concerned with doing VPN ads or something).
But if you had that, then yes, it might be possible to have something like a "swarmsite" that didn't need to be hosted.
See ZeroNet, which uses bittorrent to sync websites, including support for dynamic content and accounts. (Accounts are somewhat centralized last i checked) https://github.com/HelloZeroNet/ZeroNet
The main/original author disappeared but there are somewhat maintained community forks.
Torrents are immutable but they could just give us new torrents (with updated indexes) via chats/forums/etc. Then thanks to https://www.bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0038.html we can just download the diff.
It's absolutely insane how many of these incredibly important torrent sites are just managed and hosted by a rag-tag group of people with the site barely clinging to life.
Basically all of an actual software company is bullshit jobs unrelated to the core product like legal, marketing, investor relations, HR, maybe even developers for R&D etc.
Running a website doesn't require that many people.
I've worked at companies with 4 developers and 30+ "other stuff". The company would not be profitable and we would not get paid without them, but the actual product would work just fine if we wanted it to.
Legal is very useful in the general case, but if you're an anonymous torrent site operator who fully intends to ignore the law anyway it's a waste of time.
If you build a system for resilience, it should not take significant effort to maintain. You should be able to keep the lights on with 10-20% of the engineering team. The rest is growth.
Growth may be making the product better, creating new product lines, or improving the scalability - for example, allowing larger numbers of users or entries. However, you can make the choice to make a well constrained product that serves a valuable use but doesn't need growth. Consider Bingo Card Creator, for example.
> If you build a system for resilience, it should not take significant effort to maintain. You should be able to keep the lights on with 10-20% of the engineering team. The rest is growth.
After 10+ years you always see the operational demand increase because of all the necessary edge conditions you build up (backcompat and whatever else).
Does the cost of change increase, or the cost of maintenance, or the cost of keeping it on?
Yes, the cost of change by definition increases with the complexity. I don't think that is in contention. Why is it changing for any other reason that you're growing (or trying to stave off decline?) For internal tools, change may be a function of external business pressures (like a supplier going out of business, requiring changes in an internal tool), but that is asking for new software.
As you add libraries, the cost of maintenance increases because the surface area of security increases. However, short of major changes (React, Rails, Etc), this feels like it's not moving outside the 10-20% range.
If you're running a community funded website, you don't need any of this overhead. In the 90's, pretty much the entire internet ran without these jobs.
Sure, they're necessary if you have an actual company, but the point is that you can run a website without a company.
It's quite unbelievable that the reason was they could not meet the costs of running it, while not being able to collect donations or help raise funds to keep the lights on. Technically the ownership and administration of their servers could have been distributed all across the world, which would have helped with the staff availability to a good extent.
KickAssTorrents made millions of dollars a year in advertising revenue. I doubt their decision to start Rarbg was charitable or even ideologically driven. They probably just want out now. Lower margins may have been a part of that.
Marx always preached that the way to go is for the working class to become owners of the means of production. The only logical way to achieve exactly this is to participate in the stock market and own company shares.
I still don't understand how the communists managed to convince people that Marx saw things exactly in the opposite way.
Even now, you hear left leaning parties telling that "stocks are evil, one can lose complete retirements on the stock market" and in the same time "rich are rich because they earned everything in the stock market".
> "stocks are evil, one can lose complete retirements on the stock market"
Putting retirement money into "balanced portfolio" of stocks also destroys competition and pits corporations against their employees in a fight to get them more money after they retire minus the profits of the bookkeepers or how are those managers called.
> "rich are rich because they earned everything in the stock market"
Insider trading. :] And also just buying index funds, with the save issue as above.
I'm not surprised that a haphazardly organized group of people /can/ run a site like rarbg. It's just interesting how volatile (this isn't the right word but I'm not sure what is) the operations of these sites tend to be in light of the fact that the sites hold a lot of cultural value. RARBG was incredibly popular and was an important resource for torrenting. It's rare to see sites of that size and importance run in that way these days.
Radical notion these days. Everybody has an ulterior motive, probably one you find offensive, and you have to read between the lines and make uncharitable assumptions about their motives to find them out.
While we like to romanticize these groups, they often have ulterior motives in getting users to the site. Pushing ads from less-than-reputable ad-sources, and having a section with binaries where admins can push malware laden programs/games/files to increase the size of a client's botnet.
The model is that as users become more comfortable on the site, they eventually browse to the more dangerous categories and download programs/games/cracks/etc...
I wrote a blog post about a deep dive I did on one site, and showed that the admins were seeding malware in program downloads.
Suffice to say, when I reported the admins, other admins banned my account on the site and IP blocked me.
I actually ended up taking the blog post down because they started attacking my domain, and even Google blacklisted my domain because I had snippets of the malware code posted (I guess I should have used images instead of code). I was younger and just tinkering with security research anyway.
I don't think RARBG ever had ads, and they always filtered out anything malicious or low quality. Your description applies generally, but is the complete opposite of what RARBG was.
While we are at it, an honest question: Why should _anyone_ undertake the legal risk, monetary cost and development time burden for maintaining a public tracker?
What would release teams gain from setting up encoding pipelines and upholding their networking infrastructure?
> Why should _anyone_ undertake the legal risk, monetary cost and development time burden for maintaining a public tracker?
Try a more extreme example: why should anyone undertake the legal risk, monetary cost and logistical hassle of hiding Jews from the SS? It's not some psychopathic business decision; it's because some people stubbornly insist on doing the right thing despite it being unpopular, illegal, and clearly a bad idea.
If someone does manage to turn a profit doing it that's (all else being equal) great, but it's not the point.
Because some people grew up poor and without much access to content. Then they learned about this thing in the 90’s called the internet where you can share information with anyone for free.
So said poor person learned programming and other skills to get a tracker working so that they could give back to others who are in the same boat.
This way the poor kid (who’s family can’t afford lunch, let alone a 10€ /month Disney + subscription) can chat with their rich friends at the lunch table about the latest marvel film the week it releases and god forbid, fit in for once.
nyaa has already died once, and this replacement is nowhere near the old one wrt peer counts and content availability (the old one already wasn't great). I wish torrent trackers had kept their databases open, maybe by regularly publishing encrypted dumps with a dead man's switch on decryption keys. At least the new nyaa is FOSS, although the code isn't very useful without data.
RARBG, one of the world's largest torrent sites, has said "farewell" to millions of users. The site, which was a prominent and stable source of new movie and TV show releases, cited a variety of reasons behind its decision to cease operations. The surprise shutdown marks the end of an era.
Founded in 2008, RARBG evolved to become a key player in the torrent ecosystem.
The site didn’t only attract millions of monthly visitors from all over the globe, it was also a major release hub, bridging the gap between the Scene and the broader pirate public.
... etc.
For educational reasons I'm going to suggest Usenet. Sure you have to pay $ for a few providers to obtain most 100% but it has everything that torrent has if not more.
Not as convenient but you do get decent download speeds and if parts are broken you can normally repair with PAR2 which itself is alien tech.
Seriously, a huge part of the internet is down because the team was taken out by Covid (both death and complications), and no one even mentions this? All the evidence points to the covid complication rate compounding with each infection. Rarbg is only the start of where we can all expect to be in 5-10 years without more serious long-term mitigations (universal indoor air filtration).
This seems to use EliteTorrent (by default) which has a strong bias towards Spanish language content. There might be other reasons to use qBittorrent, but if you don't want to switch, you could just use that.
Their host charges 250 euro a month for 100 megabits and a one terabyte data cap. At the prices they're paying, I'm surprised this did not happen sooner.
rutracker is amazing. I've had no problems with the stuff I download from there (games, movies, books and software) and they also have some super niche stuff as well. Rip RARGB
There is now also a repository that is holding 100's of thousands of RARBG magnet links in text files [1]. The link is in the article. I'm not sure whether posting the direct link is proper here.
The Motion Picture Association is probably throwing free champagne around the offices and rejoicing about how that was the easiest pirate website takedown ever.
Also, if I was the MPA, I would almost look into attrition tactics now, if that were legal. Create dozens and dozens and dozens of junk piracy websites with borked videos. Maybe the first half the movie in 720p, then the audio switches to Spanish and 240p black and white with flickering. Flood the market on every pirate website with the world's worst remuxes. Overwhelm them with junk so that nobody knows what tracker to trust for anything. Maybe even (with permission from rights holders) run some pirate websites with high-quality rips, then burn them to the ground after a year or two just to demoralize.
Seeing lots of mentions here in the comments about increased serving costs but the nature of the message sounds more like the community itself has fallen apart / lost people due to covid and war. I can't imagine the effort it must've taken to keep this site running for so long given the amount of traffic, especially during the hellish last few years.
I'm sad to see them go but I support their desire to spend time and energy/resources on something else after all they've done
One of the problems of RarBG was that they were dealing with real data. Today to get a popular file from bit-torrent network all one needs is a hash (AKA magnet) - DHT and other distributed announcement protocols will take care of everything else. But the moment you gotta deal with real content - you are in a big trouble both legaly and technically: todays 4K media can take up to ten gigabyte per hour of screen time. No wonder RarBG suffered that much.
>some of the people in our team died due to covid complications, others still suffer the side effects of it - not being able to work at all.
Long COVID is having a real impact on technical people.
There's a reason Google buys COVID rapid testing kits in bulk for any of their onsite events. One of my friends working behind the scenes was gifted a grocery bag full of leftover tests.
Governments around the world have largely abandoned us to a disabling virus.
I'm interested in the art-house, non-mainstream genres, mainly produced by independent studios (e.g. one of my all-time favourites is When father was away for business, by Emir Kusturica). Do you have any suggestions for trackers specialised in these types of movies?
I wonder how much it costs to run? I can't imagine it's too crazy.. data can be stored/cached easily and access is random and has some hot spots (recent torrents). Seems like it would be fairly cheap to run?
For those questioning how websites can still illegally operate torrenting movies, the answer is very simple. It costs a lot of money and resources for the FBI and/or other federal agency to prosecute someone, let alone post adjudication costs ie: probation officers. The feds just don't care to waste time with search warrants over a menial crime.
They tried a few years back just simply mailing fines to people. But quickly realized they couldn't prove guilt without spending more money than it's worth.
Also movie makers don't care to push the issue with law enforcement anymore. They (unfortunately for law abiding folks) just inflate the price to make up for lost, just like stores do to combat shoplifting.
Movie makers aren't losing that much, if at all. It is ridiculous to assume that had piracy not been available, the pirates would pay them the full price for the content. Imagine I operate this web app free of charge that gets 1 million monthly active users, and I think to myself, if I start charging $2 per month, I'd be making $2m a month. This doesn't work because if I charge money, people would try to find less expensive options, so I would be getting way less than $2m. Piracy also contributes significantly to the general promulgation of the content into the culture, which may offset some of the profit that is lost. And no, screwing over legit customers by charging more, DRM, or whatever bullshit like that isn't going to win over more people.
Rutracker seems to have big ad revenue (just look at the ads and how popular it is). Also, Rutracker administrators seem quite serious to me (I compare the feeling I get from observing elaborate upload post format requirements, massive forum structure, important size of dedicated wiki on Rutracker and the feeling I get after reading the linked announcement).
We would like to inform you that we have decided to shut down our site.
The past 2 years have been very difficult for us - some of the people in our team died due to covid complications,
others still suffer the side effects of it - not being able to work at all.
Some are also fighting the war in Europe - ON BOTH SIDES.
Also, the power price increase in data centers in Europe hit us pretty hard.
Inflation makes our daily expenses impossible to bare.
Therefore we can no longer run this site without massive expenses that we can no longer cover out of pocket.
After an unanimous vote we've decided that we can no longer do it.
We are sorry :(
Bye
Edit: This isn't me BTW. I just copy-pasted the text from the site.
First, a sincere thank you for all the efforts you have done. My collection of TV shows is nothing but ION10 webrips. You will be missed.
While I can respect your decision, I have to ask: Why the hell did you not choose to ask for donations or monetize the website?
While there are many that cannot afford to purchase, there are plenty of hackers that could have / would have supported you.
Considering the recent events in the area previously known as Yugoslavia, and the fact that part of hosting is there, in addition to Russia - Ukraine conflict being over a year old, I'd think of other sources. ...that if we were to trust what's been publicized, of course.
While that is true their releases are not the same, take the Attenborough doc wild isles the main rarbg top release was 44gb in size those u list is 13gb, no SWTYBLZ UHD releases
They're not clones. Just proxies so they are down too.
This is usually done to make it harder for the courts to force providers to block these sites. Whack-a-mole..
PS: Why am I getting downvoted? Try clicking on the links, you will see the same goodbye message.
Edit: Oh the first 2 do seem to be clones, now I understand. The rest are proxies though. I do think even the clones basically skived off the original's database though so I doubt they will have much going forward.
The first two are 'clones' but they seem to have just taken a backup of the actual rarbg content from a few days ago (last torrents from the 25th of May!)
Is there a successful tracker founded after 2010? With all these old sites and their experienced crew quitting, things are not looking good for the long term of warez.
The only one that comes to mind is the .si reboot of nyaa.se.
Running a torrent site as a honeypot seems like a stupid move for an ISP given how cheap it would be to run a bot that automatically downloads every release and tracks the IP addresses. And Comcast would only bother with that as they own NBC, so probably have been running such a bot for about 14 years now.
Someone already mentioned the Comcast angle, and they are correct. The ISP isn't involved until they get the notification from an agent of the owner of the content.
The honeypot isn't the torrent site. You can use any site in the world or no site at all and still get busted. It's a peer to peer network, and the people busting you are seeding the torrents themselves. They catch you when you peer with them.
Just to be clear, the rights holders probably aren't publishing torrents, they just also download them and monitor anybody that happens to connect with their seed.
In a way, they are helping us with better download speeds.
If Comcast is your ISP in this context, it's not their honeypot. They're the ones receiving the requests that downloads cease from the copyright holders and Comcast acts on those requests as they see fit.
i was always skeptical on people saying that torrentz are a symptom of bad legal streaming services..
Well, i recently got myself a videoprojector with an android tv included, and since i happen to have an amazon prime account, i installed the app, which is quite good.
And yes, it's true, since i've done that, my torrentz usage has dramatically dropped..
I got myself Amazon prime, logged in on my computer, and found out I can only watch 480p video because of DRM shenanigans. The app on my TV is no longer supported (TV doesn't run Android), my phone is rooted (Xiaomi stopped making updates after two years) so I sometimes can't even find the app in Google Play let alone play decent quality video and the Chromecast app is a buggy mess.
So yeah, I went back to torrents after that. All of my problems disappeared when I just had an MP4 file I could play anywhere. I'm still paying my subscription but they can take my 1080p video from my cold dead hands.
I get your point, and i may be in the same case as you in a few years (my projector is brand new).
But that doesn't really disprove my point : when the legal streaming service is working fine, then it does have an immediate effect on pirated content consumption.
I thought that not being able to have access to all the content in the world would be a no-go, but i'm surprising myself preferring to watch legal content directly in two taps of the remote than having to search for the torrentz, the subtitles, download it, plug the computer to my projector, etc.
When streaming services do work as intended, most of them definitely work better than piracy. I'd stop pirating entirely if they did, for a reasonable price.
Hopefully the industry gets its shit together so I can legally watch shows and movies without waiting a week and so I don't need to consult two different "look up where you can stream something please don't pirate" websites to watch shows anymore. Until that magical day comes, I'll keep pirating.
Dont forget to subscribe to all the other 100+ streaming platforms, as originals will not end up on amazon.
Oh, and hopefully you will never need a subtitle that is for a language that's not the main one in your region.
legal streaming is horrible at the moment.
To be able to battle at least some of the reasons to pirate media they need to fix a couple of things (and this is just my shortlist, there's 1000+ more reasons)
- allow indexing and playback outside of the official app so 1 app could be used for multiple platform subscriptions
- allow access to content no matter where the viewer is on the world. Not only the video, but audio and subtitle languages as well
- allow subscriptions for specific content, not a 'one subscription fits all'. I dont want to watch nor pay for yet another Walking Dead something, but I do want to watch See
- allow to buy content, and provide that DRM free in high quality (not the streaming quality)
Streaming is a content ghetto. 9 times out of 10, none of the streaming websites have the media I'm looking for. When I visit friends and family and am made to sit down with their streaming services and find something to watch, it always turns into a disaster of everybody sitting on the couch browsing the various catalogue on their phones, discovering that no service has whatever movie somebody just thought of and suggested.
If you treat streaming like old cable television; you turn it on then decide what you want to watch from what is available, I guess it might seem fine to you. But if you try to decide what you want to watch first, treating streaming as a means to an end rather than the end itself, then streaming is unmitigated trash.
I agree. It seems like an flippant opinion, and I'm sure many use it that way, but some services, and frankly, regimes have proven that convenience, comfort and ease of access is very attractive to people. If a service can navigate the obstacles such as copyright, they will be more popular than taking the thing for free with a bit of work.
As a mentionned to someone else in the thread, i've realized that i was actually ok seeing less popular content straight from the remote control, than search for the top content in torrents.
Ease of use and guaranteed video & subtitles quality can compensate to some degree to not having access to all the content in the world.
No doubt! I'm in IT myself and it's second nature doing stuff like this. Most people have a different set of experience and knowledge though. I only experienced the convenience of streaming sites when I began using other devices for media, like my phone. On the phone, it was much easier to use whatever streaming than to search a torrent site, download on phone / seedbox, wait, navigate to the file, play the file. With streaming it's just search and play.
I'm still curious how it's possible to run such global illegal operations without being exposed or caught.
How is it still possible to remain anonymous on the Internet, considering in this age the thing is very mature and well commercialised?