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Rarbg Is No More (archive.org)
1352 points by 0___0 10 months ago | hide | past | favorite | 647 comments



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.


Law firms must love how many billable hours such quests generate for them.


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.

Apologies for the long rant :).


> 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.


$2-5k for a retainer. Less in many places.


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?


Yes. For example, Z-Library accepted Amazon gift card donations using an email linked to their identities: https://torrentfreak.com/how-google-and-amazon-helped-the-fb...


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.


if you're the host. the end user can use gift cards just fine, and they're usually pretty fungible.

am 100% okay moving the risk to the operation/operator


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.


And how do you get paid? AdSense requires a bank account registered to the same name.


You buy the accompanying bank account


> ad companies and payment processors [...] cut off payments when their corporate values shift.

"Sir, is it time for us to claim to have corporate values?"

"Not yet, m'boy, we are still swimming in our private ocean of profits!"


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.


What are they doing that is illegal? I thought they were just a torrent tracker?


imo they were a fairly popular and long-standing tracker. someone had to make a statement perhaps? (pb was downed multiple times)


Linking to pirated content is illegal in many European countries.


Then Google should be prosecuted.


That's not Google's primary purpose.


Well, printing was going to be for instruction. And then radio. And TV. And the internet.

We're so instructed we've gotta wear ad-blockers.


Instruction.. on what to buy, how to live and what to want.


Google has enough lawyers to give the EU and US the run around when they want to.

For smaller players, they'd have to think really carefully about whether they want to engage in multi-year litigation with them.


> Google has enough lawyers to give the EU and US the run around when they want to.

Google has paid something like 10 billions dollars of fines in the EU during the last decade. I don’t think they are giving the run around to anyone.


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.


just the cost of doing business at that point


Are you sure they paid it or they were ordered to do so? Most times, the fine is reduced or appealed ad infinitum.


Yeah, lets wait a couple of decades and see how those court cases actually end up.

Meanwhile, Google will just keep on Googling...


10 billion dollars is a rounding error for the GOOG.


Google takes down content when they get notified, rarbg doesn't.


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.

Sources: https://torrentfreak.com/google-opposes-whole-site-removal-o... and https://www.scribd.com/document/286275022/TorrentFreak-Googl...

-

However they did ban Pirate Bay in the Netherlands after a Dutch court ordered them.

https://www.makeuseof.com/why-google-removed-pirate-bay-from...


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.


> They do have access to all files, as it is in their servers.

not if they have the encrypted content only, and the decode key is only in the hash portion of a url, which never goes to a server.

But i guess crafting a technocal "solution" to a legal problem doesn't work, since the law works off intentions, and how much money you pay lawyers...


That's Mega, the one that still exists. MegaUpload the previous one didn't really have the same encryption.


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.


Google used to rule the net. These days they're not even the best search engine for legal content, let alone overall net searching.

Bing and Yandex will get you most everything you want.


It seems Google's tech can't keep up with the scale of the Internet anymore. It simply doesn't index a very large portion of the Internet now.


And a terrible one at that, as it points to the lowest-quality blogspam sludge possible.


Google does not return links to the pirate bay for me https://i.imgur.com/MkAPoFl.png.

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


Odd. Google always returns links to the pirate bay for me https://i.imgur.com/tNo6tbB.png

I'm in Canada though. But I did use Google.com.


Canada has relatively lenient copyright laws/enforcement. It's likely that Google sees no legal need to honor DMCA-style takedown notices in Canada.

Here's a guide to the legal status of torrents here with broad categories, from most lenient to most strict (caution VPN spam): https://www.vpnmentor.com/blog/torrents-illegal-update-count...

Interesting to note that downloading copyrighted content for personal use is explicitly legal (not just overlooked) in Spain, Switzerland, and Poland.


The picture shows that downloading is illegal only in six countries.


that's a different search query. I did get that same result if I use your query instead. (I'm in the US)

edit: it's also for a "proxy" site. I don't really use torrents or follow TPB happenings and don't know how that is/isn't affiliated.


Linking to the site itself (especially when that’s what you searched for) isn’t the same as linking to a torrent to infringing content would be.



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.


Hmm i guess torrent sites can also counter by just not having static URLs for content?


Or by having lots and lots of duplicate static URLs (but only revealing them one by one).


> I've yet to see Google not return a piratebay link at any point in history.

indeed. as it should, if it's relevant for the search.


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"

[0]: https://annas-archive.org/copyright


Changing the url daily works as the dmca complaint refers to a specific page.


Google does not host it links, it's very different.

Google does not store files it should not.


Well, they do, at Youtube. But they're pretty good about takedowns over there. Including of a ton of content that has no reason to be taken down.


Torrent trackers don’t host the content either.


But not in all EU countries.


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.


I didn’t know this but would like to know more. Can you expand on how they try to circumvent linking and do they circumvent it?

It is surprising to hear because as a user they _seem_ like a link. Copy the link into something and get the (illegal) files.


Magnet linking is rather like standing on a street corner and regularly yelling "have you got any cannabis"?

Here's a random RARBG magnet link that may or may not work

magnet:?xt=urn:btih:468043aa374080fed5ff65e4cd8d4fed002986b5&dn=Rizzoli.And.Isles.S05.1080p.WEBRip.x265-RARBG

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).


Great description - thanks.

I wonder if they ‘stand up in court’ and/or have ever been tested too.


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.


and just a civil issue, which doesn’t come with priority or the state power that a criminal case would


[flagged]


Amazon has provided the ability to obtain torrents of objects on S3[1].

[1] https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/API/API_GetObjec...


Cool, someone re-start the RARBG on Amazon then. What's the fuss all about?


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.


Even cooler, someone start a hosting for legitimate businesses like RARBG.


You mean like https://1984.hosting? Or more like https://legittorrents.info, which shut down recently[1]?

I had never heard of RARBG before, so I don't know if they were legitimate and you are being sarcastic or serious?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35639370


They were the website I torrented the entire Succession series.


Mate, you're being obnoxious.


I have no idea why explaining how I use the website to the question on what the website is about would be obnoxious but O.K.


> hosting for legitimate businesses like RARBG.

Not quite the same but PeerTube is P2P legitimate hosting.

I run a PeerTube instance myself and I like it a lot.


What is it with you and your extremely aggressive and yet unproductive comments?


>What is it with you and your extremely aggressive and yet unproductive comments?

Entertaining hypothetical edge cases to examine an argument's soundness has become extremely aggressive behaviour?

Anyway, my apologies.


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.


this is indeed a very helpful way of putting it, thank you


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.

Yawn.


you seem like a special flower too :)

realizing that most of anything isn't special does not preclude every thing beeing uniqe and valuable


> you (plural)

Texans would say "y'all" :)


You is always plural. The singular second person pronouns are thou (subject), thee (object), or thy (possessive).


See also "youse".


>> 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...

PHKahler


I think it's effectively just that they operate out of jurisdictions that just don't care.


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.


>In Germany they have to comply.

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?


No, German copyright predators are a proxy of American ones. Nobody cares about German content.


Does it need that many resources though? I thought just getting the list of peers in a swarm for an illegal torrent is enough.


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.


It is not that clear cut for Western Europe.

- Germany sends letters and fines

- Czech Republic doesn’t send letters or fines

- The Netherlands doesn’t send letters or fines (unless you share an absolutely ludicrous amount)

- Belgium doesn’t send letters or fines

- UK sends letters and fines

- France sends letters (tiny chance of a fine)

- Switzerland doesn’t send letters or fines


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.


Makes sense. If ISPs were allowed to share home addresses then a lot of creeps and scammers could abuse that system.


Welcome to America!

ISPs do that, but it's a lot worse if you consider your mobile provider to be an ISP.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamtanner/2013/07/10/data-brok...

https://www.vice.com/en/article/nepxbz/i-gave-a-bounty-hunte...


I'm pretty sure that sort of thing would be a gross GDPR violation in the EU.


Imagine being doxxed by your own ISP.


Of course they have to obey court orders.

The Dutch ISPs fought this in court but they lost in some cases.


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?"


The situation is the same for Canadians: we get proxied letters, but rightsholders have no access to our personal identification.


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".


almost like copyright enforcement goes hand in hand with your country's relation to the US


The Netherlands is very cozy with the US and yet enforcement is pretty lax, so I don’t think that’s the deciding factor.


Spain doesn't send letters or fines


Do you know what's the situation in Portugal?


in France you can be blacklisted from all ISPs


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?


I imagine it's not illegal for them since they do have copyright, after all (unless when they don't).


Never had any threatening letters in NL, so perhaps this varies by country.


Same in Sweden.


There have definitely been cases with letters in sweden

https://www.domstol.se/patent--och-marknadsdomstolen/om-pate...


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.


Huh, I've downloaded torrents for years with no VPN in western Europe and never got so much as an email about it.

Maybe it's changed in very recent times, I wouldn't know.


Threatening letters with a payment notice attached, that is.


Vietnam is probably the #1 place for digital piracy today.

https://torrentfreak.com/vietnam-could-kill-several-major-pi...


Linked from the bottom of the post:

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.”

https://torrentfreak.com/potential-impact-on-major-pirate-si...


Also their close neighbor, The Republic of Kinakuta


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.


Current hosting appears to be in Bosnia: 185.37.100.122 which is probably a server colocated with https://www.netsaap.com/contacts.php.


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.


This, totally.


The problem appears to just be "it's too expensive to run" at least according to the banner


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.


Comparatively cheap because you're just handing off magnet links, but when you're serving millions of unique visitors daily, it all adds up.


true. but there were also some images on the site


I believe rarbg had many "official" torrents that they seeded. This must be part of their costs.


For example in my EU country, it's legal to download movies for own use. shrug


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.


Cryptocurrency is the only actual use-case for blockchain, all the rest can be done better with other technology.

And cryptocurrency is usually used for illegal stuff, so it is not necessarily desirable.


> Cryptocurrency is the only actual use-case for blockchain, all the rest can be done better with other technology.

How I can take out a collateralized loan, anywhere in the world, without having to ask for approval?


What is a use-case for a "collateralized loan"? Can you finance anything with 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.


Sorry, but something doesn't add up. How is "cheaper credit" created by a collateralized loan exactly?


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.


Wrong for two reasons:

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.

[0]: daistats.com


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 loan agreement that is enforced by courts of justice is traditional finance certainly.

Loans in decentralised finance use smart contracts, instead of relying on the legal system.


> Loans in decentralised finance use smart contracts, instead of relying on the legal system.

Code over law.


And what I was pointing out is that there is a use-case for crypto. DeFi.


> 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.

Huh? That confused the heck out of me. How would you get the same car that you're renting in a different color?


The same model. Or a different model, but one that is worth the same in the market.


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.

[0] https://www.cnet.com/personal-finance/credit-cards/americans...


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".


No. Here is an example:

I have 1 BTC, worth $27,000 today.

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.


No, I started with 1 BTC.


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.


I think I spent $200 in 2013 on it. Now that pet rock is worth more and I'd like to capitalize on it, without spending it.

Just like people invest in a house and take equity out on it. Or they buy gold because they think it'll go up in value over time.

Regardless, you're being pedantic at this point. Back to the original discussion, there is utility to crypto now, and I've proven a way.


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.


Wow. DeFi? Be your own bank? Ordinals? No dear, we are here to hate and give our opinion on something we don't understand!


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.


How would they? Torrents are fairly trivial to build a web site around.

Blockchain sounds lile experimental engineering


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?)


Tracker websites are hardly centralized. There are thousands (millions?) to choose from.


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.


Freenet works this way. I would replace all torrents with Freenet(s) but the technology seems to be too obscure to be comfortable for large audiences.


It's also not capable of handling this kind of volume.

IPFS might be a more modern alternative but it has similar issues. It's used for fairly small files such as books (libgen) but not really for movies.

Edit: Or do you man the torrent files only? That might work but they really are just links, it might be a bit overkill for them.


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 ?


That would be really interesting usage of blockchain!


> reputable torrent tracker

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.


Has anyone tried to decentralize curation?

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.


Most of the time when I search for something, I sort by more seeders first. Some type of signature can be used too.


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!


> arrggh why??

Because you are vastly overestimating how much most people actually notice or care about this.


> doesn't care about the stereo audio because they watch their movies with laptop speakers.

Stereo doesn't imply low fidelity. Just as 7.1 Dolby Unobtainium doesn't imply high fidelity speakers.


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.


It is sad they didn't take the care to open source their stuff with whatever doc may be floating in their chats, for a resurrect


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.


I always assume that the movie studios themselves hired some proxies to put out those 61gb files so as to waste everyone's time and bandwidth.


This is a proven fact, do not be fooled. For decades Big Movie have been propagating disks out into the public with giant movie files on them.


Just like how Big Music decided to fight their pirates by only releasing unlistenable music for the last 20 years.


They are probably just ripped straight from a bluray without re-encoding.


> I sort by more seeders first.

But this couldn't be easier to game. All you have to do to be a seed is to report that you are a seed. You don't even have to send any data.


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.


> because absolutely nobody wants to live in true decentralization.

oh, some ppl do indeed want to.

thanks to encryption they can. but i agree that the likes of kazaa, edk and freenet are not for most ppl.


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?


Some examples trying to deal with this involving Mastodon (years before the Twitter Musk debacle) :

Mastodon is big in Japan, and the reason why is uncomfortable ["child porn"]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15053064

Mastodon and the challenges of abuse in a federated system

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17894684

How the biggest decentralized social network is dealing with its ["]Nazi["] problem

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20429465

Trump’s new social media platform found using Mastodon code

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29079404


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.


boredcaveman (at] tutanota d0t com


Mining the DHT for content isn’t particularly difficult, just time consuming and noisy.

For example, here is a personal DHT monitor where you can view what’s being announced on the DHT: https://github.com/retrohacker/taboo


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.


How is it distributed? Don’t you need a torrent tracker? How do you know which peer has which files to share?



You can easily decentralize search, but not fetching seed/leech counts essentially


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


I offered to donate money a while back, and they refused.


They _really_ should give a dump of all the torrents, magnet links and seed/leech counts...


hahah paying to steal stuff


more like voluntary contributing to the maintenance of an invaluable archive project


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 reports of Pirate Bay's death have been grossly exaggerated.


Not really, it's a steaming pile of it's former self.


Which one? Lol

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


> The Pirate Bay got shut down

It didn’t happen though


Eh. It got raided, was down for two months, and for a while it was unclear whether it would come back or not. https://torrentfreak.com/pirate-bay-back-online-150131/


RARBG was my favorite for finding HDR/4k content. Anybody got an alternative?


I usually just try to find stuff on DHT using BTDigg.


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.


Where are you getting that from?

On Steam, the offline title with the highest concurrent player count is Civ 6 on place 18, with 1/30 the amount of players of CS:GO.

On Twitch, Minecraft, which almost all streamers seem to be playing on multiplayer servers, is in 20th place, behind 19 exclusively online games.

I would estimate more than 99% of all playtime is spent on online games.


Read again.


What did you not understand about my comment?


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.


imagine thinking that while what.cd existed.


Shhhh, don’t tell him about RED.


OK, but tell me about RED... :-)


i've been there since day 3.


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.


And may I do same - bother you for invite? If anything I should do - would be happy to


When did TPB get shut down? I somehow missed that piece of news


It didn't. Even the classic .org domain still works. However it is blocked by some ISPs, which may lead some people to think it has been shut down.


It is not the same website.


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.


1 - Pirate bay still exists and is very much alive.

2 - Rarbg was a margin note in torrent community. There are others very much alive and better.


> Rarbg was a margin note in torrent community

It was the 4th largest according to TorrentFreak: https://torrentfreak.com/top-torrent-sites/


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.


I wonder why there's no LimeTorrent on this list.


"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.

https://torrentfreak.com/top-torrent-sites/

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.


You could search using the IMDB ID/url suffix, which almost always gave you exactly what you wanted. RIP.


> 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.


Because HD literally means 1280×720, and there are no guarantees of quality ?


> Rarbg was a margin note in torrent community

really?

i very much preferred it over pb or kat


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?


Rutracker is the best. You need to understand some russian. But everything is there.


Google Translate is your friend here. RUTracker has excellent quality music - often complete label discographies too.


1337x is a very good alternative.


Use Usenet tbh. NZBGeek offers many of the same features that RARBG did.


You can try cloudtorrents.com


> There are others very much alive and better.

Can you please tell me which ones or point me to a place that does?


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.


check the sidebar of r/trackers


Better? Which ones?


Private ones that are invite only, like PTP, BTN, RED, Bib, etc.—the public tracker community really pales in comparison.


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.


so... unless you can send us invites, your suggestions are not really useful to us


Let the kid flex, will ya


The top tier ones are hard to get into, but plenty of good ones open up from time to time for signups, e.g. TorrentLeech is open now: https://www.reddit.com/r/OpenSignups/comments/13wwg7w/torren...


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.


Unless I've known someone for a decade, they're not getting an invite.


Thanks for the confirmation that "you're not really useful to us" remains a valid statement.


good thing I wasn't asking you then :)


1337x


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