For too long imo, piracy had become a “grab it all” environment. The old “Caring is Sharing” mantra seems to have disappeared. So maybe, this Lemmy could revert back 20-30 years to become a real sharing community. IDK.
As others have said, lack of privacy is what makes BitTorrent not the best tool.
Other things may be inconvenient (like good old XDCC or using Google Disk for piracy), or “invisible Joe” (like ed2k, gnutella and Usenet, due to all of these just not being sufficiently monitored by law enforcement or neighbors interested in your porn taste) cases.
And Freenet, I2P (with iMule and what else there is, there was some sharing thing similar to ed2k in experience), RetroShare are not sufficiently popular.
In general good things are not popular.
My point is, let’s wait for Locutus and whether it succeeds in transforming the Web.
Have been doing this stuff for more years than most of you have been alive, ha,ha!!
In the early days of torrents, seeding was a key feature to keep the post alive. But now it seems too many just want to download and fuck off, with absolutely no seeding back. Why is that? They just download something, then it’s fuck off to anyone else who might want to download it?
To me the basic spirit of sharing has gone. Maybe I’m just an old cunt now, but to me it’s a real shame.
This is because many countries only have laws that prevent providing pirated content and not downloading it. This means downloading content is almost never illegal, but providing it(seeding) is.
I usually keep stuff to seed until 3.0 ratio or longer if I’m keeping the files. If it’s just taking really long and I need the drive space at 1.0 or even earlier. That should be ok right?
If you don’t have the space to be able to keep things around, that’s understandable, but less than 1.00 is considered to be leeching and is frowned upon. You’ve given back less than you’ve taken. I consider 2.00 a fair minimum, as you’ve returned twice as much as you’ve received to the ecosystem. 3.00 when and where you can is more than most will do, I think.
I just keep things seeding until I need more space, then I’ll remove things based on ratio, average upload per day, and how much I want to keep the torrent alive. For example Queen Charlotte ratio is at 81.12, I don’t really like it but since a lot of people want it I’m keeping it up. Alternatively for anime it’s mostly a ratio of 2-3 but because I know how few people actually seed anime I keep it up (doesn’t hurt that it’s only like 1 GiB per episode too). As for removals I’m probably gonna remove High On Life soon since it’s pretty heavy at 35.98 GiB and only has a ratio of 4.67 after 2 weeks.
I’ll get rid of single episode anime at the end of the season because that’s when packs will take over what people download. I’ll keep seeding packs whenever I get them though.
In a similar vein people on soulseek who have all their files locked unless you trade with them, particularly the ones who want gift vouchers and shit like that I feel goes against the community spirit of piracy as a whole. If I get hold of something rare or that has broken street date i’m excited to share it with others who may no be able to get it for whatever reason.
Really pisses me off scrolling through my search results seeing loads of lock symbols with user info listing demands that must be met for you to be oh so privaledged enough to receive a right to download from them. It goes against what I grew up knowing piracy to be, I’m guessing I am a similar age to you though.
And to all you soulseek users listing locked files with lists of demands to access them. Fuck you.
Yeah that is annoying as hell. Like I get it if it’s just like “my files are private, I’ll open them if you have shares” but that whole “I need X album FLAC and a $50 baskin robbins gift card and then I might share with you” shit is the lamest thing I’ve ever seen.
That’s such a weird attitude to have. I LOVE when I see people have downloaded mp3s or comics off me. Makes me feel like I’m a better person having shared.
I used Soulseek for a while, though I eventually stopped because there wasn’t anything interesting there for me. Just music. Music is cool, but I’m mainly looking for ROMs, and not just the stuff anyone can find in any No-Intro set within five seconds of googling.
Sure, but it doesn’t mean it won’t cause problems for our kind admin, Ernest. Eventually, someone will probably make it troublesome enough for him to reconsider.
Yeah, I’d prefer it to be a resource educating and assisting people to the best options to go to than to actually be sharing direct file links or anything like that. There’s other sites that are handling that side.
Fully agree, even though Lemmy is decentralised, each instance is still hosted by a hosting provider and is subject to DMCA and other enforcement actions like any other website. That’s why we don’t allow specific file requests and direct downloads etc. If we went that route, it wouldn’t be long before we were shut down, then have to start from scratch every few months, which wouldn’t be sustainable.
In this instance, no direct download links are allowed, but can’t speak for other instance - that’s up to them. You can always PM links to people, or link to another landing page elesewhere like 1337x.to just to offer us some protection from DMCAs. We are pro-piracy after all, but this space is for chatting about it rather than file sharing.
Some providers offer the ability to upload. That said, it is potentially a risky action and most would suggest that unless you are very sure about what you are doing, and take proper precautions, it is not worth the risk for the average pirate. Providers get a LOT of DMCA takedowns, so unless you have something really obscure that you feel would be worth uploading, it probably isn’t something to attempt. YMMV.
I was not born 30 years ago, but I’d like to embrace more the “caring is sharing” mantra. I wonder what’s your ‘workflow’/management of your uploads to seed? as in it takes storage and so on, so what are your best practices folx?
Born 35 years ago, was a teen during the rise of torrents.
I have a hard disk dedicated to transient torrents. Separate hard disk for archival and perma seed.
Everything goes into transient with minimum ratio of 5.0 by default (I forgot the minimum time, but it’s probably two weeks or a month). Sometimes I upgrade good things and upgrade them to archival and set them to seed forever.
I do remember capping my upload to 50% or so of my maximum upload, as well as limiting the number of downloading torrents (5) as well as active connections per torrent (around 100). You’ll have to play around with this one to suit your own connection.
After that I just use without much thought, and only remove torrents that have automatically stopped without much worry.
2.00 for anything I download and isn’t broken or garbage
5.00 for anything small, popular, or that I’m passionate about
Probably going to bump that up higher for some things, it’s been slow lately
I only recently got the ability to seed long-term and privately. I don’t bother with private trackers and don’t expect I ever will. That’s partially because I don’t care about new shows or movies, and partially because I don’t like exclusionary communities. My setup is virtualized, not on dedicated hardware, so I don’t have a lot of space to throw at this. I’m a small fish in a big pond and I focus on keeping alive things that I’ve enjoyed.
Yeah, it sure can, but most of the stuff I’m dealing with is older or niche. I have one that’s about to hit two months still sitting at 0.96. True to my word, though, I’ve bumped up ratios across most of what I have.
I often look for older or niche content, and even for that I still often have plenty of takers on public trackers. That my machine is port forwarded might have something to do with it. I’d say I have a “medium” amount of disk space and only stop seeding when I delete the files, but sometimes I limit the upload rate to keep some for other activities.
I’m not downloading things for the sake of having them to share. It’s a narrow intersection between things that I want, and things that I have the space to keep. Because of this, you and I might have different definitions of niche. And my connection wouldn’t be stellar even if it weren’t being sent across an ocean through a VPN. But I try to give more than I get.
The thing with piracy these days is there is a huge fear of legal burden AND extreme protectiveness to prevent takedowns. It’s the same thing as being a gang member and suspicious of new blood being undercover cops. Once you find actual piracy that works, the last thing you want to do is post publicly about it!
It used to be that just being on the internet made you trusted enough to get the warez. I don’t know how to keep the movement alive with big brother watching out for his homies so hard. Decentralize, encrypt and anonymize I suppose. BT needs an overhaul to prevent attribution. Ten bucks says it’s easily possibile but the VPN companies who have our back will lobby against it, lol.
I am not ambitious enough unfortunately, and probably not smart enough either.
It’s a game of leapfrog and it’s at a little bit of a stalemate because people just pay $5/mo. for a VPN. It was a monetization race and that’s were we landed. I’m sure copyright holders are not happy with that, but there’s no incentive to develop or change anything because who doesn’t have $5/mo?
A lot of VPNs nowadays don’t even have port forwarding and such though, including Mullvad as of recently. Not to mention how many of them end up being compromised relatively easily.
A lot of VPNs nowadays don’t even have port forwarding and such though, including Mullvad as of recently. Not to mention how many of them end up being compromised relatively easily.
Because for years I’ve been told that “they” target the uploaders, not the downloaders for prosecution. So seeding was significantly riskier that just downloading with uploads disabled.
Anyway, now I’ve set up a paid VPN and cancelled most streaming services, and uploads are fully engaged.
for years I’ve been told that “they” target the uploaders, not the downloaders for prosecution.
Yep. Once the RIAA proved that suing individual pirates for ridiculous amounts of money over one song did nothing to stop piracy, they finally changed gears: go after the people leaking the albums, the original upload groups, etc.
Governments, watchdog groups, and industry “concerns” followed suit, so eventually everyone learned that if you weren’t a part of a group, you were probably (reasonably) safe. Then they started monitoring swarms on public trackers and sending those DMCA notices en masse, but that again proved how ineffective those scare tactics were. Most people switched to private trackers to avoid that annoyance, and pirates pivoted yet again.
So seeding was significantly riskier that just downloading with uploads disabled.
Seeding wasn’t the only risk. Just being in the swarm – whether uploading or downloading – is enough to trigger a DMCA complaint. And the way BitTorrent works, you’re pretty much always seeding even if the file isn’t done downloading, so downloading and not seeding wasn’t enough.
VPNs are a great shield against those fishing complaints, but you wanna make sure to use one that has had to prove in court that they never keep logs. A lot of them say they don’t keep logs, but happily and quietly comply to subpoenas with whatever they have on customers.
iirc I clicked the submit button once and it gave me a loading circle for a few hours and I left the tab open and did something else. Definitely didn’t click the submit button more than 5 times, pretty sure I only did it once or twice. I think the issue is more likely some kind of built-in retry mechanism in the javascript code.
So, can you find more content on private trackers, then?
Oh, yes. Between PassThePopcorn and BroadcasTheNet, I’ve never not found a movie or show I was looking for. It’s not always a guarantee, especially for more niche movies/shows, but those two have never let me down.
For everything else, I usually use more general purpose trackers like TorrentLeech or AlphaRatio.
It’s worth remembering that morality has little to do with it. Back then, sharing was simple and consequence-free. Now it’s not. If you want to create a community like that, it needs to be a curated space where only people who are able to share can join.
You are not logged in. However you can subscribe from another Fediverse account, for example Lemmy or Mastodon. To do this, paste the following into the search field of your instance: !piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com
⚓ Dedicated to the discussion of digital piracy, including ethical problems and legal advancements.
In the fediverse is possible in any private company platform i don’t think so.
Cool username. Didn’t know custom fonts(?) were allowed
It’s not another font just other unicode characters. The problem is that many systems don’t support it (Text to speech, some older software, etc.).
more, for those who use 88x31 buttons
I miss these old 90s style buttons on websites. A much simpler time…
may i introduce you to…
(other free site hosts are available,[1] but neocities is very much based around the spirit of geocities/angelfire)
i myself use github pages ↩︎
As others have said, lack of privacy is what makes BitTorrent not the best tool.
Other things may be inconvenient (like good old XDCC or using Google Disk for piracy), or “invisible Joe” (like ed2k, gnutella and Usenet, due to all of these just not being sufficiently monitored by law enforcement or neighbors interested in your porn taste) cases.
And Freenet, I2P (with iMule and what else there is, there was some sharing thing similar to ed2k in experience), RetroShare are not sufficiently popular.
In general good things are not popular.
My point is, let’s wait for Locutus and whether it succeeds in transforming the Web.
What is Locutus. Couldn’t find anything of substance searching for it.
Edit: it helps if your autocorrect doesn’t interfere… https://github.com/freenet/locutus
Have been doing this stuff for more years than most of you have been alive, ha,ha!!
In the early days of torrents, seeding was a key feature to keep the post alive. But now it seems too many just want to download and fuck off, with absolutely no seeding back. Why is that? They just download something, then it’s fuck off to anyone else who might want to download it?
To me the basic spirit of sharing has gone. Maybe I’m just an old cunt now, but to me it’s a real shame.
This is because many countries only have laws that prevent providing pirated content and not downloading it. This means downloading content is almost never illegal, but providing it(seeding) is.
I usually keep stuff to seed until 3.0 ratio or longer if I’m keeping the files. If it’s just taking really long and I need the drive space at 1.0 or even earlier. That should be ok right?
If you don’t have the space to be able to keep things around, that’s understandable, but less than 1.00 is considered to be leeching and is frowned upon. You’ve given back less than you’ve taken. I consider 2.00 a fair minimum, as you’ve returned twice as much as you’ve received to the ecosystem. 3.00 when and where you can is more than most will do, I think.
I just keep things seeding until I need more space, then I’ll remove things based on ratio, average upload per day, and how much I want to keep the torrent alive. For example Queen Charlotte ratio is at 81.12, I don’t really like it but since a lot of people want it I’m keeping it up. Alternatively for anime it’s mostly a ratio of 2-3 but because I know how few people actually seed anime I keep it up (doesn’t hurt that it’s only like 1 GiB per episode too). As for removals I’m probably gonna remove High On Life soon since it’s pretty heavy at 35.98 GiB and only has a ratio of 4.67 after 2 weeks.
I’ll get rid of single episode anime at the end of the season because that’s when packs will take over what people download. I’ll keep seeding packs whenever I get them though.
Ah that’s a good point, should probably be doing that.
In a similar vein people on soulseek who have all their files locked unless you trade with them, particularly the ones who want gift vouchers and shit like that I feel goes against the community spirit of piracy as a whole. If I get hold of something rare or that has broken street date i’m excited to share it with others who may no be able to get it for whatever reason.
Really pisses me off scrolling through my search results seeing loads of lock symbols with user info listing demands that must be met for you to be oh so privaledged enough to receive a right to download from them. It goes against what I grew up knowing piracy to be, I’m guessing I am a similar age to you though.
And to all you soulseek users listing locked files with lists of demands to access them. Fuck you.
Yeah that is annoying as hell. Like I get it if it’s just like “my files are private, I’ll open them if you have shares” but that whole “I need X album FLAC and a $50 baskin robbins gift card and then I might share with you” shit is the lamest thing I’ve ever seen.
The lamest shit i’ve ever seen is someone had thousands of fake folders set up to look like they were seeding but they had 0 actual content shared.
I honestly never noticed it :D is there like a setting to turn off seeing those lock symbol people? I must have that on :D
I never got into soulseek and this is honestly one of the reasons. and all the stuff I was finding wasn’t anything I couldn’t find elsewhere.
Amen to locked out slsk “sharers”. Always hated that, though it honestly feels less common than it did back at its peak popularity as a platform.
That’s such a weird attitude to have. I LOVE when I see people have downloaded mp3s or comics off me. Makes me feel like I’m a better person having shared.
Same! I look through my uploaded list and read what other people are getting from me with a warm fuzzy feeling!
I used Soulseek for a while, though I eventually stopped because there wasn’t anything interesting there for me. Just music. Music is cool, but I’m mainly looking for ROMs, and not just the stuff anyone can find in any No-Intro set within five seconds of googling.
I wonder if this has a shot if we use something like lemmy. Doesn’t that mean there isn’t a a major company to answer to in the first place?
Sure, but it doesn’t mean it won’t cause problems for our kind admin, Ernest. Eventually, someone will probably make it troublesome enough for him to reconsider.
Yeah, I’d prefer it to be a resource educating and assisting people to the best options to go to than to actually be sharing direct file links or anything like that. There’s other sites that are handling that side.
Fully agree, even though Lemmy is decentralised, each instance is still hosted by a hosting provider and is subject to DMCA and other enforcement actions like any other website. That’s why we don’t allow specific file requests and direct downloads etc. If we went that route, it wouldn’t be long before we were shut down, then have to start from scratch every few months, which wouldn’t be sustainable.
I should probably take down the ROMs I uploaded, then?
In this instance, no direct download links are allowed, but can’t speak for other instance - that’s up to them. You can always PM links to people, or link to another landing page elesewhere like 1337x.to just to offer us some protection from DMCAs. We are pro-piracy after all, but this space is for chatting about it rather than file sharing.
Is there a guide on how to upload on Usenet ? Maybe I’m just being silly. … Or am I 🤔
Some providers offer the ability to upload. That said, it is potentially a risky action and most would suggest that unless you are very sure about what you are doing, and take proper precautions, it is not worth the risk for the average pirate. Providers get a LOT of DMCA takedowns, so unless you have something really obscure that you feel would be worth uploading, it probably isn’t something to attempt. YMMV.
I was not born 30 years ago, but I’d like to embrace more the “caring is sharing” mantra. I wonder what’s your ‘workflow’/management of your uploads to seed? as in it takes storage and so on, so what are your best practices folx?
Born 35 years ago, was a teen during the rise of torrents.
I have a hard disk dedicated to transient torrents. Separate hard disk for archival and perma seed.
Everything goes into transient with minimum ratio of 5.0 by default (I forgot the minimum time, but it’s probably two weeks or a month). Sometimes I upgrade good things and upgrade them to archival and set them to seed forever.
I do remember capping my upload to 50% or so of my maximum upload, as well as limiting the number of downloading torrents (5) as well as active connections per torrent (around 100). You’ll have to play around with this one to suit your own connection.
After that I just use without much thought, and only remove torrents that have automatically stopped without much worry.
2.00 for anything I download and isn’t broken or garbage
5.00 for anything small, popular, or that I’m passionate about
Probably going to bump that up higher for some things, it’s been slow lately
I only recently got the ability to seed long-term and privately. I don’t bother with private trackers and don’t expect I ever will. That’s partially because I don’t care about new shows or movies, and partially because I don’t like exclusionary communities. My setup is virtualized, not on dedicated hardware, so I don’t have a lot of space to throw at this. I’m a small fish in a big pond and I focus on keeping alive things that I’ve enjoyed.
Depending on the content, 10 or 20 comes quick
Yeah, it sure can, but most of the stuff I’m dealing with is older or niche. I have one that’s about to hit two months still sitting at 0.96. True to my word, though, I’ve bumped up ratios across most of what I have.
I often look for older or niche content, and even for that I still often have plenty of takers on public trackers. That my machine is port forwarded might have something to do with it. I’d say I have a “medium” amount of disk space and only stop seeding when I delete the files, but sometimes I limit the upload rate to keep some for other activities.
I’m not downloading things for the sake of having them to share. It’s a narrow intersection between things that I want, and things that I have the space to keep. Because of this, you and I might have different definitions of niche. And my connection wouldn’t be stellar even if it weren’t being sent across an ocean through a VPN. But I try to give more than I get.
The thing with piracy these days is there is a huge fear of legal burden AND extreme protectiveness to prevent takedowns. It’s the same thing as being a gang member and suspicious of new blood being undercover cops. Once you find actual piracy that works, the last thing you want to do is post publicly about it!
What are new people who actually aren’t cops supposed to do?
It used to be that just being on the internet made you trusted enough to get the warez. I don’t know how to keep the movement alive with big brother watching out for his homies so hard. Decentralize, encrypt and anonymize I suppose. BT needs an overhaul to prevent attribution. Ten bucks says it’s easily possibile but the VPN companies who have our back will lobby against it, lol.
Sounds quite messy. I… Am not smart enough to do that stuff, unfortunately.
I am not ambitious enough unfortunately, and probably not smart enough either.
It’s a game of leapfrog and it’s at a little bit of a stalemate because people just pay $5/mo. for a VPN. It was a monetization race and that’s were we landed. I’m sure copyright holders are not happy with that, but there’s no incentive to develop or change anything because who doesn’t have $5/mo?
A lot of VPNs nowadays don’t even have port forwarding and such though, including Mullvad as of recently. Not to mention how many of them end up being compromised relatively easily.
A lot of VPNs nowadays don’t even have port forwarding and such though, including Mullvad as of recently. Not to mention how many of them end up being compromised relatively easily.
First rule of Piracy Club
Because for years I’ve been told that “they” target the uploaders, not the downloaders for prosecution. So seeding was significantly riskier that just downloading with uploads disabled.
Anyway, now I’ve set up a paid VPN and cancelled most streaming services, and uploads are fully engaged.
Yep. Once the RIAA proved that suing individual pirates for ridiculous amounts of money over one song did nothing to stop piracy, they finally changed gears: go after the people leaking the albums, the original upload groups, etc.
Governments, watchdog groups, and industry “concerns” followed suit, so eventually everyone learned that if you weren’t a part of a group, you were probably (reasonably) safe. Then they started monitoring swarms on public trackers and sending those DMCA notices en masse, but that again proved how ineffective those scare tactics were. Most people switched to private trackers to avoid that annoyance, and pirates pivoted yet again.
Seeding wasn’t the only risk. Just being in the swarm – whether uploading or downloading – is enough to trigger a DMCA complaint. And the way BitTorrent works, you’re pretty much always seeding even if the file isn’t done downloading, so downloading and not seeding wasn’t enough.
VPNs are a great shield against those fishing complaints, but you wanna make sure to use one that has had to prove in court that they never keep logs. A lot of them say they don’t keep logs, but happily and quietly comply to subpoenas with whatever they have on customers.
undefined> Most people switched to private trackers to avoid that annoyance, and pirates pivoted yet again.
So, can you find more content on private trackers, then? If I search there will I finally be able to find Sudigadu with english subtitles?
deleted by creator
iirc I clicked the submit button once and it gave me a loading circle for a few hours and I left the tab open and did something else. Definitely didn’t click the submit button more than 5 times, pretty sure I only did it once or twice. I think the issue is more likely some kind of built-in retry mechanism in the javascript code.
Oh, yes. Between PassThePopcorn and BroadcasTheNet, I’ve never not found a movie or show I was looking for. It’s not always a guarantee, especially for more niche movies/shows, but those two have never let me down.
For everything else, I usually use more general purpose trackers like TorrentLeech or AlphaRatio.
My question is always the same, how the heck do you get an invitation for these sites?
It’s worth remembering that morality has little to do with it. Back then, sharing was simple and consequence-free. Now it’s not. If you want to create a community like that, it needs to be a curated space where only people who are able to share can join.
Let’s hope so :)