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mrtksn
themagician
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.
unavoidable
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.
expertentipp
> 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.
wukerplank
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.
jesterson
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.
Mountain_Skies
Law firms must love how many billable hours such quests generate for them.
terminalcommand
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 :).
waboremo
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.
joshspankit
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.
theturtletalks
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?
heresie-dabord
> 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!"
anjel
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.
bubblethink
>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.
Gasp0de
What are they doing that is illegal? I thought they were just a torrent tracker?
abwizz
imo they were a fairly popular and long-standing tracker. someone had to make a statement perhaps? (pb was downed multiple times)
gersg
Linking to pirated content is illegal in many European countries.
moffkalast
Then Google should be prosecuted.
datadeft
But not in all EU countries.
ornornor
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.
yieldcrv
and just a civil issue, which doesn’t come with priority or the state power that a criminal case would
mrtksn
[flagged]
supriyo-biswas
Amazon has provided the ability to obtain torrents of objects on S3[1].
[1] https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/API/API_GetObjec...
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phkahler
>> 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.
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samstave
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...
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deep-fake assassinations are going to be a thing...
PHKahler
_AzMoo
I think it's effectively just that they operate out of jurisdictions that just don't care.
mrtksn
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?
wkat4242
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.
CodeArtisan
Vietnam is probably the #1 place for digital piracy today.
https://torrentfreak.com/vietnam-could-kill-several-major-pi...
cykros
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.
costco
Current hosting appears to be in Bosnia: 185.37.100.122 which is probably a server colocated with https://www.netsaap.com/contacts.php.
abwizz
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.
wkat4242
This, totally.
adql
The problem appears to just be "it's too expensive to run" at least according to the banner
maccard
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?
tracker1
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.
dunmalg
Comparatively cheap because you're just handing off magnet links, but when you're serving millions of unique visitors daily, it all adds up.
mpsprd
I believe rarbg had many "official" torrents that they seeded. This must be part of their costs.
RektBoy
For example in my EU country, it's legal to download movies for own use. shrug
slazaro
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.
maeln
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, ....
Solvency
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.
maeln
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.
nopcode
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
fallat
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.
unixhero
How would they? Torrents are fairly trivial to build a web site around.
Blockchain sounds lile experimental engineering
6510
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.
theptip
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.
dmix
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.
Xen9
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.
SergeAx
> 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.
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Tuna-Fish
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.
Paul-E
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.
Tuna-Fish
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.
throwawayiddqd2
Most of the time when I search for something, I sort by more seeders first. Some type of signature can be used too.
ryandrake
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!
pessimizer
> 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.
tracker1
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.
abwizz
> 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.
jasonfarnon
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?
BlueTemplar
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
rakoo
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.
xenago
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
grishka
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
boredcaveman (at] tutanota d0t com
r3trohack3r
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
dmos62
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.
chakintosh
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.
drexlspivey
How is it distributed? Don’t you need a torrent tracker? How do you know which peer has which files to share?
zolland
Here is a good resource https://wiki.theory.org/BitTorrentSpecification
pdimitar
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.
codetrotter
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.
NoMoreNicksLeft
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?
dmos62
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.
anticrymactic
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
TaylorAlexander
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.
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poisonarena
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
rationalist
I offered to donate money a while back, and they refused.
hoschicz
They _really_ should give a dump of all the torrents, magnet links and seed/leech counts...
robertoandred
hahah paying to steal stuff
thescriptkiddie
more like voluntary contributing to the maintenance of an invaluable archive project
m4r1k
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
qalmakka
The reports of Pirate Bay's death have been grossly exaggerated.
lasc4r
Not really, it's a steaming pile of it's former self.
bazmattaz
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
thiht
> The Pirate Bay got shut down
It didn’t happen though
bscphil
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/
rabuse
RARBG was my favorite for finding HDR/4k content. Anybody got an alternative?
GaggiX
I usually just try to find stuff on DHT using BTDigg.
jasonfarnon
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.)
JW_00000
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.
kyriakos
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.
BlueTemplar
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.
chickenimprint
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.
jasonfarnon
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.
SSLy
imagine thinking that while what.cd existed.
SamuelAdams
Shhhh, don’t tell him about RED.
jzb
OK, but tell me about RED... :-)
SSLy
i've been there since day 3.
nikanj
When did TPB get shut down? I somehow missed that piece of news
Strom
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.
RoyGBivCap
It is not the same website.
pessimizer
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.
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feyes
That's pretty devastating. This was old reliable for a long time. I could never keep up with the demands from private trackers as streaming made it so I didn't need to utilize them as much.
dmix
Are there any private torrent sites for movies/tv that you can buy your way in without needing a seedbox?
holoduke
Checkout sonarr and radarr together with jackett. Plenty of ways to find zillions of sites. Most dark streaming sites use these tools to fully automate everything
paintballboi07
Yep. Although, I'd recommend prowlarr instead of jackett. Integrates with the other arr apps much better.
drexlspivey
Last I checked you can get in IPTorrents and HDTorrents with a donation. Still need to maintain your ratio but you can also boost your upload with donations.
jackspratts
phenomenal site. while the content is upped by users the fact that multiple rips were found on the same page; SDR, HDR, HDR10, 264, 265, 720, 1080, 2160, dubbed, original, theatrical cuts, director's, producer's etc. was all on the brilliant, dedicated folks of rarbgtor and is what made the site the best in the world. nothing else even approaches it. like OiNk wiithout the drama. i'll remember the time spent there with gratitude and fondness. and I just installed two more 20TB drives, less than 18 hours ago...
- js.
sph
o7 thank you for your service, keeping the Internet awesome and anti-corporate.
Where one piracy site dies, a thousand spawn from its corpse.
Maybe the media companies will eventually pull their heads out of their collective arses and quit their cartel, allowing the existence of legal, paid streaming sites a-la-Spotify with access to 99% of the repertoire. Until then, torrent is how we protest while they create more and more insular streaming services to milk people $9/mo at a time.
"Piracy is almost always a service problem." — Gabe Newell
(If you need a semi-private tracker that's easy to get into, try TorrentLeech. Also /r/opensignups)
Asooka
A service and a pricing problem. All cases of piracy I have observed stem from one of 3 reasons
1. Too expensive. This encompasses several varieties, like the media in question being literally priced more than the person is willing to pay, or the pricing is acceptable, but the person can buy only one of several choices and wants to evaluate all before giving one their money.
2. The product is not offered for sale. This is sometimes literally that the product isn't available for sale in your country, or the product is not available in a useful form, e.g. it doesn't come with subtitles in your language, it won't work on your device, it requires a stable internet connection, which you don't have, etc.
3. For political reasons, to avoid supporting DRM.
bscphil
> For political reasons, to avoid supporting DRM.
This is very much a practical reason as well, though this overlaps with "not available in a usable form". DRM is the reason I can't watch movies at the highest bitrates and resolutions on my device from Netflix or Amazon. It's the reason I can't trust that things I purchase will be available to me indefinitely. It's the reason I can't build a collection of media (e.g. with Kodi) that is playable on my TV with one click with a single unifying interface.
> The product is not offered for sale.
This extends to some other cases as well. For instance, where the only available version is a crappy remaster (Terminator 2), and the original is much superior. Or if you want to watch the film with a director's commentary.
There's also, very broadly, a 4th reason - convenience. This encompasses both ease of use (if I know what movie I want to watch, I don't have to search to see where it's streaming), and discoverability (a good torrent site will easily let you see all the movies by a director or actor, and provide recommendations). Or if you're looking for a particular special feature, it's much more convenient to be able to download it than to go looking for a physical media copy and wait for it to be shipped to your door.
mvanbaak
With the globalisation, there is actually a 4th reason rising: availability of content in specific regions. I sometimes want/need content with audio and/or subtitle language X, which is not available legally where I live, but the exact same platform does have it available in the region that speaks this language.
pirating is in this case the best solution as I can pick the quality I want, with the audio and subtitle languages I need.
5e92cb50239222b
I think this is just the second reason rephrased a bit differently. And it isn't at all new — pretty much all Japanese game and animation studios have refused to acknowledge our region's existence for about as long as these industries have themselves been around.
For example, Nintendo consoles have been unavailable since the 90s — which is why we've been using these clones:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dendy_(console)
and are still unavailable now unless you're willing to buy consoles and games on ebay, overpriced and without warranty (which is what some of my friends have been doing, but I refuse to support publishers that consider my American dollars second class to those coming from actual Americans).
So torrents it is, then. 'Fuck you' can go both ways.
loeg
This is covered in #2.
ajford
Exactly. I dropped out of the torrent scene for probably around 5 years when Netflix had a huge back-catalog and it just wasn't worth the hassle to manage torrents and a media server.
Then the Netflix catalog shrunk to originals, there's now 6 different streaming services I have to juggle to watch the usual content my family likes, and we're constantly using third-party services just to figure out what's available where. I hate having to switch from Netflix to Hulu to finish out a show because the last season is only on Hulu. Or things like Warner and Disney cutting shows because they don't want to pay residuals or whatever dumb accounting BS they feel like pulling.
If you make it more convenient to torrent and shove everything into Plex, why would I pay to get a worse experience.
happymellon
For 2, it can be the silliest things.
Disney holding back the second half of the final season of Amphibia. Released in the US but not here for unexplained reasons. For 6 months piracy was the only way to get a conclusion.
Our Flag Means Death, even though it had a large section of its cast from Britain it wasn't available to watch for far too long here.
I could go on, but you get the point. Any distribution rules are a creation of their own making in the first place.
AdamH12113
> Maybe the media companies will eventually pull their heads out of their collective arses and quit their cartel, allowing the existence of legal, paid streaming sites a-la-Spotify with access to 99% of the repertoire. Until then, torrent is how we protest while they create more and more insular streaming services to milk people $9/mo at a time.
I have been hearing people make this same basic argument since the 90s. (I'm sure it's older than that.) During that time the price of video and audio entertainment has decreased while availability and quality have vastly improved. Despite this, piracy is still going strong. The ideological goalposts used to justify it keep moving, but the desire for free stuff is timeless. (Not judging here -- I've certainly done my share.)
Adjusting for inflation: Twenty years ago, a DVD with one recent movie cost ~$30, or you could rent one for $5-8. One album on CD cost ~$20. Buying individual songs for the then-unheard of price of $1.65 (99 cents at the time) on iTunes was brand new. They had limited bit rate and DRM, and you had to buy an expensive iPod if you wanted to use them conveniently. If you wanted good TV shows, you paid something like $60-80/month for cable TV (more if you wanted to watch The Sopranos) and had to watch on a schedule, with lots of ads.
If you compare that to today's world of cheap streaming services, high-quality DRM-free music, and even cheaper physical media, it's not even a contest.
sph
That's a very US centric view of the problem. Because these days if you leave the borders of your country, you'll see that the streaming world is still a fragmented archipelago of crappy B-tier licensed movies, while the good stuff people want to watch is only available in the US through a VPN.
And cable TV or films at the cinema are as expensive as ever.
Which is why Spotify has had an incredible success worldwide and music piracy has reduced dramatically: their repertoire is very comprehensive and mostly the same everywhere in the world.
People really want to believe it is a money issue, and they are just terribly misguided. Gabe Newell is absolutely right here, and he knows piracy, as he deals with the demographic with expensive needs (gamers wanting the latest $70 game) and the least money (as young gamers don't have a job, or don't earn a lot)
It is not a money problem.
lostgame
>> "Piracy is almost always a service problem." — Gabe Newell
Once again; the media companies are absolutely doing everything in their power to drive even casual media consumers into piracy. I wouldn't be surprised if piracy was already more rampant than it's ever been - but it's only getting worse, due to ludicrous streaming fragmentation.
It'll never happen, but the only thing that can save piracy is an aggregate all-inclusive monthly subscription platform where all the films/shows from all services are available, just like Apple Music or Spotify. I pay $30-40/mo and I have access to all the stuff on Netflix, Prime, Max, Disney...
When you stream a movie from Netflix, they get the credit. Disney? The same.
Nobody is going to pay for all these services, and more and more are ditching them altogether. The response of the streaming services is to increase prices and reduce content. It's hilariously embarrassing. They are asking us to pirate.
chromoblob
> Where one piracy site dies, a thousand spawn from its corpse.
Maybe that's a bad thing. Having one central site rather than many is better for searching and availability of uploads.
seanalltogether
> "Piracy is almost always a service problem." — Gabe Newell
I find this an odd argument in favor of pirating movies, because everything that steam offers for games, amazon prime or itunes offers for most tv shows and movies. In fact with amazon prime you can buy content and watch it on pretty much any kind of device out there.
muti
The coverage by service for tv/movies is so much worse than games/audio, that's what makes it a service problem.
Netflix was killing pirating when it had "everything", pirating is seeing a resurgence as the landscape becomes more fractured.
jokowueu
Most people have moved to Plex shares these days
JohnBooty
My experience is that 100% of what I see on friends' (and friends' friends') Plex shares is.... movies that they downloaded via TPB/RarBG/etc torrents.
If the supply of torrented content dries up, it seems like many Plex shares will start to become very stale.
jokowueu
Ofcourse, I'm not saying torrents don't have a place it's just that they seem less trafficked these days , online piracy streaming sites , iptv(with vod) and Plexshares have taken the front seat.
calmoo
Plex Shares (like ones you buy on the internet from a stranger) are mostly fully automated and pull from private/public trackers + usenet. I don't see the supply of torrents really having any effect in this regard.
5e92cb50239222b
Nobody I personally know have ever heard of Plex at all. Almost everybody uses BitTorrent to some extent.
oxygen_crisis
[dead]
robertoandred
I love when thieves act like they're such noble saints.
redundantly
I love when soulless corporations bribe governments to keep a stranglehold on works of art that have impacted cultures around the world and prevent future artists from being able make more art and prevent the proper collection and preservation of these works and block the access to them, all so they can keep making money off of decades old IP.
It goes both ways. There are no Saints to be found on either side.
I don't care one bit about the pocketbooks of our corporate overlords, and neither should you.
joe463369
In fairness, somebody has to pay for the actors and the grips and the foley artists, and I'm not particularly convinced that the pirate's stance of "I want it for 20 cents, in 4k, and DRM free and if I can't have that then torrrenting it is my moral right" is either right or sustainable.
robertoandred
Don't pretend you care about artists when you refuse to pay them.
5e92cb50239222b
Your useless copypasted comments brought nothing to this discussion. You have changed nobody's mind. Have you wrote all that to make yourself feel good?
robertoandred
I don't think you know how copy/paste works.
izacus
Yeah, we all love Robin Hood books. What does your comment have to do with this thread though?
youreincorrect
Uh, because it responded to a comment that wrote a bunch of 2009-era Guy Fawkes mask-wearing redditor bullshit that attempts to make piracy noble.
> o7 thank you for your service
(o7 would be a salute)
> Where one piracy site dies, a thousand spawn from its corpse.
False and nonsense, especially in 2023.
> Maybe the media companies will eventually pull their heads out of their collective arses and quit their cartel...
Okay, I'll stop here.
I'm fine with piracy, personally. I'd prefer we just admit that you're mostly using it to download movies, music, and television shows for free. This isn't some noble fight for freedom. We're talking about watching mindless bullshit content like Star Wars, without paying for it. Piracy proponents, and comments like the one starting this thread, make it seem like we're entitled to this content. We're not. But I'll admit, I don't watch much in the way of tv or movies any more anyway, so the whole debate is lost on me.
I just rolled my eyes at the ridiculous tone of that comment, like they're freedom fighters. It's self-important bullshit.
protocolture
I love it when noble saints steal
scotty79
Creating fake meanings for old words doesn't make them real.
They even had to go through one level of indirection to make people believe what they made up.
They couldn't just say, watching digital copy witout paying for it is a theft because people would just laugh at them, no it's not.
They had to do a two step process through obsure old crime to confuse people. Using a digital copy without paying for it is piracy. And piracy is theft.
Consuming didgital content on your own terms has as much to do with theft as it has with actual piracy that got some resurgence around Africa in recent years.
sktrdie
Why don't torrent site owners just release their sites as a torrent file itself? Like a sqlite dump with search indexes?
They could either self-update the torrent [1] or just release the new torrent via forums/groups/chats etc. Would bring the costs down to zero.
Lammy
It's not just the site. RARBG themselves were responsible for many of the video encodes, hence the "RARBG_DO_NOT_MIRROR.exe" included in many of them: https://torrentfreak.com/rarbg-adds-exe-files-to-torrents-bu...
krzyk
Pirate bay does that.
traverseda
Because they make money off of ads and people who have the skills and resources to do that without profit motive also probably are afraid of getting entangled in legal battles.
sktrdie
From the announcement doesn't seem like they were making money?
traverseda
Pretty sure I remember there being ads.
petecooper
qersist3nce
So these crawl torrent indexers and provide search functionality?
Do they also search private indexers?
arsome
They crawl the peer to peer DHT, private torrents have a flag so they do not get announced via DHT.
SSLy
You can't search private indexers without having account on them.
dark-star
they are not searching the indexers, they are searching the DHT directly.
Some private trackers do not set the "disallow DHT" flag, so those will be indexed as well. Most do, however, and it's impossible to scrape those without an account, yes
pantulis
From the released note:
> Some are also fighting the war in Europe - ON BOTH SIDES
What an absurd tragedy this is. I think it bears mention between all this conversation about sharing torrents.
bazmattaz
Yes my heart broke reading this. Likely two young people who worked together around a common goal. All be it illegal. Now they’re hiding in bunkers and told to shoot each other if needed.
Such a tragedy. Fuck Putin
CoBE10
I guess mirrors would stay unaffected, because they seem to be up right now. Someone will probably clone their torrents. They might not have been the best quality, but they were always better than YIFI (YTS). I always liked that you could search Rarbg using IMDB numbers. Also, their UI was really pleasing to me, plus, there were many userscripts that extended the functionality of the site. I wounder who will fill up their place, because TPB was always the last resort for me. In the meantime Btdig could be a nice transitory place to find all of their torrents.
e12e
> I always liked that you could search Rarbg using IMDB numbers. (...) I wounder who will fill up their place, because TPB was always the last resort for me.
tawayasdf
what is the de-facto alternative these days?
poisonarena
rutracker
grishka
I second this but I'm not sure how much use it is outside of the former USSR. Most movies and TV shows there do come with original English soundtracks tho.
medlazik
1377x
melvyn2
1377x is an ad-hijacking "clone" of the real 1337x
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inversetelecine
I think this is a typo? should be 1337x.
BLKNSLVR
I mean, it did take a pandemic, war, and rampant global inflation to finally kill it. Testament to the resilience it showed throughout its lifetime. I think it's somewhat poetic that it was unrelated to law enforcement pressure.
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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?