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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
-
deep-fake assassinations are going to be a thing...
PHKahler
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.
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.
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, ....
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.
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.
This is also the problem with all distributed social networks. In the end, your options are formal centralization, and informal centralization, because absolutely nobody wants to live in true decentralization.
Here is straw man proposal, similar to cert chains and webs of trust: Say I'm a "curator". I say on HN/Reddit/Discord "here is my key hash 'p2pcuration:185da2bc59167692f596404fd83235f9bcb4e107b041f2e6e8d972da6dba00b7'". Any user that clicks the link or copies it into the search app adds the key to the trusted user list. With my private key I can sign torrents after I download them myself, which would mark the torrent as "good". When anyone who has added my key searches, the system searches for a corresponding signature from me as well. If a signature is found, the UI can chose to elevate that result.
The system could be extended so that signers could also sign other keys, expanding the trust network.
This system doesn't need to be run or maintained by each user. It could be served through a webui that can be run locally or shared with a small community. Migrating the interface to a new host would just require moving the config and keys.
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.
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
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.
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.
For example, here is a personal DHT monitor where you can view what’s being announced on the DHT: https://github.com/retrohacker/taboo
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.
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.
It didn’t happen though
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.
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.
2 - Rarbg was a margin note in torrent community. There are others very much alive and better.
It was the 4th largest according to TorrentFreak: https://torrentfreak.com/top-torrent-sites/
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.
really?
i very much preferred it over pb or kat
Can you please tell me which ones or point me to a place that does?
- js.
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)
1. Too expensive. This encompasses several varieties, like the media in question being literally priced more than the person is willing to pay, or the pricing is acceptable, but the person can buy only one of several choices and wants to evaluate all before giving one their money.
2. The product is not offered for sale. This is sometimes literally that the product isn't available for sale in your country, or the product is not available in a useful form, e.g. it doesn't come with subtitles in your language, it won't work on your device, it requires a stable internet connection, which you don't have, etc.
3. For political reasons, to avoid supporting DRM.
This is very much a practical reason as well, though this overlaps with "not available in a usable form". DRM is the reason I can't watch movies at the highest bitrates and resolutions on my device from Netflix or Amazon. It's the reason I can't trust that things I purchase will be available to me indefinitely. It's the reason I can't build a collection of media (e.g. with Kodi) that is playable on my TV with one click with a single unifying interface.
> The product is not offered for sale.
This extends to some other cases as well. For instance, where the only available version is a crappy remaster (Terminator 2), and the original is much superior. Or if you want to watch the film with a director's commentary.
There's also, very broadly, a 4th reason - convenience. This encompasses both ease of use (if I know what movie I want to watch, I don't have to search to see where it's streaming), and discoverability (a good torrent site will easily let you see all the movies by a director or actor, and provide recommendations). Or if you're looking for a particular special feature, it's much more convenient to be able to download it than to go looking for a physical media copy and wait for it to be shipped to your door.
pirating is in this case the best solution as I can pick the quality I want, with the audio and subtitle languages I need.
Then the Netflix catalog shrunk to originals, there's now 6 different streaming services I have to juggle to watch the usual content my family likes, and we're constantly using third-party services just to figure out what's available where. I hate having to switch from Netflix to Hulu to finish out a show because the last season is only on Hulu. Or things like Warner and Disney cutting shows because they don't want to pay residuals or whatever dumb accounting BS they feel like pulling.
If you make it more convenient to torrent and shove everything into Plex, why would I pay to get a worse experience.
Disney holding back the second half of the final season of Amphibia. Released in the US but not here for unexplained reasons. For 6 months piracy was the only way to get a conclusion.
Our Flag Means Death, even though it had a large section of its cast from Britain it wasn't available to watch for far too long here.
I could go on, but you get the point. Any distribution rules are a creation of their own making in the first place.
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.
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.
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.
Maybe that's a bad thing. Having one central site rather than many is better for searching and availability of uploads.
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.
Netflix was killing pirating when it had "everything", pirating is seeing a resurgence as the landscape becomes more fractured.
If the supply of torrented content dries up, it seems like many Plex shares will start to become very stale.
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.
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.
Do they also search private indexers?
> 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.
Such a tragedy. Fuck Putin
Anyone have any solid private tracker recommendations for movies and TV shows?
After taking advantage of public trackers like RARBG, I feel like it's my time to give back.
Unless you know someone already on the tracker and they are willing to vouch for you.
If you want a list head over to /r/trackers and use the search function.
also watch entry level trackers for open invites. speed, iptorrents, torrentleech, etc
The irony that I used to run a UUCP node on the original version of Usenet does not escape me :-)
Providers are companies and servers where the data is actually stored, as opposed to peers in torrenting. Since they are for-profit, you need to purchase a subscription to have access to these servers. r/usenet has some nice deals on those[2]. Frugal is usually the most recommended for beginners since it’s pretty cheap and has most files you’ll want.
Indexers are similar to what rarbg was. They make it easy to search for files stored in the providers. They usually require a subscription as well, and some require invites, but are really cheap and easy to get [3]. nzbgeek doesn’t require an invite and is pretty complete. nzbplanet and drunkenslug have more content, but require invites. You can get invites for those on r/UsenetInvites
Finally, you need something to download the files. There are many options available for that, but I find that the best one is sabnzb [4]. It is pretty complete and has a lot of moving parts, so I recommend following the trash-guides article on it to get started[5]
[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/Usenet/wiki/faq/
[2]: https://www.reddit.com/r/usenet/wiki/providerdeals/
[3]: https://www.reddit.com/r/Usenet/wiki/indexers/
[4]: https://sabnzbd.org/
[5]: https://trash-guides.info/Downloaders/SABnzbd/Basic-Setup/
Usenet is a lot of effort.
I have since switched to SABnzbd from NZBget. I saw a comment regarding hard to find things, I am subbed to two indexers and either I am not looking for obscure things or I am letting the other tools I listed do most of the heavy work. Prowlarr is doing most of the heavy lifting doing the searches for me.
I also wonder if Forte' Agent still works? Does Newsguy still exist? /s
edit: found the answer to my question
That's how quality service looks like. Glad I pulled (here legally) all the movies I wanted in my private collection. RIP.
I read that Rarbg was like thepiratebay but safer. I guess that's due to moderation to check which torrents are safe, right?
This people had a website that offered a nice UI to find torrents. Did they had ads to make money? So they offered their services to maintain healthy piracy in exchange of money and also to pay servers. (I am not criticize or judging I just want to understand how it worked)
Would It be possible to share the same website using a torrent file? Like shipping and actualizing the website and sending to users trough torrent so they can search it locally? Or send a sql database and then create a UI for users to search trough it? Or would be complications because torrenting exposes our ip?
However, there was an update to the protocol, BEP44, that did allow you to update the already-in-progress torrent.
Furthermore, there is a protocol called WebTorrent that swaps out some of the other base protocols for WebRTC, allowing a web browser to participate in the torrents. You could just include a link to the library via CDN. The trouble of course is that bittorrent now relies on DHT more and more (you wouldn't want to have to run a tracker, if you did it'd just be a target of legal attacks)... and WebTorrent can't do DHT (of any variety) well. There was a proposal to allow browsers to be able to do native network sockets, but I think that got turned down by Mozilla (maybe they were more concerned with doing VPN ads or something).
But if you had that, then yes, it might be possible to have something like a "swarmsite" that didn't need to be hosted.
Running a website doesn't require that many people.
I've worked at companies with 4 developers and 30+ "other stuff". The company would not be profitable and we would not get paid without them, but the actual product would work just fine if we wanted it to.
The model is that as users become more comfortable on the site, they eventually browse to the more dangerous categories and download programs/games/cracks/etc...
I wrote a blog post about a deep dive I did on one site, and showed that the admins were seeding malware in program downloads.
Suffice to say, when I reported the admins, other admins banned my account on the site and IP blocked me.
I actually ended up taking the blog post down because they started attacking my domain, and even Google blacklisted my domain because I had snippets of the malware code posted (I guess I should have used images instead of code). I was younger and just tinkering with security research anyway.
While we are at it, an honest question: Why should _anyone_ undertake the legal risk, monetary cost and development time burden for maintaining a public tracker?
What would release teams gain from setting up encoding pipelines and upholding their networking infrastructure?
Try a more extreme example: why should anyone undertake the legal risk, monetary cost and logistical hassle of hiding Jews from the SS? It's not some psychopathic business decision; it's because some people stubbornly insist on doing the right thing despite it being unpopular, illegal, and clearly a bad idea.
If someone does manage to turn a profit doing it that's (all else being equal) great, but it's not the point.
I wonder if The Scene is still remotely accurate by modern standards — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xIs_5nfJKu4
So said poor person learned programming and other skills to get a tracker working so that they could give back to others who are in the same boat.
This way the poor kid (who’s family can’t afford lunch, let alone a 10€ /month Disney + subscription) can chat with their rich friends at the lunch table about the latest marvel film the week it releases and god forbid, fit in for once.
Maybe it will come back in the future when things settle down or a new backer comes in.
RARBG magnet link archive:
https://torrentfreak.com/rarbg-over-267000-movie-tv-show-mag...
https://github.com/2004content/rarbg
( released 5 hours ago )
[0] https://torrentfreak.com/bulgaria-approves-draft-law-that-tu...
Iconic Torrent Site RARBG Shuts Down, All Content Releases Stop
https://torrentfreak.com/iconic-torrent-site-rarbg-shuts-dow...
RARBG, one of the world's largest torrent sites, has said "farewell" to millions of users. The site, which was a prominent and stable source of new movie and TV show releases, cited a variety of reasons behind its decision to cease operations. The surprise shutdown marks the end of an era.
Founded in 2008, RARBG evolved to become a key player in the torrent ecosystem.
The site didn’t only attract millions of monthly visitors from all over the globe, it was also a major release hub, bridging the gap between the Scene and the broader pirate public.
... etc.Guess I'll have to subscribe to a USENET after all.
RARBG was amazing because it had everything, but still curated the releases for minimum standards of quality. Is there an alternative out there?
Not as convenient but you do get decent download speeds and if parts are broken you can normally repair with PAR2 which itself is alien tech.
Provider backbone/list: https://svgshare.com/i/oti.svg
Seriously, a huge part of the internet is down because the team was taken out by Covid (both death and complications), and no one even mentions this? All the evidence points to the covid complication rate compounding with each infection. Rarbg is only the start of where we can all expect to be in 5-10 years without more serious long-term mitigations (universal indoor air filtration).
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/28/opinion/last-pandemic.htm...
https://github.com/iordic/qbittorrent-search-plugins/blob/ma...
seems like rutracker.org (ex torrents.ru) is gonna outlive everybody
Deeply sad about this. Nothing lasts forever.
[1] https://torrentfreak.com/rarbg-over-267000-movie-tv-show-mag...
Also, if I was the MPA, I would almost look into attrition tactics now, if that were legal. Create dozens and dozens and dozens of junk piracy websites with borked videos. Maybe the first half the movie in 720p, then the audio switches to Spanish and 240p black and white with flickering. Flood the market on every pirate website with the world's worst remuxes. Overwhelm them with junk so that nobody knows what tracker to trust for anything. Maybe even (with permission from rights holders) run some pirate websites with high-quality rips, then burn them to the ground after a year or two just to demoralize.
They will be missed!
I'm sad to see them go but I support their desire to spend time and energy/resources on something else after all they've done
Long COVID is having a real impact on technical people.
There's a reason Google buys COVID rapid testing kits in bulk for any of their onsite events. One of my friends working behind the scenes was gifted a grocery bag full of leftover tests.
Governments around the world have largely abandoned us to a disabling virus.
I loved VXT stuff on rarbg, and would love to find them again.
Also movie makers don't care to push the issue with law enforcement anymore. They (unfortunately for law abiding folks) just inflate the price to make up for lost, just like stores do to combat shoplifting.
Not that I use bittorrent very much personally, I gave that up many years ago.
RIP, I suppose.
It was a good site.
We would like to inform you that we have decided to shut down our site. The past 2 years have been very difficult for us - some of the people in our team died due to covid complications, others still suffer the side effects of it - not being able to work at all. Some are also fighting the war in Europe - ON BOTH SIDES. Also, the power price increase in data centers in Europe hit us pretty hard. Inflation makes our daily expenses impossible to bare. Therefore we can no longer run this site without massive expenses that we can no longer cover out of pocket. After an unanimous vote we've decided that we can no longer do it.
We are sorry :(
Bye
Edit: This isn't me BTW. I just copy-pasted the text from the site.
Archived link: https://web.archive.org/web/20230531105653/https://rarbg.to/...
Your efforts did not go unnoticed and you will be greatly missed.
I hope the circumstances of your lives improve and that you can find normality in these difficult times.
How much would it have helped to have 1% of users chip in 10 USD/year? (1% is probably optimistic, but still...)?
Is there a successful tracker founded after 2010? With all these old sites and their experienced crew quitting, things are not looking good for the long term of warez. The only one that comes to mind is the .si reboot of nyaa.se.
The honeypot isn't the torrent site. You can use any site in the world or no site at all and still get busted. It's a peer to peer network, and the people busting you are seeding the torrents themselves. They catch you when you peer with them.
Use a VPN, and read more.
Well, i recently got myself a videoprojector with an android tv included, and since i happen to have an amazon prime account, i installed the app, which is quite good.
And yes, it's true, since i've done that, my torrentz usage has dramatically dropped..
So yeah, I went back to torrents after that. All of my problems disappeared when I just had an MP4 file I could play anywhere. I'm still paying my subscription but they can take my 1080p video from my cold dead hands.
legal streaming is horrible at the moment.
To be able to battle at least some of the reasons to pirate media they need to fix a couple of things (and this is just my shortlist, there's 1000+ more reasons) - allow indexing and playback outside of the official app so 1 app could be used for multiple platform subscriptions - allow access to content no matter where the viewer is on the world. Not only the video, but audio and subtitle languages as well - allow subscriptions for specific content, not a 'one subscription fits all'. I dont want to watch nor pay for yet another Walking Dead something, but I do want to watch See - allow to buy content, and provide that DRM free in high quality (not the streaming quality)
