• Midnight Wolf@lemmy.worldEnglish
    170·
    2 months ago

    …which is why today’s sponsor is NordVPN!

    (don’t actually use NV there are much better options, this was for comedic effect)

    • ameancow@lemmy.worldEnglish
      9·
      2 months ago

      VPN’s are the new essential subscription service for online content. Back in the olden times, we had to pay for minutes of using internet and long distance phone calls, today we have to pay for privacy and access to content we’re “not allowed” to see. And what you’re allowed to see or not is a strange, politically motivated list that is always changing.

  • ristoril_zip@lemmy.zipEnglish
    27·
    2 months ago

    Sounds like a bunch of us should put up seeds with titles like “This (1947) It’s A Wonderful Life (Public Domain) is better than (2025) Fantastic Four”

  • Psythik@lemmy.world
    211·
    2 months ago

    Speaking of which, I gave up on torrents a couple of years ago and switched to direct downloads. Not only is it much faster due to not having to rely on seeds, turns out that ISPs don’t actually care if you download pirated content. Distributing it is where they get you.

    • RunawayFixer@lemmy.world
      18·
      2 months ago

      This is going to depend on the country that you’re in. Germany for example is pretty notorious for also going after the small fries.

        • Schadrach@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
          1·
          2 months ago

          What’s the best way to do that, presuming I already have access to a Usenet server but that’s really all I know?

          I mean I’ve used Usenet before, but that was back in the late 90s using Netscape Communicator and I was mostly (but not exclusively) reading text groups. Most of my piracy back then involved trolling IRC channels to either find DCC bots or get access to FTPs. And even then was limited because, well, dialup.

          • MyNameIsIgglePiggle@sh.itjust.works
            2·
            2 months ago

            It’s a bit complex to setup to be fair, you probably want to go to the site that cannot be named here and look for a Usenet guide.

            The long and short of it is you probably still are going to need to sign up and pay for a Usenet server that focusses on files. I use newshosting as my primary server and usenet.bucket as my backup (you need to because DMCA)

            You also need a tracker. I use nzbgeek. This is to search for files because they are all broken down fragments across the messageboards

            Finally you need nzbget or some such to download the files

            I then use sonarr and radarr to manage my downloads and Plex to watch the shows.

            The last bit is just a nice to have.

            I know it sounds like a lot, and it is a bit to get started, but it’s solid and just works once it’s going.

  • grooveygroovester@lemmy.world
    18·
    2 months ago

    They’re just trying not to lose their internet service provider probably. ISP’s are even starting to threaten their residential and commercial customers alike because they can’t afford the lawsuits so network tech’s are starting to turn in individuals about compliance and such.

    • u/lukmly013 💾 (lemmy.sdf.org)@lemmy.sdf.orgOPEnglish
      6·
      2 months ago

      Yeah, this is just a student-run association running it, providing connection from university’s upstream ISP which apparently is easy to upset.
      I posted this because I actually find this nice, as it doesn’t fully block torrents, but just specific ones, and they also make that clear. They could just block torrents and stay safe.

      Func fact: Some dorm rooms apparently actually have 2.5Gbit. I’ve seen the speed test. Of course, you’ll need a compatible network card. Most have “only” a gigabit.

    • Phoenixz@lemmy.ca
      4·
      2 months ago

      Not a new thing either z this has happened for decades now

      Use a VPN, people! The “we’re watching you” is not a joke, LOADS of parties are watching your every action, actually

  • chunes@lemmy.world
    213·
    2 months ago

    Why would anyone, anywhere block torrenting? There is nothing illegal about it.

    • titanicx@lemmy.zip
      16·
      2 months ago

      Coming from an IT perspective, I can tell you 100% that torrenting on a network can cause a bottleneck with the amount of bandwidth that it often can take especially if it’s not set up properly. Several years ago I remember working in a corporate network and we had our internet slow down to a near crawl because one person decided they wanted to torrent a movie during one of our busiest seasons. Let’s just say we’re able to track them down and they got fired on the spot.

        • JackbyDev@programming.devEnglish
          6·
          2 months ago

          Knowingly pirating a movie on a company network and it causing a lot of disturbance for everyone else is pretty bad. Also could’ve been a new hire in probation period or something.

          • MeThisGuy@feddit.nl
            43·
            2 months ago

            sounds like bad network admin. no single device should ever be able to make 100s or thousands of simultaneous connections, and the bandwidth should be reasonably throttled to prevent this.

            • Trainguyrom@reddthat.comEnglish
              2·
              2 months ago

              Ideally they wouldn’t be able to bring the network to it’s knees like that, but sometimes one user behaving how they aren’t supposed to can highlight areas of improvement in the network configuration.

              As JackbyDev@programming.dev said, they knowingly did something illegal that isn’t work related on company property and caused an effective outage in the process, which on its own can be a fireable offense, but if performed by an employee who was already on thin ice, it’s an easy out for their manager to get rid of them of they didn’t have enough reason to let them go beforehand

        • titanicx@lemmy.zip
          2·
          2 months ago

          Potentially opening up a issue with the internet service provider and other fines for the company you work for knowingly by doing something idiotic like downloading seems like a bad move.

      • chunes@lemmy.world
        5·
        2 months ago

        That’s interesting, I always figured the router/OS or whatever did a decent job balancing network resources regardless of the type of application.

        • SapientLasagna@lemmy.ca
          124·
          2 months ago

          The feature is called QoS, and is available on even the cheapest router. Torrenting can cause network issues, at least on crappy infrastructure, not because of bandwidth usage, but because it opens a lot of connections and can overload a router if it doesn’t have enough RAM.

          Tracking down and firing someone to cover your corporate iT incompetence is certainly a choice.

          • IngeniousRocks (They/She) @lemmy.dbzer0.com
            12·
            2 months ago

            Pretty sure they were fired for engaging in illegal activities on their work hardware, not for torrenting on a network that couldn’t handle it.

            If it were a Linux ISO I’m sure it would have been a slap on the wrist and a “hey don’t do that again our network can’t handle it” but it was a film, Something the company can (theoretically) get in trouble for

            • titanicx@lemmy.zip
              1·
              2 months ago

              Yeah we did have instruction place to be able to do legal torrents. Our programmers and IT department often downloaded ISO images firmware etc that were only available by a torrent.

          • titanicx@lemmy.zip
            1·
            2 months ago

            Well you also have to remember this was about 10 years ago Network infrastructure isn’t quite what it is today. Not only that but when somebody does something illegal on a corporate network that is something that legal deals with and is not a choice that is made lightly.

    • BilSabab@lemmy.world
      7·
      2 months ago

      because IP holders have enough pull to make their bitching and moaning heard instead of fixing inherent issues to force people into piracy.

    • JackbyDev@programming.devEnglish
      4·
      2 months ago

      Do you want real answers or are you just expressing frustration? Because if you’re just expressing frustration then the answers will just frustrate you more lol.

    • retro@infosec.pub
      23·
      2 months ago

      Humble Bundle distributes their DRM-free games and other content via BitTorrent.

      • some_kind_of_guy@lemmy.world
        4·
        2 months ago

        Bram Cohen. He also created a crypto protocol called Chia, which is interesting. The idea was to create a green (ish) crypto that would leverage existing resources, in this case old storage drives. So it uses “proof of space” rather than “proof of work”. The “plotter” (as opposed to computationally intensive GPU/CPU “mining”) fills up your storage space with “plots”, randomly generated data files ~100gb each. To earn crypto, it’s basically a lottery against your plots. The network gives you a random hash, and if it matches one of your plot files, you get rewarded with a token. Very low power, keeps old storage out of landfill a while longer, and once those plots are initially made, they’re good to go forever - they can “win” more than once, so the more energy-intensive process of plotting (though it’s still nowhere near the consumption of proof-of-work, which is a disaster) has a natural upper limit of your total storage space.

        The difficult bit is creating the plots, it takes hours to days to create one, depending on your write speed. I put my fastest storage on that, a specialised PCIe nvme SSD. I think I was able to bang out a plot every couple hours eventually, then I would offload it to a somewhat monstrous storage server with the maximum number of drives the motherboard would support. Others in the community created massive RAM drives. Very expensive, but super duper fast.

        I plotted for a while, but cashed out when it stopped making sense economically. Eventually, the price per terabyte of storage + electricity eclipsed any significant gains. Did a lot of scavenging, haunting thrift shops, and trading up for higher storage capacity on eBay. Actually made a few grand of pure profit before the price settled down, and difficulty increased. That was the most fun I’ve ever had with crypto. Besides all the storage, cables and hubs, I built my “farm” solely from stuff I already had laying around. I even made a profit selling all the drives back, as this project singlehandedly pulled almost all the slack out of the used storage market. It kept a lot of equipment out of the landfill for much longer than usual, which is pretty neat.

        • explodicle@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          1·
          2 months ago

          What happens if the price of Chia goes up enough to exhaust the supply of unused old hard drives? Bitcoin used to only consume spare CPU cycles too.

          It’s shifting costs from energy to hardware - greenwashing the blockchain/AI/whatever when the real solution is time-tested pigouvian taxes on the external cost of pollution.

          • some_kind_of_guy@lemmy.world
            2·
            2 months ago

            That happened early on in the cycle, and it happened only once. Partly because those looking to sell did so once the coin became tradable, then the price took a nosedive and started to stabilize. Once the pressure was released, and those looking for profits exited, it didn’t have the same cycles of mania as Bitcoin and the others. Further down the line, applications were built on top of the chia blockchain. It’s pretty boring as cryptos go, which is a good thing.

    • ILikeBoobies@lemmy.ca
      1·
      2 months ago

      League of Legends used to, don’t know if they still do. There was a setting in the patcher to turn p2p off.

  • comador @lemmy.worldEnglish
    192·
    2 months ago

    Policing this crap isn’t trivial and not worth the effort.

    We just gave up and block 100% of all P2P traffic on both our university wireless and student wired networks.

    • Godort@lemmy.ca
      8·
      2 months ago

      In our corporate network, we just detect for common BT applications on the endpoint and alert on that instead.

        • fxdave@lemmy.ml
          1·
          2 months ago

          Sorry I still don’t understand. Did you just block typical ports?

          • comador @lemmy.worldEnglish
            2·
            2 months ago

            No, there’s no direct port blocking involved because P2P can work on all ports.

            As such, the F5 BigIP identifies the packets themselves with the p2p protocol in them and blocks the packets themselves that are identified as P2P.

            This way, the only torrent traffic that may get through is the kind running inside a VPN. Even then though, we can identify encrypted torrents by other means (Deep Flow Inspection, trace the VPN traffic or directly monitor the student machines that are owned by the university).

    • bjorney@lemmy.ca
      4·
      2 months ago

      My university just blacklisted the questionable trackers’ DNS, not the actual data traffic

      So basically I would tether to my cell phone, wait for it to fetch a list of peers from the tracker, and then switch back to the uni wifi to complete the download

      • bobs_monkey@lemmy.zip
        12·
        2 months ago

        Likely is. When a dorm resident does the torrenting, the university would be receiving those naughty letters.

        • Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.world
          2·
          2 months ago

          Oh, those naughty letters! There’s a reason Seaseme Street is never brought to you by the letter J or Q. Such naughty letters.

        • balsoft@lemmy.ml
          1·
          2 months ago

          Sorry, I’ve never lived in a country which bootlicked the copyright owners so much. I’ve read up on it and wow it sounds kinda insane, someone spies on your traffic and sends you legal threats for pirating stuff.

          • bobs_monkey@lemmy.zip
            1·
            2 months ago

            Eh yes and no. Usually a representative of the rightsholder will join the swarm of a torrent, note all the IP addresses, and send their love letters to every ISP on that list. From there, the ISPs will forward the letters and may take action depending on jurisdiction and local law, which usually amounts to soft threats or suspending your account after multiple interactions. It isn’t that the ISPs are spying on your traffic (at least in this instance), they just don’t want to get caught up in “enabling piracy” or whatever nonsense. Hence why VPNs are a thing.

            • balsoft@lemmy.ml
              1·
              2 months ago

              I’m not saying it’s the ISPs spying on you, it’s the copyright owners; and the ISPs bend over to them (because the legal system forces them to).

    • some_kind_of_guy@lemmy.world
      3·
      2 months ago

      Issue is getting into the tracker, yeah? Back in the day it was going into random irc channels to beg for an invite, along with like 100 other randoms doing the same. I would imagine not much has changed in that regard, it just happens on Discord or Telegram?

      • daq@lemmy.sdf.org
        3·
        2 months ago

        I got into all the private trackers I’m on (4) during their open signup periods. Never had to beg for an invite. Just check from time to time.

  • chicken@lemmy.dbzer0.com
    15·
    2 months ago

    At least it’s allowed, when I was in college they didn’t allow any torrent traffic at all. They had also banned pings specifically, and threatened to shut off my internet if I didn’t stop trying to send pings, which apparently my torrent client was doing automatically.