this post was submitted on 25 Jun 2023
162 points (96.0% liked)
Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ
54577 readers
549 users here now
⚓ Dedicated to the discussion of digital piracy, including ethical problems and legal advancements.
Rules • Full Version
1. Posts must be related to the discussion of digital piracy
2. Don't request invites, trade, sell, or self-promote
3. Don't request or link to specific pirated titles, including DMs
4. Don't submit low-quality posts, be entitled, or harass others
Loot, Pillage, & Plunder
📜 c/Piracy Wiki (Community Edition):
💰 Please help cover server costs.
 |
 |
|---|---|
| Ko-fi | Liberapay |
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I just paid $70 for a 3-year PIA subscription to mask my torrent usage from my ISP. So, an average of a little over $2 per month. Well-seeded movies only take about 10 minutes to download, more obscure stuff admittedly takes longer. Also, torrent streaming exists, so you can start watching even faster if that's your thing.
Admittedly, I'm not familiar with Usenet or how it works. I'm just saying that torrents are cheap, fast, and easy. Do you have a crash course on how to use Usenet? I'm curious.
You can find tutorials out there but the jist is.
Once you get that far, then you can move on to the best part, How easy it is to plug in sonarr and radarr. then everything just auto-downloads for you and you dont have to do anything.
To me, if you are using a VPN to torrent, great, I have one too for obscure stuff. But most people are far better off using Usenet. It is way safer and faster, and is easier to automate.
So who's hosting all of this movies? Who are you actually downloading from?
My point was every single thing i download maxes out, the 57MB wasnt the point. Not every torrent will max out. Only the well seeded torrents, and on public trackers it will not max out. I've tried. Private torrents sure, but unless you have a seedbox, you're ratios are going to be all out of whack. I do both Usenet and torrents, I'm well aware of all the advantages of torrents, and im well aware it can be automated. Usenet is just easier. No symlinking to maintain ratios.
And of course its more secure. 1st off, no VPN disconnects. Second off, point me to one single case where someone has been prosecuted for downloading off Usenet. Most of us here are probably from r/piracy, and see every day the dozens of "I got the letter" posts from torrenting. I've never seen a single letter from usenet.
Torrents are really great for obscure stuff that is really hard to get though. That's pretty much all I use it for.
I'm a member of one private tracker; it's private enough that I don't need a VPN while downloading/seeding and I have had no issue maintaining ratios.
For public trackers, no ratios required. For VPN disconnects, you just need a torrent client that properly isolates to a single network connection, which effectively operates as a kill switch. There are also VPN clients with kill switches, but I tend to not use those because doing it in the torrent client is easier and more reliable.
Re: prosecution, I'm pretty sure nobody has been prosecuted for simple downloading in a decade. The feds only go after major torrent tracker owners, the ones doing the distributing. The dreaded letters are just that: letters. They're a scare tactic from your ISP, they don't actually prosecute or even kick you off your plan; they just make you watch a little video on how piracy bad.
Again, Usenet is only "secure" if you can fully trust the owner of the server you're connecting to. It would be trivial for a government agency to set up a honeypot or take over an existing server and turn it into one. The reason they don't seem to care is probably because fewer people are on Usenet; they're going for the bigger fish.
Sure, most of this is true, but only for some people. The letters still come, and people absolutely do pay damages for torrenting, especially in Germany. Meanwhile none of this is true for Usenet, there simply is no misconfiguration you can make that will result in a letter. Sure it could but at this point it's never happened. With torrenting it can and does happen all the time. No letters, no scare tactics, no ratios to maintain (I get that you dont have to but most struggle). No secret club you have to get into. No variable speeds.
I totally agree that torrenting is awesome and it used to be the way i did everything as well. But after getting on usenet I was completely shocked and I'm never going back.
Fair enough, maybe I'll check it out. That's the kind of explanation I was looking for, by the way, thanks.
And the reason they don't care is because it's so much harder to get people on it. Hence, it's safer.