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Google has been found to "recommend" torrent and unauthorized streaming sites in response to search queries:
Google is an excellent search engine. The company does its best to present users with relevant information wherever it can. With a reel of popular torrent sites, for example, when users search for it. Or a handy overview of streaming sites such as Netflix, Hulu, Putlocker and Movie4k.to. Whether Hollywood will appreciate this service doubtful though.
[...] When you type in "best torrent sites" or just "torrent sites," Google.com provides a fancy reel of several high traffic indexers.
The search engine displays the names of sites such as RARBG, The Pirate Bay and 1337x as well as their logo. When you click on this link, Google brings up all results for the associated term.
While it's a thought provoking idea to think that Google employees are manually curating the list, the entire process is likely automated. Still, many casual torrent users might find it quite handy. Whether rightsholders will be equally excited is another question though.
The automated nature of this type of search result display also creates another problem. While many people know that most torrent sites offer pirated content, this is quite different with streaming portals.
This leads to a confusing situation where Google lists both legal and unauthorized streaming platforms when users search for "streaming sites."
The screenshot below shows the pirate streaming site Putlocker next to Hulu and Crackle. The same lineup also rotates various other pirate sites such as Alluc and Movie4k.to.
This has SHOCKED Express, which has loudly warned about the UK "Kodi" menace in recent months.
(Score: 2) by turgid on Wednesday July 12 2017, @12:18PM (11 children)
I always used to get my Slackware ISOs using bittorrent but a few years ago something strange happened. My client would never seed. I could download but it would never upload. I never figured out why. Never had the time. There days I just use wget to download from one of the official mirrors. Oh well... I was thinking, a lot of ISPs throttle or block bittorrent since it is so frequently used for piracy (allegedly) and we can't have empowered Little People distributing data from their own systems even legally because next thing you know Marxist Revolution etc etc. What's the solution?
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 2) by Geezer on Wednesday July 12 2017, @12:30PM (5 children)
Buy Patrick beer and he'll mail you free Slackware ISO cd's for life.
(Score: 2) by turgid on Wednesday July 12 2017, @01:10PM (4 children)
I have a subscription. I get DVDs in the post :-)
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 2) by Osamabobama on Wednesday July 12 2017, @07:59PM (3 children)
Subscription DVDs by post... There used to be a company called Netflix that did that; are they still in business? If so, do they have Slackware in their catalog?
Appended to the end of comments you post. Max: 120 chars.
(Score: 2) by turgid on Wednesday July 12 2017, @08:33PM (2 children)
I usually order stickers and T-shirts too. Nothing quite as cool as an official Slackware T-shirt.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 2) by Geezer on Thursday July 13 2017, @01:48PM (1 child)
I got the big "Bob" face on mine. :)
(Score: 2) by turgid on Thursday July 13 2017, @07:40PM
My one has Tux smoking the pipe.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Wednesday July 12 2017, @02:14PM
I think your guess is right. I can't run patches for my new Acer tablet or do a "repair" on this computer's Microsoft Office when Office stops running, even when the device is streaming music. Pretty sure Comcast is blocking a port Microsoft and Acer use. The only way to repair Office is to reinstall Windows. Not sure how to update the damned tablet! I've contacted Acer, but haven't heard back.
mcgrewbooks.com mcgrew.info nooze.org
(Score: 2) by Magic Oddball on Wednesday July 12 2017, @04:21PM
In my household, the solution so far has been to find & use ISPs that still use the 'dumb pipe' approach. (They still exist, it just takes some persistent Web searches & checking physical local Yellow Pages/phonebooks to track them down.) There's enough congestion on the Internet these days that aside from a small percentage of downloads & 3-4+ simultaneous HD streams, there typically isn't a huge difference between my cheapo 6mbps DSL, my brother's Comcast & our father's 40mbps+ FTTN. Even if it did make a difference speed-wise, I'd much rather work around the limitation than give money to an ISP that interferes with my connection or otherwise treats me poorly — companies like that should put on a hat and walk into the Pacific Ocean until it floats.
(Score: 2) by deimtee on Wednesday July 12 2017, @04:36PM (1 child)
If your ISP is blocking, Just go into your torrent client prefs and set a non-standard port. That usually fixes it.
Having said that, it may just be that you are getting swamped by seeders with massive upload pipes. Whenever I download a new distro, always via torrent, I hardly ever upload anything. There are usually lots of seeders with fast university/corporate connections, and not many leeches. You should still use bittorrent so that you save your favorite distro's bandwidth.
If you cough while drinking cheap red wine it really cleans out your sinuses.
(Score: 2) by turgid on Wednesday July 12 2017, @07:36PM
Interesting. I always used to use the command line version of BitTornado that came on the Slackware disks. However, I just found a newer one called Transmission [transmissionbt.com] which I've just compiled and I'm trying it out now (with the Gtk+ GUI). There are currently about 50 peers and almost all of them are purely seeding so it's no wonder I'm not uploading anything.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 12 2017, @07:14PM
Nice things about Bittorrent:
It does the checksums automatically.
If one segment fails, it will tell you which one so that you can download just that part again.
With wget, you have to do the checksum yourself.
...and, if there is an error, you have to start over again from zero.
So, yet another instance of a provider potentially screwing you on bandwidth.
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