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As crackdown on torrent sites continues around the world, people who are pirating TV shows and movies are having to get a little more creative. Cloud storage services such as Google Drive, Dropbox, and Kim Dotcom's Mega are some of the popular ones that are being used to distribute copyrighted content, according to DMCA takedown requests reviewed by Gadgets 360.
These Google Drive links, as well as links to those of other cloud storage services, are then shared by people on select subreddits, forums, and Facebook groups. Over the past two weeks, Gadgets 360 located over a dozen Facebook groups where people openly share such files and request more movies and TV shows.
[...] Jon, who didn't share his last name, said people are moving to Google Drive and other services because authorities worldwide continue to crackdown on torrent websites and other file sharing services. In the last two years, KickassTorrents, ExtraTorrent, Shaanig, Yify Torrents and other websites, which together heydays used to garner over 500 million unique visitors (according to web analytics firm SimilarWeb), have all shut down.
Moreover, Internet service providers are increasingly making it difficult to access the few torrent websites that are still in operation, Jon said. "You've got to be part of a private tracker, public torrenting is over," he told Gadgets 360. Private torrent tracking websites usually require users to be invited — which in itself is a difficult process.
There are several publicly accessible torrent websites that continue to exist, but "torrenting" is getting more difficult by day, multiple people told Gadgets 360. Public sites are mired with pop-up windows filled with ads trying to sell them malware, which makes it a poor experience.
Torrents are dying as savvy pirates come to their senses and abandon antiquated torrent tech, uploading their wares to cloud hosting sites like Google Drive instead.
(Score: 1) by ants_in_pants on Monday September 11 2017, @08:42PM (1 child)
There's nothing wrong with being a leech, and it's not a requirement at all for seeding. Having a seedbox is just a luxury, and people with huge seedboxes are what keep lots of old seldom-downloaded torrents alive. I also use my VPS for other things too.
That makes a lot of assumptions. Remember when you'd get the wrong music off napster?
But earlier you were talking about how the ability to remove a file from a download, such as something implanted by the uploader to get their id out there, is such a big net positive. If it's a different package, and I can't know it's still the same content because all I have is the hashes, what assurance do I have that it's really what I'm looking for?
you don't need a special(or general) VPS service to download torrents either. You do, however, need a server to run an ED2k node, unless you decide to specifically run it only with kademlia... in which case the architectural differences from bittorrent are negligible.
you do know that's exactly how bittorrent works, right?
au contraire. You can find some really fringe stuff on private trackers, although it's usually either useful or entertaining.
I have not, actually.
-Love, ants_in_pants
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Tuesday September 12 2017, @04:01PM
and can just share stuff right off their HD
you do know that's exactly how bittorrent works, right?
No, it doesn't at all. Do you even use BitTorrent? With BT, if you want to share something, you have to leave it in its unaltered state, in a specific location where it can be shared. If you want to share something new, you have to go to the trouble of creating a new tracker for it and uploading your .torrent file somewhere. If you alter something, it won't be shared automatically. With ED2K, you just point it at directories you want to share, and you're done.
au contraire. You can find some really fringe stuff on private trackers
Ok, then how do you get access to those, since they're, as you said, private? You have to hang out on some communities for a while, be social, etc. Major PITA. With ED2K, you just load up the program and do a search, and it's all there. You don't have to be a card-carrying member of some community to get access.
you don't need a special(or general) VPS service to download torrents either
But you do to share them for very long, unless you don't mind leaving terabytes of stuff on your HD in an unaltered state. I don't like the way torrented stuff has their files named, and I always rename stuff according to my own file-naming standard (which is a whole lot cleaner and easier to read), so it's impossible for me to seed.
If it's a different package, and I can't know it's still the same content because all I have is the hashes, what assurance do I have that it's really what I'm looking for?
WTF? Do you not know how cryptographic hashing works? If it's the same size file, has the same SHA1 (or whatever) hash, and has a somewhat similar filename, then it's almost certainly what you're looking for, unless someone is trying to pollute the system to "combat piracy" (which is also a problem with BT). The odds for finding a SHA1 collision are literally astronomical.
That makes a lot of assumptions. Remember when you'd get the wrong music off napster?
Again, I have no idea what you're talking about. If the file has the same size and hash, it's the same file. File names are not important for positively identifying them once you have the size and hash.