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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 11 2017, @04:02AM (8 children)
About 15 years ago, people would upload stuff to freedrive, xoom and geoshitties, possibly in stripes across them, possibly disguised to look like legitimate content.
Google seems to be immune to copyright enforcement, viz. Youtube, so it is a good choice to host stuff there.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Monday September 11 2017, @04:25AM (4 children)
As long as you obey DMCA requests and make a half-assed attempt not to be a piracy haven, your service can be a piracy haven.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 4, Informative) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday September 11 2017, @04:34AM (3 children)
You don't even have to halfway make an attempt. You're in fact legally in a better position if you don't curate user content at all. It is important to refrain from actually promoting copyright infringement though.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 3, Touché) by lx on Monday September 11 2017, @06:08AM (2 children)
Tell that to a certain fat German with a silly name and a big mouth.
(Score: 4, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 11 2017, @06:18AM (1 child)
Come on now, there is no need for insults. Let's leave Angela Merkel out of this, okay?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 12 2017, @11:11PM
It's sad when we have to look to Germany for leadership to get AWAY from the Nazis :)
(Score: 4, Insightful) by qzm on Monday September 11 2017, @05:59AM (2 children)
Not to mention the logic of:
'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.'
Combined with:
'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'
So, somehow these 1337 pirates think Farcebook and Reddit are sneaky places to hide links to content?
Yes, so very smart, I'm sure those will never be found.. so very cunning.
(Score: 2) by lx on Monday September 11 2017, @06:11AM
If nobody can find your files you're not really sharing them.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by TheRaven on Monday September 11 2017, @07:30AM
sudo mod me up
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday September 11 2017, @04:26AM (4 children)
You know what is a good substitute for torrent sites? Torrent sites. Google Drive and the like are a good substitute for entirely different transfer methods like rapidshare and megaupload.
On a related note, we'll have a Deimos returning as honcho of Demonoid story running in about four hours.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Monday September 11 2017, @05:19AM
You reckon Jon (who didn't share it this time), will share his last name on Demonoid?
(grin)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 11 2017, @06:14AM
Let's hope he'll bring back magnet links.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Monday September 11 2017, @11:54AM (1 child)
Oh, I donno, sounds a lot like USENET to me. That was pretty interesting from the late 80s up to somewhat recently. I was an active paying EasyNews downloading user, until just a year or two ago.
Hollywood seems to have found the ideal way to kill torrent sites, anyway. Kinda like the music industry. I don't pirate music anymore because nothing good is being produced, nothing "top40" or popular is worth listening to. Likewise a movie about emoji sounds so bad that I'm not even willing to watch it, thus no need to obtain it, thus no interest in torrenting it. I pulled up a list of 2017 hollywood releases and there's apparently nothing that isn't a formula movie or remake number 666 of something that frankly was tired and weak when I saw it first time around in the 70s.
You might lure boomers into a torrent site to obtain media format #99 of some Beatles album from the 60s, they bought it on vinyl, 8trak, cassette, dcc, dat, minidisc, cd, and now they just want a F-ing mp3 of it.
There's more to "illegal bits" than crappy pozzed video and audio, such as crappy poorly written software. I miss late 80s warez BBSes and late 90s FTP sites. The modern way to trade warez is to rebrand anything older than six months as "legacy abandonware" and throw up a website with DL links and pretty much dare anyone to submit a copyright takedown notice, and insanely enough some of those sites stay up for years. That's what lack of centralization does to copyright enforcement.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Grishnakh on Monday September 11 2017, @03:12PM
Hollywood seems to have found the ideal way to kill torrent sites, anyway. Kinda like the music industry. I don't pirate music anymore because nothing good is being produced, nothing "top40" or popular is worth listening to.
There's a problem with this logic. Sure, all music made in this decade is trash, but you're ignoring all the music that was made in decades prior. I'm still learning about great music that was produced back in the 70s, thanks to YouTube. Same goes with movies: sure all today's movies are comic book stuff, or a really disappointing Alien franchise installment, but there's an enormous amount of movies out there from decades past. Even if you limited yourself to movies and TV made before 1995, you could build quite a library of excellent movies and shows that would take you a very long time to finish watching (and that's ignoring all the trash, which of course is 95% of everything made).
You might lure boomers into a torrent site to obtain media format #99 of some Beatles album from the 60s
You can also lure younger people in to obtain that Beatles album, people who never bought it before because it came out before they were born. You can also lure fans in to download bootlegs and such. There's got to be an enormous number of soundboard recordings of concerts that fans would love to get their hands on.
The modern way to trade warez is to rebrand anything older than six months as "legacy abandonware" and throw up a website with DL links
6 months obviously isn't abandonware, but stuff older than 10-15 years generally is. What we really need is copyright reform, so all these old copyrighted works can be preserved; if it weren't for the "pirates", a lot of old 80s DOS software would be gone now, just like how we're missing some of Shakespeare's plays [wikibooks.org] plus tons of stuff from the ancient Greek and Roman eras, and so much stuff that was lost when the library at Alexandria burned. Copyright really shouldn't last longer than 20 years, and maybe even less for software.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 11 2017, @05:03AM (1 child)
I think that should read "...together, in their respective heydays, used to..." -- but even so, isn't that a bullshit statistic?
Let's say there are 100 million people using kat, right? Then you shut that down, they go to torrentz.eu; eventually you shut that down too, and they go somewhere else. Now kat had 100 million users in its heyday, torrentz.eu had 100 million in its heyday, but it's not sensible to add those and say there's 200 million users -- there's 100 million users being chased from one site to the next. (Apologies if I have misremembered the order of those shutdowns, it was over a year ago...)
---
Oh, by the way: I still use torrents, I don't find torrenting "more difficult by day", I never see pop-up windows trying to sell me malware (good grief, what sort of morons is "Gadgets 360" interviewing, and where did they find them? Is torrenting really more mainstream than ad-blockers?), and even if I did, most of my torrenting (by volume) is current TV shows; for these, everything's scripted: flexget reads rss feeds and tosses the shows I'm watching into transmission automatically, a hacked-up version of torrentexpander.sh [github.com] unpacks, renames, and organizes them, and rsync brings them over to my main drive. I only actually visit torrent sites (both public and private) when I'm looking for movies, old tv shows, music, or (most often) ebooks. If being a "savvy pirate" and "coming to my senses" means ditching an automatic system that works better than a DVR, then count me among the senseless old fogeys clinging to their antiquated torrent tech.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 11 2017, @06:13AM
#bookz on undernet is better in my experience for bookz than thepiratebay.
(Score: 5, Informative) by Runaway1956 on Monday September 11 2017, @05:30AM (6 children)
Gdrive is cool and all, but I only keep a few things on it. Google tracks EVERYTHING, in case anyone has forgotten. I really don't want to feed Google a lot of free data about me. I make them WORK to mine my data.
I don't think Gdrive is going to replace a lot of torrenting. The typical use I see for torrenting is, you have an idea what you want, so you do a torrent search. You're offered dozens/hundreds of "matches", and you select a known release group, maybe staying within a group of one or six "trusted" torrent trackers. Having made a selection, you double click, it starts downloading, and your client exchanges trackers with however many other clients are downloading. You list of trackers may grow from two or three, to a dozen or more.
Using Gdrive, you don't get all of that. You're merely offered a link by someone - hopefully someone you "trust" - or you stumble across the link on someone's Facefook page. Oh - wait - Facefook? They are mining you for data, remember? OF COURSE Facefook is going to look at whatever it is you're downloading. Uh-oh - you might as well just call the FBI/MAFIAA to snitch on yourself. Fek that!!
Now, I have been leery of torrenting for quite some time. Few years ago, my ISP got a notification that we had downloaded a copyrighted book (that stupid wizard kid, Potter) AND that we were sharing that book via torrent. ISP wanted assurances that we had deleted the book, and that we wouldn't be torrenting anymore. Utter bullshit, we lied to them.
Since then, we've gone to using Torrent via VPN. The person in this house who downloads terabytes of movies carefully set it all up so that we aren't tracked. I HOPE it's still running like it was the last time I looked!!
Is this method "safe"? Well, like most things, it will work until it doesn't work.
Meanwhile, I've not heard a single peep about torrents drying up. The sneaker net that feeds off of the torrenting still runs full bore, and no one complains a bout a lack of movies.
I'm not personally involved, other than supplying the connection to the ISP. I just don't watch many movies, and none of the series, such as Game of Thrones.
Maybe it's time I took another look at our setup, and be sure it's running like I think it's running.
But, no, torrenting isn't dead, yet, at least.
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 11 2017, @06:14AM (2 children)
> I make them WORK to mine my data
said the guy from his public, official, SN account.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 11 2017, @06:47AM
Yeah, I'm sure that pseudonym is very revealing. Well, it could be, but that's not necessarily the case.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 11 2017, @06:53AM
I was quite shocked when the POTUS [soylentnews.org] started posting here.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by bzipitidoo on Monday September 11 2017, @10:17AM (1 child)
I don't believe the Fine Article. Strikes me as a propaganda piece. Yeah, the MAFIAA wishes torrenting was dying! This NDTV that ran the article certainly could be biased, them being a media provider and all.
Was that notification alleging that a certain wizard kid book was pirated on your connection through the Copyright Alert System? Well, fear not, CAS is dead now.
The safety we have is in numbers. It is utterly impractical to throw every alleged pirate in prison, or sue them, or otherwise ruin their day, there are way too many for that. Merely keeping records on who supposedly pirated what is problematic. Trying to impose some cost or punishment is laughable, and can only backfire if they somehow found the power to do that to significant numbers of the accused.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Monday September 11 2017, @11:32AM
To be honest, I can't remember exactly, it may have been CAS. The ISP told us that the third time would result in their canceling us - and there was another letter sent to our address after that. IF there were another, it would be the third. Mehhh, whatever. If it should happen, I'll go with satellite. Latency sucks, but I'll have a much faster connection - except in foul weather.
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 12 2017, @11:16PM
I can't believe people are still relying on point to point/central point of anonymity failures like gdrive, vpns, etc.
There are a number of solutions out there to lower your risk profile, including a few other anonymity networks.
But I2P already has the infrastructure in place for this use case and unlike its alternatives is very unlikely to dox you without you personally sharing information that can tie you to your torrenting activities.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Appalbarry on Monday September 11 2017, @06:15AM (3 children)
Torrents? Disappearing? Hah! Despite all of the fud about how the torrent sites being shut down, it's still the case that I can Google "Pirate Bay," find anything I want, and have a fast and easy download into Plex.
Claims that torrents are disappearing sound like fake news, intended to mislead you.
(Score: 2) by Weasley on Monday September 11 2017, @07:17AM (2 children)
But torrents are antiquated. The new ingenious way is putting the file in a publicly accessible location and posting a link on a webpage. Why didn't anyone think of that before?
(Score: 2) by coolgopher on Monday September 11 2017, @07:20AM (1 child)
Nah, clearly the future is to download everything off the block chain.
(Score: 1) by ants_in_pants on Monday September 11 2017, @06:12PM
Oh god. Make a blockchain that big and it will succumb to a 50% attack next tuesday.
-Love, ants_in_pants
(Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 11 2017, @07:24AM (7 children)
https://torrentfreak.com/no-google-drive-is-definitely-not-the-new-pirate-bay-170910/ [torrentfreak.com]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Grishnakh on Monday September 11 2017, @03:23PM (5 children)
The problem with torrents that I see is that it depends on people "seeding", which means they have to keep all these files in a certain place on their HD and keep their torrent client up, with every single one of these things listed as a separate entry. Moreover, they can't change any of them: the filenames have to stay the same, they have to keep all the extra parts of it (like .nfo files that pirate groups add), etc.
Honestly, it seems like it'd be better for file-sharers if they moved to using the ED2K system. On that, you just point to some directories where your stuff is, let it index it and generate hashes, and then people can find what they want from there with a text search. Even if you rename a file from "Cool.Movie.[Groupname].10bitX265.WTF.mkv" to "Cool_Movie.mkv", it won't matter because it's indexed by hash and size, so it'll correlate that with other people who have the same file but with a different name, and downloaders can download from all of you simultaneously. And you don't have to maintain each shared item as a separate torrent with its own tracker; you can share any arbitrary file from any folder you point it to, so it's pretty trivial to share hundreds of thousands of separate files if you want.
But, as we see so often in tech, the technically superior solution gets little recognition or use, while the trendy but inferior solution gets all the fame and mindshare.
(Score: 1) by ants_in_pants on Monday September 11 2017, @05:56PM (3 children)
A lot of people(myself included) run VPSes that do all the torrenting for them, then download off the VPS when they want the files. Hell, I had a friend that had all the files he torrented available on a website he ran out of that same VPS.
That's the point. It wouldn't do to let people inject random data into your torrents. And the point of filenames staying the same is it allows people to know the origin and history of the files. I don't want to get a file that says its encoded by CoalGirls but turns out to be shitty quality.
eDonkey has the problem that it relies on central servers, and the extensions by eMule are, at best, a hack. There aren't any advantages over bittorrent that outweigh the higher speed and assurance. Not to mention the fact that I can't find a linux client anywhere.
-Love, ants_in_pants
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Monday September 11 2017, @06:39PM (2 children)
A lot of people(myself included) run VPSes that do all the torrenting for them, then download off the VPS when they want the files. Hell, I had a friend that had all the files he torrented available on a website he ran out of that same VPS.
So to try to not be a leech, you have to sign up for a VPS service? Hmm....
And the point of filenames staying the same is it allows people to know the origin and history of the files.
Oh please. The whole point was that on ED2K, if one person renames their copy of the file to something else, it won't matter because the system will see the size and hash are the same, and recognize it's really the same file. People searching will just find the original filename, because most people aren't going to bother changing it.
It wouldn't do to let people inject random data into your torrents.
What "random data"? ED2K checks file hashes. You can't just add anything; it'll look like a completely different file. Even changing some metadata (ID3 tag, etc.) will change the hash and make it a new file.
There aren't any advantages over bittorrent that outweigh the higher speed and assurance.
Sure there are, I already listed them. People don't need a special VPS service to use them, and can just share stuff right off their HD, so you get more seeders and a larger variety of content (not just what's currently popular). On BitTorrent, you only see stuff that's fairly recent and popular. You probably won't find, for example, a PDF copy of some 15-year-old printer service manual, or a service manual for a 1970s-era oscilloscope. Weird stuff like that is pretty routine on ED2K. There's no speed advantage to torrents; they both do "swarming" (downloading parts from different seeders simultaneously); the problem is just an order or two of magnitude fewer users.
Not to mention the fact that I can't find a linux client anywhere.
You never heard of "amule"? It's been around for ages.
(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.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 12 2017, @11:19PM
That said, there is an ed2k network still running inside I2P, complete with the imule client, a modified amule with i2p networking support.
Unfortunately, based on personal searches of it, there is very little worthwhile content there unless more people are willing to seed, or a gateway seeder to clearnet ed2k is implemented to relay files.
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 11 2017, @05:03PM
We'll see what the misogynerd narrative does. If Google gets skewered as a company that's helping dread pirates (omg! dread pirates, and not just Roberts!) in the media, take it as a warning. Google's Hail Mary of firing James Damore for daring to hint at an obvious question one may have about the exclusive privileging of cisgenderism and heterosexuality inherent to the misogynerd narrative may not be nearly enough to appease feminists and their 0.01%er masters.
Always remember that when dealing with feminists. They are pathological liars, and they are shills for the Ownership Class. You can jump when they bark and ask how high on the way up, but it is never enough to appease feminism.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 11 2017, @07:45AM
This is like, so totally your time to shine or whatever.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 11 2017, @08:18AM
And so, is the hammer also going to fall on Larry Page and Sergey Brin or whoever is on top at Google now, the way it fell on Kim Dotcom?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 11 2017, @01:19PM (1 child)
I was trying to help someone install linux mint the other day (mostly to make it easier for them to learn python), and they said their university has a policy of blocking access to the network for downloading *any* torrent.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 11 2017, @02:36PM
Sadly, most universities do. Pressure from MAFIAA.
(Score: 3, Touché) by LoRdTAW on Monday September 11 2017, @02:10PM
Looks like cloud storage is a success!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 12 2017, @12:49AM (1 child)
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.
C'mon, this has got to be sarcasm!
So, essentially the same thing as secretly sharing warez on ftp sites, as it was done in the 90's, is a 'new tech' thing?
(Score: 1) by dr_barnowl on Tuesday September 12 2017, @08:44AM
I know... "antiquated torrent tech" hahahahahaha.
Torrents are about as cyberpunk as you can get - files hosted everywhere but nowhere, no central server required (not even for torrent hosting with distributed hashtables and magnet links).
Cloud file hosting uses some of the same technology, but is essentially just the evolution of FTP, dumb client talking to a facade that pretends to be a dumb server (with some marginally smarter guts than before).
Now, if people wrote some kind of file distribution system that exploited multiple cloud storage providers as encrypted block storage, that would be more interesting.