Anonymous Coward writes:
"BBC News reports that an Argentinian program that offered a Netflix-like interface for accessing torrents has resurfaced after its main website closed over the weekend.
Their site now hosts a goodbye letter. In it, they said that the software is legal, and that they're shutting down the service "Not because we ran out of energy, commitment, focus or allies. But because we need to move on with our lives".
All is not lost, though, as the project has been picked up by at least one torrent site, and the software is available on github. Yarr, 'tis a fine day to be a pirate!"
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 18 2014, @07:00PM
Of course they ran out of commitment. That's perfectly fine, of course, but it's silly of them to claim otherwise.
"I haven't run out of commitment to my marriage, your honor, but I'm requesting this divorce to get on with my life."
(Score: 2) by everdred on Tuesday March 18 2014, @08:53PM
Just to be clear, this "Popcorn Time" isn't at all related to "Popcorn Hour," an early network-connected set-top box mostly in the vein of what Roku is today, right?
(Score: 4, Interesting) by mmcmonster on Tuesday March 18 2014, @09:56PM
Sounds like they're not at all related.
This seems to be some sort of on-demand streaming based on a torrent architecture which will try to download the first few blocks early so that the video can stream while it's still downloading.
A nice extension to the .torrent architecture, but nothing particularly earthshattering.
The danger of this approach is that, due to a nice GUI, it brings file sharing back to the masses a la Kazaa.
And just like early file sharing systems, because of assumptions made by the application, the users are at risk of being sued by the MPAA and similar trade groups.
(Score: 1) by adolf on Wednesday March 19 2014, @05:30AM
Why is that a "danger" IMHO, the masses using torrents (or anything torrent-like) is exactly what is needed to hasten an end to the stalemate.
I'm wasting my days as I've wasted my nights and I've wasted my youth
(Score: 1) by Rousay on Wednesday March 19 2014, @08:21AM
It is a danger because it's so easy to use and so easy to misunderstand for what it really is (piracy), that lots of people who are oblivious to how they need to protect themselves from the industry's legal arms will neglect to do so, and as a result, a lot of unwitting people will likely end up being charged with high-value lawsuits. That's danger, no?
(Score: 1) by adolf on Wednesday March 19 2014, @08:57AM
Nah.
I've seen this all before -- these are not at all new issues.
Very few people who pirate casually ever bother to protect themselves at all.
And I suspect that the number of casual pirates is still increasing, instead of decreasing -- no matter if the backend is BitTorrent-based or some other thing.
I'm wasting my days as I've wasted my nights and I've wasted my youth
(Score: 1) by Yog-Yogguth on Wednesday March 19 2014, @09:40PM
As an interested onlooker that has kept an eye on things almost since the beginning (sneakernets —those were real networks and in some ways still are—, bbs, usenet and such) I think both you and the grandparent are at least a bit wrong if not completely:
- There is no stalemate and there hasn't been for a decade or more, for all their efforts the MAFIAAs are microscopic entities being carried along by an eternal tsunami. No matter how fast they try to spin their little flagella they're hardly moving at all. Their attempts at "high politics" and "clever juridical warfare" are continually backfiring and reducing any efficiency they might have hoped for; they're even worse off than they were at the turn of the millennium. In the big picture they might as well not exist.
- Copyright avoidance is easier that ever before and more people are doing it than ever. Nothing else seems to rationally explain the astounding resources and capabilities one can discover; there must be at the very least exabytes of content flowing every hour (not just bittorrent) considering the speeds and diversity of content involved, anything else is hard to imagine.
By now I would think that if every infringement last year was to be addressed then most of the infringers would die of old age before getting to court XD
Torrenting and seedboxes is one matter but even the most old-fashioned style of file sharing (i.e. simple downloads) has increased in scope and capability to a point where it's practically entirely unlimited. What exists these days is tantamount to broadcasting channels (due to rss) that aggregate and push out games, movies, magazines, books, music, and tv series within days of their existence/publishing. Some also do gatewaying between the torrent environments and the backbone environments.
The name of that game is reaction: get it while it is hot and before it disappears. If you want the latest issue of The Economist or New Scientist or Playboy you need to take it when you can because in a month or two it might be gone (or not, but it's a gamble by then). Personally I don't since I don't think these and other examples are interesting at all; they're worth less to me than the storage required (even when it's just a few handfuls of MB), but that's only my opinion.
Of course anyone wanting can always request reuploads and hope somebody answers; with a handful of effort and patience the collective memory is astronomical.
That's not all: things are due to improve dramatically (i.e it's still catching up to Moore's law) because right now not all of the "broadcasters" have become aware of and had time to hook up with and use the new "bandwidth providers"; I'm talking of those that push at least 2MBps —that's two megabyte per second— of content to you for free (and $deity knows how far some of them truly scale, at least one seems to approach the size of a small ISP as far as I can tell) and some of that is without any kind of registration, or captcha, or waiting time, or forced compression, or even ads (maybe I'm just not seeing them). Think AnonFiles but much faster and better. There must be a glut somewhere akin to the days of "pirate FTPs" hosted on cracked servers because not even traffic analysis would be valuable enough for anyone to bother doing this if they had to pay anything (even electricity) for it (or maybe several competing three-letter agencies decided it was time to try monopolizing the upload, intermittent storage and download providers "market" lol).
Fun apropos: I was thinking of mentioning it in a journal post; just "today" some of the "pirates" were pushing Windows 7 Unlimited Platinum Edition or some such; the funny part being that it was 7 not 8 :)
Bite harder Ouroboros, bite! tails.boum.org/ linux USB CD secure desktop IRC *crypt tor (not endorsements (XKeyScore))