Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

This year I‘ll be able to upgrade to 25/25Gbps and I‘m planning on using at least 20Gbps for seeding 24/7. Is any maintainer of private trackers interested in inviting me?

Hello mateys,

There's a lot of discussion recently about the ethics of piracy. A lot of good points have been made out of a handful bad ones. The most compelling one is of course the data preservation one, that piracy is the only way to mass preserve digital media in a medium that is prone to error.

However, sometimes discussions about the ethical justification to privacy often lead to rationalizing. Pirating, as others have exclaimed, is at best morally grey, and there are some cases, namely pirating works of small creators, where it is actively harmful and wrong.

I would like to share my perspective on it. I studied some game theory in college and that course made me look at the world in a different way. I believe piracy is a perfect example of a game theory concept known as the prisoner's dilemma and evolutionary game theory, if you all haven't heard about it. My essay is less of a justification of piracy, but more of an explanation of why piracy happens and grounding it in theory.

As a background for this concept, here's a scenario. Let's say you're a criminal faced with two options: snitch or stay silent. There is also another criminal, your accomplice, who is also in jail and faced with the same option. Depending on your response and your accomplice's response there are different payouts:

I stay silent and accomplice stays silent: 2 years of jail for both of us

I stay silent and accomplice snitches: 5 years of jail for me, 1 year of jail for the accomplice

I snitch and accomplice stays silent: 1 year of jail for me, 5 years of jail for my accomplice

We botch snitch on each other: 3 years of jail time for both of us

Most of you probably know where this is going, but bear with me because i'm gonna go further. The quick analysis of the situation is that there is a best-case scenario, which is both of us staying silent. But this best-case scenario can only happen with the result of cooperation. This is because if one of us flips, the other will have to serves longer sentence. The best case scenario can only happen if we both agree before the game that we will stay silent so we can guarantee the outcome, or else we will serve the longer sentence if the other betrays us.

So, what if we play this game without cooperating beforehand? Well, looking at my options:

if i stay silent, i can either get 2 years or 5 years of jail time

if i snitch, i can get either 1 year or 3 years of jail time

when faced with both these options, which strategy will you choose? of course, I do not want to got to jail for 5 years. Snitching definitely looks mad appealing to me when looking at it from this perspective. That's why, in game theory, snitching is what's called a nash equilibrium. Staying silent is not a nash equilibrium, because if the other snitches then I get a resulting jailtime which is worse off than if i just stayed silent.

Note that this does not mean that everybody should snitch. It's just that, given the choices handed to us, snitching is the one that will result in the least bad jail sentences. As with life, there may be other factors at play, such as the fact that if I snitch, the gang boss might kill me when I get out, which will definitely affect my decisions whether I should snitch or stay silent.

Okay. So how does this relate to piracy? What if we now play this game at a massive scale. Each and every one of us is faced with two options: pirate or buy. Currently, the majority of people actually buy software and media!

But wait. If buying is analogous to staying silent, and pirating is analogous to snitching, why aren't we at Nash equilibrium? why isn't everyone pirating software? My sweet summer child, I present to you the concept of law. The purpose of the law is precisely to coordinate people so we don't fall into our shitty Nash equilibriums and ruin everything, and it does it precisely by attaching a more negative result to snitching (pirating). That's why we have stoplights (seriously, we talk about stoplights a lot in my game theory class) and why (mostly) everyone follows stoplight laws. (before you say tRagEdY oF tHE cOMmONs!!!! the guy Garrett Hardin who coined the term was a hardline eugenicist and his intellectual contributions is a shitstain in academia so shut the fuck up.)

(for people that are curious, this is the realm of Evolutionary game theory. It studies the scenarios where each individual pair off in a population and play a game, and studies stable populations and stable strategies under this model. Ironically, i learned this from Game Theory, Alive by Anna R. Karlin and Yuval Peres. which i got from libgen XD)

So, as we have it, we have a majority of people buying software, with a minority of pirates who are getting that software or media for free. We aren't at nash equilibrium!! More technically, piracy is stable strategy under the parameters of the system. We pirates know that buying all the software we interact with will just make us poorer and sad in the end, and we'll be stuck with all the DRM. But on the other hand, it's untenable if everyone just pirates everything all the time! We pirates profit so long as the majority of people keep buying software. This puts us, pirates, at a very precarious position. It is dangerous when the population of pirates to increase, because this will cause things and create domino effects which will put us at nash equilibrium due to more regulation of piracy and a crackdown of piracy, leaving us worse off and needing to adapt to these changes.

My advice:the most stable strategy right now is buying software whenever you can spare the coin and if you think the value of the software to you matches its price, but pirating if it's convenient or unaffordable.

Too long, didn't read: piracy is a stable strategy under the current parameters of the system. If everybody pirates it fucks everything up. So, be as sneaky as you can. Also, read up on your evolutionary game theory you pleb

Hey all. Last season I used various streaming sites for baseball, but the quality was low and they obviously don't work on Apple TV. I'd love to watch games on both ATV and iOS in HD.

One option will of course be IPTV, but I only need baseball since I don't watch other sports or any other live TV.

My friend in another state lent me her unneeded MLB TV account, but it appears they don't want our money since no VPNs work. Research indicated smart DNS would work, but MLB TV doesn't carry the national games or playoffs anyway.

I don't mind paying for this, though I'd love not to! 😂

Based on the need for only baseball, where should I look and what might it cost?

Thanks!

I use soulseek (well nicotine+ for linux, but same network). For years know I have know that searching for certain terms will fail to give results because they are being filtered. For example "bryan" or "adams" returns no results for me. Although I can find these items in other ways- I'm curious if there have been any new finds on how to bypass this?

A simple tool to take the work out of uploading.

I'm just sharing. This should be used more widely

I'm learning to make my own clothes, but fabric is expensive and buying patterns from corporations feels like death by a thousand cuts. Anybody know of a resource for shared patterns? Megathread understandably doesn't address this particular need.

I apologize, I’ve been out of the loop for more than a decade with piracy, so I have a dumb question.

My friend has a cracked version of Baldur’s Gate 3 (GOG, I think) and I want to play online with him. I don’t mind actually buying the game for myself on Steam so I can install it on both my Mac and Deck, but I don’t want to spend the money if it means a legit copy that doesn’t play nice with his cracked copy.

Can cracked games play online with legit games, would I need a cracked copy as well, or is online MP simply out of the question?

Thanks to anyone willing to give a response.

I used to use Hamachi on Windows to play "local LAN" games with my friends, has anyone tried using Tailscale for this purpose? As far as I know it should work fine, but I'm not sure and I don't have any friends to try it out with, but it makes me curious.

It doesn't matter if it's a CD, a Film, or manual with the instructions to build a spaceship. If you copy it, the original owner doesn't lose anything. If you don't copy it, the only one missing something (the experience) is YOU.

Enjoy!

Of course, if you happen to have some extra money for donations to creators, please do so. If you don't have that, try contributing with a review somewhere or recommending the content, spread the word. Piracy was shown to drive businesses in several occasions by independent and biased corps (trying to show the opposite).

Soft Archive is hosting a dangerous file in their Affinity 2.4.1 releases.

https://www.virustotal.com/gui/file/c1bc0af0c55281609ceb3d51ca277ccc703b7b9acaef219a8dd22933c0ad3ff0/detection

Additionally this is an exe and so far all we needed to "patch" was to replace a dll.

I've been facing issues on Horizon FW, the Ksenia build from cs rin ru based on Goldberg's Steam emu and using a Xbox One X controller. While having vibration off to save battery on the controller (and also I kinda hate vibration), it still has some vibration on while shooting arrows or using strong attack (both are related to RT button) and it is a bit bugged since it vibrates really fast and stays while you hold the button.

I've read that the solution in Steam is forcing the Xbox 360 config in steam input settings, but since it's a pirated version this isn't an option (maybe manually adding it to steam library?).

Tried updating the game to the latest version (1.0.38) as it was supposed to fix some controller issues but it didn't work for this specific issue, so now I'm trying to manually fix it, in steam_emu.ini there's a line that says this: SteamInput=SteamInput006

Is there any list of controllers and their correspondent numbers?

I've seen multiple people here talk about lucky patcher and wanted to try it out, found the official site though reddit (cos I've had google give me badware links for things like these before) and the site rang every alarm bell in my brain.
From the too-good-to-be-true premise to the red text before the download saying that the app is Perfectly Safe, scanned the apk with virustotal (not perfectly accurate i know) and it returned a bunch of flags.

So is luckypatchers.com the actual site?

Edit: got the apk from the direct download link in the subreddit's about page and ran it on waydroid, seemed legit but also very old and the custom patches would just make the app (YouTube in this case) close instantly.
Might be some google service detecting something's off or maybe the patch is just outdated.

Here's a table I adapted from Louis Rossman's video on the levels of piracy, grey areas and his morals and ethics on it. (spreadsheet file)

I tried to condense each rank and make it less about a specific type of media like CD audio or DVD video, along with a table of simplified characteristics of each situation. Of course more levels can be added and there are many situations not covered. This hierarchy is simply the way Louis ordered it from more to less justifiable; he respects people can think about it differently and I do too. He suggests that he doesn't really care about people that pirate without giving a shit about creators, and that he only has a problem with people who aren't honest with themselves about their motivations.

Setting legality aside, what 'level of piracy' is morally or ethically acceptable to you?

Hi piracy community,

I'm currently thinking about developing a tool which allows downloading songs from Spotify. Now, I don't think this is allowed in Spotifys ToS and I wanted to ask, if anybody has any experience with getting their Spotify account banned.

I have 3 main questions:

1. Can I appeal my ban?
2. What happens if the account is part of a family? Does the family owner get punished?
3. Does the payment method get locked?

Any and all help would be appreciated!

Note: I know that tools for this already exist, but I want to write my own.

Sorry if this is the wrong place, it's a Linux question but it's come about whilst trying to build my arr-Plex stack.

So, Linux (Debian) user accounts; What is best practice for running applications as their own UID? Why should I do that? and how can I avoid file permission errors.

I see advice such as "create a new system account called radar/sonarr/Plex". So I do that, and then find all my downloads are owned by qbittorrent user and it doesn't have permission to move them into my Plex library and Plex can't view them either.

All seems overcomplicated. Why can't I just run everything all with username 'Plex'?

Disclaimer: Obviously this is for educational purposes only. I would personally never use my internet connection for anything illegal at all. I simply tested the below setup then deleted everything out of pure interest to understand how things worked and do not use any IPTV service. I love paying Netflix and other streaming platforms and will always support big companies and their profits.

So...

If you are like me and have a TV, and either a firestick or (in my case) an apple tv, where the users are used to just clicking with a remote into Netflix, switching to IPTV might be quite a struggle.

I have found what I now consider the perfect setup, easy enough for an 8 year old to use and required no intervention from users, no moaning "something has broken". Seamless and easy. Impossible? Not at all. And if you don't have an IPTV provider I can hook you up with one if you send me a DM message also (they have trials).

Requirements for this to work.

1. Access to cryptocurrency (Paypal is an option if privacy is not paramount).
2. An IPTV provider (aka discord access to organise IPTV service on the low - message me if you don't have one) .
3. An apple TV (or firestick) app to play the streams
4. A VPN to hide the traffic.
5. Bandwidth - about 50mbit would be ideal and more than enough.

All of the above can be paid for by Paypal if you don't want to use crypto, however if you require to be untraceable then you will need to use crypto for the IPTV and mullvad VPN part.

Costs:
Recommend not subscribing to anything more than 3 months at a time max. This is in case things break/get shut down and so on.

IPTV - I use a UK centric provider that costs £30 GBP every 3 months (Equivalent to 10 GBP a month). This gives live TV (sky), Netflix, Disney+, Amazon Prime and a few other bits and bobs in this price. You also get a backup stream so if the primary goes down you can still use your IPTV.

A TV app. You can either use UHF or Snappier IPTV. UHF costs 0.99 per month (recommend only subscribing monthly) and Snappier costs 1.99 per month. They have different layouts depending what you prefer. Both cost a nominal amount so suggest picking the one that's easier to use for you. I use UHF.

A VPN. I use mullvad. You will need a 1 time purchase on an app called passepartout on apple TV. This allows you to sync a VPN profile from your iPhone to the apple TV and ensure that when the Apple TV turns on it auto connects to your VPN. This hides your traffic and so on.

The basic setup:

Once you have organised getting your IPTV streams from a provider and have a VPN, then it is very straightforward. For mullvad you set a country exit point in the account. I just set the same country as I currently reside so the ping is low and speed is fast.

Setup Passpartout with your vpn provider and create a profile (Mullvad has an account number and the password "m"), sync this to Apple tv. Ensure apple tv can connect. Reboot and check it stays connected. The Apple tv is now secured for use of the service. Similar setup for a firestick I imagine (maybe you can add a vpn without this app I don't have a firestick to test with so am not 100% sure).

Next install an IPTV app like UHF and subscribe for 1 month @0.99.

Next add the playlist streams you have to UHF, and the app will have your sections of live tv, series and movies. The correct way to do this is add an Xtream playlist (M3U8 is an older style that I found had issues) and insert the URL, Username and Password.

Thats it, dead easy. Super reliable and so simple even kids can use it. There is no fiddling around, and no issues.

Just wanted to write this up as there was nothing when I was looking to test this for educational purposes. Now there is something written. And you can trial it too. Its not for everyone but maybe if you need something simple, and easy then give it a go :)

• T

Wonder if there any blind people here who have used a jailbroken firestick and how accessible it is, particularly with alexa. please email to [email protected]

Hi there!

I have these running on my RPi 4 with DietPi OS: -Jellyfin -Sonarr -Radarr -Prowlarr -Bazarr -qBittorrent -Jackett -Jellyseerr

Also, I have Real Debrid.

I am struggling with the setup. What should I do next? Any advice or suggestions? Do I have redundant programs? Does anybody know how to set up them?

Thanks in advance for your help :)

Is there a video which compares 1080 and 4k and another one comparing HDR vs SDR?

When I watch 4k content I think, wow, this is great detail. But when I watch 1080 this is very good, but the tiny people in the background wouldn't be blurred in 4k.

And when I watch a dark SDR video I hate that the movie companies didn't release HDR quality although it's a recent movie/ series. But how would I know if it would be better?

I always think that the grass is greener on the other side, but how would I know?

Would it be hard to create such a video file? I guess with ffmpeg. But all else would need to be kept constant which is the difficult part

Hello fellas looking for iptv playlists for Jellyfin media server. Any recommendations? (The ones that actually work, mainly looking for sports ones)

Ahoy mateys, I’ve sailed the docs and rode the forums but I need some help on how best to rip and encode a 3D BRD. I’ve managed to use ffmpeg to create a kind of SBS video but it’s wrong and there’s a green bar between the feeds. What is the magic sauce I’m missing? Makemkv is what I used to rip.

Anyone have some one-liners or tips in the documentation that don’t suck?