this post was submitted on 01 Dec 2023
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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

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Thanks to whoever posted this on reddit. I hope other clients detect and blocking it.

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[–] [email protected] 36 points 8 months ago (4 children)

If it's spoofing them, its going to be more effort than it's worth to actually detect that client. I strongly recommend you to delete this post or you're gonna cause a massive Streissand Effect

[–] [email protected] 23 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Seriously I didn't even know about Stremio up until now

[–] [email protected] 5 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

Seems to be a good app if you pair it with Real Debrid. Good UI, good platform support, very popular. I just don't want it wasting my seeding bandwidth.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (2 children)

There are more ways to detect than peer ID.

This client is already extremely popular. Before the spoofing update, it's mis-identified as TorrentStorm 0.0.0.8 in qBittorrent. It makes up half the peers on a lot of my torrents. Have you checked?

[–] [email protected] 14 points 8 months ago

That. Is. Hilarious. I always block anyone that pops up as torrent storm since I never get any data from people on that service

[–] [email protected] 8 points 8 months ago

Me, using a private tracker: Nope, don’t see them.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

Lemmy is not any where big enough of a platform to cause any noticeable Streissand Effect let alone a "massive" one

[–] [email protected] 6 points 8 months ago

Lmao. Lemmy's active users isn't even 1% of people pirating.

[–] southsamurai 31 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Does this really bother folks that much? I've never cared much about this kind of leeching as long as it isn't dominating my personal bandwidth. And it never has so far, though I have to admit my 4ish tb of movies isn't exactly high demand stuff, so I don't usually have more than one or two at a time being leeched.

Hell, I don't really care much about leeches anyway, as long as the overall ability to find things is still there. I look at it as the price of the freedom of torrents. There's always going to be higher demand for data than there are people with the resources/time/willingness to seed heavily. I'm okay with that because I don't really want to have to keep and seed every fucking thing out there, it would take much more storage than I can afford to be able to keep a ratio on most private trackers since I tend not to keep shit I don't intend to watch at least once a year unless it's something pretty damn obscure.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (2 children)

It does dominate my personal bandwidth. You'll notice if one of your torrents is on their app. You'll be uploading all day and it'll fill half your peers list.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 8 months ago

As someone that uses stremio quite a lot thats sad but understandable to hear. I do try to make up for my leeching habbits by keeping every normal torrent seeding indefinitely.

[–] southsamurai 1 points 8 months ago

I guess the low demand files I have keep me from running into it.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 8 months ago (2 children)

I don't understand what's going on. Can someone ELI5?

[–] [email protected] 21 points 8 months ago (2 children)

Torrents are people sharing files with each other, uploading and downloading. Stremio downloads, but never uploads. And now it doesn't want you to know who's using it, because people kept banning it.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 8 months ago

Got it. Thanks!

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago (1 children)

I though that streamio uploads too. Because a few months ago my internet browsing was slow, after I closed streamio the issue stopped.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (2 children)

I dont think stremio does either technically. Stremio it's typically used as a front end application for debrid services. Mainly real debrid, all debrid and premiumize.

I believe the 2 debrids only download, but i think premiumize seeds, but not 100% sure.

That being said if a file gets added to these services it is not constantly leeching like op said. The real debid servers for example will download a torrent and distrubute the downloaded file throughout their cdn, leaving it in their cache for 30 days. I believe each time it is accessed by a user that 30 day clock is reset.

Stremio typically only shows cached torrents in there app so in order for a user to force a download they would need to go to their debrid provider directly and add the torrent causing it to get added to the cache.

Is it bad for the torrenting network, yes because they don't seed, is stremio using up all of seeders bandwidth, probably not

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago (1 children)

What if im not using real debrid in streamio?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Not 100% sure but since they are free links they wont come from torrents, at least not in the same way. They are being scraped from streaming websites.

Whetger or not the original uploaded got them from a torrent is unknown but they would have just downloaded it once and uploaded so very different in its effect on torrenting.

Those sites have always coexisted with torrents because they are often of low quality whereas torrents are higher quality

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago (2 children)

In Stremio Im using torrent plugins, not streaming websites.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago

Gotcha, i only use the debrid links so my knowledge on this was how cinemahd used to do it in the past

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago

But to answer your question, if there is a plugin with a torrent client included then it is most likely set up to download the files sequentially to allow streaming but i would assume it is set to turn upload off (so it leeches) because your tv would probably buffer more if it used additional bandwith

If thats the case (not 100%) then that may be why they are trying to block stremio

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago (2 children)

My girlfriend got a legal claim for using stremio when her vpn failed which in Germany is only possible if you actively upload something so I'd say it does that

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Ok, maybe stremio has a torrent client compiled in or maybe a plugin i dont use has one then.

However, if you turn off upload in your torrent client you can still get caught, uploading isnt want triggers it, connecting to peers with your exposed ip triggers

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Yeah but afaik downloading in Germany isn't against the law since it's allowed to download a "backup copy" of things you actually own legally so it's pretty much never enforced. The only way people in Germany get sued is for uploading but then a couple of bytes is already enough in many cases

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago

I can't speak for germany but where i live downloaders dont ever get sued, they just get complaints from isps and if they get too many they may be shut off or have their speed throttled.

Uploaders get sued because its too costly and time consuming to go after the downloaders

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago

Not using a debrid service in Germany is crazy

[–] [email protected] 13 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Ok... I like the interface of StremIO, which looks like a service aggregator (ie I can open the movie on a streaming service i have access to), but I don't like the fact that I can't pre-download and seed less popular files. It supports debrid services, but from the technical description, thesec seems to be leech-equivalent to seedboxes...

What would be a good drop -in replacement? Something that works on google TVs and is easy to maintain?

[–] [email protected] 11 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

If you use a debrid service, you're okay because the debrid service just downloads the file once and caches it for everyone, and you pay for the bandwidth to download from them. That isn't excessive leeching, whether they seed or not.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago

From my early torrent days, we used to say that any torrent we dont seed back to at rast 1:1 is bad for the network (leeching). I can see why there is a desire to block StremIO clients, but if it was modified to see back to some ratio, it would be nicer.

As for debrid, it's a bit too "centralised" for me still... I've read that it's a major weak point in the system and that servers are often unavailable. That's why i like the resilience of torrents. (Plus the sharing aspect. Sharing is caring!)

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago

I could never get it to work well, every movie I tried would only play for a few seconds then buffer, then just become unplayable, on very good Internet.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago

Did anyone create issue yet?

[–] [email protected] -3 points 8 months ago

New Lemmy Post: PSA: The popular leech client Stremio got an upgrade to spoof other clients than TorrentStorm. (https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/9523935)
Tagging: #Piracy

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