this post was submitted on 09 Aug 2023
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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

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As the title says. do you guys know any pirate sites which have released their logistics, like cost of the servers, video servers etc. how much it costs to run them.

I have bee looking into a few offshore DMCA ignored hosts and wanted to compare.

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

You are not going to get far just by ignoring DMCA countries. You need to protect your anonymity entirely or you will simply be extradited to a DMCA country.

The most appropriate approach, like for any site, is probably to have a multi cloud setup across jurisdictions. Such as hetzner, Amazon, whatever. And you have orchestration to set them up and tear them down on a whim.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

I think i know how to protect my anonymity very well. I will be accessing a virtual desktop from a trusted provider via VPN on tails from my desktop. the vitrual desktop will also be connected to a VPN and i will then log into my server from it. I haven't put it into action yet but i think this will be enough

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

If you go off of the streaming services (like 123movies or something), they upload the downloaded files to 2+ video hosting websites, then display the links. They also have a shit ton of ads, so I guess they do get profit by how long they seem to last.

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

What kind of piarate sites are you talking about? Running a torrent tracker, movie streaming website, sports online translation website, book archive et c. are completly different tasks with different infrastructure requirements.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I was mostly thinking about a movie streaming site. do you have any suggestions?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Well, movie streaming services are maybe the most expencive to run as they require CDN infrastructure. CDN is server network where films are hosted and from where films are streamed by end users. CDN consist of servers with a lot of webspace and with fast connection, also those servers are spread across the globe: for example, if three different users from Melbourne, London and New York stream same movie in same quality from some top pirate streaming website, they might be connected to three different servers (each of this servers would have fastest speed for corresponding end user). Needless to say, running a full scale CDN for popular movie streaming website is not possible for random enthusiast. So such websites are owned by pirate enterpises which convert seo traffic to money through advertising of services which are impossible to promote using legal channels (primarly illegal gambling operators, but also forex, hyip and another types of scams). You can try to rent CDN api access (or even whitelabel with some codebase), as CDN owners sometimes offer that on blackhat boards. But you should keep in mind that renting CDN/whitelabel is illegal deal paid in cryptocurrency: you have a chance to get a proper service to built your own website and you have a chance to be scammed. What i've said above is only related to all-genres libraries. If you have some very limited project (like South Park fansite and only want to stream this show episodes and nothing more) then everything is by far easier.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I think the pirate bay did did that, but I'm not sure. I do know that they're very open about stuff like that, so there's a good chance there. I'm sure I've seen a couple revealing "we got this dmca and this is what we did" posts from them. That was years ago thoigh.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

If I remember correctly it was something as follows"

TPB's tactic was to tell them to essentially fuck off we're not in your country nor are we hosting anything more than a search engine. At least till they finally got dragged into court in their country where they got some prison time and fines and moved to a .to domain in lieu of .org.