Most piracy is either two ancient methods that work perfectly of Usenet or BitTorrent. There is nothing wrong with these methods.
this post was submitted on 30 Dec 2024
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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ
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Usenet has many things wrong with it, NNTP is not at all designed for distributing large files, it's for propagating messages across servers. File integrity checks have to be tacked on for instance, and the few servers still serving binaries are commercial services that are vulnerable to copyright trolls.
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What the what? More relevant than ever. How is this a legitimate question? I2p is great but adoption is extremely low.
How is this a legitimate question?
It's not.
Yes it's very much alive and very important. A lot of industries (like their products: books, movies but also games) are getting restricted, taken away, taking down and removed from other platforms. Old ROM sites are taken down. And platforms like archive.org need to remove all their books.
The problem is, that there is nobody archiving anymore.. because it's not allowed due to "copyright infringement". In the end, all these products like books, movies and (old) games might be gone forever. Next generations will not be able to have access to it. This is what worries me the most. And Torrent might be the only way to fix/solve it. By distributing these kind of material. Especially older books, older movies and older games.
Yea, hoarders and seeders are cultural heroes, to me
Torrenting is a decentralized approach and the corpo parasite hates it because there is nothing they can do about it, short of shutting down the internet lol
Get fuck Disney
This seems like a dumb question, BitTorrent absolutely is still relevant and probably the most popular method of file sharing in the scene. Foss groups use it too for distributing ISO files for Operating systems, and it might even be used as the video hosting provider in future Fediverse YouTube alternatives (I've heard talk of a video hosting platform on Fedi which uses activitypub for everything else but hosts videos via BitTorrent) pretty cool stuff.
So yeah BitTorrent is still relevant, and it makes sense since if it isn't broken why fix it? Not to say that it couldn't be better, the biggest problem with it is the anonymity issue, but until someone makes something better BitTorrent will continue to be popular, and the ideal choice for decentralized file sharing, especially in the piracy scene.
Almost always I find torrenting the most convenient method to download anything. When someone puts some file up for download and that person uses one of those stupid free file hosters, I usually get annoyed by "disable ad blocker", slow dl speeds, etc.
A torrent makes things so much more convenient.
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It's alive and well. My independent research shows that torrents of users are using it for large foss packages, as well as various media.
This duck in a hoodie shows how both technologies can function together. https://hackyourmom.com/en/pryvatnist/bittorrent-cherez-i2p-dlya-anonimnogo-obminu-fajlamy/
A better question is, what would you improve over current way that torrents work.
I wish there were some way to enable availability to persist even when torrents' peak of popularity has passed - some kind of decentralized, self-healing archive where a torrent's minimal presence on the network was maintained. Old torrents then could become slow but the archival system would prevent them being lost completely, while distributing storage efficiently. Maybe this isn't practical in terms of storage, but the tendency of bittorrent to lose older content can be frustrating.
I don't see what you can do at the protocol level to improve availability, you still need people storing the file and acting as peers. Some trackers try to improve that by incentivizing long term seeding.
It’s called private trackers, and they are great.
Meh.. I get itchy when I hear private. We could also improve the experience for seeding publicly and for longer. Not only by education but maybe even using some kind of intensive to keep seeding.
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A better question is; What would you change in the current Internet/WWW to make it as decentralized as Torrents are?
I wish there was a decentralised way of hosting websites. Kind of like torrents.
Sounds like maybe what you're looking for is ipfs? https://ipfs.tech/
Problem with IPFS, is that it's not really that decentralized as I wish it was. Since by default the data is not shared across the network, meaning if nobody is downloading and hosting that node, you are still the only one having a copy of the data. Meaning if your connection is gone or if you get censored, there is no other node where the IPFS data is living. It only works if somebody else is activily downloading the data.
Ow, and then you also need to Pin the content, or the data will be removed again -,-
Furthermore, the look-up via DHT is very slow and resolving the data is way too slow in order to make sense. People expect today max 1 or 2 seconds look-up time + page load would result in 4 or 5 seconds.. Max... However with IPFS this could be 20, 30 seconds or even minutes...
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I'm personally trying to fix it.. https://libreweb.org. Still a proof of concept though.
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There's some cryptobro projects about sticking distributed file sharing on top of ~ THE BLOCKCHAIN ~.
I'm skeptical, but it might actually be a valid use of such a thing.
Blockchain is a nice technology, but not all the solutions need blockchain technology. Just like BitTorrent doesn't require blockchain, a decentralized internet alternative also doesn't need blockchain.
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The profit motive
Make mutable torrents possible.
What’s the advantage to that? I don’t want the torrent I’m downloading to change.
I want that. For example you downloaded debian iso version 13 and after some time it can be updated to 13.1. Obviously it shouldn't be an automatic operation unless you allowed it before starting download.
I wouldn’t call that mutable, more like version tracking in which each torrent is aware of future versions.
I kind of like that, but you might be able to accomplish it with a plugin or something.
Put a file in the torrent called “versions” or something like that, and in there would be a url that the client can use to tell you if there is a new version.
It wouldn’t change the protocol though, since the new version and old version would still need to be separate entities with different data and different seeding.
Like the 13.1 torrent being only a patch to the 13 one and listing it as a dependency? Downloading the 13.1 torrent would transparently download the 13 if it wasn't already, then download the 13.1 patch and apply it. But I don't think any of this needs to be at the protocole level, that's client functionality.
Resilio sync can do this, I'm pretty sure.
Although if implemented as an extension to BitTorrent, I'd want it to be append-only, because I don't want to lose 1.0 just because 1.1 becomes available.
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I use Torrent daily, I basically never stop seeding what I download to my Plex Server and I also use a Real Debrid account, which essentially caches the torrents to their servers for us to stream through different methods (like Kodi, Stremio, or more recently for me Plex thanks to Riven/Zurg).
Also your article just says streaming and cloud services are more popular with the masses. Where does it say torrenting is replaced by another piracy method
Just taught my ten year old how to.use bit torrent last week. It will live forever!
The protocol is still relevant. Is there anything better yet with enough people using it that it's relatively easy to find anything you want through it?
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It is not anonymous and suffers network fragmentation. Yet the force of Bittorrent is its large community and mature performant tooling (compared to IPFS).
I2p is not a more efficient file sharing protocol.
You may be thinking about ipfs, which is a file sharing protocol, but I wouldn't say that is more efficient than bittorrent afaik.
I never used torrent as much as the last years
It's more relevant then ever.
With the media companies ndoing what large media companies do, aarrr think that torrents are very important indeed, matey
There are things like torrentio now which lend BitTorrent piracy a more integrated UX, and that has definitely extended the lifespan of its usefulness to me. Torrents rarely max out my line speed these days, mostly because I have 1000X the bandwidth compared to when I first started torrenting 20 odd years ago. But it's still one of the fastest and simplest methods to get any file you want, so I think it's relevant
Yes.
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