This looks like apks and no desktop apps, is that accurate? I’ll never forget the warm cozy feeling I got when my isp sent me a letter listing the the movies I had pirated over popcorn time.
Movie studio hires company to monitor bittorrent trackers/dht, send letter to isp, isp forwards the letter to you (legally required in some juridsictions, e.g. canada)
In many cases this is a pgp signed xml document, which is bizarre as i have no idea what an average person would make of that.
The XML is supposed to be used by the ISP receiving the dmca notice, with their internal automation systems, to determine what subscriber had a specific ip address in a DHCP pool at that point in time. Then generate an email outbound to the customer's email in the billing system db.
You can query trackers and DHT for torrents, and they return a bunch of IPs that are seeding/downloading the torrent. And then, as an ISP, you can combine IPs to subscriptions.
Check out this website that does the IP querying part for you:
The easiest way is to just compare what your actual public ip address is (e.g. using `curl ifconfig.me`) and what actually configured as WAN ip address in your router/modem. If it doesn't match, you're likely behind a CGNAT.
It's not really an ISP if it uses CGNAT. It's more of a web service provider. And it's not like you (or your neighbors) can participate in p2p protocols anyway if you don't have a routable IP address and ports.
Downloading torrent is fine though. You can connect to peers just fine, it's just the other peers can't initiate connection to you which is bad for seeding.
Even if they weren't too lazy to, an IP doesn't and can't identify a person or even household. Must be my neighbors downloading movies on my open wifi network, I can't figure out these high tech router thingymajigs ;).
In France it's an offence to not configure securely your network if there's some illegal stuff happening on it. You are held responsible for any downloads on your own network.
It's how it works for US ISPs already, at least as far as copyright is concerned. If an ISP doesn't uphold the DMCA, and they allow repeat offenders on their networks (defined as "unproved accusations by the media industry that an IP was logged more than once") the ISP can become liable for the actions of their subscribers and subject to billions in fines. See Cox cable and the dozen or so other lawsuits against ISPs going on right now
Well, your ISP knows which customer account it routed to at a given moment in time. The rest doesn't necessarily matter to them.
For example, I asked what happens if you ignore Comcast's Bittorrent warning and someone else on HN said they do indeed terminate your account.
Maybe playing dumb doesn't get you off the hook. Or it reveals you as a dumb helpless open relay. The most I can imagine Comcast doing if you responded to them would be sending over a technician to reset your router password.
most ISPs dont, having many dhcp servers and not having developers is not completely trivial to parse the logs and put in some database, or just add some tooling to isc-dhcpd
RIPE makes it basically mandatory to use dhcp in order to recive ip space, even though in most places it is completely useless since 2010, you save maybe 5% because literally nobody turns off their routers
also of course because there is no ip space now, admins put small lease times like 1 hour, or sometimes even less, so you have constant influx of logs and updates
i can imagine those scripts are buggy, misread timestamps and etc
If you're gonna do this stuff always always always use a VPN, and not a free VPN. Honestly I use a VPN for literally everyhing. My two mobile phones and 3 PCs and a home server. If I can't get to a site because they block VPNs then fuck them I'll spend my money somewhere else.
I don't even care that much about torrents or geo-locked stuff, I just trust them more than my ISP.
Setup was incredibly smooth and straightforward.
IIRC Mozilla also re-sells Mullvad's service under a name like (IIRC) FireFox VPN, which, last I'd heard, was still the only way to directly fund development of the browser.
Agreed. I was a happy Mullvad customer for a few years until Proton offered me a deal that was too good to pass up. I like to change up my VPN provider and/or account every couple of years anyway so I'll probably go back to Mullvad when my current term is up.
> IIRC Mozilla also re-sells Mullvad's service under a name like (IIRC) FireFox VPN, which, last I'd heard, was still the only way to directly fund development of the browser.
Which is a nice thing but you can't forward ports, and forwarding ports is a big benefit Mullvad has especially for torrents.
I used Algo to make my own, it builds a VPN server on your host. If you choose to host on digitalocean the script sets everything up via API and you're done in minutes.
I reckon it is against DigitalOcean's terms of service to seed copyrighted content. They forward DMCA complaints and will threaten to deactivate your account if you disregard warnings.
So either rent a server in some country that doesn’t recognize copyright law, or uproot your entire life and move there? Why would anyone choose the second option?
> As we said earlier, such campaigns don’t have a terribly strong history of success in the UK. The courts have also previously warned such firms to be very careful about the use of threatening language, given that those being targeted are not yet proven to be guilty of what they are accused.
> Voltage seems to require the letter recipients’ to convince the firm that they weren’t responsible, but in law, the burden of proof is normally on Voltage to prove that the recipient is the one responsible and not the other way around.
Digital Economy Act 2017 increased the already-existing penalties to max 10 years in prison for copyright infringement - which you technically commit every time you fire up BitTorrent without blocking upload. The same act (and its predecessor 2010 bill) compels ISPs with over 400k subscribers (i.e. all the big ones) to monitor subscribers for such activity.
The fact that prosecuting authorities tend to go after distributors rather than consumers is simply due to a value-for-money calculation. There is no formal or informal decriminalisation of consumer piracy, if they could find a cheap way to go after everyone they would - and they likely will, sooner or later.
if we've had laws such as that since 2017, and they were being enforced, you would have heard of people getting sentences, or even fines, right?
surely you can find stronger evidence than the police taking the unprecedented step of contacting - contacting, not arresting, or fining - a few tens of thousand in one region of the country?
That's not true. ISPs are supposed to monitor their networks for illegal activity and notify consumers if they detect them doing illegal things. I got threatened with disconnection about 10 years ago, because my then-wife was downloading TV series fairly regularly via BitTorrent.
Also, people using stuff like IPTV and the likes are routinely cracked down on, with jail sentences and all.
I honestly have no idea how you could come up with a sentence like that. The UK is among the most piracy-restricting countries in Western Europe, because of the massive influence of a certain media-baron over the political landscape among other things.
because everyone I know pirates and no one I know has had an issue with it. I've never read an article about anyone being prosecuted for it. respectable people do it without fear
Yeah, I have had 0 copyright notices ever just downloading stuff, until literally this last week when I actually decided to stop being a leacher and seeded all the torrents I still had the files downloaded back up to 3x ratio. Got 3 copyright notices in a few days and then they actually flat out turned my internet off this morning until I called them. So finally got around to buying and setting up Mullvad and now all will be good from now on hopefully.
Would it be enough to slice the data between different connections when a country with restrictive laws is detected, so that no user is actually sharing working copies, not even single pages, portions of a song or single frames of a movie? That would be doable by separating data at atomic level, say odd nibbles here, even nibbles there, and transmit/receive them on different connections so that even by intercepting 100% of a transmission from point A to B there would be no chance to reconstruct the data, even in case the encryption, if present, was broken. The only way would be to tap also other connections containing the other half plus data for reconstruction, which would probably require physical access to the endpoint, or a court permit to intercept all data from to that endpoint, which is totally doable but on a whole different level, that is, if they are doing that then the user is already in trouble.
This is good advice, but it should probably be extended by saying that the VPN you chose matters. At least around here many VPN are just as inclined to share your internet usage with law enforcement and/or the law firms sending out those letters as ISPs are.
So you gotta make sure you use a VPN that doesn’t out you to the authorities, and, can’t be made to do so.
...most IPS in most contries are just OK with piracy ...use proper VPNs for stuff that needs real security, enjoy your entertainment in peace (sure, if you're into weird kinds of pr0n). Most ppl who occasionally pirate also pay for content and have Netflix substrictions and stuff anyway (most artists do get payed - or at least some company gets paid for their work...), and those who don't would just pirate anyway, just switch ISP, so nothing gained by this.
(Side note: US seems like such a dystopian place nowaday... wasn't it "land of the free" or smth. And I'm comparing to like developed countries in Western Europe and Asia, not freakin Russia or Afganistan!)
You're just repeating the scaremongering that VPN providers use to sell their insecure s, please stop!
Tor + (~secure) VPN, but most things like pirating and pr0n DON'T require 'real' security!
You want privacy mainly and that's orthogonal to security.
If privacy is not enough and you need secrecy... well, just use your botnet as a VPN and from that get to Tor! (You do own a botnet in this case, that's what you need the secrecy for :P ...otherwise you'd have specialists hired for this at your disposal, or you'd be the specialist providing it to someone else).
You have never dealt with US ISPs I see... We have usually 1 or 2 ISPs and they are all spying on you for the MPAA and RIAA. So you clearly don't know what you're talking about here.
laughts in Switzerland, where you can torrent what ever the heck you want with your 25gbps/25gbps FTTH connection from Init7 for 60USD/month and providers don't do QOS or DPI and there's no limit in how many terrabytes you're torrenting.
If you're interested in the discovery or the ease of use part of it, you may be interested in https://github.com/sct/overseerr - it integrates with the mentioned software, and it's beautifully done.
I have this in combination with *arr stack, and even the non technical family members use it without any issues.
It's been back. I don't think it ever left? There's been a couple recent updates but I wish they would give the desktop build some more attention to ux. I open it and it makes my computer unresponsive for a minute or two before the application window appears and lets me do things beyond wiggling my cursor across the otherwise frozen screen. The reddit link on the github page also still points to the old banned subreddit instead of the current one.
I’m currently digging their Android source code and it is so outdated that it sent out a warning to upgrade the project’s gradle plugin from 3.5.* to 7.*.
I used to use Popcorn Time for a while when all I watched my movies on was on my old HTC Sensation XE with a 540p display, 11 years ago.
Now, I've upgraded to a nice 55" OLED, and I can't move away from Blu-ray rips. The sheer size of these rips (~25-70 GB) will burn through my data plan in an hour flat, not to mention that even with a 4G connection, it might be a little hard for a sporadically-seeded torrent to keep up with the bit-rate required for the film to play without buffering.
Even so, great effort bringing it back again; I had great fun with it when I did use it.
I don't see the point anymore. Lots of torrent software allows sequential downloads, so I can play them as they are downloaded, assuming the download speed is faster than the length of the video, in a video player of my choice. Usually though when I decide to watch something I pick it for that night, add it and watch it when I'm ready, so streaming is not really a problem I need solved.
Well my point is that it's a solved problem that doesn't require a special client. Torrent clients allow sequential downloads, and people can use any source for torrents they like and play in any player they want. You can stream torrents without popcorntime.
this graphic-design technique (that uses computers) for presentation is known as ASCII art. I read somewhere it is sorted into almost 550 categories (in 1 collection online)!
If popcorn time would also add streaming of live events functionality, they would completely capture the old acestream market that would still be interested.
With the demographics of HN and some of the topics that come up often (e.g., Linux, privacy, nostalgia for old-school forums, weird little micro-optimizations of peoples' lifestyles to achieve the "best" possible way to do a certain thing, etc.), I have always been a little bit surprised to see quite how many people personally use tools like Popcorn Time and how little mention of some forms of filesharing there is.
I think it is worth looking into private trackers for anyone a bit more interested in media than the average person.
- There is almost no need to use any VPN service on these sites.
- Quality control is unmatched; many sites have strict rules on what can be uploaded and general standards of uploads. Often this means that each torrent has mandatory screenshots for video quality comparisons, consistent track orders for bilingual releases, MediaInfo/BDInfo to allow you to know the contents before downloading (e.g., codecs, languages, audio channels, bitrates, etc.), source information to know what version of a film or series you're watching, and full ripping logs in the case of CDs/vinyl, etc.
- There are also usually limited slots for torrents in a particular group (e.g., on some sites, a single film may have one or two 1080P encodes, one or two 720P encodes, one remux of the Blu-ray, and one untouched disc unless there are multiple significantly different masters available), meaning lower-quality releases will be trumped, removing the need to compare releases and pick. You can be confident you are downloading something decent on the first attempt.
- There is a tremendous amount of obscure, foreign, and rare content that cannot be found on public sources or streaming services. As an anecdote, take Ma vie en rose, a Belgian movie I wanted to watch. It wasn't on any streaming services with English subtitles, the American DVD was out of print, and the only HD release at the time was a Blu-ray for the Japanese market without English subs. While it was impossible to find on any public tracker or streaming service, I immediately found someone who took the effort and money to buy the DVDs for the subs, manually OCRed them to SRTs, purchased and ripped the Japanese Blu-ray, and remuxed it with the newly created English subs into a nice, single MKV for easy consumption.
- Almost everything is well-seeded. Private trackers usually incentivize long-term retention of downloads, so regardless of how old something is, you can usually still download a copy.
- The community. Many complain about opening up Netflix to a sea of overwhelming, infinite choices and being stuck just trying to pick anything. An advantage of the niche-specific private trackers compared to streaming services, public trackers, and Usenet, though, is that there are usually "collages" or lists of some sort where users will maintain what is essentially those IMDb lists or the random top-10 article-spam you'll find on Google, except it's all hand-picked content by people who are seriously, genuinely, and perhaps overly interested in the topic you're browsing. I rarely struggle to find something to watch/listen to because I can dial in a specific thing I am after, and someone will usually have already put in the effort of curating a list of the best content I have never heard of.
- And again, with regards to the community, the knowledge is cool. For anyone interested in the technical side of some of these topics, a lot of discussion and information is, unfortunately, locked up on member-only forums (not to mention the resources - e.g., for those interested in anime encoding & fansubbing, some of the Chinese trackers, in particular, are so valuable, be it for the untouched DVDs/Blu-ray sources or the guides and tools).
And don't get me wrong, I don't mean to sound like some insane person. I completely recognize that not everyone wants to/can dedicate the time, there is a barrier to entry, and it may simply not be how m...
Redacted ("RED") is probably the best place to be nowadays for general music. It is where the majority of people ended up after What.CD, one of the earlier trackers, closed.
They have a ton of lossless audio, and you generally have choice in terms of which version of something you would like (e.g., an older release, if you don't like the remasters [1], or want specific deluxe/international editions -- Japanese CDs often come with bonus tracks). They also have very helpful curated collections of similar music and such.
Plus, having a RED account tends to help serve as a way to get to other trackers (of course, you should genuinely use the site rather than collecting accounts, etc.). RED is also unique compared to a lot of other decent trackers in that they don't require you to be invited by someone else or already have an account on another site; you can sign up by doing a short interview on their IRC [2]. Worth noting, though, that it'd be best to do it on a Friday night or something when you'd have time to waste; all of these sites are run by volunteers, so it can be a few hours of idling before you'd actually get a chance to sign-up.
For East Asian music, like K-pop, J-pop, J-rock, etc., Jpopsuki has the most extensive collection. SugoiMusic is another one, but I haven't checked it out very much.
And although it is primarily an eBook site, MyAnonamouse ("MAM") has a fair bit of sheet music, plus they also do IRC sign-ups.
Other than that, though, Orpheus ("OPS") is another decent music tracker. But realistically, RED tends to have much more available. However, I do think it's a cool site and I do respect how transparent they are, with even the site being open-source [3].
simply handing out invites gets you in trouble. If you know the other guy, he may invite you, but otherwise you should go with the official interview process (https://interviewfor.red). Also checkout https://www.reddit.com/r/OpenSignups to find some small entry trackers.. gain some reputation by being a good citizen on those. Take screenshots of your account stats every now and then. Then you can try asking for an invites to other trackers by providing your stats and stuff. The tracker communities are small and have to look out for each other. If you have no record whatsoever, the trust is too small to be invited. Also you risk your own account by inviting random people. There is also orpheus, an alternative to red that is a bit easier to get into.
I wish :( Unfortunately, pretty much all of the sites have rules regarding giving away invites to people on public forums and such. And many will claim to ban your entire invite tree if someone breaks any serious rules.
I wouldn't be surprised if someone else offered an invite. I am sure a fair number of HN people have accounts, but since RED has a relatively easy official route, I would go with that option if it's something you can find the time for; it'd suck to potentially build up an active account somewhere just to end up banned because your inviter also happened to invite someone else who did someone silly, like sell their account, etc.
There are lots of little random smaller trackers that have open signups, which you can usually find on Reddit, as roboyoshi mentioned. They'll vary in quality a lot, though, but occasionally there is something interesting there.
Other than open signups and person-to-person invites, most trackers have some sort of official invitation route. Typically this is just having an account on --insert partnered site-- for X months, don't get banned, have a minimum amount of data downloaded/uploaded.
In addition, as far as useful trackers go that have regular pathways without knowing anyone or having any account on any site, the ones below are the only ones I am super aware of.
IRC invites:
- RED; general music
- MyAnonamouse; ebooks/audio books/sheet music
- BakaBT; anime
Regular open signups:
- AvistaZ/ExoticaZ/CinemaZ; AZ is great for people who like Asian movies, and they have a Discord where they announce open signups, which is usually a couple of times a month
Relatively lax invite rules:
- Jpopsuki; East Asian music
Donation signups:
- M-Team; movies, tv, adult content <-- good pathway into the Chinese communities if you don't have Chinese friends
99.9% of trackers do not offer any real incentives for donating, though, and the ones that do are rarely worth being a member of, so I would avoid the majority that mention anything like that like the plague, though.
If any weebs out there end up on U2, jpopsuki, animebytes, etc., I have such an absurd amount of bonus points, so feel free to PM or емаil me and I'll send you a load of credits to get started without worrying about ratios - plznospam |AT| omarassadi.com
Because in order to become a part of a private tracker, you have to know someone personally who is also a part of a quality private tracker and trusts you enough to give you access without triggering a tree ban from one untrustworthy actor.
I think PTP is somewhat doable, but it will take some years to get there. BTN is impossible unless you know people. Both are overkill for your average media needs and it makes no sense for most people to work that effort. TPB/BTDigg has pretty much everything you could want and usenet still exists without all the ratio/maintenance hassle. The Plex Servers are a good alternative if you want convenience. My feeling is that the tracker community is getting smaller and smaller. The new generation is more in the google-drive abusing camp, although there is some activity still on p2p. Just my 2cents from the small insight that I have.
Yeah, getting an account on those two sites, in particular, without knowing someone would be tough. HDB is the only other one I can really think of like that, though. Most others are relatively straightforward, with passive time often being the only real requirement (e.g., the most sought-after anime tracker is basically "have an account on --insert site-- for 12 months without getting banned").
In those cases, anyone who wants an account is probably best off just having conversations and meeting new people on IRC/forums of some of these trackers. Both of those sites have a lot of active accounts, so with a bit of mingling, you'll befriend someone who can invite, plus you get to meet interesting characters along the way.
But yeah, I don't envy anyone actively trying to get an account on PTP/BTN. It takes a long time to build up the credits to invite someone, and more importantly, given things like tree bans when someone does some serious offense, you don't want to invite just any stranger.
I think that is the aspect I like the least about private trackers; as a whole, the scene can be a bit elitist and unwelcoming towards new users. I get that it is a difficult balance to maintain, though. On much less important forums, the ban evasion problems are already bad enough as it is, so I can't imagine moderating a place like PTP.
It's really not that hard. The hard part is getting invited to the good ones. The lower quality private trackers regulary have public invites though, and a good ratio on them lets you apply to the good private ones.
Once you have an invite, all you need is a computer with space and an internet connection. Download a bunch of popular new or older large freeleech torrents and seed for a month. For best outcomes, pay $10 for a seedbox and let it do it - usually faster bandwidth and less hassle.
Total time investment is 1-4 hours, + $10 for a seedbox if you want to accelerate/simplify things.
I stopped caring for private trackers after the few I was invested in closed down, and it's pretty high maintenance. Nowadays public trackers are pretty much enough for everything I'm looking for.
If I remember rightly, you can use Popcorn Time to stream any torrent simply by dragging and dropping the link into the application. It doesn't depend on where you get the links, even if it does have a default search engine. Maybe I'm misunderstanding.
There is a reason why I said "almost" no need ;-) Of course, you can never be sure about anything, but on the other hand, many of these places have been around for upwards of a decade or longer without any major incidents.
I get paranoia; I am the obsessive and compulsive person who literally feels physically gross and uncomfortable if I am not running FDE, etc. I feel that way because I don't like even the idea that someone could be snooping where I don't want them to be. In that sense, everyone has their own tolerance for risk, preferred levels of privacy, etc. I will never judge anyone for being cautious, but I still think a lot of it is still paranoia.
For the average person who doesn't want to receive another abuse report this month because they don't want their ISP to terminate their service, private trackers do tend to solve that part of the VPN equation, at least.
Awh this brings me back. I was a large contributor to the desktop version of this incarnation of PT, focusing on the ability to play on external applications and Chromecasts and also adding TV Shows. I remember having such a eureka moment when I finally figured out how to get subtitles working when streaming live to a Chromecast
My code still exists in the desktop source[1] but essentially what you need to do is convert an srt to vtt [2] file and start a local http server that will serve the VTT file [3] and point the Chromecast to that
Not Popcorn Time, but I've had great experience using Airflow (airflow.app) for streaming video to Chromecast. Among other things, it handles subtitles quite well.
My impression is that overall HN was generally enthusiastic about cryptocurrencies and the tech powering them until a few recent scandals and scams. To be honest that is just broadly similar to public opinion (or at least, the portion of the public who have heard of cryptocurrencies)
I believe the point is that Popcorn Time is/was a shining example of the decentralized web, to the point that it accomplished some of what “web3” claims it is trying to achieve (for a specific set of use cases), and therefore is “more web3 than crypto”.
Retooling on a “web3 stack” would be pointless, because it is already accomplishing its goal without that stack.
Given some of the people here might run their own servers, the self-hosted alternative is to have something like Sonarr PVR for newsgroups and torrents, alongside a tracker indexer like Jackett, and then Plex for the frontend. In this combination, you "subscribe" to TV shows and select movies on the Sonarr system, and then the downloading is taken care for you even when new episodes arrive. These will then appear on Plex which is refreshed by the pipeline automatically. The system integrates with private trackers and is capable of maintaining your seed-ratio if that's important.
I recently fell into this rabbit-hole while trying to organise my music. For music there is Lidarr, which also ID3 tags your music and reorganizes it into folder structures. This is convenient since organizing anything using Plex is a nightmare.
It would be nice to have popcorn time itself allow the server URL to be edited, so you can either use public servers or your own private one.
I don't really see why the same code can't be used for both - it seems such a waste of effort to rebuild everything twice for the only slightly different usecases.
On my NAS I run a Mullvad/WireGuard container with a kill switch, and Jackett, qBittorrent, etc. share its network stack. Being able to do so with a single Docker Compose option (`network_mode: container:vpn`) is a killer feature.
So I download everything I can't legally access here, and don't have to worry about my IP leaking. Then on my TV I open Kodi and enjoy.
Cheaper than Netflix+Prime+Hulu+Disney+Apple+HBO and pretty low maintenance.
It's pretty simple overall: gluetun is the VPN container, qBittorrent runs inside of it and downloads torrents, Jackett is a torrent search aggregator, Sonarr&Radarr use Jackett+qBittorrent to download movies and TV shows when they release, Bazarr adds subtitles after the fact.
Everything goes into a media directory, which my NAS shares via SMB. Only effort required is paying my VPN subscription and updating the Docker images once in a while.
By kill-switch I mean iptables rules that don't let anything out if there's no VPN interface up. So you don't run the risk of leaking torrent stuff through your plain-text connection if the VPN goes down.
With regards to your music library, how do you listen to your music on the go? I tried the self-hosted setup maybe 8 years ago and couldn't find a reliable way to stream to an iOS device. Is that something you've looked into?
I recently setup Navidrome (https://github.com/navidrome/navidrome) for listening to my music collection, and it’s pretty good. Kodi/Plex work, but their apps are really built for the video use case, music is different enough that I like having the specialized tool.
Navidrome supports the Subsonic API, so there are a number of native clients compatible with it. I chose Substreamer on iOS. It’s not free, but it’s a one-time cost that doesn’t try and drag you into any subscriptions or anything. There are free alternatives like iSub, but I found their UI lacking & decided Substreamer was worth the few bucks.
I use Plex. There is a music focused player called Plexamp which I use on iOS. This allows also offline downloads. IIRC you need the Plex Pro subscription, but that's around $100 one-off payment.
MPD plus MAFA works well with android and it has an IOS version. Personally I only use it around the house but it ought to work fine if you forward the port. Even though phone storage is ridiculously cheap now it is kind of nice not to worry about keeping it in sync in terms of both music and playlists and seamlessly switch from local playback to streaming.
I have exactly this setup except I also run Radarr for movies. And instead of using torrents I subscribe to a Usenet provider, with nzbget/nzbhydra2 handling all of it. I had a lot of failed downloads using torrents, almost zero over the years since switching to Usenet.
+1 for prowlarr. Used to run jackett but I much prefer the automatic updating of *rr services when I change my indexer settings in prowlarr.
Currently running prowlarr with sonarr, radarr, lidarr, bazarr (for subtitle fetching) all from a single docker-compose file, no complaints.
Am i the only one who finds the *arrs to be.. not great? Be it UI, UX, deployability (C# .NET required magic reverse engineered stuff like Mono to work on Linux/*BSD where most people would run them on, and IIRC none of them are on .NET Core yet), error handling. I once spent an afternoon trying to get Jackett go work on FreeNAS due to some library mismatches due to the magic sauce required to run Windows software on FreeBSD. It baffles me 1) that software stack was chosen in the first place 2) it was reused for all other *arrs 3) it still remains in use today 4) there are no alternative tools using a saner tech stack. Not to mention the fact that I don't see the point in having different *arrs for music, films, series, when the functionality is 90% the same and it could just be different toggable tabs... I was so pissed i hesitated trying to rewrite all of it in Django or something.
They run great on arm, too! I got a raspi 4 running everything smooth as butter. The most problematic aspect is interfacing with the usb drives; I eventually had to move them to a powered hub to get the required current.
A lot happened in the years since the official popcorn time disappeared. Nowadays you can use stremio (or kodi) with something like real-debrid to get instant high speed links to most everything on torrent sites.
192 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 227 ms ] threadIn many cases this is a pgp signed xml document, which is bizarre as i have no idea what an average person would make of that.
Check out this website that does the IP querying part for you:
https://iknowwhatyoudownload.com/
"Autonomous (self-hosted) BitTorrent DHT search engine suite."
https://github.com/boramalper/magnetico
Anyway, that repo is archived now. But I did find a more modern iteration of the idea: https://github.com/dennis-tra/nebula-crawler
rotating IP addresses made the warnings pointless.
If you put a trivially guessable password are you still liable? Are there still exploits for wireless encryption?
Kind of crazy that there isn't a huge burden of proof required by the accuser.
For example, I asked what happens if you ignore Comcast's Bittorrent warning and someone else on HN said they do indeed terminate your account.
Maybe playing dumb doesn't get you off the hook. Or it reveals you as a dumb helpless open relay. The most I can imagine Comcast doing if you responded to them would be sending over a technician to reset your router password.
Wait, what?? If I want to cancel comcast I should just install bittorrent , and I don't have to negotiate the hassle of cancelling over the phone?
Sometimes the fee can be the remaining service fee - so for a $150/month 24 month plan that's a whopping $3600!
Your ISP knows which IP you have and when.
RIPE makes it basically mandatory to use dhcp in order to recive ip space, even though in most places it is completely useless since 2010, you save maybe 5% because literally nobody turns off their routers
also of course because there is no ip space now, admins put small lease times like 1 hour, or sometimes even less, so you have constant influx of logs and updates
i can imagine those scripts are buggy, misread timestamps and etc
This is for all sorts of legal requests they might get.
in practice it maybe a good thing that mistakes are made
I don't even care that much about torrents or geo-locked stuff, I just trust them more than my ISP.
Setup was incredibly smooth and straightforward.
IIRC Mozilla also re-sells Mullvad's service under a name like (IIRC) FireFox VPN, which, last I'd heard, was still the only way to directly fund development of the browser.
Which is a nice thing but you can't forward ports, and forwarding ports is a big benefit Mullvad has especially for torrents.
https://github.com/trailofbits/algo
> As we said earlier, such campaigns don’t have a terribly strong history of success in the UK. The courts have also previously warned such firms to be very careful about the use of threatening language, given that those being targeted are not yet proven to be guilty of what they are accused.
> Voltage seems to require the letter recipients’ to convince the firm that they weren’t responsible, but in law, the burden of proof is normally on Voltage to prove that the recipient is the one responsible and not the other way around.
Also see:
* https://torrentfreak.com/piracy-its-a-crime-uk-govt-ignored-...
* https://www.lewissilkin.com/en/insights/shipwrecking-online-...
* https://www.pinsentmasons.com/out-law/news/new-law-to-deter-...
Then you have stuff like this: https://www.digitaltveurope.com/2020/09/17/uk-police-take-un...
The fact that prosecuting authorities tend to go after distributors rather than consumers is simply due to a value-for-money calculation. There is no formal or informal decriminalisation of consumer piracy, if they could find a cheap way to go after everyone they would - and they likely will, sooner or later.
surely you can find stronger evidence than the police taking the unprecedented step of contacting - contacting, not arresting, or fining - a few tens of thousand in one region of the country?
THIS HAS BEEN BLOCKED BY THE HIGH COURT
or some shit. and then at that point you find the other domain that isn't, or just type in the IP. It's all very shallow
Also, people using stuff like IPTV and the likes are routinely cracked down on, with jail sentences and all.
I honestly have no idea how you could come up with a sentence like that. The UK is among the most piracy-restricting countries in Western Europe, because of the massive influence of a certain media-baron over the political landscape among other things.
10 years ago is a long time
So you gotta make sure you use a VPN that doesn’t out you to the authorities, and, can’t be made to do so.
(Side note: US seems like such a dystopian place nowaday... wasn't it "land of the free" or smth. And I'm comparing to like developed countries in Western Europe and Asia, not freakin Russia or Afganistan!)
You're just repeating the scaremongering that VPN providers use to sell their insecure s, please stop!
You want privacy mainly and that's orthogonal to security.
If privacy is not enough and you need secrecy... well, just use your botnet as a VPN and from that get to Tor! (You do own a botnet in this case, that's what you need the secrecy for :P ...otherwise you'd have specialists hired for this at your disposal, or you'd be the specialist providing it to someone else).
VPN doesn't hide your ip, it only makes it harder to look up. I don't think VPN protects you like people think they do.
I don't say you shouldn't use one, but I will say that the most popular VPN providers are probably already backdoored by the US government.
I have this in combination with *arr stack, and even the non technical family members use it without any issues.
Now, I've upgraded to a nice 55" OLED, and I can't move away from Blu-ray rips. The sheer size of these rips (~25-70 GB) will burn through my data plan in an hour flat, not to mention that even with a 4G connection, it might be a little hard for a sporadically-seeded torrent to keep up with the bit-rate required for the film to play without buffering.
Even so, great effort bringing it back again; I had great fun with it when I did use it.
I think it is worth looking into private trackers for anyone a bit more interested in media than the average person.
And don't get me wrong, I don't mean to sound like some insane person. I completely recognize that not everyone wants to/can dedicate the time, there is a barrier to entry, and it may simply not be how m...They have a ton of lossless audio, and you generally have choice in terms of which version of something you would like (e.g., an older release, if you don't like the remasters [1], or want specific deluxe/international editions -- Japanese CDs often come with bonus tracks). They also have very helpful curated collections of similar music and such.
Plus, having a RED account tends to help serve as a way to get to other trackers (of course, you should genuinely use the site rather than collecting accounts, etc.). RED is also unique compared to a lot of other decent trackers in that they don't require you to be invited by someone else or already have an account on another site; you can sign up by doing a short interview on their IRC [2]. Worth noting, though, that it'd be best to do it on a Friday night or something when you'd have time to waste; all of these sites are run by volunteers, so it can be a few hours of idling before you'd actually get a chance to sign-up.
For East Asian music, like K-pop, J-pop, J-rock, etc., Jpopsuki has the most extensive collection. SugoiMusic is another one, but I haven't checked it out very much.
And although it is primarily an eBook site, MyAnonamouse ("MAM") has a fair bit of sheet music, plus they also do IRC sign-ups.
Other than that, though, Orpheus ("OPS") is another decent music tracker. But realistically, RED tends to have much more available. However, I do think it's a cool site and I do respect how transparent they are, with even the site being open-source [3].
---
[1]: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war> [2]: <https://interviewfor.red/en/index.html> [3]: <https://github.com/OPSnet>
I wouldn't be surprised if someone else offered an invite. I am sure a fair number of HN people have accounts, but since RED has a relatively easy official route, I would go with that option if it's something you can find the time for; it'd suck to potentially build up an active account somewhere just to end up banned because your inviter also happened to invite someone else who did someone silly, like sell their account, etc.
There are lots of little random smaller trackers that have open signups, which you can usually find on Reddit, as roboyoshi mentioned. They'll vary in quality a lot, though, but occasionally there is something interesting there.
Other than open signups and person-to-person invites, most trackers have some sort of official invitation route. Typically this is just having an account on --insert partnered site-- for X months, don't get banned, have a minimum amount of data downloaded/uploaded.
In addition, as far as useful trackers go that have regular pathways without knowing anyone or having any account on any site, the ones below are the only ones I am super aware of.
IRC invites:
Regular open signups: Relatively lax invite rules: Donation signups: 99.9% of trackers do not offer any real incentives for donating, though, and the ones that do are rarely worth being a member of, so I would avoid the majority that mention anything like that like the plague, though.If any weebs out there end up on U2, jpopsuki, animebytes, etc., I have such an absurd amount of bonus points, so feel free to PM or емаil me and I'll send you a load of credits to get started without worrying about ratios - plznospam |AT| omarassadi.com
There’s a reason those accounts sell for upwards of $500
Best bet for most people is finding a plex server with access to these sites.
In those cases, anyone who wants an account is probably best off just having conversations and meeting new people on IRC/forums of some of these trackers. Both of those sites have a lot of active accounts, so with a bit of mingling, you'll befriend someone who can invite, plus you get to meet interesting characters along the way.
But yeah, I don't envy anyone actively trying to get an account on PTP/BTN. It takes a long time to build up the credits to invite someone, and more importantly, given things like tree bans when someone does some serious offense, you don't want to invite just any stranger.
I think that is the aspect I like the least about private trackers; as a whole, the scene can be a bit elitist and unwelcoming towards new users. I get that it is a difficult balance to maintain, though. On much less important forums, the ban evasion problems are already bad enough as it is, so I can't imagine moderating a place like PTP.
Once you have an invite, all you need is a computer with space and an internet connection. Download a bunch of popular new or older large freeleech torrents and seed for a month. For best outcomes, pay $10 for a seedbox and let it do it - usually faster bandwidth and less hassle.
Total time investment is 1-4 hours, + $10 for a seedbox if you want to accelerate/simplify things.
How do you know it's not a law enforcement honeypot?
I get paranoia; I am the obsessive and compulsive person who literally feels physically gross and uncomfortable if I am not running FDE, etc. I feel that way because I don't like even the idea that someone could be snooping where I don't want them to be. In that sense, everyone has their own tolerance for risk, preferred levels of privacy, etc. I will never judge anyone for being cautious, but I still think a lot of it is still paranoia.
For the average person who doesn't want to receive another abuse report this month because they don't want their ISP to terminate their service, private trackers do tend to solve that part of the VPN equation, at least.
You most definitely need a vpn at least if you are here in Germany.
Teach me your ways, sensei.
[1] - https://github.com/popcorn-official/popcorn-desktop/blob/dev...
[2] - https://github.com/popcorn-official/popcorn-desktop/blob/dev...
[3] - https://github.com/popcorn-official/popcorn-desktop/blob/dev...
Also, it can be definitely done with ffmpeg.
It's a completely legal app, that's still updated. But it becomes just like popcorn time after you download a few plugins.
And those plugins are downloadable from within the app itself.
Last year's endless deluge of scams and rugpulls will probably be cryptocurrency's Eternal September.
I believe the point is that Popcorn Time is/was a shining example of the decentralized web, to the point that it accomplished some of what “web3” claims it is trying to achieve (for a specific set of use cases), and therefore is “more web3 than crypto”.
Retooling on a “web3 stack” would be pointless, because it is already accomplishing its goal without that stack.
I recently fell into this rabbit-hole while trying to organise my music. For music there is Lidarr, which also ID3 tags your music and reorganizes it into folder structures. This is convenient since organizing anything using Plex is a nightmare.
I don't really see why the same code can't be used for both - it seems such a waste of effort to rebuild everything twice for the only slightly different usecases.
You can edit it. The option is in the settings.
It feels great when it all works together.
So I download everything I can't legally access here, and don't have to worry about my IP leaking. Then on my TV I open Kodi and enjoy.
Cheaper than Netflix+Prime+Hulu+Disney+Apple+HBO and pretty low maintenance.
https://gist.github.com/1player/dbdafdd197e1623f5831108fc0cc...
It's pretty simple overall: gluetun is the VPN container, qBittorrent runs inside of it and downloads torrents, Jackett is a torrent search aggregator, Sonarr&Radarr use Jackett+qBittorrent to download movies and TV shows when they release, Bazarr adds subtitles after the fact.
Everything goes into a media directory, which my NAS shares via SMB. Only effort required is paying my VPN subscription and updating the Docker images once in a while.
I used to use https://github.com/dperson/openvpn-client which has a killswitch option as well.
By kill-switch I mean iptables rules that don't let anything out if there's no VPN interface up. So you don't run the risk of leaking torrent stuff through your plain-text connection if the VPN goes down.
Navidrome supports the Subsonic API, so there are a number of native clients compatible with it. I chose Substreamer on iOS. It’s not free, but it’s a one-time cost that doesn’t try and drag you into any subscriptions or anything. There are free alternatives like iSub, but I found their UI lacking & decided Substreamer was worth the few bucks.
I use the android version and it is great.
I've personally had no issues with the *arr's though, running on both Windows and Linux
I have been using it for years, and I'm pretty pleased with it.
Has anyone reviewed the source for possible unintended or intended side effects?