Several Piracy-Related Arrests Spark Fears of High-Level Crackdown * TorrentFreak

misk@sopuli.xyz to Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ@lemmy.dbzer0.com – 213 points –
torrentfreak.com
33

I’m not subscribing to streaming services.

I’ll ditch the idea of watching TV the moment my arr setup stop working.

I used to subscribe to streaming services but then they took all their content that I used to watch off - either to move to another streaming service or just "gone forever".

If they don't want the money I was giving them, why do they give a fuck if I pirate it? I tried to do things right and they told me they didn't want my money.

Exactly, I cancelled my Netflix subscription when I knew you can watch season 1 and 2 of a show but you must subscribe to another service to watch 3 and 4.

It was the dealbreaker to me.

Petty infighting between scene groups needs to stop. Fall together or fall apart.

Did we read the same article? This mentions nothing about infighting between groups.

So, a couple people went down because OpSec was broken by rival scene groups outing people’s identities; from there things started to crumble more and more.

Lesson: either get a seedbox, get a VPN in Amsterdam, or live in South/South-east Asia.

Seedbox

I've admitted kinda taken a backseat to piracy for the last while, and I've seen this term come up a ton. Is it just a remote server that you download all of your shit on?

Yup. If you care about ratio then it has some proper speeds and ssd. But most people use it as a hop. I stopped and switched the arr to a docker network that only uses proton vpn. Best decision ever.

Precisely but it doesn't have to be remote. Some people self host locally but that requires a fast connection and a vpn. Most remote seedbox's are basically virtual private servers. They usually have apps like Jellyfin or plex for streaming all your content locally. Which is what I do and it's very automated and convenient. You can also use your seedbox as a vpn tunnel. If you're a member or interested in private torrent trackers, a seedbox is recommended to help keep your ratio high.

Is this actually considered seedboxing? I always thought it was a remote thing for an extra layer of privacy

They can be. It's really down to user preference. You can setup your own server locally with containers and vpn Killswitches, or you can pay monthly on some server space remotely. A seedbox is basically just a server for seeding/torrenting.

I believe this is more about scene release groups. People that rip bluerays or retrieve copies of cinema movies

They should be using seedboxes to seed, and should be using VPNs in other countries to upload their content. Worst case scenario, torrenting completely moves to i2p, eradicating the problems being faced by these groups today

Is there a way to get and pay seedboxes anonymously? Otherwise the feds could "just" get your information from them. Like with every VPN service you got to trust the the service and their confidentiality (not keeping logs etc) I guess?

Even if you do pay them anonymously, your IP will be recorded when you access/download from them. Case in point: Mullvad was forced to shut off port-forwarding because of torrent traffic on their network. Mullvad allows you to pay with Monero.

Don't do it for the privacy, do it because having the server in a different country like the Netherlands makes it easier to pirate. For all they know, you're just accessing random IPs in the Netherlands and all they see is HTTPS traffic.

IP alone isnt enough to convict someone in the states though. Since it only points to the local network and not the person on the network it could be anyone on that network. It was the issue the RIAA ran into when trying to take music downloaders to court.

That's the thing, you'd have to connect to the seedbox via VPN anyways.

I'm using usenet anyway, always have, always will ;⁠-⁠)

How do you find good things on Usenet now? So much of it is uploaded encrypted

That's what the indexer is for, no? Gives you the keys and a map.

Why Amsterdam specifically?

Plenty of data centres and the Netherlands are excellent in terms of government policy towards "sharing"

Good to know. I've been concerned about finding host nations that let us do what we want.

"The most recent reported conviction saw a 37-year-old man receive a 60-day suspended prison sentence in September for pirating more than a thousand works through local BitTorrent trackers." Woaaah now, calm down there, killas. A hand can only be slapped so hard. Why even bother convicting at this point if one can pirate thousands of things and get a sentence like this? Surely they must realize how little of a deal it really is?

It is an action to emphasize the piracy is illegal and they will hunt you down for it using state resources, not matter the sentence.

This guy will be on their shitlist at least for a decade now. The next sentence would be times worse. But the best effect of this is that you sentence one guy, no matter how light the sentence is, then 1000 teens are afraid of ever thinking of piracy. Surely some of them will say "lol look at the joke of a sentence, so keep on pirating" but a lot won't.

What's better yet, a lot of those afraid teenagers will internalize piracy as both illegal and immoral.

Were these people that were arrested not using a VPN?

yea, never understood this.

i use a very thoroughly tested no-logs vpn for everyday casual stuff but this isn't the first time i've seen people doing encodes get caught. i'm not a genius but i know how to read shit online, ask questions, and test my setup... you'd think people doing sketchier stuff would lean into the same a bit harder than I have.