Now just watching uTorrent slowly download them all. Hopefully my VPN keeps the eyes off of me…

1. qbittorrent is better in many many ways compared to utorrent and hasa very similar interface. qbit is open-source, utorrent isn't. qbit doesn't have ads or malware, utorrent has or has had both many times. qbit allows you to bind to a specific network interface (e.g. you VPN connection instead of regular ethernet one) which offer better protection if your vpn drops. feel free to do your own research here or elsewhere on the web if you doubt any of my points.
2. if your VPN is a free one, that wont protect you at all. those guys will squeal and turn over server logs with ip address at the drop of a hat. Even a lot of paid-for VPNs are shitty lying bastards. So picking a good vpn can be challenging there are probably posts here covering recommendations but generally you want ones that have either been taken to court and were unable to provide logs OR ones that have been audited by a respected 3rd party firm that can confirm they are truly a "no log VPN". I can recommend PIA, NordVPN, and Mullvad as some ones that are highly unlikely to turn over any logs (bc they don't have them) but there are others and doing your own research isn't a bad thing. The site torrentfreak.com does an article once a year or so that covers a few of the more popular VPNs and different aspects of thier privacy but they don't declare a "best vpn", just rate them on varius privacy and security aspects.
3. Even if you have a good VPN, check that you aren't leaking your real IP via dns lookups: ipleak.net or dnsleaktest.com
4. Check that you torrent client set up not to leak: search for 'torrent ip leak test' and do one of the torrent ip leak tests. ipleak.net hasone of these if you scroll down on the page; look for "Torrent Address detection" and click "Activate" button and it will give a magnet link to start test with
5. additionally, you can set up a "vpn killswitch" to prevent traffic from going over regular internet if you vpn drops. If you using qbit, this probably isn't strictly required but many people here like to have this as an additional safety. i can't really provide details on this bc the process varies widely. A lot of VPN client apps have this feature built in. But even if they don't, you can set something like this up in most firewalls but exact steps will vary depending on OS (Windows/Linux/Mac) and which firewall you are using (or I guess whether or not you even have one installed).

FOr anyone else reading this while slightly inebrinated, note: AR = AlphaRadio (a private tracker). Nothing happening to the Arr tools.

Everyone else, pardon my and my whiskey.

“Argentinians mostly pirate content”

Arrrrgentinians?

me too but im on linux so i can do firejail lutris (or firejail steam or whatever for legit stuff) and run that shit in a security container.

fucking nice.. is that on their public eu domain? having trouble finding it but probably looking in the wrong places

anyone feels like pm my dumbass the loc or give a hint, i'd appreciate it

edit: also tried dht (qbittorrent, solidtorrents) but no joy there either

edit2: to fellow drunken fools:

is that on their public eu domain?

the ansqer is 'yes'. See: /public/Random/torrents

edit3: had a few drinks and forgot to add the one i got from eu domain... brought qbit up again after i sobered up and it still had the dht search open and so I figured why not and retried it... and now it was showing up there too (via bt4g dot org). go figure

now i just need to free up enough space to acually dl it (it has things packaged as multiple ~8GB .7z files, so anybody who was hping to pick-and-choose based on what you want subs for, sorry to disappoint; gotta dl whole thing and extract to do that ... so really you need quite a bit more than 90gb if you account for the archives + whatever size of extracted files is)

IMO Piracy is completely justified regardless...

But that said, wouldn't it be the content owner rather than Sony (who is a third party platform) who is to blame for justifying it in this particular case? (based on the iamge here which seems to imply that the content owner is the one pulling the content rather than sony itself).

Dn't get me wrong, not saying the situation is good. or that Sony is a good company. Only that they don't appear to be the ones instigating this move unless I am missing some other info. FWIW, I lost all hope in the idea of a pro-consumer way of doign streaming content ages ago and have been flying the black flag for years so I guess this just doesnt seem like aynthing new to me. I willntt even consiedr paying for netflix, prime, disnet, hbo, hulu, or whateve else. Maybe if they stop being greedy fuckwits and come up with a something fair for consumers I'll consider but until then, fuck the loto f them.

edit: fixed a tpyo

TBF, he said "an" leader not "the" leader

well, also it was not long ago with a short-time frame...

If it all turns out to be a prank / main account was hacked / etc, great .. but could see someone who expects a lot of negative feedback or even somene who have a lot going on offline not really bothering to look at commentss

plus we all knw silent legal / state presure is a thing.. rarbg, kat, and many others had people willing to take over but ithink they got legal pressure to stop.

my plan is just have a few glasses of boubron and relax. we are hydra and all that lol

Maybe? Been awhile since I've messed with my setup and while I don't like slow, I prioritize security over speed so my settings might not be what you want anyway. so I'd recommend just looking up a guide; it is an extremely popular torrent client and there should be tons of guides out there. Or if you not sure which guide to use, just create a new post here - lot of people use it and probably have set it up from scratch more recently than me. I know some people say to open ports on the router but i've never liked the idea (I view it as less secure) but some people swear by it.

I can recommend that you test the following:

• make sure you are using a VPN server that isn't too far away. If you were in say San Franciso and selecting a VPN in New York or Europe, your speeds will be less than if you selected one in Seattle or Los Angeles
• do a speed test off your vpn vs on it (e.g. speedtest.net). ALL VPNs will be slower than regular non-VPN due to the encryption and having less hops. But you can see how much difference it makes when you switch servers and if you have more than one VPN service, then you can find servers in the same city for both and compare which service is faster.
• If your VPN has a modified WireGuard service (PIA and Nord both do IIRC), then that should be faster. I say modified bc the unaltered Wireguard spec has a privacy red flags so if you have a VPN service that offers it, make sure you read up or at least skim some reviews and whatnot to make sure they handled those issues that in a way that doesn't leave your identity exposed. PIA and Nord both did that (I think Nord's was called something else not actually WG but idr).
• make sure you do your testing on popular torrents - but if it is anything you could get in trouble for, then you should do all the leak tests I mentioned above FIRST. Only mentioning, bc I had a friend that was testing his shit on some obscure thing he was looking for and saying it was slow but when i helped him configure his settings, we tested with something popular (i think whatever the current hottest show was) and he was actually getting a lot better speeds than he thought.

edit: just searched on dbzer0 and wasn't seeing much on this. I did find a reddit post and a makeuseof guide that both mention stuff about improving speed. For the reddit one, I think the patched exe they are talking about is likely a dev build and since that was from a few years ago, whatever fix is probably already merged in and no longer needed. will compare the other settings vs mine and post back

edit2: are are the differences i have from the guide:

• makeuseof has (Tools > Options > Speed) "Upload and download rate limits are set to infinity by default, and it's recommended not to tinker with these limits. Most often, users limit the upload rate to save bandwidth and get faster download rates, but the torrent client's choking mechanism compromises download rates when upload rates are limited, making the download process much slower." - on mine, i had infinite down and was restricting upload. But I kind of think MUO's advice is better and increased my upload amount. Mine was 100 KiB/s, now 1000 KiB/s. Only reason I don't put it on infinite is I am on a capped internet and tend to leave my downloaded stuff around for sharing so I want to avoid uploads consuming too much of my monthly bandwidth and I don't leave my client running 24/7 so not sure how reliable bandwidth settings are.
• makeuseof has (Tools > Options > BitTorrent) "In the dropdown menu next to Encryption mode, select Allow Encryption. " but on mine I have it as "required Encryption" - probably this would make mine slower than the suggestion tho
• Tools > Options > Connection settings I have "TCP and uTP" (same as MUO) but that old reddit thread was recommending only TCP.
• MUO has (Tools > Options > Connections) : "Ensure the box beside Use UPnP / NAT-PMP port forwarding from my router is checked. " - as I mentioned, I don't do port forwarding so I leave mine unchecked but there is probably a speed hit for this.
• There was also something about "Don't download multiple torrent files at the same time. This will then allocate all available bandwidth to downloading a single file, resulting in a faster download. " - I generally ignore this but there IS some truth to it. I have had hundreds of things queued before and gotten awful speeds. I recommend just not going overboard with how many you are running at once.
• Tools > Options > Advanced: Find the network interface and select the one that corresponds with your VPN. If you aren't sure, for most Windows users you can connect to VPN then find from command line using ipconfig /all and look for something that is NOT disconnected and probably has TAP-Windows Adapter Vx if using OpenVPN-Protocol (most VPNs) but might be different for wireguard. For Linux users, to show network interfaces run ip -4 -o -br addr - usually in linux ethernet interfaces start with an E and wifi interfaces start with a W, lo is localhost, and 99% of the time the vpn interface will be named tun0 if you are using a VPN with OpenVPN-protocol (most of them) but might be something different for wireguard or if you have customized things.

sites that allow users to download the audio from YouTube URLs

you guys use sites for that? I just use vpn + yt-dlp

I hate copyright. even if they didn't get rido f it compeletey then would be awesome if theysd at least massively scale back the amount of time they can have a copyright liek to maybe 5-10 years max and make them non-transferable (no fucking buying companies jsut to get their copyrights)

From a less selfish perspective, if it exists in decent quality on public trackers, I’d rather contribute to keeping it alive there, where more people can access it.

This is the way. If more people did this then arguably no one would even need private trackers...

im not really into crypto ... Monero / XMR is a privacy coin

thanks... same here. so much so that until you phrased it exactly that way, I hadn't even put together that "Monero" == "XMR" and thought people were talking about 2 separate coins 😅

frugal usenet and Blocknews actually have a cash payment option on the website at checkout, if you are worried maybe ask them the track record for receiving it.

good to know, thanks

If you are doing VPN to, Mullvad takes cash but you do not need vpn for usenet.

already have a paid, no-log VPN that I torrent with. Mullvad looks awesome but probably won't check it out til mine expires. my current one says my payment and connection info is separate. no way to verify that but at this point, i've been with them over a year and if they were lying, i would be well and truly fucked anyway lol

Most quality VPNs will have a killswitch built in and enabled automatically, with nothing to setup, but they are notoriously unreliable and can fail.

Fair. I do all of my setup manually these days (networkmanager on linux, openvpn client app on the rare occasion i'm on windows, not a mac guy so no clue there). I implement one using a firewall but that is more complex than most people want. Still, as long as it is done in addition to the qbit network interface bind, then it's not bad to also set a VPN killswitch.

The key term people want to search for is “bind.” You want to bind qBit to your VPN.

Agreed. This is what I was referencing in the first bullet about network interface

I’m not saying you shouldn’t recommend these, or that people shouldn’t use them, but IMO, people should at least be warned to search for the following, so they can make an informed decision:

1 - Fair points. TBH, I had my doubts about that initially but have been with them the whole time (before and after kape acquisition). FWIW, I have not seen any change in PIA service quality. In fact, I have seen them add Wireguard support and release all of the code as FOSS (see here). I agree that Kape did some sketchy shit in the past but from what I have seen over the last several years, they are not doing anything sketchy in the VPN/technology sector part of their business (aside from maybe advertising which I consider to be separate). I don't even really think about Kape anymore tbh. If they were ratting me out, I would have had enough dcma notices to start a bonfire with by now.

2 - I had not been aware of that. I haven't used them in a few years. Any sort of data breach definitely sounds bad but since I haven't reviewed the details, I don't want to jump to any conclusions either.

I like Mullvad from a tech and privacy standpoint but IMO they are a bit on the expensive side compared to some of the other options. Nord and PIA you can usually get multiyear deals on periodically and that can drastically lower the overall cost ($80 for a 3yr VPN plan = monthly about 2.22 USD/2.04 euro vs 5 euro/month for mullvad). Not saying price is the be-all-end-all or that Mullvad is unaffordable but it is going to be a consideration for many, especially people that already don't want to shell out for a paid VPN over the free ones. With that in mind, I think there is still value in PIA (and possibly Nord - I haven't reviewed the details of what exactly was breached - e.g. vpn service vs blog server vs etc, what data was exposed, what steps they took to address, etc). There are many other no-logs vpn options besides Nord, PIA, and Mullvad out there, I just don't have any personal experience with them.

authoritarian country

How authoritarian we talking? China?

Very good comment. That said, for this part

Figure out how to encode and compress video so that it still looks good, you can still find some old scene rule nfo’s to have a better idea on what settings to use to encode. I use a gui called qvs to do encodes, theres also another one called staxrip, you can also learn how to just use command line arguments and just use x264 or x265 from the command line.

I'm wondering if anyone might have any ffmpeg one-liners that are pretty decent for converting larger mkv's from makemkv or similar down to a more reasonable size for archiving. Basically looking to get something similar to the old ION10 / ION265 encodes from RARBG if that helps (720p or 1080p w 8- to 10-bit depth using x264 or x265).

Even better if someone's got a link to a github or similar page with a few different tried and tested presets to study.

not OP but nice guide. thanks man

Ive only done a handful in linux. mostly i use repacked gog stuff cuz its easy and i don't have to deal with cracks. so easy that sometimes i end up legit buying to support the devs if the game is good.

lot of the time i also use firejail. haven't run into many issues with it so far (i think there was one game where i disallowed net access but it wouldnt run until i granted it) and most stuff works same as without.

lol good points and so true. reading this just makes me think of the old quote If the penalty for a crime is a fine, that law only exists for the lower classes. When I think of record labels and big film companies, let's just say that the first thing that comes to mind isn't starving artists but coastal elitists getting pissy bc they can't charge people even more.

Looks like I was wrong...

this is from an older thread before the final closing announcement:

24 February 2024

...

Yesterday, we received unfortunate news from one of our trusted admins stating that the owner of the site intends to shut it down due to insufficient revenue.

...

Kinda remember there being similar discussions about people should not use TOR for P2P and for similar reasons.

Anyway, I thought I read something awhile back that P2P and torrenting were eyeing I2P for future anonymousness. Is thhat still a work in progress or am I remembering wrong?

did they censor new versions of the show or something?

currently at 1.2k voting to keep protesting and 2.2k voting to give up.

guess the ones left aren't savvy enough to understand "federation"... then again, it wouldn't surprise me at all if spez had employees with bots dedicated to spamming any protest-related polls either.

As I was reading the OP, I was wondering if there would be other comments along the lines of this. I love all the work Valve has done getting stuff to work on Linux and pretty much don't pirate games bc I want to support them with my wallet whenever I can afford to.

Partly, this is me not wanting to deal with malware. But honestly, I'm well versed enough with security containers and virtual machinesthat I feel like if I put in a little effort, I could probably even run a game that I know has malware in a sandbox without much risk. So I think the fact that they put in an effort to support my platform is the much bigger factor. That said, I also really love GOG's lack of DRM and downloadable offline installers. So if it's something I'm confident will work outside of steam, I will buy there instead. But everything else, I get on steam.

Funny thing is... you can still find it with duckduckgo, search.brave.com, qwant, searx..

plus even on google, you can click any of the first several links - including wikipedia - and the link is easy to find. sadly 'reddit pirate bay' is easy to find TPB link from but 'lemmy pirate bay' doesn't have TPB link without more searching (and even more sad, the first result isn't dbzer0 but a community on the ml instance)

Thanks, I hate goodreads and hadn't known about BookWyrm ... which is ironic since I am currently reading a series that has a dragon-creature that is literally called a book wyrm (Divine Apostasy)

Most of the alternates that I looked at, tend not to have basic info (obv it should have author/title but also i like it to have series info like book # in a series, when it was released, and category/theme tags) or else the sites would have a lot less book coverage (especially in niche genres) so I always seem to end up back on GR which I hate. Will see if some of the bigger BW instances do a better job

I think legally, rights holders have always been asshats. I remember something called a V-C-R and when media was on magnetic tapes... even back then, there were warnings at the beginning of films. That was back before there were stream content and you had to physical drive or walk to buildings that contained the videos and pay for a rental... and a lot of poeple would make their own copies.

I think the big things that have changed is:

• The DMCA (and I mean the bill, not the notices people get bc of the bill) made "fair use" - like recording a personal copy of a rented or broadcasted film/music/etc - a lot tricker, legally speaking
• People moving to consume most of their "standard" tv content from "no"-cost (technically paid for by non-skippable non-targeted ads) public broadcast over radio waves and picked up via tv antenae just like radio stations but with video to cable-tv networks that were tightly controlled by greedy bastards. (hint: all of those greedy cable-tv bastards are mostly all the same guys trying to control streaming services today, they just moved from cable to internet).
• The expanse of the itnernet + increase of world population / percent of the world thats connected means that one copy is spread a LOT more than when a guy made a copy from a video rental store
• Most companies have gotten more aggressive about marking their territory and pissing legal warnings all over there content than in the old days

That said, I hate big companies and even if it is morally untenable, I will still continue to pirate, bc fuck em. If I could download a car or a barrel of whiskey, I'd pirate those too. maybe someday we'll get star trek-style replicators and i can finally download a car.

Not a mod so you might not care about my opinion but...

I don't hate lemmy and hope it will continue to improve but at the same time, I still feel the UI is a bit minimal and lacking on a lot of features right now (TBF probably some of it is me getting used to it still). Some of this works in its favor tho.. like if I created a new account on reddit, I'd have to deal with all the karma bs again before I could even post to most subs. Here, this is my first post on this instance, and no problems AFAICT... which is really fucking awesome IMO. Other things, like how to show all communities sorted by # of subscribers or how I search for a specific phrase in a specific community (like "rootless docker" + "qbittorrent" in c/Piracy for instance), I am still a bit unclear if there is even a way to do that.

I don't see anything overtaking lemmy immediately. kbin is the next closest one I can think of that is open-source + federated and not controlled by a company and I think it is even less smooth than lemmy right now. There's mastodon but IMO that is more twitter alternative than reddit alternative.

But I guess if something came along that checked all the right boxes (foss, federated, markdown, long-form comments, more features, etc) then I would at least be open to considering it.

sorry, i'm a total noob at this stuff. so from here https://agoradesk.com/how-to-buy-or-sell-cryptocurrency-anonymously-with-cash

does that mean i can only trade other crypto for it? like i have a credit card and cash but no crypto, no wallet, etc currently...

so still kind of confused. i know it says they take paypal, zello, etc but assume that all of those would leave a papertrail.

Pay by cash

so that only leaves cash and it sounds like you are supposed to put actual paper cash monies in an envelope and physically mail it out? doesn't that mean if you mailed like $50 or $100 or whatever, that it could get lost in the mail and you're just fucked and have to eat it?

Also, doesn't post office requiere a return address? i thought they refuse to mail without that cz of bombs/hatemail/etc? Am I wrong about that?

can confirm

have tried kbin... everything he said about instances being slow and buggy applies doubly at kbin (dot social). some of the busier lemmy instances like this one have it a little but I was get server 503 / unavailable errors very frequently with kbin.

I hope both fix the issues and we can all enjoy better stability on better infra all around the fediverse.. but until then IMO lemmy is slightly more stable.

not really sure what you mean (maybe i didnt notice or it was before i started using it?) but to each their own I guess?

yeah but those usaully are bypassable if you have vpns or custom dns or whatnot. even for neewbies that just use vpn client sw.

if they force it at browser level, in theoty, that would even override vpn / custom dns unless you have a modifyied browser that removes the block or otherwise doesnot comply. which most novices wont know how ot do.

another good reason to use ff / foss browsers if you aren'y already. kinbda hope they do it, just to drive up marketshare of foss bowsers lol

thanks mate. much appreciated

I've heard a few people mention bubblewrap but never really looked into it. might have to read up and give it a try. do you think it's pretty easy to pick up coming from firejail?

Interesting. I'm still on a VM setup and still need to migrate everything over to using docker (or podman). I had made an attempt a year or so back but wanted to run all my containers without root and whatever one I was using as a template at the time had been expecting the opposite. Then life caught up with me and I ran out of time on that project

But good to know about Gluetun. Maybe I'll revisit the migration to containers at some point if I get the free time.

i think endeavour lets yuo do FDE from the gui installer also but yeah fedora is fucking great

Raubmordkopie

Robbery murder copy? (at least thats' what google is telling me 'mord' means?)

That's cool and I genuinely wish them luck with it, as it will probably help lemmy adoption... but for me, I'm pretty partial to staying in the browser. Have a shit load of addons I like, including userscripts. plus, I run librewolf with a firejail container and I'm too lazy to write a new profile for whatever app just for one site lol. Still I hope after the infra issues get some love that the site UI won't end up lagging too far behind the apps

Sorry, should have clarified... I meant on desktop site via browser.

edit: was thinking i couldn't mention show nsmes but after re-reading rule 3, i think it meant more for linking to specific things or requesting links. especially after seeing posts like this I think merely mentioning show names might not be as big a deal as I originally thought.

Mods, if i am mistaken, please delete this comment or message me and tell me how i fucked up

shows I was referring to in main post were Forgeed in Fire and Tuff as Nails. TAN is the one I currently having issues with.