They’re just trying not to lose their internet service provider probably. ISP’s are even starting to threaten their residential and commercial customers alike because they can’t afford the lawsuits so network tech’s are starting to turn in individuals about compliance and such.
In that case they should have been promoting VPN usage ‘’(^-^)
Yeah, this is just a student-run association running it, providing connection from university’s upstream ISP which apparently is easy to upset.
I posted this because I actually find this nice, as it doesn’t fully block torrents, but just specific ones, and they also make that clear. They could just block torrents and stay safe.Func fact: Some dorm rooms apparently actually have 2.5Gbit. I’ve seen the speed test. Of course, you’ll need a compatible network card. Most have “only” a gigabit.
Not a new thing either z this has happened for decades now
Use a VPN, people! The “we’re watching you” is not a joke, LOADS of parties are watching your every action, actually
Sounds like a bunch of us should put up seeds with titles like “This (1947) It’s A Wonderful Life (Public Domain) is better than (2025) Fantastic Four”
I like your style.
More reason to use a VPN.
They’re not trying to actually stop you; they’re trying to keep the lawyers at bay.
Or i2p.
And make sure it isn’t PIA… I am using it and i wasnt aware it was zionist controlled!
Mossad says hello. So does Palantir and Penlink. They are all drinking buddies. They drink data.
I paid for the sub… and I am strapping for cash for now. Once I am not I will find a different provider and ditch it.
Good luck. Avoid american vpns too
PIA is my third… or fourth, I dont remember. I used avast, nordvpn, expressvpn, and I even had McAfee come with my new (formerly) windows PC. But since McAfee is a sack of shit VPN with a logs policy it was no better than using no VPN.
What is your recommendation?
At least theyre making the distinction
VPN, even for legal stuff cause “we can see you” can f off tbh
But if that’s the extent of the approach you’d still be giving the same information to your VPN provider.
Most people would be better off just making sure all of their traffic uses TLS. If you also need to obscure your address from your destination’s host, then combine the two protections.
VPN’s are the new essential subscription service for online content. Back in the olden times, we had to pay for minutes of using internet and long distance phone calls, today we have to pay for privacy and access to content we’re “not allowed” to see. And what you’re allowed to see or not is a strange, politically motivated list that is always changing.
Back in the olden days people scoffed at China fencing off the web, shutting down access to sites and whatnot. Now politicians in plenty of western countries actively talk about it like a good thing.
On top of that, the big visible VPN companies are all owned by the same one or two companies, and while they boast loudly about keeping you safe, they do fuck all for privacy. You’re just paying to give your data away. There’s a scarce few good private VPNs, but they also don’t tend to advertise much.
Well don’t leave us hanging, which one’s the best?
Personally I use Mullvad. They’re a Swedish company and I’m located in Sweden. They had their servers taken by the authorities, who in turn were unable to recover anything of use. That’s the best kind of audit you could get, and speaks volumes more than say, Apple self-proclaiming that their stuff is private with their source being “trust me bro.”
That said, I don’t think you should trust a random gay dude on the internet; my judgement is based on an event that happened here, I’ve no idea if their infrastructure looks the same everywhere. Look into how the companies operate, who they partner up with, who owns them, etc. and make that judgement for yourself.
I’ve been using NordVPN linux cli and I’m actually quite happy with it, good speed and server availability. Also tried Mullvad and is 5* also
Proton is my favorite (most servers to choose from)
Runner up is Mullvad and IVPN
I’ve been using Private Internet Access for probably 10+ yrs.
they say they don’t keep logs, and I believe years back they even went to court for it.
PIA VPN offers secure and fast VPN servers in 91 countries, no logs, and 24/7 support. Protect your online identity, access blocked content, and enjoy unlimited bandwidth with PIA VPN.
and for a 3 yr plan it’s like 3 bucks a month.
when I was living in the US yrs ago I was even using prepaid Visa cards to pay (almost) truly anonymously. one step removed and all that.
they also have the latest protocols, complete configurability on almost all devices, and split tunneling and port forwarding and the likes.
and no, I am not a spokesperson for them… just a happy customer.
if they have since sold out, please enlighten me. but I’m now in a country with less to worry about.
They uh…they sold out. Like a while ago.
https://www.hackread.com/private-internet-access-pia-vpn-sold-israel-privacy-concerns/
Who knows, maybe Kape is trustworthy, but the fact that they have roots in advertisement and have bought out, at this stage, 4 different VPN companies… no thanks.
Mullvad or Proton are both easy recommendations
Glad they don’t see the porn.
…which is why today’s sponsor is NordVPN!
(don’t actually use NV there are much better options, this was for comedic effect)
What’s wrong with Nord?
Overall the marketing is dishonest/over promises and there’s some previous lack of transparency with data breaches along with being closed source. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/NordVPN#Criticism
There’s just better options: https://thatoneprivacysite.xyz/
deleted by creator
(Data last updated on 20/07/19)
*Builds privacy site*
*Embeds Google sheet*
That sheet seems to hold Nord in pretty good regard,
I used to use Nord. Happier with Mullvad, way less faff
Nord is owned by a shady company
it has google firebase trackers https://reports.exodus-privacy.eu.org/en/reports/652224/
use mullvad instead
How have you not yet realised to be very doubtful and suspicious of anything that’s heavily advertised on YouTube etc? Which Nord is like top 5 of along with Raid Shadow Legends, Raycon earbuds, BetterHelp and Manscaped. All, including Nord, having been widely known for years to be scams and/or just shitty products and companies. Do you really think they’d do those sponsorship deals if they were actually good and naturally got customers via word of mouth? All of this is so damn obvious.
It’s not too bad. The client is the usual bulky Electron trash though.
aside from the fact it just doesn’t work on windows 10 anymore for me?
idk it also seems to not work for torrenting, one of my ISPs blocks torrent traffic when using it now
I use it on windows 10 with no issue
Nothing really, I’ve been using them for years and have had no issues.
If you’re just pirating movies it’s fine, as long as you’re not selling state secrets or anything like that you’re fine with nord.
For real. I don’t torrent much rn but I absolutely would if I saw this
Why would anyone, anywhere block torrenting? There is nothing illegal about it.
Coming from an IT perspective, I can tell you 100% that torrenting on a network can cause a bottleneck with the amount of bandwidth that it often can take especially if it’s not set up properly. Several years ago I remember working in a corporate network and we had our internet slow down to a near crawl because one person decided they wanted to torrent a movie during one of our busiest seasons. Let’s just say we’re able to track them down and they got fired on the spot.
NGL firing someone for downloading a movie seems like overkill
Knowingly pirating a movie on a company network and it causing a lot of disturbance for everyone else is pretty bad. Also could’ve been a new hire in probation period or something.
sounds like bad network admin. no single device should ever be able to make 100s or thousands of simultaneous connections, and the bandwidth should be reasonably throttled to prevent this.
Ideally they wouldn’t be able to bring the network to it’s knees like that, but sometimes one user behaving how they aren’t supposed to can highlight areas of improvement in the network configuration.
As JackbyDev@programming.dev said, they knowingly did something illegal that isn’t work related on company property and caused an effective outage in the process, which on its own can be a fireable offense, but if performed by an employee who was already on thin ice, it’s an easy out for their manager to get rid of them of they didn’t have enough reason to let them go beforehand
Again, they knowingly did something illegal with company property.
It is bad network admin but if it was on a trusted network segment it’s not entirely unexpected.
Potentially opening up a issue with the internet service provider and other fines for the company you work for knowingly by doing something idiotic like downloading seems like a bad move.
That’s interesting, I always figured the router/OS or whatever did a decent job balancing network resources regardless of the type of application.
The feature is called QoS, and is available on even the cheapest router. Torrenting can cause network issues, at least on crappy infrastructure, not because of bandwidth usage, but because it opens a lot of connections and can overload a router if it doesn’t have enough RAM.
Tracking down and firing someone to cover your corporate iT incompetence is certainly a choice.
Pretty sure they were fired for engaging in illegal activities on their work hardware, not for torrenting on a network that couldn’t handle it.
If it were a Linux ISO I’m sure it would have been a slap on the wrist and a “hey don’t do that again our network can’t handle it” but it was a film, Something the company can (theoretically) get in trouble for
Yeah we did have instruction place to be able to do legal torrents. Our programmers and IT department often downloaded ISO images firmware etc that were only available by a torrent.
Well you also have to remember this was about 10 years ago Network infrastructure isn’t quite what it is today. Not only that but when somebody does something illegal on a corporate network that is something that legal deals with and is not a choice that is made lightly.
A better solution would just be to limit connections per client.
Or, not do illegal shit on a corporate network. Maybe do that shit on your own at home?
Do you want real answers or are you just expressing frustration? Because if you’re just expressing frustration then the answers will just frustrate you more lol.
because IP holders have enough pull to make their bitching and moaning heard instead of fixing inherent issues to force people into piracy.
Laziness, much easier to just block it than try to prevent only illegal torrents
debrid services for the win! just let someone else torrent it for you, and download it from them.
AllDebrid costs €3 a month and saves you any legal headaches.
I am saving that…
nice
I think in the US at least even doing that is a no-no unfortunately.
thx for clearing that up! in Europe at least, consumer protection laws cover downloads (“you’re a moron who doesn’t know what you’re actually downloading and whether it is legal”), but seeding == distributing, which is a punishable offence
It doesn’t provide legal safety here in the states, you’ll wanna use some kind of anonymizing service.
If, however, you plan to do lots of streaming of your torrents, it is absolutely the best way to go. I am familiar with RealDebrid, which is a similar service. Its good stuff, probably pay with cash-by-mail or cryptocurrency though.
Yeah seems like a reasonable approach.
*should really learn how to block the leeches from debrid services, because they contribute* *nothing* to the pool…*
AllDebrid retains files for 30 days and must be seeding a ton (how would they get high download speed otherwise?), what am i missing here?
the caching of files also helps, since they’re only leeched once, then downloaded from their servers by potentially more than one user
The Big Brother energy of that “We Can See You” eye in the middle is pretty high.
I mean, it’s an open “heads up” so better that than not informing their students at all
Yeah college networks are one of the biggest ones I would not trust unless I had a VPN going. Average computing? Perfectly fine. Naughty things? VPN up
You shouldn’t need to pay for a VPN to prevent your ISP from seeing whether your torrent is public-domain or not if you’re using TLS.
If you don’t use the VPN for normal things then you leave yourself open to indentification by correlation. It’s the same rule for naive Tor users. The more normal and distributed it appears in traffic, the harder it is to correlate other pieces of data they they already have access to.
indentification by correlation
Not in my college. They have plenty of IP addresses to not use NAT, i.e. every user gets their public IPv4, and authentication is done with WPA2-Enterprise, i.e. unique login.
Everything is immediately traceable.
Friendly reminder that the panopticon we live under today was considered horrifying a hundred years ago
It’s still horrifying today. We’re just powerless to stop it.
We didn’t start the fire…
Ryan started the fire
It was always burning.
But we’re tryin ta fight it 🎶
Or even 25 years ago! They (and in many cases we) tried to warn them. Turns out the other “they” are happy to give it away for AI slop videos.
That’s not when they gave it away. It was well and truly gone 24 years ago lest terrorists win
Speaking of which, I gave up on torrents a couple of years ago and switched to direct downloads. Not only is it much faster due to not having to rely on seeds, turns out that ISPs don’t actually care if you download pirated content. Distributing it is where they get you.
This is going to depend on the country that you’re in. Germany for example is pretty notorious for also going after the small fries.
Isn’t it harder to find direct downloads? Or am I just stuck in the past on the bay?
Two words: Real Debrid.
I’m using Usenet , not sure what op is using though
Usenet
What’s the best way to do that, presuming I already have access to a Usenet server but that’s really all I know?
I mean I’ve used Usenet before, but that was back in the late 90s using Netscape Communicator and I was mostly (but not exclusively) reading text groups. Most of my piracy back then involved trolling IRC channels to either find DCC bots or get access to FTPs. And even then was limited because, well, dialup.
It’s a bit complex to setup to be fair, you probably want to go to the site that cannot be named here and look for a Usenet guide.
The long and short of it is you probably still are going to need to sign up and pay for a Usenet server that focusses on files. I use newshosting as my primary server and usenet.bucket as my backup (you need to because DMCA)
You also need a tracker. I use nzbgeek. This is to search for files because they are all broken down fragments across the messageboards
Finally you need nzbget or some such to download the files
I then use sonarr and radarr to manage my downloads and Plex to watch the shows.
The last bit is just a nice to have.
I know it sounds like a lot, and it is a bit to get started, but it’s solid and just works once it’s going.
If you only want to download one song for free you can just Google it now.
Private tracker plus encryption. Good luck.
Issue is getting into the tracker, yeah? Back in the day it was going into random irc channels to beg for an invite, along with like 100 other randoms doing the same. I would imagine not much has changed in that regard, it just happens on Discord or Telegram?
I got into all the private trackers I’m on (4) during their open signup periods. Never had to beg for an invite. Just check from time to time.
Any chance you might name said trackers, so that I know what sites to watch?
TorrentLeech is the one I use most. Funfile and Pretome that branched off from it are the other popular ones.
https://lemmy.world/c/opensignups
I think you can also watch similarly named reddit without having to even create an account.
I got “busted” downloading Debian once lol
Of course, never download Debian buster or you’ll get busted.
Legal game updates as torrents? Is that a thing?
Humble Bundle distributes their DRM-free games and other content via BitTorrent.
I know WoW used bittorrent for game updates, it was built in and was the “standard” download mechanism.
https://worldofwarcraft.fandom.com/et/wiki/Blizzard_Downloader
I’m sure it’s far from the only game that did.
Spotify got its start by distributing its music files peer-to-peer as well.
Embrace Extend Extinguish. Maybe they shouldn’t have in the end
Interesting! Thanks
Even Windows Update has a peer-to-peer option.
Valve hired the creator of Bittorrent to design Steam.
Bram Cohen. He also created a crypto protocol called Chia, which is interesting. The idea was to create a green (ish) crypto that would leverage existing resources, in this case old storage drives. So it uses “proof of space” rather than “proof of work”. The “plotter” (as opposed to computationally intensive GPU/CPU “mining”) fills up your storage space with “plots”, randomly generated data files ~100gb each. To earn crypto, it’s basically a lottery against your plots. The network gives you a random hash, and if it matches one of your plot files, you get rewarded with a token. Very low power, keeps old storage out of landfill a while longer, and once those plots are initially made, they’re good to go forever - they can “win” more than once, so the more energy-intensive process of plotting (though it’s still nowhere near the consumption of proof-of-work, which is a disaster) has a natural upper limit of your total storage space.
The difficult bit is creating the plots, it takes hours to days to create one, depending on your write speed. I put my fastest storage on that, a specialised PCIe nvme SSD. I think I was able to bang out a plot every couple hours eventually, then I would offload it to a somewhat monstrous storage server with the maximum number of drives the motherboard would support. Others in the community created massive RAM drives. Very expensive, but super duper fast.
I plotted for a while, but cashed out when it stopped making sense economically. Eventually, the price per terabyte of storage + electricity eclipsed any significant gains. Did a lot of scavenging, haunting thrift shops, and trading up for higher storage capacity on eBay. Actually made a few grand of pure profit before the price settled down, and difficulty increased. That was the most fun I’ve ever had with crypto. Besides all the storage, cables and hubs, I built my “farm” solely from stuff I already had laying around. I even made a profit selling all the drives back, as this project singlehandedly pulled almost all the slack out of the used storage market. It kept a lot of equipment out of the landfill for much longer than usual, which is pretty neat.
What happens if the price of Chia goes up enough to exhaust the supply of unused old hard drives? Bitcoin used to only consume spare CPU cycles too.
It’s shifting costs from energy to hardware - greenwashing the blockchain/AI/whatever when the real solution is time-tested pigouvian taxes on the external cost of pollution.
That happened early on in the cycle, and it happened only once. Partly because those looking to sell did so once the coin became tradable, then the price took a nosedive and started to stabilize. Once the pressure was released, and those looking for profits exited, it didn’t have the same cycles of mania as Bitcoin and the others. Further down the line, applications were built on top of the chia blockchain. It’s pretty boring as cryptos go, which is a good thing.
Back in the day FFXIV 1.0 distributed updates via torrent iirc.
League of Legends used to, don’t know if they still do. There was a setting in the patcher to turn p2p off.
