In the circle of piracy
(midwest.social)
Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱOh no, the youngins are on their "if no one talks about it, the corpos won't know" delusion again.
Security through obscurity isn't security, and plenty of sites have survived longer than most of you have been pirating despite coverage by actual news organizations. Your least (or most) favorite youtuber (or forum, or guide, or wiki) isn't moving the needle.
If you aren't part of the actual scene that's sourcing shit for day 0 (or earlier) upload you have nothing to worry about regarding open discussion through psuedonymous social media. Or people making youtube videos. Or guides etc.
Pirate sites and fan projects that get shut down weren't going to last anyway. Real ones arr either set up to last or find a way to continue. Like Pirate Bay and AM2R.
Okay so the corpos know.... But compared to power users and then giving that same information to Joe Nobody who had no idea these things existed...that forces them to be a lot more aggressive because now you have "mainstream" attention
Hence my mention about Pirate Bay. There were multiple mainstream news stories about it. Multiple of the founders were unmasked and put on trial, but the site was constructed so that it kept running. It is still running to this day, despite it no longer being the face of piracy that it was long ago.
Edit: In more recent news/sites, Anna's Archive. They have yet another lawsuit against them that isn't going to amount to anything but maybe a few more domain names going down because none of the people operating it have been able to be unmasked.
There's some irony in that you still think the Pirate Bay has some use in today's way of pirating. Okay, grandpa, you're out of nursing home curfew.
I never said that and you're wildly missing my point. If the person running your site hasn't run things in a way that they can tank some news coverage, it was doomed from the start.
Take this very lemmy instance. The public facing load balancer they currently use is hosted in France. They aren't revealing anything beyond that and it's not something that can be found by anyone not involved with the systems administration side of things. The admins are careful to practice proper opsec as well, not revealing their home country.
You can find all sorts of writeups about countless less than legal sites and projects, both ones that survived and ones that died. Not a single dead one is dead because of attention. Most are dead because the people running it made some mistake that allowed authorities to find their real identity so they could be prosecuted. Or because of internal drama. Or rising costs, like myrient which is closing the end of this month.
The last time I even remember private trackers being taken down was in the days of Oink.UK and What.CD.
Oink was shut down in 2007 and What was shut down in 2016, both mostly because they had grown so big they were hard to ignore. A lot of modern sites keep an upper limit on the accounts they allow to prevent too much growth and attracting attention.
Hell, I remember baconBits having an upper limit of less than 10,000 accounts. Once that limit was reached, you couldn't even send out invites.
Also, public trackers that were huge like RARBG survived until finances shut them down, via COVID and the war in Ukraine, they were never taken down forcibly, and they were massive and widely used.
Me, still using Pirate Bay since before most of the people in this sub were born.
My country plays wack a mole with their domains. I mostly rely on 2 private trackers now
If you're not using a VPN to visit PB.org from a non- problematic country, are you even trying?
Wouldn't this be solved by using a DNS server your country as no control over?
But anyway PirateBay is not recommended anymore.
*laughs in private tracker
Yeah but I don't want to have to deal with community drama, upload requirements, minimum seed ratios that you can't hit because you aren't downloading popular enough torrents, applying to get in like it's some fucking C-level job application... Some of us pirate because we want content, not because it's a lifestyle.
The private trackers I'm on also give "credits" for seeding time in addition to seed ratio, so even if not a lot of people are grabbing data from me, I can still download more by keeping my files always seeding.
Now, I'm not in any "big" or "classic" tracker, so maybe this is only a thing on the Smaller/Newer PTs, that being said they have everything I want so 🤷
Just fuckin with ya. Those are all valid gripes. I guess I got in on the scene way early through invites from friends and so I've hardly ever had to go through any interview process. I think the only place I "interviewed" was baconbits and it wasn't really an interview since I mostly just shared evidence of good ratio on other trackers with long-lived accounts. I've had an account in good standing on Cinemageddon for... 18 years as of next month. Getting over that initial hump made it pretty easy to get in with good standing, and most decent trackers aren't that hard to get good ratio on.
You must Imagine Sisyphus a happy pirate
weird to blame video form lol.
Popular video gets attention. Attention reaches company. Company reaches for lawyers. Lawyers reach for cease and decist forms.
Company worries about massive mainstream attention compared to being niche
My pass the popcorn account is older than my 20yo son.
