It seems like a lot of the most well-known pseudo-legal BitTorrent "groups" (PopcornTime, YIFY, ISOHunt, now Kat) turn out to be one-man shops, and as such, just completely dissolve as soon as their owner crosses paths with law enforcement. In some cases, these services are integral enough to the "scene" to be brought back by others. But other times, everything just stops for a while. This seems like a bus-factor pro…
It would be a bus-factor problem if any one person ran all these things. But they're all run by different people, none is essential.
> It also shows that Apple handed over personal details of Vaulin after the investigator cross-referenced an IP-address used for an iTunes transaction with an IP-address that was used to login to KAT’s Facebook account. I find it darkly ironic that a legal purchase of music helped them catch the guy.
Does that mean that Apple basically feeds every transaction information to Feds so that they can find this match?
So Bittorrent is decentralized but you need a centralized index of the available torrents? Is this correct? Can you find anything without a site like KAT? TIA.
Distributed discovery is possible, but you quickly run into spam/noise problems. Centralized communities generally have features such as curation and deduplication (duplication is bad for torrents, as it causes peers to be spread across multiple slightly-different packages of files, reducing the available peers for both). It's not a technical problem, it's a social one.
In a blockchain-based system, proof of work could give users points so they could spend them to show their trust on a file (or maybe transfer them to whoever they trust so they can release files with a number of points from the start). For the duplication problem, solve it like IPFS does, the file's hash is it's Uri so a duplicate would just point to the same resource. Actually, people could build KAT-like sites entirely in IPFS and users loading (and thus, serving them to other users) said sites would be the trust mechanism.
> This seems like a bus-factor problem. Why does it keep happening? Why aren't these sites being run by multi-national teams that can survive a loss like this? Trust. You have to be sure the people you're working with are diligent, careful, and won't turn you in (and likewise for them).
It feels like you could factor off the trust requirements into a much smaller kernel, though. For example, you could operate (your instance of) your pseudo-legal service yourself, but open-source the codebase (sticking it on GitHub even) and accept patches from anyone. You could also implement a simple replication architecture for your service, where at any time one node (yours) is considered to be the 'canonical mas…
I think you just discovered the first actual use case for ethereum. Albeit, the architecture would have to be a little different and there's a lot of complications in that.
It wouldn't surprise me one bit if ethereum came to be a way to host illegal websites considering bitcoins main market is for illegal transactions.
I find it interesting that a Polish man was charged by US laws, rather than under Polish law. I think he opened himself to US law by hosting the servers at one point in the US. Regardless, it is rather fascinating that his first visit to the US could potentially be from extradition.
He reportedly is Ukrainian and not Polish.
This makes it even more interesting. I also didn't hear any Polish media reporting his arrest (I live in Poland).
I would like to know where in the country he was arrested and what he was doing in Poland - no luck so far.
I suspect robin hood would have had the support of the people that he helped, so donations is appropriate. I'd say where the analog breaks down is the media companies aren't exactly extorting the people, nor price gouging.
>media companies aren't exactly extorting the people, nor price gouging. In your opinion.
Ok, I'll bite. What makes you feel they are extorting consumers or price gouging?