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Alleged founder of world’s largest BitTorrent distribution site arrested

arstechnica.com

51–60 of 356 posts

Re: Alleged founder of world’s largest BitTorrent distribution site arrested

#51
post #50
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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?

Because they bundle 200 channels of crap with the 5 channels that you actually want forcing just about everyone to overpay for what they're receiving.

Re: Alleged founder of world’s largest BitTorrent distribution site arrested

#52
Does anyone know if there is data somewhere on how much money has been spent by governments (specifically the USA) on attacking copyright related stuff?

My main complaint about this is that I'd rather my tax dollars be spent stopping crime that causes physical harm.

Re: Alleged founder of world’s largest BitTorrent distribution site arrested

#53

When will the feds learn that this is whack a mole.. and every time the mole improves. (I am 1428x times smarter...)

Whackamole has uses. Sure diehard users will find new trackers but it makes it harder for the average consumer to pirate.

My dads favorite tv show tracker went down and he couldn't figure out how to get another private one. He's had to get a dvr and borrow my HBO password.

Re: Alleged founder of world’s largest BitTorrent distribution site arrested

#54
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

You just described what.cd.

What.cd open sourced Gazelle, the source code for the website and tracker. The core development team accepts pull requests, but they are themselves insulated from the owner and operator of what.cd.

Since opening Gazelle, many other private trackers have adopted it.

Re: Alleged founder of world’s largest BitTorrent distribution site arrested

#55
post #14

ArsTechnica seems to have the most detailed and best linked (PDF + DoJ press release) article as of now: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/07/kickasstorrents-a... Somewhat more/complementary details seem to be available on: https://torrentfreak.com/feds-seize-kickasstorrents-domains-... — e.g. regarding methods: [...] The complaint further reveals that the feds posed as an advertiser, which revealed a bank acco…

Ok, we changed the URL to that from http://bnonews.com/news/index.php/news/id4926. If there's a more substantive source, we can change it again.

Re: Alleged founder of world’s largest BitTorrent distribution site arrested

#56

Wow, this sucks, I love KAT, what now? TPB is rubbish.

Whip out that credit card and start buying stuff instead? Who cares if you don't use it much, it's all relative.

I like buying CDs and Bluray, then I rip them for everyday use. But its nice to have something tangible to back it up.

Plus its all legal and protected, since I don't rebroadcast any of the content, just private enjoyment.

Re: Alleged founder of world’s largest BitTorrent distribution site arrested

#57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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).

I'd also wager more communication makes more vulnerabilities. Thinking back to lulzsec and dread pirate Roberts, both were caught thanks to communication.

To add to this even more, Lulzsec got outed by a member who chose to cooperate with the FBI, and in doing so got a reduced sentence. So in many ways, your security is entirely dependent on the security of everybody else - if they don't hide their identity well, then your identity can be in jeopardy too.

If someone starts cooperating with some type of law enforcement you're screwed, and if anybody gets caught and is facing a 50 year charge unless they cooperate, you can probably bet on which one they'll choose.

Re: Alleged founder of world’s largest BitTorrent distribution site arrested

#58
post #22

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.

Google the title and add 'torrent'. Then look for magnet links. Google was recently sued over this.

Re: Alleged founder of world’s largest BitTorrent distribution site arrested

#59
post #52

Does anyone know if there is data somewhere on how much money has been spent by governments (specifically the USA) on attacking copyright related stuff? My main complaint about this is that I'd rather my tax dollars be spent stopping crime that causes physical harm.

You're free to ask your congressmen to change the copyright laws. Until then, they should be enforced: Having some manager deprioritize certain crimes because he thinks they're too expensive to enforce moves power from the legislative to the executive.

You didn't directly make this distinction, but your point about preferring to allocate tax dollars to physical crimes would be a strange way to view changing the law.

Re: Alleged founder of world’s largest BitTorrent distribution site arrested

#60
post #5

The cat and mouse game continues. Remember The Pirate Bay? Why don't studios have their own similar sites where they allow free torrents of some shows and offer paid torrents. As a busy person, I'd much rather pay for something which guarantees: - high quality - no subtitles - no buffering issues - no viruses - click and play

You can do all of those things on iTunes or Amazon Video. Why would the movie studios run their own content distribution when it gives them little competitive advantage.
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