liked it.
Show HN: Privacy-focused, ad-free, non-tracking torrent search engine
81–90 of 359 posts
Re: Show HN: Privacy-focused, ad-free, non-tracking torrent search engine
#82Don't you realize that you can't build a usable site without mountains of JS and user-tracking scripts? /sarcasm It's really refreshing to see a fast, small efficient site that gets rid of all the bullshit. Congrats!
Yes!
At first I literally couldn't believe what I was seeing - ZERO third-party bullshit in uMatrix. Not just none to unblock to make the site work - none at all!
(Apparently you can make a website without downloading Bootstrap from someone's external CDN...)
And then... oh my God, how fast the site is. I can actually feel I have a somewhat modern, powerful computer. Usual day-to-day browsing makes me forget that.
So yeah, for this reason alone I'll be using and recommending this site. Great job!
Re: Show HN: Privacy-focused, ad-free, non-tracking torrent search engine
#83Don't you realize that you can't build a usable site without mountains of JS and user-tracking scripts? /sarcasm It's really refreshing to see a fast, small efficient site that gets rid of all the bullshit. Congrats!
with all free services it starts this way ( look at imgur and so on. ) and eventually ends in ads ridden monster. but we usually end up in a couple of years great service, before they figure out that they could be earning money with serving ads or selling data.
Let's be grateful for what we have now.
The cycle is usually completed by another free service starting and being usable for the next few years, and in this case there's no pain in switching (no content you uploaded and spread URLs to), so I wouldn't worry.
On the other hand, in the age of HTML "hello world" including an Angular installation, downloading Bootstrap from external CDN, and at least three different kind of tracking scripts, I think sites like this one need to be praised loudly.
Re: Show HN: Privacy-focused, ad-free, non-tracking torrent search engine
#84I applaud the effort, but what's the model for making money? Are you just self funding this?
Re: Show HN: Privacy-focused, ad-free, non-tracking torrent search engine
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
Growing up I heard horror stories of people pirating versions of Windows, Office, etc that had backdoors installed. If you download pirated software there isn't a real way to know for 100% certainty that it isn't laced with something . So I avoid it like the plague. Even if the majority don't have anything it only takes the one and then, depending on its level of sophistication, you're screwed.
My favorite was all the pirated copies of Windows 10 that were floating around that supposedly had the telemetry features removed. It always confused me who exactly those were targeting.
My guess: one's mother / uncle / neighbour who wants Windows 10 on his/her laptop, but heard about it spying on you and does not want that.
I know that the usual rule of thumb is that "normals don't understand or care about complicated technical issues" such as privacy. But Windows 10 telemetry was so widely discussed in media, that I noticed even the non-tech people around me were refusing to upgrade from Win8 to Win10 on the basis of "I heard it spies on you".
Re: Show HN: Privacy-focused, ad-free, non-tracking torrent search engine
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
Given the relatively slim page size (23Kb for me), and given that SQLite can pretty easily host a relatively simple database like this one and serve 100K-1M queries per day[0], I would expect that whoever is hosting this could pretty easily host this on a single dedicated server which only costs ~$50. So for the foreseeable future, I suspect this site will be fine. [0] - https://sqlite.org/whentouse.html
The cost of hosting will probably be insignificant compared to the cost of dealing with DMCA takedowns and possibly lawsuits.
That's why I built Magnetissimo: https://github.com/sergiotapia/magnetissimo
It's easy to build a crawler, the hard part is spending time on bullshit like DMCA takedowns and such. Even if you say: "I just crawl, I don't provide download links, I don't even know what is indexed", you have to deal with legal issues.
So, host your own locally or for your community. No big deal.
Even Google has to deal with DMCA!
Re: Show HN: Privacy-focused, ad-free, non-tracking torrent search engine
#87The top 1000 has a lot of software. The thought of running pirated software always filled me with unease, having been burned by malware in my younger days. Only tangentially related to this really well done torrent search (so snappy!), but does anyone have a feel for how safe this software is in general? Do security firms do any analysis on it?
Growing up I heard horror stories of people pirating versions of Windows, Office, etc that had backdoors installed. If you download pirated software there isn't a real way to know for 100% certainty that it isn't laced with something . So I avoid it like the plague. Even if the majority don't have anything it only takes the one and then, depending on its level of sophistication, you're screwed.
Pirating Windows is pretty stupid these days. You can download the official MS ISO from their website, and buy a real key from some subreddits for like $20.
The keys they sell are those bulk keys large companies get, their IT dep guy wants to make some extra coin on the side. But they work.
Re: Show HN: Privacy-focused, ad-free, non-tracking torrent search engine
#88Asking purely out of curiosity: Are you actually based in India? (The domain is on the Indian TLD and the address in whois records lists an Indian city).
Here in India, cyber law enforcement is a joke, and if some legal issue comes up with this site, I'd be curious to see how it works out.
And, just a hypothetical follow up question: how would it work out if the site was not even DMCA compliant?
Re: Show HN: Privacy-focused, ad-free, non-tracking torrent search engine
#89I think this a great idea. I looked up things like Tor Browser, Tails, and a few Linux distributions and popular open source projects. I found all of them far more quickly than I could have by going to their respective sites.
Then I thought I probably shouldn't do that without promising myself to always verify the hashes, even if this site lets me start the download faster.
Re: Show HN: Privacy-focused, ad-free, non-tracking torrent search engine
#90Asking purely out of curiosity: Are you actually based in India? (The domain is on the Indian TLD and the address in whois records lists an Indian city). Here in India, cyber law enforcement is a joke, and if some legal issue comes up with this site, I'd be curious to see how it works out. And, just a hypothetical follow up question: how would it work out if the site was not even DMCA compliant?
I'm not associated with it, but yeah, it was posted in /r/india few days ago:
https://www.reddit.com/r/india/comments/5mj3vz/setting_up_ne...
Domain is from Gandi (France) and IP address (hosting?) seems to be from Netherlands