131–140 of 350 posts
torrent is really a great technology. subversive and evergreen. genuinely useful and hard to kill.
Only if you use a private tracker. Public ones always have seeders whose job it is to collect IP addresses. You'll still get that letter in the mail about pirating
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> What I find most strange about the modern day piracy is quality. For a lot of pirates, it's a niche hobby to preserve the best quality version of some media / art. I see it as an underground librarian archivist movement. In 100 years iTunes may be dead, but there will be some person with every album available in high quality lossless FLAC. Same with Netflix and it's bit starved encodes.
already, Disney has been censoring past episodes not even based on today's sensibilities but it seems purely based on keywords. there's an episode of the suite life of zach and cody where zach pretends to have dyslexia in order to get extra time in his exams, and near the end of the episode he gets busted and they have a thoughtful conversation about how it's unfair and hurts the people who need the extra time, and h…
Ah good time. Bring back memory. My involvement with that period was I wrote a p2p file sharing app using the Gnutella protocol, an alternative to the Napster. It was a fun time.
That's what Limewire used right? Is that network still a thing? Last I checked it was, but full of bots that return fake files named after your exact search query.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Curious to hear more informed thoughts from old ISP folks, but afaik one of the things that made Napster possible was that 56kbps connections were roughly symmetrical (~33kbps up?). By capitalizing on the oft unused upload bandwidth, Napster provided a benefit at little cost. Would be fascinated to hear what this looked like on the PSTN backend load side, ~2000.
> 56kbps connections were roughly symmetrical I don't think so, asymmetry was the innovation that made 56K possible on POTS (plain old telephone sevice, with only enough bandwidth for squawky voice)
I'm curious about the nuances, but it seems like the last mile download/upload imbalance was created by the originating signal mode?
Download = First mile internet to ISP could be upgraded to digital, and thus grab some extra throughout by avoiding analog noise handling
Upload = First mile user to ISP was inherently analog over phone lines, and so sacrificed throughput for line noise tolerance
Napster was a little before my time, though I fondly remember torrenting when I was a kid and oddly enough, it was a small time scam that got me into it. I remember when I was a kid (maybe 13 or 14) I really (and I mean really) wanted to play Grand Theft Auto. My dad picked up a copy of GTA San Andreas for me about a year prior but after seeing the violence and language he forced me to take it back, that put the tast…
Napster was such an improvement over what it replaced, but, it’s funny by today’s standards Napster was so “basic”. I remember waiting 3+ hours for a single song to download. Then discovering it wasn’t what I wanted but a troll who renamed the `Barney The Dinosaur I love you` song. Then I’d spend another 3+ hours downloading a different song. Ah 56k internet, what fun. Today, TPB and a quick search can give you an ar…
Unless you were young and on a college/university campus where your dorm room probably had Ethernet jacks.
Napster was such an improvement over what it replaced, but, it’s funny by today’s standards Napster was so “basic”. I remember waiting 3+ hours for a single song to download. Then discovering it wasn’t what I wanted but a troll who renamed the `Barney The Dinosaur I love you` song. Then I’d spend another 3+ hours downloading a different song. Ah 56k internet, what fun. Today, TPB and a quick search can give you an ar…
> And they’re so good at it, that the pirated product is usually substantially better than the official version How so, when most of these products are digital to begin with? If you have the quality of the studio master, then there’s nothing to improve.
For examples, an artist's discography is sometimes neatly organized in folders, by year, and the files are tagged with metadata. In case of anime, fans improve or outright provide subtitles. They often do extra things like including karaoke for the opening and ending, color coding subtitle lines to match the speaker's personality or design, and provide stylized subtitles for signs and other letterings on the screen. In case of movies, they are often optimized to a specific kind of usage, for example to be able to be viewed on every phone, or to have a minimal file size. Sometimes, especially older releases, are digitally cleaned up and enhanced. Games install easily and is packaged in a way that it just works, without faffing about with the launchers and things like that.
Napster was such an improvement over what it replaced, but, it’s funny by today’s standards Napster was so “basic”. I remember waiting 3+ hours for a single song to download. Then discovering it wasn’t what I wanted but a troll who renamed the `Barney The Dinosaur I love you` song. Then I’d spend another 3+ hours downloading a different song. Ah 56k internet, what fun. Today, TPB and a quick search can give you an ar…
> What I find most strange about the modern day piracy is quality. For a lot of pirates, it's a niche hobby to preserve the best quality version of some media / art. I see it as an underground librarian archivist movement. In 100 years iTunes may be dead, but there will be some person with every album available in high quality lossless FLAC. Same with Netflix and it's bit starved encodes.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> What I find most strange about the modern day piracy is quality. For a lot of pirates, it's a niche hobby to preserve the best quality version of some media / art. I see it as an underground librarian archivist movement. In 100 years iTunes may be dead, but there will be some person with every album available in high quality lossless FLAC. Same with Netflix and it's bit starved encodes.
> In 100 years iTunes may be dead, but there will be some person with every album available in high quality lossless FLAC. Same with Netflix and it's bit starved encodes. Yeah, nah. WhatCD’s full catalogue has never been recovered.
> nah. WhatCD’s full catalogue has never been recovered.
The loss of WhatCD's torrent database didn't wipe out anyone's library.