The name "putio" sucks. It's sounds like the spanish word "puto" (that means faggot) I think the service is great, though
I saw the HN post 6 times today and every single time I read puto. Not trying to troll, just being honest about the name.
Put.io
261–270 of 330 posts
Re: Put.io
#262Earlier quoted context omitted.
In theory what you say makes sense, but then why is there still DRM? There's been strong evidence that it's useless for a long time already, and companies are still implementing it. What do you think will actually convince people to stop that hasn't happened already? I say it weakens the case because more piracy just inspires the knee-jerk reaction of "we have to do something to protect the children from pirated soft…
Thanks for responding. What you say makes sense as well, I guess we're really talking about two different arguments. One logical/reasoned (look, DRM has basically failed) and the other emotional (OMG piracy! We must have more DRM!). They're kind of orthogonal to my mind. >> In theory what you say makes sense, but then why is there still DRM? For a whole complex of reasons, some of which boil down to exactly what you…
I should say that for market segmentation it appears to work - those that stick to the rules are limited to media from their region. But this is another driver piracy.
Re: Put.io
#263Earlier quoted context omitted.
So there are two groups of people on this planet: (a) Those who download stuff illegally instead of paying like 0.01% of their disposable income per year for it whilst making about as much money as those who have created the content. (b) Those who download stuff illegally instead of having no access at all or paying completely unaffordable fantasy prices for it whilst making only a fraction of those who have created…
Let's not delude ourselves into thinking the people who are in group (b) are the ones who have enough money to afford a high-bandwidth internet connection, a modern computer, and the knowledge to know what torrents and the accompanying technology are. The vast majority of people will be using this to watch movies they don't feel like paying for. There might be a handful who genuinely can't access it, who have no way…
That's a terribly first-world-centric view to take. I live in Lebanon, definitely a country that does not qualify as "developed" by any standards and people here are in group (b).
Your options here for watching movies are (a) cinema(which doesn't work for TV shows), (b) wait for them to show up on crappy cable services, (c) buy pirated DVDs for 1~2$ a pop and (d) torrent. Buying legal DVDs is possible but extremely hard, not simply due to the cost but also the availability. If I wanted to buy a pirated DVD there are at least 3 different shops within 2min of my home in an eastern Beirut suburb whereas if I wanted to go the legal option I'd need to drive down to Virgin in downtown Beirut(15min drive) and pick from an extremely limited selection.
The only viable solutions if you want timely and not incredibly inconvenient access to movies or shows are (c) and (d). Internet connections are incredibly expensive relative to Europe or the US(50$/mo for 4mb and a 25GB cap) and yet I know a lot of people who go with option (d), mainly because traffic at night isn't subject to the cap. People will simply cue up their torrents and download them between 12am and 7am and watch them the next day. If you keep a buffer of unwatched movies/shows this can work quite well. My personal approach is to torrent to a digital ocean droplet and then download over regular HTTP overnight. Most people are not technically savvy enough to do that but they would be able to use put.io. I happen to use my droplet for other things, but if I didn't put.io would be cheaper as well.
Re: Put.io
#264Earlier quoted context omitted.
Uh, you can just push your payment through a mixer and it's effectively anonymous.
Theoretically, assuming that the mixer is perfectly implemented and law enforcement never uses their legal authority to compromise it, and that your records are never acquired by law enforcement. There's no reason to believe any of those assumptions are true – and once any of them fail, you've helpfully given the prosecutor a detailed, hard-to-deny log of your every transaction.
It'd take effort for a mixer to log things - it's not something that happens by itself. There's no reason to think the implementor would do that, unless the mixer is already compromised.
Other than that, there's really not that much to implement in the mixer.
Additionally, the break in security is disjunctive. It's not just the mixer that has to be compromised, its the entire chain - exchange, wallet, mixer; if any of them do not cooperate, your trail ends.
Re: Put.io
#265It seems as though the primary use case being discussed and implied is torrenting of media that is not legal (however ethical you feel it may be) to torrent in many countries. Please remember that when you do so, you weaken the case the rest of us have against the same laws you're ignoring, against DRM, against intrusions into our privacy, and against unfair ISP practices.
Not respecting copyright in 2014 is a moral issue.
It is good when authors can earn money on their work, and thus it used to be that authors had a deal with the government. Tax money is spent to enforce a limited monopoly for a few years, and afterward society could the work to the improvement of all. This deal has now been completely perverted, and all works stays perpetually under restrictions.
Worse, In Sweden, we have a special deal on top of copyright. Every time someone purchase a harddrive, they are forced (through taxes) to pay for the privilege of "private copying". This deal is then again perverted through the use of DRM. Companies that do this are effectively stealing, and here the word is used correctly: They are stealing my money. I paid for something, and the other party is now refusing to give up their side of the bargain.
When asked to respect copyright, I am asked to balance the moral issues at hand. Can I, morally, support the perversion in order to get authors some money, or should I ignore copyright in order to force a change.
Re: Put.io
#266These are the reasons put.io is awesome: - It caches torrents that other people downloaded(popular torrents) so if you add them, they are in your library immediately - You can subscribe to RSS feeds of TV shows from showrss.info without needing to download every show individually - You can install the XBMC app to access you content there - A REST API? Yup! They have it! - It converts videos to MP4 on their cloud - Yo…
Hey! Someone uses showRSS! Glad you like it :D
Off topic, is there anything like your service but for movies?
Re: Put.io
#267Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sequential downloading defeats one of the primary goals of torrents: to make rare data common. If only one peer has chunk ae986f6ea789 of a torrent, it makes sense that you'd want to download that chunk first in case the peer disconnects before it's fully seeded. Even with movies/music, 70% of the peers may have the first 70% of the movie downloaded, so if you join the swarm it would make sense to throw you at the fi…
There's no need to do purely sequential download, though. You only need to download sequentially at the speed of playback, the rest of your bandwidth can go to the rarest chunks.
You're right, but then you'd need to programmatically determine the video bitrate in the torrent client, or integrate it with the video player. Either way is a pretty heavyweight solution.
Re: Put.io
#268Wow. This is brilliant.
Re: Put.io
#269Earlier quoted context omitted.
Theoretically, assuming that the mixer is perfectly implemented and law enforcement never uses their legal authority to compromise it, and that your records are never acquired by law enforcement. There's no reason to believe any of those assumptions are true – and once any of them fail, you've helpfully given the prosecutor a detailed, hard-to-deny log of your every transaction.
It'd take effort for a mixer to log things - it's not something that happens by itself. There's no reason to think the implementor would do that, unless the mixer is already compromised. Other than that, there's really not that much to implement in the mixer. Additionally, the break in security is disjunctive. It's not just the mixer that has to be compromised, its the entire chain - exchange, wallet, mixer; if any o…
> It'd take effort for a mixer to log things - it's not something that happens by itself. There's no reason to think the implementor would do that, unless the mixer is already compromised.
This is true in theory but the history of software is littered with obvious counterexamples where theoretically secure software was compromised by admins forgetting to disable debugging / logging, insecure temporary or backup files, etc. When you use a mixer you're trusting the admins to get all of that right even before you talk about malice.
I'm not saying it's trivial, merely that the bitcoin infrastructure was obviously not designed to counter state-level threats. The perfect identification of all past transactions is just too easy to get wrong and and a prosecutor only needs to show a convincing case, not absolute mathematical proof – I wouldn't bet against the simple timing of transactions being enough in many cases
Re: Put.io
#270I use and love put.io. Completely hassle free. I'd never go back. The killer feature is instant completion of torrents if someone else has already downloaded them. I can be watching a movie 60 seconds after thinking of it.
> I can be watching a movie 60 seconds after thinking of it. Is that at all legal? Unless you mean films that have fallen into the public domain or that remain unlicensed in your nation or jurisdiction, I'm pretty sure this is unlawful. If there aren't laws on the books yet concerning a 3rd party service downloading or hosting pirated content on one's behalf yet, I would still consider this to be unethical behavior.…
Depends where you are in the world. In my country(Poland) downloading any material for your own use is 100% legal.