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The Pirate Bay down, forever?

blog.brokep.com

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Re: The Pirate Bay down, forever?

#141

Post by jkaunisv1 »

bad_user wrote: post #61
eXpl0it3r wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe I'm one of these "jerks", but it's always amusing to me when people complain about ads on the internet, while there are so many different ad-blockers out there.

I never understood ad blockers or the people promoting ad blockers. People complain about ads, yet they are unwilling to pay for content, with the popularity of something like ThePirateBay being testament to that. And then, I can understand that many websites are showing distasteful ads, but if you don't like it, then don't use those websites. This gives a chance to competing websites, being practically like voting w…

Personally, I use an ad blocker because I never click on ads. They're an ugly distraction and waste of bandwidth that I will literally never click.

For sites whose content I respect who I know rely on per-impression (not click-through) ads, I'll generally add an exception to my ad blocker, and/or buy some merchandise now and then to support them. I'm really excited about systems like Patreon that make this support easier because I don't need more t-shirts.

I respect creators as I'm a creator myself. But at the same time, I think if you're going to put content online and expect something like ads to support it, you need to rethink your business model.

To me it's like putting physical products on a stall on the street, and leaving it unattended with a little bucket for payments hidden in the corner. Yes, morally speaking, people shouldn't steal from it. I wouldn't steal from such a place, but I would not be surprised if others did.

Re: The Pirate Bay down, forever?

#142

Post by rglullis »

bad_user wrote: post #91
laichzeit0 wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I never understood ad blockers or the people promoting ad blockers. I block ads because they annoy me. Maybe I'm completely selfish but I don't give a shit that whoever I'm "freeloading" from isn't receiving any compensation. I also download books, music and software because if I can get something for free, I'm not going to pay for it (don't care about the content creator, this is purely selfish). I also download m…

M'kay, thanks for proving my point. I can't help but feel annoyed because it is exactly this attitude that brought us DRM, Trusted Computing and that helped build the monopolies that we are seeing. It's also not selflessness, because one can be both selfish and recognize that it would be in his best interest to not use ad blockers and to not pirate. This is shortsightedness and it is a pity that it's so prevalent.

I used to think like you... when I was a teenager. I remember one of the things that was attractive about cable TV was that it was ad-free. Now, can you name one cable channel without ads?

I am also firmly in the ad-block camp. You have to realize that there is no contract that forces us to follow the expectations of companies' business models. If my lack of cooperation is enough for them to fail at providing the service, they are the ones that need to change. Not me.

Re: The Pirate Bay down, forever?

#143

Post by musername »

amelius wrote: post #62
lelandbatey wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing is that to download a torrent, the absolute minimum amount of information you need is the torrent hash. The torrent hash is on the order of ~40 characters long, requiring no other information. All you have to do is paste that short sting into a torrent client to download a set of files. Are we really going to say that these 40 character strings are illegal to share? If I paste the hash for the latest blockb…

If you wrote down the number Pi in hexadecimal, I conjecture that any possible 40-digit sequence would appear in there somewhere. Indeed, how could it possibly be illegal to share pieces of Pi? :)

because information without conext is useless?

Re: The Pirate Bay down, forever?

#144

Post by ZoF »

mfisher87 wrote: post #131

NICE TITLE HN: "The pirate bay down forever (Peter Sunde's blog)" Peter Sunde's Blog: "The Pirate Bay down, forever?"

I'm genuinely curious as to why an admin hasn't changed this title yet.

Certainly enough people have commented about it and it is a grossly misleading omission.

Re: The Pirate Bay down, forever?

#145

Post by forgottenpass »

Joeboy wrote: post #137
evgen wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do just love how people think a blockchain is magic crypto fairy dust that solves all problems...

If you're trying to create a distributed, censorship resistant public record then it's a pretty sensible approach to investigate.

Only in the general sense that bitcoin is a system with some desirable properties of a decentralized torrent index. The list of all software with features desirable in a distributed torrent index is as long as my arm and it's arguably sensible to "investigate" any one of them.

But the grandparent poster didn't name many technologies, they singled out the bitcoin blockchain specifically. A technology that through the popularity of its function has made it a popular target to have other things bolted onto. But popularity of the blockchain hammer does not turn all problems into nails.

Re: The Pirate Bay down, forever?

#146

Post by musername »

Raphmedia wrote: post #99
ozh wrote: post #64

Sometimes I really don't get why stuff get upvoted and frontpaged on HN.

I feel as if some links, even when poor, are upvoted in order to have a comment discussion on the subject they speak about.

comments alone increase rank, but too many look like spam and therefore get stooped

Re: The Pirate Bay down, forever?

#148

Post by mikeash »

Joeboy wrote: post #137
evgen wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do just love how people think a blockchain is magic crypto fairy dust that solves all problems...

If you're trying to create a distributed, censorship resistant public record then it's a pretty sensible approach to investigate.

The Bitcoin blockchain solves the problem of maintaining a distributed public ledger such that changes are agreed upon by all and can't be changed retroactively.

You don't need any of that if you just want a torrent index. There's no need for consensus and no need to keep a secure record of the past. Bitcoin needs to prevent Joe from forging messages like, "Bob sent Joe one thousand bitcoins," but there's no corresponding scenario for torrents.

Re: The Pirate Bay down, forever?

#149

Post by nickthemagicman »

roel_v wrote: post #38
lelandbatey wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing is that to download a torrent, the absolute minimum amount of information you need is the torrent hash. The torrent hash is on the order of ~40 characters long, requiring no other information. All you have to do is paste that short sting into a torrent client to download a set of files. Are we really going to say that these 40 character strings are illegal to share? If I paste the hash for the latest blockb…

It's sad that I have to beat that tired old drum again, but in law, intent matters (yes I have a law degree but I think it's fair to say that one doesn't need one to know that). After 15 years I should have been desensitized by farcically naive 'reasoning' (or I should say, farcically naive sophistry, because let's face it, that's what it is) like 'they don't post torrents, the users do' and 'how can a small string b…

Intent is subjective as hell. I cant believe you have a law degree and dont realize this.

Every story has a million differnet sides.

It seems like thats the lawyers JOB to prove varying degrees of intent.

Was their 'intent' to merely share magnet links in an open forum or was it to destroy copyright protections,ruin the entertainment industry, and starve all artists to death.

Did I put 115 grain in your head by accident or was I intentionally trying to murder you? (Ie accidental manslaughter vs 1st degree)

Intent does matter and the client with the smaller pockets usually has the worst intentions.

Re: The Pirate Bay down, forever?

#150

Post by jimmaswell »

sysk wrote: post #6
Kequc wrote: post #4

In the last 8 years the pirate bay hasn't changed? It went open source and embraced magnet links entirely. Making it so that almost nothing was being hosted on the server itself. You can download the entire pirate bay in 90MB to put one up of your own. There are hundreds of pirate bays all over the world running on almost nothing allowing everyone to download the same things at the same speeds. [edit: It didn't go op…

The fact that it's hosting torrents in flat files or in database rows seems like a minor technical difference to me. Apart from that, the same broken UI doesn't seem to have changed much in the past 8 years. I didn't know that TPB was open source... surprised that the community didn't try to improve the UX a bit.

Broken UI? Really? The posters here are so peciliar about UI sometimes. It's bewildering. Nothing was wrong with TPB's UI. It did exactly what it was meant to cleanly and in an easy to use way. Nothing was difficult or unintuitive about it. Did it not look starkly minimalist enough? Did it not use enough css3? Did it use a table and that just ruined the whole thing? Not enough fancy javascript transitions?
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