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The Long, Slow Decline of BitTorrent (2017)

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Re: The Long, Slow Decline of BitTorrent (2017)

#321

Post by markc »

ProfessorLayton wrote: post #153
distances wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a major issue with streaming services. Netflix usually doesn't offer even English subtitles to an English-speaking movie if you're in a non-English speaking country! At least with DVDs you could rip it and add subtitles yourself if needed.

Netflix seems to be pretty opinionated about subtitles. Try watching Narcos without subs, you can't. "Off" means the Spanish parts are subbed, and switching it to Spanish means the English parts are subbed! Netflix, a Californian company, simply couldn't fathom that some people might understand English and Spanish.

You'd need more "settings" too because some people want only foreign language subtitles turned on (language impaired) and others want subtitles for everything (hearing impaired). And what if you're multi-lingual but hearing impaired? You might want all subtitles for languages you speak in the original language.

Re: The Long, Slow Decline of BitTorrent (2017)

#322

Post by zanny »

wang_li wrote: post #249
rando444 wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since the EU has stated they won't be doing any trade deals with anyone not in the Paris climate agreement, it looks that this won't be a problem with the current US administration. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/eu-trade-deal...

Where are they going to get microprocessors and hard drives?

Considering most microprocessors are manufactured in Taiwan and Korea and a lot of hard drives come from Singapore and Thailand, the EU doesn't even have anything to worry about on that front.

Re: The Long, Slow Decline of BitTorrent (2017)

#323

Post by samblr »

jimmies wrote: post #62

I can't read the article because the website is down. But I have something to say about torrenting movies. Late last year, my old parents who don't speak English came to visit me for a couple of months in the US. I'm just a graduate student with a limited budget, and my mom is car sick so we couldn't go out every night. I didn't want them to waste time on Facebook after dinner until we went to bed, so I had to think…

Bittorrent has kind of given me real sparks in life that I could have never attempted to experience.

This is in terms of amounts of books that I have downloaded! Most associate torrents with audio/video downloads. But any books lovers here - should check out the wealth out there.

I sincerely want to 'buy' all books I have downloaded after I own a house and a dog.

Re: The Long, Slow Decline of BitTorrent (2017)

#324

Post by twohlix_ »

eximius wrote: post #270
falcor84 wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But do note that hosting is actually only a very small percentage of where money goes. In 2017, Wikimedia received ~87M in donations while only ~2M were spent on hosting. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/d/da/Wikim...

What the hell? Why do they need my money if they have 50 Million dollars in cash or cash equivalents? Am I reading that right? And who the hell are their employees that are getting paid 33 million dollars a year? How many employees are there? EDIT: Reading a related comment's linked OP-ed, it appears that the Wikimedia Foundation spends a lot of money on non-wikipedia things. That is disturbing to me. I would like to…

They have ~300 employees. So 33M is not a crazy price to pay. ~110k USD/employee/year. Considering the industry they're in (information and tech) this is totally reasonable.

Otherwise no big deal that it may or may not fit your values to donate to Wikimedia.

Re: The Long, Slow Decline of BitTorrent (2017)

#325

Post by [deleted] »

jjrh wrote: post #253
shrimp_emoji wrote: post #215

>Cause 5: VPN Usage >The real problem here is that there’s no way to know just how much of VPN traffic is growing or how much of it is BitTorrent. Though different traffic studies look at the internet from different vantage points, some simply would not be able to see VPN-obscured BitTorrent traffic. I'm on a VPN all the time, and torrenting without a VPN, to me, is living on the edge. I'd constantly wonder: how long…

> I'm on a VPN all the time, and torrenting without a VPN, to me, is living on the edge. I'd constantly wonder: how long before I receive a stern letter? That's really a USA thing.

[deleted]

Re: The Long, Slow Decline of BitTorrent (2017)

#326

Post by drchickensalad »

gsich wrote: post #306
nsxwolf wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are required to per the licensing deal they made with the content owner.

This always reads like an excuse. They don't have to enforce it as strictly. Content owners don't specify the exact technical details Netflix has to deploy. If the deal says "no access for users outside country x", Netflix could just ask the user from which country they are from. Then, depending on the answer either show it or not. On another note, some companies like this. Take Valve with Steam. They are definitly i…

You're free to think that, and possibly some less important companies could get away with it.

However, in reality, the content owners really aren't that dumb and incompetent. There are very punishing legal implications to breaking the contracts, especially your relationship with others. And the content owners don't just do nothing; there's quite detailed questions and requirements they give when you renew their content, and they very often discover things they want to change after.

It's obviously a problematic enough relationship that netflix doesn't want to be a part of it anymore. More power to them; I wish this could be done for all industries as easily/well.

Re: The Long, Slow Decline of BitTorrent (2017)

#327

Post by zanny »

Robotbeat wrote: post #26

What's more interesting to me is using BitTorrent not for pirated movies but as a content distribution system enabling more free services like Wikipedia. Wikipedia is a super heavily visited website, so must pay a lot for hosting. They manage to pay for it all with donations, but other sites can't. For example: What if Open Access journals used peer to peer for nearly-free content distribution? That'd allow the open…

This is practically the thesis of IPFS.

Re: The Long, Slow Decline of BitTorrent (2017)

#328

Post by thomastjeffery »

kbenson wrote: post #208
ProfessorLayton wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Netflix seems to be pretty opinionated about subtitles. Try watching Narcos without subs, you can't. "Off" means the Spanish parts are subbed, and switching it to Spanish means the English parts are subbed! Netflix, a Californian company, simply couldn't fathom that some people might understand English and Spanish.

> Netflix, a Californian company, simply couldn't fathom that some people might understand English and Spanish. Or they just decided the path that serves the most people without complicating matters is to assume you want subtitles for any language not selected as the primary audio language. I think the relevant question here is how would you design a control panel that allowed you to define which of the many language…

Add an English and Spanish audio language.

It's really not hard. The real problem is that because it's closed-source software, the user must rely on the creator to think of every edge case.

Re: The Long, Slow Decline of BitTorrent (2017)

#329

Post by eximius »

twohlix_ wrote: post #324
eximius wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What the hell? Why do they need my money if they have 50 Million dollars in cash or cash equivalents? Am I reading that right? And who the hell are their employees that are getting paid 33 million dollars a year? How many employees are there? EDIT: Reading a related comment's linked OP-ed, it appears that the Wikimedia Foundation spends a lot of money on non-wikipedia things. That is disturbing to me. I would like to…

They have ~300 employees. So 33M is not a crazy price to pay. ~110k USD/employee/year. Considering the industry they're in (information and tech) this is totally reasonable. Otherwise no big deal that it may or may not fit your values to donate to Wikimedia.

Not crazy, no, but surprising that they have ~300 employees.

Re: The Long, Slow Decline of BitTorrent (2017)

#330

Post by anonu »

The article claims that p2p traffic is dropping and quotes percentage numbers which appear to be a percent of total web traffic. This doesn't actually tell me if p2p traffic is dropping. It only tells me that its not growing with - what I would expect is a growing pie of internet traffic.

Furthermore, I would consider the source (plagiarismtoday.com) when choosing to trust some of the items in this article. I've never heard of them - but my initial inclination is to believe they have an agenda.

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