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Rarbg Is No More

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Re: Rarbg Is No More

#541

Post by lelandbatey »

Rant423 wrote: post #401
ferCats99 wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They don't, many encodes were from other P2P or release groups and they just stripped the names and attributed to themselves

Got any proof for this wild claim?

This isn't a particularly wild claim in the world of piracy. It's very, very common for folks to take high-quality media released by a group X, remove the filename suffix/nfo and then re-distribute that file elsewhere without attribution.

I will say though that from what I hear, RARGB did do some nice value-add work though. For example, once HEVC/H.265 decoding began to become widespread, and its file size savings became very clear, someone on the RARGB side of things went through many hundreds of the most popular movies and re-encoded existing high-quality releases into very tiny (and thus very popular) ~1.5GB 1080p versions then started seeding them back up. They did this in a relatively short period starting in ~2019, and you can tell that it was a single person/group because all these encodes of movies include metadata about when they were encoded and the software used to do the encoding; all those movies had the same metadata and encoding timestamps that were pretty close together.

Funny anecdote; apparently the encoding settings they used caused problems for many people, leading to many complaints saying "why do only movies from RARGB stutter?":

https://www.reddit.com/r/Piracy/comments/n1497q/anyone_else_...

https://www.reddit.com/r/Tdarr/comments/13rv6j7/automatic_ra...

Re: Rarbg Is No More

#542

Post by double2helix »

For those questioning how websites can still illegally operate torrenting movies, the answer is very simple. It costs a lot of money and resources for the FBI and/or other federal agency to prosecute someone, let alone post adjudication costs ie: probation officers. The feds just don't care to waste time with search warrants over a menial crime. They tried a few years back just simply mailing fines to people. But quickly realized they couldn't prove guilt without spending more money than it's worth.

Also movie makers don't care to push the issue with law enforcement anymore. They (unfortunately for law abiding folks) just inflate the price to make up for lost, just like stores do to combat shoplifting.

Re: Rarbg Is No More

#543

Post by mxmilkiib »

oliwarner wrote: post #397
mxmilkiib wrote: post #289

A reminder that if you're using qBittorrent there is an in-client torrent search tab you can enable.

This seems to use EliteTorrent (by default) which has a strong bias towards Spanish language content. There might be other reasons to use qBittorrent, but if you don't want to switch, you could just use that. https://github.com/iordic/qbittorrent-search-plugins/blob/ma...

You want https://github.com/qbittorrent/search-plugins/wiki/Unofficia...

Re: Rarbg Is No More

#544

Post by Paul-E »

Tuna-Fish wrote: post #148
slazaro wrote: post #125

I keep wondering all the time why torrent search is based on websites (centralized), which can be taken down, etc., while once you have a torrent file or a magnet/hash everything is distributed. Is there a main reason why there isn't (AFAIK, even though I haven't really researched) a distributed search that wouldn't have these problems? Is it a tech problem that literally can't be solved? Or it just hasn't been done?…

The problem is not search, it's curation. Any system that accepts everything will be overrun with things you do not want (fakes, *very* illegal things), and so there needs to be some authority that determines what is allowed. At that point, you are centralized, and hosting a website doesn't significantly hurt you. This is also the problem with all distributed social networks. In the end, your options are formal centr…

Has anyone tried to decentralize curation?

Here is straw man proposal, similar to cert chains and webs of trust: Say I'm a "curator". I say on HN/Reddit/Discord "here is my key hash 'p2pcuration:185da2bc59167692f596404fd83235f9bcb4e107b041f2e6e8d972da6dba00b7'". Any user that clicks the link or copies it into the search app adds the key to the trusted user list. With my private key I can sign torrents after I download them myself, which would mark the torrent as "good". When anyone who has added my key searches, the system searches for a corresponding signature from me as well. If a signature is found, the UI can chose to elevate that result.

The system could be extended so that signers could also sign other keys, expanding the trust network.

This system doesn't need to be run or maintained by each user. It could be served through a webui that can be run locally or shared with a small community. Migrating the interface to a new host would just require moving the config and keys.

Re: Rarbg Is No More

#546

Post by diath »

traverseda wrote: post #460
sktrdie wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the announcement doesn't seem like they were making money?

Pretty sure I remember there being ads.

Even so, if they earn less money off ads than it costs to keep the site running, they're not making money, they're losing money.

Re: Rarbg Is No More

#547

Post by unavoidable »

themagician wrote: post #456
mrtksn wrote: post #18

RARBG was originally Bulgarian, like many other trackers and warez stuff. Eastern Europe - inside EU or outside of the EU - has always been major player in this scene. RIP. I'm still curious how it's possible to run such global illegal operations without being exposed or caught. How is it still possible to remain anonymous on the Internet, considering in this age the thing is very mature and well commercialised?

The answer to this is easier (and harder) than you might think: just don't say anything. You can get away with quite a bit just by being silent, and for longer than you'd think. A big way that people get away with things for so long is just by not answering questions. Someone says, "Is this [illegal thing] yours" and you say nothing. Now you've got to burn hours and dollars trying to prove someone owns something so t…

Am a lawyer. This is correct. Drafting subpoenas, motions, applications, convincing a skeptical judge that Twitter posts are "real" evidence, or explaining how DNS records work, not to mention actually scheduling a damn hearing, then multiply that by 4 or 5 jurisdictions (therefore 4 or 5 sets of lawyers), and you got yourself easily a few years' worth of work.

Re: Rarbg Is No More

#548

Post by alwayslikethis »

grishka wrote: post #473
poisonarena wrote: post #448

Earlier quoted context omitted.

rutracker

I second this but I'm not sure how much use it is outside of the former USSR. Most movies and TV shows there do come with original English soundtracks tho.

I believe this is what kept it relatively low profile despite the scale. There is far more copyright enforcement and attention paid to English language sites compared to non-English languages. China has had their own crackdowns, and the totalitarian system cannot allow freedom of information, so there are no good torrent sites in China either. This leaves Russian sites most unencumbered, with the high quality moderation on the forum making the directory safe to use.

Re: Rarbg Is No More

#549

Post by wkat4242 »

nopcode wrote: post #341
Solvency wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This makes sense but...I'm being fully serious and earnest here and revealing my own naïveté: Couldn't some form of blockchain work here? Like couldn't some form of distributed/democratized community curation and moderation happen by using the blockchain to manage the arbitration of new torrents (and their successors, like when the community decides New Random Anime X encoding to be a superior copy)? Plus you have pr…

This happened in the dutch usenet piracy community. Downloading happened over usenet, but curation and discussion on a centralised website. The site got seized and the community moved to a new forum that runs on usenet itself. Blockchain is overkill here - don't need a coin or stake or whatever

> Downloading happened over usenet, but curation and discussion on a centralised website. The site got seized and the community moved to a new forum that runs on usenet itself.

True, it worked really well for a while but lately it's been pretty terrible due to local copyright representatives suing major uploaders and others stopping because they just got old.

Also the notice & takedown has really killed usenet a bit. Private trackers are hard to get into just like with torrents.

Re: Rarbg Is No More

#550

Post by wkat4242 »

Xen9 wrote: post #230
Solvency wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This makes sense but...I'm being fully serious and earnest here and revealing my own naïveté: Couldn't some form of blockchain work here? Like couldn't some form of distributed/democratized community curation and moderation happen by using the blockchain to manage the arbitration of new torrents (and their successors, like when the community decides New Random Anime X encoding to be a superior copy)? Plus you have pr…

Freenet works this way. I would replace all torrents with Freenet(s) but the technology seems to be too obscure to be comfortable for large audiences.

It's also not capable of handling this kind of volume.

IPFS might be a more modern alternative but it has similar issues. It's used for fairly small files such as books (libgen) but not really for movies.

Edit: Or do you man the torrent files only? That might work but they really are just links, it might be a bit overkill for them.

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