Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Rarbg Is No More

web.archive.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

611–620 of 679 posts

Re: Rarbg Is No More

#611

Post by palata »

whimsicalism wrote: post #505
maeln wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bitcoin is going to be 15 years old soon and aside from this original usage, no real usage has really taken off for "blockchain" technologies (and no, I am not counting the occasional pump and dump / virtual scarcity scheme as a real usage of the tech). We really have to stop asking this question. And I say this having had some involvement with some web3 projects/company. Even if it is theoretically possible, it crea…

There are plenty of real uses for cryptocurrency that exist in the real world, but most of it is boring stuff: people holding their assets in stablecoins in countries that have capital controls.

Cryptocurrency is the only actual use-case for blockchain, all the rest can be done better with other technology.

And cryptocurrency is usually used for illegal stuff, so it is not necessarily desirable.

Re: Rarbg Is No More

#612

Post by JW_00000 »

jasonfarnon wrote: post #575
m4r1k wrote: post #92

Probably the largest blow to the torrent sharing community since The Pirate Bay got shut down. The impact of content availability will be noticeable for years to come

I'm very out of the loop at this stage of life, but one thing I have wondered--has software as a service, and all the online gaming, killed off all those kinds of warez? Are most of these pirate sites nowadays just for movies/tv? (One of the reasons I have been wondering about this is that I so f'ing hate windows etc updating and phoning home all the time I would prefer a version cracked a la 2007 to prevent that, ov…

I genuinely think Spotify and Netflix, and other streaming services, have been the biggest blow to torrent sites. For the average user, it's just so much easier to pay $10/month (or even less when you share your account with friends) and get easy & user-friendly access to the content (in a way that happens to be legal).

10-15 years ago, before Spotify/Netflix, people used to say: "As long as it's easier to acquire things illegally, people will continue doing so," and I think that has really been shown to be true.

Re: Rarbg Is No More

#613

Post by creatonez »

q1w2 wrote: post #215
sbdaman wrote: post #178

It's absolutely insane how many of these incredibly important torrent sites are just managed and hosted by a rag-tag group of people with the site barely clinging to life.

While we like to romanticize these groups, they often have ulterior motives in getting users to the site. Pushing ads from less-than-reputable ad-sources, and having a section with binaries where admins can push malware laden programs/games/files to increase the size of a client's botnet. The model is that as users become more comfortable on the site, they eventually browse to the more dangerous categories and downlo…

I don't think RARBG ever had ads, and they always filtered out anything malicious or low quality. Your description applies generally, but is the complete opposite of what RARBG was.

Re: Rarbg Is No More

#614

Post by SergeAx »

One of the problems of RarBG was that they were dealing with real data. Today to get a popular file from bit-torrent network all one needs is a hash (AKA magnet) - DHT and other distributed announcement protocols will take care of everything else. But the moment you gotta deal with real content - you are in a big trouble both legaly and technically: todays 4K media can take up to ten gigabyte per hour of screen time. No wonder RarBG suffered that much.

Re: Rarbg Is No More

#617

Post by red-iron-pine »

alwayslikethis wrote: post #539
madars wrote: post #475

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. For example, Z-Library accepted Amazon gift card donations using an email linked to their identities: https://torrentfreak.com/how-google-and-amazon-helped-the-fb...

This screams poor opsec to me. Accepting anything other than anonymized crypto (Monero, etc) is basically untenable in this era of mass surveillance. Going through a big tech company is a good way to get caught.

if you're the host. the end user can use gift cards just fine, and they're usually pretty fungible.

am 100% okay moving the risk to the operation/operator

Re: Rarbg Is No More

#618

Post by red-iron-pine »

einpoklum wrote: post #459
WastingMyTime89 wrote: post #418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Google has enough lawyers to give the EU and US the run around when they want to. Google has paid something like 10 billions dollars of fines in the EU during the last decade. I don’t think they are giving the run around to anyone.

Alphabet is valued at over 1.5 Trillion dollars. If they pay 1 Billion USD in fines per year, maybe their lawyers are actually doing an ok job for their client.

just the cost of doing business at that point

Re: Rarbg Is No More

#619

Post by clsec »

chakintosh wrote: post #601

For what it's worth, there is a concerted effort at r/DataHoarder to bring the site back from the dead.

There is now also a repository that is holding 100's of thousands of RARBG magnet links in text files [1]. The link is in the article. I'm not sure whether posting the direct link is proper here.

[1] https://torrentfreak.com/rarbg-over-267000-movie-tv-show-mag...

Re: Rarbg Is No More

#620

Post by Fnoord »

wukerplank wrote: post #586
expertentipp wrote: post #493

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Someone says, "Is this yours" and you say nothing. Now you've got to burn hours and dollars trying to prove someone owns something so that you can go after them. The opposite is the German approach. Shower the cuntiest lawyers with money, lobby for laws allowing to easily pick a victim, bully the victim senseless. Lobby even more and if someone uses the word "corruption" in context of copyrights, bully the shit out…

Germany really takes the price when it comes to (torrent-based) piracy. The lawyers around it created a nice little ecosystem for themselves. Honeypot torrents and all. They have such a nice system that they don't go for the torrent sites, just milk the torrenters.

It also creates a weird liability where hotel owners have to snoop on their users in order to deflect responsibility. It also stimulates self-censorship. VPNs are likely very popular in Germany.
Post reply on HN