I’m a bit surprised to see so many torrent posts. Are most people still using Torrents? Are most piracy users aware of programs like sonarr or radarr?

  • PeachMan@lemmy.one
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    1 year ago

    I’m a member of one private tracker; it’s private enough that I don’t need a VPN while downloading/seeding and I have had no issue maintaining ratios.

    For public trackers, no ratios required. For VPN disconnects, you just need a torrent client that properly isolates to a single network connection, which effectively operates as a kill switch. There are also VPN clients with kill switches, but I tend to not use those because doing it in the torrent client is easier and more reliable.

    Re: prosecution, I’m pretty sure nobody has been prosecuted for simple downloading in a decade. The feds only go after major torrent tracker owners, the ones doing the distributing. The dreaded letters are just that: letters. They’re a scare tactic from your ISP, they don’t actually prosecute or even kick you off your plan; they just make you watch a little video on how piracy bad.

    Again, Usenet is only “secure” if you can fully trust the owner of the server you’re connecting to. It would be trivial for a government agency to set up a honeypot or take over an existing server and turn it into one. The reason they don’t seem to care is probably because fewer people are on Usenet; they’re going for the bigger fish.

    • idle@158436977.xyz
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      1 year ago

      And the reason they don’t care is because it’s so much harder to get people on it. Hence, it’s safer.

    • idle@158436977.xyz
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      1 year ago

      Sure, most of this is true, but only for some people. The letters still come, and people absolutely do pay damages for torrenting, especially in Germany. Meanwhile none of this is true for Usenet, there simply is no misconfiguration you can make that will result in a letter. Sure it could but at this point it’s never happened. With torrenting it can and does happen all the time. No letters, no scare tactics, no ratios to maintain (I get that you dont have to but most struggle). No secret club you have to get into. No variable speeds.

      I totally agree that torrenting is awesome and it used to be the way i did everything as well. But after getting on usenet I was completely shocked and I’m never going back.

      • PeachMan@lemmy.one
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        1 year ago

        Fair enough, maybe I’ll check it out. That’s the kind of explanation I was looking for, by the way, thanks.