Most people have extremely weird ideas of what’s considered piracy and what isn’t. Downloading a video game rom is piracy, but if you pay money to some Chinese retailer for an SD card containing the roms, that’s somehow not piracy. Exploiting the free trial on a streaming site by using prepaid visa cards is somehow not...
lol good points and so true. reading this just makes me think of the old quote If the penalty for a crime is a fine, that law only exists for the lower classes. When I think of record labels and big film companies, let’s just say that the first thing that comes to mind isn’t starving artists but coastal elitists getting pissy bc they can’t charge people even more.
I use a mix. Sometimes, I’ll read stuff in the foliate app on Linux from my desktop outputting onto a big screen tv.
But I also do an old kindle while lounging on couch/bed and Librera reader on phone (android/f-droid) when I’m on the shitter.
For the most part, I load different things on each and just jump back and forth between several stories. Keeps things interesting and no need to sync bookmarks and whatnot.
Well, i decided to brush up my simple HTML page and created a fully linked wiki on the subject. Please take a look, in the hope it will be useful for at least one fellow one-eyed leg-pegged passionate data hoarder....
A lot of my files were shitty 480p versions of movies from the Napster days. Now they’re all 1080p, with a few 720p exceptions (mainly tv series episodes). All in all 500 something files in total. Now just watching uTorrent slowly download them all. Hopefully my VPN keeps the eyes off of me…
Maybe? Been awhile since I’ve messed with my setup and while I don’t like slow, I prioritize security over speed so my settings might not be what you want anyway. so I’d recommend just looking up a guide; it is an extremely popular torrent client and there should be tons of guides out there. Or if you not sure which guide to use, just create a new post here - lot of people use it and probably have set it up from scratch more recently than me. I know some people say to open ports on the router but i’ve never liked the idea (I view it as less secure) but some people swear by it.
I can recommend that you test the following:
make sure you are using a VPN server that isn’t too far away. If you were in say San Franciso and selecting a VPN in New York or Europe, your speeds will be less than if you selected one in Seattle or Los Angeles
do a speed test off your vpn vs on it (e.g. speedtest.net). ALL VPNs will be slower than regular non-VPN due to the encryption and having less hops. But you can see how much difference it makes when you switch servers and if you have more than one VPN service, then you can find servers in the same city for both and compare which service is faster.
If your VPN has a modified WireGuard service (PIA and Nord both do IIRC), then that should be faster. I say modified bc the unaltered Wireguard spec has a privacy red flags so if you have a VPN service that offers it, make sure you read up or at least skim some reviews and whatnot to make sure they handled those issues that in a way that doesn’t leave your identity exposed. PIA and Nord both did that (I think Nord’s was called something else not actually WG but idr).
make sure you do your testing on popular torrents - but if it is anything you could get in trouble for, then you should do all the leak tests I mentioned above FIRST. Only mentioning, bc I had a friend that was testing his shit on some obscure thing he was looking for and saying it was slow but when i helped him configure his settings, we tested with something popular (i think whatever the current hottest show was) and he was actually getting a lot better speeds than he thought.
edit: just searched on dbzer0 and wasn’t seeing much on this. I did find a reddit post and a makeuseof guide that both mention stuff about improving speed. For the reddit one, I think the patched exe they are talking about is likely a dev build and since that was from a few years ago, whatever fix is probably already merged in and no longer needed. will compare the other settings vs mine and post back
edit2: are are the differences i have from the guide:
makeuseof has (Tools > Options > Speed) “Upload and download rate limits are set to infinity by default, and it’s recommended not to tinker with these limits. Most often, users limit the upload rate to save bandwidth and get faster download rates, but the torrent client’s choking mechanism compromises download rates when upload rates are limited, making the download process much slower.” - on mine, i had infinite down and was restricting upload. But I kind of think MUO’s advice is better and increased my upload amount. Mine was 100 KiB/s, now 1000 KiB/s. Only reason I don’t put it on infinite is I am on a capped internet and tend to leave my downloaded stuff around for sharing so I want to avoid uploads consuming too much of my monthly bandwidth and I don’t leave my client running 24/7 so not sure how reliable bandwidth settings are.
makeuseof has (Tools > Options > BitTorrent) "In the dropdown menu next to Encryption mode, select Allow Encryption. " but on mine I have it as “required Encryption” - probably this would make mine slower than the suggestion tho
Tools > Options > Connection settings I have “TCP and uTP” (same as MUO) but that old reddit thread was recommending only TCP.
MUO has (Tools > Options > Connections) : "Ensure the box beside Use UPnP / NAT-PMP port forwarding from my router is checked. " - as I mentioned, I don’t do port forwarding so I leave mine unchecked but there is probably a speed hit for this.
There was also something about "Don’t download multiple torrent files at the same time. This will then allocate all available bandwidth to downloading a single file, resulting in a faster download. " - I generally ignore this but there IS some truth to it. I have had hundreds of things queued before and gotten awful speeds. I recommend just not going overboard with how many you are running at once.
Tools > Options > Advanced: Find the network interface and select the one that corresponds with your VPN. If you aren’t sure, for most Windows users you can connect to VPN then find from command line using ipconfig /all and look for something that is NOT disconnected and probably has TAP-Windows Adapter Vx if using OpenVPN-Protocol (most VPNs) but might be different for wireguard. For Linux users, to show network interfaces run ip -4 -o -br addr - usually in linux ethernet interfaces start with an E and wifi interfaces start with a W, lo is localhost, and 99% of the time the vpn interface will be named tun0 if you are using a VPN with OpenVPN-protocol (most of them) but might be something different for wireguard or if you have customized things.
Most quality VPNs will have a killswitch built in and enabled automatically, with nothing to setup, but they are notoriously unreliable and can fail.
Fair. I do all of my setup manually these days (networkmanager on linux, openvpn client app on the rare occasion i’m on windows, not a mac guy so no clue there). I implement one using a firewall but that is more complex than most people want. Still, as long as it is done in addition to the qbit network interface bind, then it’s not bad to also set a VPN killswitch.
The key term people want to search for is “bind.” You want to bind qBit to your VPN.
Agreed. This is what I was referencing in the first bullet about network interface
I’m not saying you shouldn’t recommend these, or that people shouldn’t use them, but IMO, people should at least be warned to search for the following, so they can make an informed decision:
1 - Fair points. TBH, I had my doubts about that initially but have been with them the whole time (before and after kape acquisition). FWIW, I have not seen any change in PIA service quality. In fact, I have seen them add Wireguard support and release all of the code as FOSS (see here). I agree that Kape did some sketchy shit in the past but from what I have seen over the last several years, they are not doing anything sketchy in the VPN/technology sector part of their business (aside from maybe advertising which I consider to be separate). I don’t even really think about Kape anymore tbh. If they were ratting me out, I would have had enough dcma notices to start a bonfire with by now.
2 - I had not been aware of that. I haven’t used them in a few years. Any sort of data breach definitely sounds bad but since I haven’t reviewed the details, I don’t want to jump to any conclusions either.
I like Mullvad from a tech and privacy standpoint but IMO they are a bit on the expensive side compared to some of the other options. Nord and PIA you can usually get multiyear deals on periodically and that can drastically lower the overall cost ($80 for a 3yr VPN plan = monthly about 2.22 USD/2.04 euro vs 5 euro/month for mullvad). Not saying price is the be-all-end-all or that Mullvad is unaffordable but it is going to be a consideration for many, especially people that already don’t want to shell out for a paid VPN over the free ones. With that in mind, I think there is still value in PIA (and possibly Nord - I haven’t reviewed the details of what exactly was breached - e.g. vpn service vs blog server vs etc, what data was exposed, what steps they took to address, etc). There are many other no-logs vpn options besides Nord, PIA, and Mullvad out there, I just don’t have any personal experience with them.
since you seem familiar with those clients, do you know if either or both of those have a network interface bind feature like qbittorrent? (if not familar, qbit lets you pick which interface your vpn uses and only torrent on that one - which is damn handy if your vpn drops)
i used to use deluge back in the day (years ago) but ended up switching to qbit after i got a dcma when my vpn dropped. i’ve since improved my setup and safeguards a lot but was wondering if it ever got a similar feature.
Interesting. I’m still on a VM setup and still need to migrate everything over to using docker (or podman). I had made an attempt a year or so back but wanted to run all my containers without root and whatever one I was using as a template at the time had been expecting the opposite. Then life caught up with me and I ran out of time on that project
But good to know about Gluetun. Maybe I’ll revisit the migration to containers at some point if I get the free time.
It’s actually an old windows VM and definitely not convenient, more it’s just that I know I’ve tested the fuck out of it and it’s rock-solid in terms of not leaking ips or whatnot. I’ve been wanting to migrate it to be pure linux for some time but part of the complexity is porting my old firewall rules… linux firewalls don’t see process paths for the most part so I pretty much need to handle things in a much different way. I could probably throw together a Linux VM with iptables-based rules without too much trouble but I guess I just figured skipping past VMs entirely and going directly to containers was better but that ended up being more time- and research-intensive than I had originally expected (apparently i suck at containers lol)
every few minutes is a lot. havent been on nord for a few years but even when i was on them i dont remember getting drops that frequently. i suspect it is likely not an issue with qbit as many others use it without running into drops like that - including myself.
probably an issue with either nord or your isp. if you are on wifi, there are also some routeres with known issues when it comes to dropping wifi signal - but there’s too many different models and firmware versions to really guess this accurately without detailed info (and sometimes it only happens in specific versions of firmware on specific routers).
i get occasional drops on PIA but its usually after running for something like 3-7 days straight. i’m not using the official pia client app but instead download manual ovpn file configurations from pia and import them into generic client. under windows, you need the openvpn free community client for this. under linux, you can import them into networkmanager. iirc, nord has manual ovpn files too but they make you select a specific server and download 1 config file at a time.
alternately, if you setup wireguard that might also work better but haven’t tested myself
I don’t know enough about ovpn or wireguard to know how that would help me…
OpenVPN and Wireguard are different protocols that VPN providers can use. Technically, there are also groups and client apps of the same name for both too. I think there are other protocols too (pretty sure there’s one called IPsec and maybe some others) but OpenVPN and Wireguard are 2 of the most common. Wireguard is newer and generally is regarded as faster than OpenVPN protocol but there are some privacy issues with it if using the unmodified version. Some VPN companies use a modified version of WG that address those issues (Nord and PIA). But since customers can’t inspect the server configs, I would definitely recommend only using VPN companies that have undergone a third party audit to confirm that they keep no logs and have a server configuration without privacy issues (off my head: PIA, Nord, Mullvad, expressvpn, surfshark, cyberghost).
Is that not a VPN/tunneling that you have to have both sides to use?
Yes, if your VPN provider doesn’t have servers configured with Wireguard, then you can’t use it. And even if they do, it probably won’t be all the servers so you need to choose one with it. So if say your provider was Nord. Nord calls their modified WG as “NordLynx”.
If you wanted to connect to Nord’s WG (aka NordLynx) servers, AFAIK you have to use the official Nord client app. Some providers might release a WG config file that you could use to manually set it up but last time I checked Nord only offers manual config files for OpenVPN (here’s an old reddit thread basically saying the same thing). This is annoying if you are trying to have a setup where you can switch between multiple providers and protocols easily (like me) or in places where you can’t install client software (like routers) but probably not a big deal to most users connecting from a computer/tablet/phone/etc.
For PIA, it is similar although they don’t rename their Wireguard as something else. But again, they don’t provide manual WG configs and you have to use their official app to use it. However, they do have some github repos and more technical users can run some scripts to generate temporary manual configs (my understanding is that unlike the OpenVPN manual configs, these will eventually expire and you will need to rerun the scripts again at some later time).
I used Nord proxies when I still used uTorrent, never had issues. I’m definitely hardwired, and my isp is shit, don’t get me wrong, but the only change I can see is qBit and proxies. I tried every server they had available, and the issue just stops when I don’t use their proxies. Maybe I should try proxies from some other service, but I’m not really in a place to shop around… and I don’t know that free vpn services have proxies that you can try.
Not sure. Hard to debug without concrete details and I’m probably not the best for that anyway. Could be proxies; I connect to vpn servers but not via socks proxies so not sure how those are different speed wise.
If not that, could be qbit settings or version (several years ago some various builds of qbit could be hit or miss but I thought that was more or less done with nowadays). If you are interested in working it out, my recommendation would be to take some screenshots of qbit settings. Then create a post asking about improving qbit speeds and also list a) who the vpn provider is - nord or whatever you use now, b) how you are connecting - nord app or proxy url etc, c) if you are testing with same torrent in each, then what kind of approx numbers you are seeing in qbit and what you expect based on network test. That would probaby be enough info for folks to help you get it sorted and would be a good resource for anybody else having similar troubles.
The reason? The new deadpool IP shredded the contracts with the original game developers primarily because the voice actors weren’t the ones everyone is now accustomed to (mostly ryan reynolds).
Makes me wonder how out of touch those guys are that they see the only solution is the nuclear route. Even if there were more issues than just this, it seems like better options could be found.
Steam managed to allow the content owners to be able to download and install the game without any problems while also complying with the new terms surrounding the deadpool ip.
That’s a very good example and I agree that’s a much better way to do it.
I would think tho that this was more of a difference in how the original contracts were designed (e.g. Steam probably planned for this from day 1) but it’s clear that wherever along the timeline the decision was made that Steam handled it way better than Sony.
I think one other angle we’re probably missing is that Sony is in the movie industry in a big way, where Steam is not. From everything I’ve seen, film/movie/tv/music bigwigs are some of the greediest and most childish asshats in existence. Just look at the pettiness of their lawsuits.
I got out of video game piracy for a while, but I’m coming back. One thing I have been absolutely SHOCKED by is how finding PC game torrents is actually kind of difficult from my normal sources. Now it’d be one thing if I just wasn’t seeing games, but for some reason Playstation and Switch have far more uploaders and...
tbh, i never really used galaxy so i guess i have no idea what i’m missing. if it’s just an online install client kinda like steam but for gog content, that wouldn’t really interest me too much but if it lets me download offline installers as a batch job, that alone would be totally worth it (i have no idea if it does that already or not)
ok, you convinced me that I want Galaxy for Linux too 😁
the achievements, social, and install management stuff wasn’t too important for me but having it simplify offline installer downloads vs doing it from browser would be great.
Definitely agree that being able to control install location + whether or not to update is nice (compared to steam) but I was comparing vs what I can already do in the offline installers so I guess that’s why it didn’t matter to me if the client could do it. But some games you need to download a lot of files which is kind of a pain in the ass from the browser (especially when it’s something you need to run under wine since gog tends to split windows games into multiple pieces/.bin files more often than they do native linux ones from what i’ve seen).
they are based on size but it’s only the windows versions. for example, if you buy witcher 2, it has windows and linux versions. linux version is a single ~20 GiB file while the windows version has a small exe + lots of bin files that are 1.5 GiB or less and you need all of them to install.
As for why, no way to know for sure without inside info, but best guess is that they are trying to account for maximum file size limits across all the various possible Windows/Mac filesystem types but whichever employee setup the Linux ones realized that most Linux users wouldn’t be using shitty Microsoft filesystems. FAT12 is fairly safe to ignore but they might have been considering FAT16 and HFS as the lowest common denominators, then making the files slightly smaller than the max file size just in case.
That or possible that they were balancing by network loads (since Windows versions probably account for around 99% of all downloads) and that was somehow determined to be the sweet spot.
Possibly stupid question, but how does one manually tag things on lemmy when using desktop web ui from browser (as opposed to mobile apps that specifically have a tagging feature). Is it as simple as add some #SomeWord thing? Asking bc I thought that when using markdown for comments (which I do), the # at the beginning indicates a heading level, not a tag. So… guess I’m just saying I have no idea how tags work in lemmy (don’t know how to add them, don’t know how to search by them, etc).
It might be worth mentioning - or at least linking to - how one can do so manually on lemmy in the readme.md file for dummies like myself.
Decided to dip my toes in so I followed the guide to a website where I can download some content via google drive. Like an idiot, I didn’t research the risks of direct downloads before and so I’m now a bit paranoid. I understand the chances are low and my media player needs to be exploited but is there a way to be certain? A...
I understand the chances are low and my media player needs to be exploited but is there a way to be certain?
Personally, even if I was on a highly targeted OS like Windows, I wouldn’t really worry too much about video files being infected - with the obvious exceptions of making sure they are actually video files not something like .mkv.exe and that your system isn’t compromised some other way (e.g. installing / running random apps or scripts off the web / email / etc).
But if you want a little extra peace of mind, you could run an antivirus file scan on it or take steps to sandbox it in a VM or security container.
If you are on Linux, you can run the media player apps like vlc / mpv / smplayer / etc in security containers which would limit their capabilities if there ever was a successful exploit on the player software via something embedded in a video or music file. There are several different apps you can use to make use of such security containers. The easiest is probably to just use flatpak versions of applications (flatpak is a “universal” linux build format - most of these are available on flathub.org - and have a built-in security container called bubblewrap which you can control with a tool called flatseal). There are also other options besides flatpaks such as firejail (which I use myself), which has pre-made profiles for a lot of the more popular linux apps so like for vlc I could simply launch firejail vlc in shortcuts or I think there is a graphical app for it too. edit: jsut checked and yup, there is a gui called firetools: github | their blog which has screenshots and a 2min video demo.
Linux security containers rely on features built into the Linux kernel so I’m not sure if there are comparable alternatives for Windows or Mac. But I suppose if you were on one of those, you could always just run things in a virtual machine.
A post on reddit said to use mkvtoolnix to check all the elements but I honestly don’t know what to look for. Any help?
Without an actual link to see what they said, I’m going to go out on a limb and guess their assumption was that you would either have some kind of corrupted exe that is NOT a valid video OR a valid video. I mostly agree with that assumption - there are things like steganography that can hide data in some other data files like pictures or videos but that is more just extra crap than exploit.
IF you accept this assumption, then what they probably meant was that you could use mkvtoolnix to confirm that the mkv file loaded successfully and had audio + video streams (e.g. a really really basic test for it being a valid mkv file). You could do the same thing with the mediainfo tool (I believe this is also crossplatform since that’s what RARBG used to use on their media detail pages… and God do I miss that, wish other public trackers all did the same thing).
It's funny how google pretends the music on YouTube isn't straight up piracy and everyone just goes along with it
Most people have extremely weird ideas of what’s considered piracy and what isn’t. Downloading a video game rom is piracy, but if you pay money to some Chinese retailer for an SD card containing the roms, that’s somehow not piracy. Exploiting the free trial on a streaming site by using prepaid visa cards is somehow not...
Why don't nfo files contain a checksum for the release?
I assume there’s some historical reason for this, but currently, the way scene releases reach most people seems to consist of:...
Epub Site
Anybody have any recommendations for public or private trackers for ebooks? Looking mainly for epub files.
Updated my Gentoo guide to Sailing the High Seas (www.paneburroezucchero.info)
Well, i decided to brush up my simple HTML page and created a fully linked wiki on the subject. Please take a look, in the hope it will be useful for at least one fellow one-eyed leg-pegged passionate data hoarder....
Arrrrrrrrrr (lemmy.world)
I just deleted my entire library and redownloaded it.
A lot of my files were shitty 480p versions of movies from the Napster days. Now they’re all 1080p, with a few 720p exceptions (mainly tv series episodes). All in all 500 something files in total. Now just watching uTorrent slowly download them all. Hopefully my VPN keeps the eyes off of me…
Sony Steals Customers' Purchased Content - Piracy is COMPLETELY JUSTIFIED! (odysee.com)
What happened to the PC games (or what happened to consoles)?
I got out of video game piracy for a while, but I’m coming back. One thing I have been absolutely SHOCKED by is how finding PC game torrents is actually kind of difficult from my normal sources. Now it’d be one thing if I just wasn’t seeing games, but for some reason Playstation and Switch have far more uploaders and...
Info: This community is monitored by the Lemmy-Tagginator bot (lemmy.dbzer0.com)
You might have seen my lemmy tagginator which I announced here and I explain its purpose in its README....
How to check a direct downloaded mkv file
Decided to dip my toes in so I followed the guide to a website where I can download some content via google drive. Like an idiot, I didn’t research the risks of direct downloads before and so I’m now a bit paranoid. I understand the chances are low and my media player needs to be exploited but is there a way to be certain? A...