If piracy is moral and ethical and enables us to share knowledge, why do private trackers gatekeep this knowledge? It goes against the principles of piracy. Do they do it just to feel superior about bring in a sekrit club?
I would say it is more of a practical consideration. Private trackers generally enforce upload/download ratios. This ensures the health of the sharing pool stays good.
Also, they curate the collection so that it doesn’t get filled with low quality garbage.
Part of preserving and sharing knowledge is doing quality control.
Do they ensure that each torrent is seeded? Do they have a problem of dead torrents?
Usually torrents remain seeded because private tracker users are encouraged to seed everything forever. In addition, often if a private tracker has a bonus system they will offer extra bonus points for seeding low-seed torrents, and some even automatically mark torrents as freeleech if they’re below ~5 seeds, encouraging people to revive its seed count in a targeted manner.
I’ll be honest I’m not trying to preserve knowledge I just want high quality stuff for free. Private trackers weed out the low quality files and keep the system healthy by also weeding out people who just leech files without seeding anything back.
I think there’s lot less potential abuse, if you control your tracker and the peers. If I remember correctly, you usually have to seed till a specific ratio is reached. I doubt that any copyright-infringment-abuse-company tries to get acces to those trackers, if they have to upload stuff at first.
Copyright alliances try to get access to private trackers, but only the database that tracks everything to arrest big uploaders. They don’t need anything else. Private trackers, as the name implies, track everything, a treasure trove of incriminating evidence.
One potential advantage is that many private trackers are meticulously-curated. The more people that are on a tracker, the harder it is to quality control every single upload. Most of the top-tier trackers aren’t just a dumping ground for data, they have tons of categories and slots for each potential piece of data to go, and if a better piece of data can fit in that slot then the previous one needs to be reviewed, deleted, and replaced.
Another reason is that private trackers often have many rules to facilitate the overall health of the tracker and its swarms, e.g. minimum quality for uploads, minimum seed times, required ratios etc. If anyone could get an account they could break the rules over and over after being banned.
Often, ISP spy on public tracker to see if you download stuff but way less on privates one. I guess it’s just a way of staying more private.
I would also add that in public trackers you can download your file and close your torrent client and not share it back and therefore be selfish in just getting what you want tihiut sharing back to the pirate community
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I seed more on public than on provate tbh, why? Because there are way more leechers on public than on private or even semi private, the number of time I keep a torrent to seed and it stays at a ratio of 0 because it’s a dark things that probably get downloaded once a year… So I use some fake seed software because otherwise I’m not able to see it anyway… it’s sad and don’t make me happy, but sometime it’s the only way…
That’s why I have abandoned private trackers. I only use public ones with a seed ratio of 2, because I like giving back. Everything else is downloaded with Real-Debrid and jDownloader2 (mostly OCHs or sometimes torrents, when there aren’t much/any seeders and the speed is unacceptably slow).
Most trackers have minimum time after which you can stop seeding, and reseed request system where you are notified if anyone wants a dead torrent to be reseeded.
ISPs only forward copyright notices they receive for your IP address. They don’t track public trackers.
principles of piracy
What are principles of piracy? I am not aware of unified principles that everyone agrees to. Besides, even if you believe it is moral and ethical, it might still be illegal in their country.
Morality and ethicality has nothing whatsoever to do with legal or illegal. Legality is a concept obtruded to people by a minority, elected by a miseducated and misled majority. What OP meant was obviously the spirit of sharing as opposed to profit at all costs. And the answer lies in itself, the spirit of sharing includes sharing (hence the name) and not only leeching, that’s what private trackers try to assure the users do.
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I recently joined TL as my first tracker and I must say, the quality and seeders are really good. Since they enforce seeding ratios/times and incentivise it, it becomes a self sustaining system.
If piracy is moral and ethical and enables us to share knowledge, why do private trackers gatekeep this knowledge?
Because thats not how most people see it. It’s just a way to watch movies (or download stuff) for free. Private trackers ensure a higher quality experience
Piracy isn’t some high philosophical debate, it’s seeing something you want and making a copy of it.
Switch to usenet and call it a day. Switched last year and am finding the stuff I want, new and old without issue. I still have some private trackers in my list but have usenet as #1 and rarely does it not pull what I request of it.
Yeah, but unlike 20 years ago where it just came with email accounts, Newsgroups/Usenet aren’t/isn’t free anymore, right? Well, you have some free ones still, but they are filtered for piracy and alike, so rather unusable.
So, do you happen to know any free ones with everything still available or do you just pay for Usenet? If the latter, I don’t really see the difference with streamingservices (other than maybe having the file locally, but torrent does that for free too) and it takes away the whole reason of pirating stuff if you’re still gonna pay for it, imho. If the first though: Please share! 😅
I’m not on Usenet, but what you need to consider is that you will pay a really small sum compared to what you can find (and then download at a high speed). Your comparison to streaming services is therefore inaccurate (because there you’re going to find only a very limited amount of content at a higher price).
Sure, but with free alternative s in piracy, then paying for it again (however little) is taking steps direction streamingservices…
Why would one pay for pirated stuff (to people that didn’t even do any effort in creating the content or even in doing the pirating, nb), while it’s also freely available through different means that are just as easy and capable of being automated? 🤔
Anyway, the above is not arguing , the above is a genuine question.
Ease of access I imagine… go to one place, find what you were searching for, have great downspeed - all in very little time/with very little effort.
Again: That’s just hearsay - I’m a lowly plebs who torrents.
You can get Usenet very cheap. I pay $6/month (less than my VPN for torrents), but there are cheaper options available. And it’s worth every penny. Downloads are much faster, more content is available, no dead links, no share ratios to worry about, no VPN needed, the list goes on.
It does feel kinda silly paying money to pirate, but you get over that as soon as you start using it.
I dunno, my torrents are never corrupted or missing either abd download full speed for free. I see everything I want minutes after it airs, with FileBot sutomatically sorting everything for free all I need to do is open Kodi on my AndroidTV and select what I want to watch…
I see no need or afvantage of changing that to anything that costs me money to get the exact same result… 🤷♂️
I think it’s just peopke that did pay justifying themselves to themselves after the fact. There is no real advantage at all…
I get love letters from my isp whenever I share torrents from public trackers. I’ve never gotten one from a private tracker so I only use private trackers now.
I do believe that piracy is moral and ethical and sharing knowledge is what helps humanity thrive. However, due to copyright law, the sharing of knowledge is criminalized. Private trackers serve as a way for people to share knowledge with less of a risk of bad actors (commonly known as copyright trolls) interfering. Private trackers very much are a “secret club”, but that is why they are able to stay open for long periods of time without legal action. For me, whenever I download something from a private tracker I am also sure to share it publicly on other P2P networks, as to not gatekeep.
Piracy is more about preserving knowledge than sharing knowledge, after all, torrents are not really accessible for the majority of people. There’s a tech barrier plus in most places you want a VPN. Then you need decent bandwidth and a reliable connection. Private Trackers are all about preserving media. Maintaining healthy seeds is important, especially when it comes to media that is very niche or no longer in circulation, “legally”. Sites come and go, especially public trackers. Seeders also come and go. Private trackers last a lot longer, and have more dedicated seeders. It’s difficult and time consuming to be a dedicated seeder, and it’s much more rewarding to host your files on a private tracker than a public one.
Knowledge unshared is knowledge forgotten. Whoever preserved the knowledge will die.
Ya definitely, you can’t have one without the other.
I’m not going to be as positive as the others. For every person who seeds everything there are those doing the bare minimum. But they will do the bare minimum because they’re in a good ecosphere of rarities that are seeded and don’t want to lose that benefit
I’m curious, I thought with DHT the hash of the file would suffice?
easy for the malicious to spoof…
What do you mean? Are you talking about the hash being spoofed?
It’s fairly trivial to craft a dummy file that has the same hash as any given file, the chance of that happening randomly is infinitesimal, hence the usefulness of hashing, but it has been done in the past as a way to poison torrents.
This is FUD. There is no publicly known pre-image attack against SHA1, the hash used in mainline DHT.
Huh, there has been a detected SHA1 hash collision in 2017. But unless your malicious actor is the NSA it’s unlikely they would be able to crack the hash
Collision, not pre-image attack (the two are different)
