Every once in a while I'll try to watch something through the Intended Method™ and it always proves itself to be a worse experience.

Most recent example - I was watching Malcolm in the Middle on Disney+ with my girlfriend, and we found that there are entire audio tracks missing in multiple episodes. Usually some kind of ADR, like someone talking off camera. There's an episode where Reese rents an apartment and there's a recurring bit of him talking to his depressed neighbour through the wall. But you'd have no idea because they somehow completely deleted the neighbour's dialogue from the audio, so it's just Reese having a one-sided conversation with a wall. We saw multiple episodes where something like this happened, and when I looked online there were reports of it dating back years.

Never had an issue like that with torrenting because the people providing it care about the quality, metadata, etc. No one providing official routes to this media seems to care. You have AI-upscaled "4k" movies where the actors don't even look like themselves and there are hallucinated artifacts and things that aren't there. Images cropped to widescreen, like the infamous Duff Beer joke being out of frame in The Simpsons. TV series with edits or entire episodes removed because they were deemed too offensive. Movies and shows randomly appearing and disappearing so you have to endlessly manage subscriptions and switch between different apps with better or worse players just to watch a single series. Just a nightmare.

It's very strange to think about this in the current context. Anything P2P used to be the Anti Christ of the Software Industry. The lengths Microsoft and game vendors went to prevent copying is insane. Installing Windows as well as various Higher End software is a huge pain because of this.

On the other hand Microsoft is very much leading with OpenAI in vacuuming any content, stripping effectively copyright claims.

That being said, nowadays the only use case for me to use Pirate Bay is when I cannot get a movie elsewhere. I'd pay for it but it's not possible - because of copyright...

If the corporates are OK downloading content in breach of licences for training their intelligences, which apparently they are, I consider myself OK doing the same to train the model in my head.

    Although the raid and the subsequent criminal investigation were
    carried out in Sweden, the US Government played a major role behind
    the scenes.

As for why the US Gov was willing to act as MPAA's private enforcer...

    (2012) Chris Dodd [MPAA chief] went on Fox News to explicitly threaten
    politicians who accept MPAA campaign donations that they’d better
    pass Hollywood’s favorite legislation… or else:

Trading law for campaign donations is a place one might go after years of trading Gov power for campaign donations.

https://www.techdirt.com/2012/01/20/mpaa-directly-publicly-t...

I haven't visited a torrent site since I found out I could search for them from within qBittorrent.

When it comes to films, I torrent exclusively remuxes or whole Blu-Ray images. TPB hasn't been relevant for me for the last 15 years or more, since it never had a culture of such large file sizes, just small re-encodes. I wonder why, because obviously that data doesn't have to pass through TPB's own servers.

The pirate bay raid is a good example of the kind of soft power the US has lost with their recent behavior. Hard to imagine Stockholm police being as receptive nowadays.

edit: I'm very sorry for making a relevant comment that extrapolate on the content of the shared article.

We need to raid those lobbyists. How much money did the get from the USA?

So the real pirates was the swedish government. It's time to completely change the whole government. Back in 2006 they thought they targeted only few individuals. I am sure there are many more people who don't support what the swedish government did. Did they ever apologize for serving US corporations here? How much financial kickback did they get there?

Sometimes feel like I'm the only one still using it around me, but the service is still great and functional

I'm happy making one-shot payments for most types of media.

But I want to start a new bittorrent tracker for individual movies or episodes for which the provider requires you to create a recurring subscription, to rip off such content unabashedly.

Stremio is a good place to do this. I of course use it to watch freely and legaly available science and craft videos and nothing else.

By the way, Stremio is not at all torrent or p2p software. It's just a streaming software and you can plug in any streaming source/add-on for this, including torrents, of course just to watch legally available videos.

Maybe check it out: https://github.com/stremio https://www.stremio.com

I wish the same was true for LibGen and SciHub. I feel sad that the short period of easy open access to any knowledge (text), even for people not in academia, is over...

From "The Pirate Bay down, forever?" (2014)

> TPB has become an institution that people just expected to be there. Noone willing to take the technology further. The site was ugly, full of bugs, old code and old design. It never changed except for one thing – the ads. More and more ads was filling the site, and somehow when it felt unimaginable to make these ads more distasteful they somehow ended up even worse.

> As a big fan of the KLF I once learned that it’s great to burn great things up. At least then you can quit while you’re on top. I think I left TPB just a little bit after that top, and not when it’s as shitty as it was when it was closed today. It feels good that it might have closed down forever, just a real shame the way it did that. A planned retirement would have given the community time and a way to kick off something new, something better, something faster, something more reliable and with no chance of corrupting itself. Something that had a soul and could retain it.

https://web.archive.org/web/20160712155638/http://blog.broke...

private trackers are the only way to go nowadays I think. I've stopped using TPB for 11 years now since I joined private trackers. safer, less dead torrents, higher quality

Remember how liberating it was to record TV shows or movies to VHS tape? My dad still has VHS tapes of Simpsons recordings that I'd rewatch as a kid.

All the best stuff doesn’t get licensed by streaming services at all

Entire generations of people have no idea something exists

For us from poor country that can't really afford the online price of movies and games . Pirate bay is like the Google search . . . Thanks for existing.

Great documentary on the topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G6qcJt2NPY8

A much more interesting article would cover HOW they are still up. Would love to know the details of the how in this case.

For most of that 20y, TPB was behind OVPN (vpn provider). They're the other provider I trust besides Mullvad.

<3 Still a great public tracker. We absolutely need people who will run sites like this and crack and bypass stiff like Denuvo and so on. We really do need to keep these sort of skills, tools, and communities alive to be able to resist digital oppression and techno-fascists. Sounds corny as hell but it's true imo.

For some reason I thought the pirate bay was like fake/scam urls now. Is that or was that not the case? I thought I was remember the URL constantly changing and it was hard to keep up.

So many gigabytes downloaded! Long live the King !

I'm curious why IPFS never took off (I haven't dug into it much), but it seems more decentralized than BT.

It works great with a nice stremio setup for live streaming. No subscriptions necessary anymore.

If its not on their top 100/48 hr list then its not worth watching.

So not to hijack this thread or anything but there's one good metric (if nothing else... the fact FB overwrote your email while Google seems to believe in data liberation, and fewer breaches) to tell apart the difference between those two companies

Google had been asked to remove Pirate Bay in results. They didn't. On Google, and I don't really know how it changed over the years, but there'd be a notice about links removed due to DMCA, if it came to that, basically. (Okay, Youtube, which they own, has always been a bit aggressive, and that isn't nothing)

Facebook? Facebook wouldn't let you SEND a link to PB in private messages. It still deletes your post now if you link Anna's Archive. This after apparently heavily scraping LibGen

I don't love Google for a lot of reasons but I damn well feel better using it compared to Mr. "Dumb Fucks"

thepiratebay founders got fined for 7$ million

I wonder if they ever paid the fine. Probably they will be in debt forever.

For a brief moment I used Netflix, but very quickly went back to actually watching anything by I want.

I feel for the kids that are waking up to this enshitification, without a clue on how to sail.

The hypocrisy of tech bros claiming to make well into the six figures being unwilling up pay a few dollars a month for dozens or hundreds of hours of entertainment while simultaneously expecting that everyone else should pay for the increasingly buggier software that pays their salaries....

Most of the problems many of you are complaining about with streamers are the result of your fellow programmers doing poor work. Consider the irony that many in this discussion won't pay for Disney+ because of the technical issues on the software side of things.

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It's kind of cool but also kind of spooky: A legally targeted site just staying online for 20 years, not because of obscurity, but simply because it can't be taken down.

Are our institutions this incapable?

> For now, the site remains online, twenty years after Hollywood thought it had seen the last of it. And whoever is in charge today, will likely do everything possible to keep it that way.

I'm vaguely aware that other people than the original group are running it now.

Also, I don't torrent much, but it seems pretty stagnant and dead. It's been occasionally useful to me to find older stuff that doesn't seem to be well represented on newer (public) sites.

I think the site has been hosted by the police since them. They probably use it as a honeypot or something - except the site is so poorly managed that no one really comes :D