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?
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Torrents. I don’t really find Usenet worth the money. I can get most of the stuff I want on public sites. Some others I can get on private trackers. Never really felt the need to use Usenet. And as others have pointed out, the arr apps work great with torrents.
And honestly, I find it a little scummy to pay for content to people who don’t own them. I don’t think piracy in itself is unethical, but I if you take money for stolen content, that’s not cool in my book.
I get what you are saying about paying someone who doesn‘t own the content.
However I‘d argue that you are not paying them for the content, but just for hosting it on their servers. So its more like a tool, as is your VPN if you are torrenting. And most people wouldn‘t mind paying a VPN just to pirate content.
Usenet, I agree, might take you some time to get invites to the good indexers, especially if you don‘t want to pay immediately, but in the long run it‘s definitly worth it.
I havn‘t played arround with torrents for quite some time, whats the most popular setup for torrents atm?
Not sure about the most popular setup, but I use a docker container that has
qbittorrent-noxandgluetunin it. It’s connected to some other containers with arr apps and such.And I think it’s a bit different than just paying for VPN. You can use VPN for many other reasons. But here, you know exactly what you’re paying for. I’d never pay to use any private tracker for the same reason.
Torrents… Fast, free, and easy
my man
What is fast for you? On usenet it maxes out my internet speeds. Can’t get any faster than that. And I pay like 5 bucks a month for usenet. Fully automated, max speeds. It’s worth it.
I just paid $70 for a 3-year PIA subscription to mask my torrent usage from my ISP. So, an average of a little over $2 per month. Well-seeded movies only take about 10 minutes to download, more obscure stuff admittedly takes longer. Also, torrent streaming exists, so you can start watching even faster if that’s your thing.
Admittedly, I’m not familiar with Usenet or how it works. I’m just saying that torrents are cheap, fast, and easy. Do you have a crash course on how to use Usenet? I’m curious.
You can find tutorials out there but the jist is.
- Subscribe to a suenet provider. I use Tweaknews, but there are some that can get as cheap as $3 per month. Especially around black friday, the plans go on sale.
- Get a downloader such as sabnzbd or nzbget and configure the provider in it.
- Get an indexer. Much like torrents, you need an indexer to grab release from. I use Nzbplanet, but there are lots of others like Nzbgeek.
- Then its a lot like torrents. You download the nzb file off the indezer and import it into your downloader. and it will max out your speeds. For example, all my content averages a download speed of 57MB/s (that is mega-bytes not mega-bits). And I have it throttled. It will max you out.
Once you get that far, then you can move on to the best part, How easy it is to plug in sonarr and radarr. then everything just auto-downloads for you and you dont have to do anything.
To me, if you are using a VPN to torrent, great, I have one too for obscure stuff. But most people are far better off using Usenet. It is way safer and faster, and is easier to automate.
So who’s hosting all of this movies? Who are you actually downloading from?
- 57 MB/s isn’t especially fast. I have plenty of torrents “max” my connection, you can easily download a popular torrent at gigabit speeds because they’re often well seeded. But the speed really isn’t that important to me. The difference between a 5 minute download and a 10 minute download is insignificant.
- Torrent downloads can be automated. If you have a favorite uploader you can easily subscribe to their releases.
- I don’t see how Usenet is inherently more secure than torrenting with a VPN…You’re just downloading files from somebody else’s server, it could easily get taken over and become a honeypot, or the owner could serve you malicious files. Both torrents and usenet are potentially vulnerable to that sort of thing.
- Torrents have the advantage (and disadvantage) of being decentralized. As long as a torrent has seeders it’s nearly impossible to take down. You’d have to individually attack each seeder, and there might be thousands.
My point was every single thing i download maxes out, the 57MB wasnt the point. Not every torrent will max out. Only the well seeded torrents, and on public trackers it will not max out. I’ve tried. Private torrents sure, but unless you have a seedbox, you’re ratios are going to be all out of whack. I do both Usenet and torrents, I’m well aware of all the advantages of torrents, and im well aware it can be automated. Usenet is just easier. No symlinking to maintain ratios.
And of course its more secure. 1st off, no VPN disconnects. Second off, point me to one single case where someone has been prosecuted for downloading off Usenet. Most of us here are probably from r/piracy, and see every day the dozens of “I got the letter” posts from torrenting. I’ve never seen a single letter from usenet.
Torrents are really great for obscure stuff that is really hard to get though. That’s pretty much all I use it for.
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.
And the reason they don’t care is because it’s so much harder to get people on it. Hence, it’s safer.
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.
Torrents can also max out your speed if there are enough seeds, unless you live in a country where your ISPs are allowed to throttle specific types of traffic or something. Or I suppose if you have 10 gbit downlink then you prolly won’t max it off a torrent.
Idk what you mean by fully automated. If you mean sonarr, radarr and the like, they work for torrents too.
I might very well try usenet when I get fiber in my current location (haven’t had it in over a year, it sucks, don’t recommend) and a server for the arr suite, but in general I like my piracy being free lol
All I know is I don’t ever have to care about well seeded torrents, or maintaining ratios on private trackers, or getting letters from VPN disconnects. The 5 bucks a month is worth it just for that.
With a proper setup, which is not hard to do, you shouldn’t be getting any IP leaks or copyright letters. Just be sure your VPN has it’s firewall up and clients are set to only use the network adapter.
And yet, people still do. I don’t, I use a docker container for torrenting. With usenet there is no misconfiguration you can make to get nabbed. It’s safer.
Fair enough, none of that has ever been a thing for me.
Okay, extremely obscure things have dead torrents, but I’d wager you won’t find many of those ultra obscure downloads on Usenet either. I dunno about any letters either, I suppose my country is a bit too small for anyone to care, because I’ve been torrenting for nearly 20 years with no issues - and so have many of my friends.
The ratios I’ll agree with you on. It’s a damn competition on private trackers, really annoying because everyone else wants to seed too. I just use public trackers.
Ratio on private trackers isn’t really a big deal as long as you’re the kind of person that can keep a couple hundred GB worth of things seeding close to 24/7. Aside from actual ratio(the thing your torrent client reports), they tend to have a system that rewards having things seeding, whether anyone actually connects to you or not, that you can use to boost “ratio”. There’s also usually some options for acquiring some content without it counting against you, like freeleech(download data isn’t counted in your ratio) for low seeded or new torrents, or discounted/refunded credit for extended seed times, or seeding large amounts of data. Aside from the first few months in a new tracker, ratio isn’t a big issue.
My experience (and I’ll admit that I’ve only used a private tracker since rarbg went down) is that you can only get some seeding done within the first few hours of a new torrent going up, after that there’s just so much competition and so few people downloading, you might get a gigabyte of upload a week on a 50 GB freeleech torrent. It might just be specific to TL.
I do have a ratio nearing 10, but my upload buffer is still small enough that I don’t want to download anything non-freeleech lol
Not OP but well seeded torrents max out my server’s ethernet at 80 MB/s (bytes not bits)
I use torrents almost exclusively because of the price (free) and convenience. That is, I can get them easily where I live for no additional cost beyond my low speed internet. I have no extra money at all, at this time in my life, unfortunately.
Sonarr and radarr can use torrents just as much as they can use usenet. I used them for both, now I dropped usenet altogether.
I find it easier to either DDL or torrent, plus a lot of the stuff I’m after recently proved hard tto find on usenet for whatever reason.
It’s more hassle to search usenet for my usecase and while it’s true that maxing out download speeds is awesome, I’m not in a hurry. I let the .arr apps do the work while I’m busy with life and when I get back home I have it all ready anyways.
What’s the problem with torrent?
Honestly nothing at all, I just prefer the speeds and reliability of Usenet (though I pay for that).
Private trackers have great speed and reliability as well. I’ve been using sonarr and radarr for years but have never bothered with Usenet due to the added cost. They all work great with torrents even though they were originally designed for Usenet.
Are most piracy users aware of programs like sonarr or radarr?
Sounds like you yourself aren’t aware of their capabilities, if you’re presenting a false dichotomy of torrents or *arrs
I’m using torrents much less since fmovies. I just stream my shows and movies now. Music is also getting harder to find so I went back to Soulseek. For everything else, I’m using Tribler, an open source torrent client using onion routing.
Never heard about tribler . Does it use tor for the traffic ?
I don’t think it uses Tor directly, but Tor technology: “a custom built-in onion routing network”.
It seems to work from what I can tell because my downloads are not seen by iknowwhatyoudownload.com
More here https://www.tribler.org/anonymity.html
Torrents and muthafuckin’ DC++!!!
Jesus, dc++ is still around???
@marx2k @doolittle wow literally haven’t thought about that in 16 years I think.
About the same here. Its a cool idea and I really liked it but ended up stopping using it once I went with a headless Linux setup.
If dc++ can be done with a docker container and if i could hit my headless dc++ container er with an android app or even a web front-end that i also host, id get back into it.
I think the other issue i had was getting into various dc++ servers was a pain in the ass and downloading an album from someone would take days, if it finished at all. And the quality of the tracks would be questionable enough where it also had me running the downloads through other apps which verified the quality, track completion, renaming, etc.
Lidarr does all of this already.
So now that I think about it…
Eh maybe not dc++ again
When I was living on campus at uni 9–10 years ago we had only 5 GB data per month* but we also had a DC++ LAN with all the other on-campus students which didn’t count. It was semi-endorsed with a wink and a nudge by the inter-college IT people, and was an absolute dream for grabbing pirated movies and TV shows.
* this thankfully excluded a whole bunch of shit including government websites, uni sites, and anything from Google, including YouTube, so it was very possible to stay under. I think it went up to 20 GB in my second year.
Excuse my ignorance, what’s DC++?
DC++ is great but I can’t get a decent working client for Linux that works with an IPv6 router (i.e. no port forwarding)
Its funny that you say “still using torrents” while the usenet is basically older than torrents
Torrent
utorrent
lol
I’ve never used Usenet… I’m really not familiar with it, tbh. I just DDL or stream everything lol.
I tried Usenet, wasn’t a big fan of it, to be honest.
The way I see it, unless you live in a country where your traffic is constantly moderated for torrent traffic, there’s no reason to not use torrents.
Also, IPv6 torrenting is for the most part unmoderated by ISPs, my friend who lives in California only torrents via IPv6 on qBit and he had gotten 0 emails from his ISP. However, YMMV depending on country.
Torrents. Because it’s free and fast (if what I’m pirating is famous enough). I started using sites like 1337x, nyaa,rabg🪦 etc… with qbittorent a few years ago and never had any reason to change.
Except for rarbg
RIP rarbg
Usenet. Been using it consistently for over 10 years now. I only torrent when I can’t find something on usenet. So not too often. Plus Usenet just maxes out my download speed on everything. It’s so freaking fast compared to torrents. I gladly pay for that.
I have no knowledge of usenet. How do I get started?
A quick run down: Get yourself a Usenet client (akin to qbittorent for example). SABnzbd is the most popular, free, and open source.
Next you will need an Indexer (similar to a torrent site like The Pirate Bay). There are a lot of these and you will usually need to pay (most are like 10-20 per year, some are free, but it may be hard to find content on the only free sites) to access an indexer. A good paid one I used was NZBgeek. Another is NZB Finder which has free accounts (with some restrictions).
Last thing you need is a Usenet Provider (these are the companies that actually host the files you download). You will need to pay for this for sure and most people actually pay for 2-3 Usenet providers (most only host things for a certain time and content can get taken down due to DMCA). There are a ton of options to choose from and you can mix and match is so many diffrent ways, but Frugal Usenet is pretty popular (if you pay for yearly, they give you an account for another Usenet provider that you can use as a partial backup). I always paired it with UseNight (just has speed restrictions depending on time, but its a great backup) which is very cheap per year. I don’t want to get to technical, but I will mention it incase people want to take the Usenet dive. When buying multiple providers, do NOT buy them if they are from the same backbone! You can refer to this chart to help figure out the main ones. Content that gets taken down via DMCA is pretty much removed at the backbone level and will affect every provider under it (I know the free account from Frugal is the same backbone, but that’s just for backup in case of outages).
Sorry just getting used to notifications in lemmy so I didn’t see this till now. But @hydra@beehaw.org summed it up perfectly.
You need A client, an indexer, and a Usenet provider.
I use SABnzbd for my client, I’ve got several different index sites, and 3 providers. One of which is a yearly unlimited subscription and the other 2 are bucket plans where I buy access to a set amount of GB to download and once I use it, I either buy more or lose access. They basically serve as backup servers if something can’t be found on my main unlimited server. I use prowlarr in conjunction with radarr and sonarr to manage my indexers and shows and movies, and use SABnzbd as my download client, connected to my Usenet provider. It works beautifully once you get it set up right.
Can you tell me which indexers you use? I would like to subscribe to a few myself.
Yeah sure. I’ve used NZBGeek, DOGnzb, nzb.su, binsearch, filesharingtalk and drunkenslug. Some are invite only, if you’re interested I do have a few invites left for DOGnzb… If you’re gonna go down this road, you’ll definitely want multiple indexers.
This was the killer feature for me. That and not having to worry about getting takedown notices when I’m in the US. US ISP’s seem to entirely ignore the existence of usenet.
I don’t DL that much and it’s usually just books so I still use torrents and a VPN.
