6mo ago

gen Z is trying to cancel discretion ‼️ (piracy rant)

please, god, stop talking about where you do piracy on public forums. stop talking about specific sites. don't name services. don't link links. don't respond to shutdowns with recommendations on where to go next. stop airing this out publicly. you are not shepherding the masses. you are plattering cash for salivating IP lawyers if you do literally anything other than reply 'DMs' when talking publicly about anything that is even in a light-gray area.

the worst type of posting, all time, is when a piracy site is shut down and all of the absolute lemmings ^(not ^an ^insult ^I ^usually ^like ^to ^use!) immediately decide to pile into the thread of the news post reporting this and go "🙏 thank GOD they didn't get" and then practically post the entire WHOIS lookup for their favorite service alongside the specific products they love to consume on there with an appended "like where else would I watch [MEDIA PROPERTY] 😭"

look. I get it

we grew up in the panopticon. chronic oversharing online is, IMO, the most prominent feature that gaps millenials and gen Z.

still, you fucking snitch-addicted neuron beasts need to learn discretion! you are skirting the law! your posts are public! you know what I would do if I was a corporate copyright lawyer? hitch a fucking RSS feed to every single news post about a piracy site shutdown and watch as hundreds of people tell on themselves for, what I assume, comes down to:

my site not mentioned in comments must confirm others share qualia with me
heh, theyre using that site? lmao, get with the program (my site)
ah, it seems the users of this service are lost sheep, allow me to recommend my own illicit service so they shall find their way

and compile the services they VOLUNTEER UP TO THE CHOPPING BLOCK FOR THE NEXT DOSSIER BECAUSE THE VERY CONCEPT OF PRIVACY AND DISCRETION HAS BEEN SKINNER-BOXXED OUT OF PEOPLE WHO REFUSE TO EVEN REDIRECT THEIR RECOMMENDATIONS TO DMs BECAUSE THEY ABSOLUTELY HAVE TO SAY SOMETHING BEFORE OTHER PEOPLE SAY IT! THEY HAVE TO CAPTURE THE ZEITGEIST! THEY HAVE TO BE TAPPED IN! THEY HAVE TO LET OTHERS KNOW THEY ARE TAPPED IN! THEY REQUIRE IMMEDIATE UNINTERRUPTED FEEDBACK ON EVERYTHING! EVEN WHEN THEY ARE SKIRTING THE LAW!

THEY JUST GIVE THE GAME AWAY! FOR NOTHING! THEY JUST SAY IT!

STOP FUCKING RATTING! OH MY GOD–

70 comments

Do you think poor ip lawyers don’t know rutracker exists? For 20 years?
Sites closing is result of reaching jurisdiction, not absence of information
- Yeah like it takes 5 seconds to find the top public torrent trackers everyone uses and many of them have been going for a very long time. They are aware of all the private sites too and have issued takedown requests to them in the past. Like how you can't upload any Harry Potter stuff (ick) to the big private eBook trackers because Rowling's lawyers went after them. But that was like 10 years ago and the sites are still running.
  Edit: misremembered Rowling on the list but there's still a handful.
  
  There is legit thingy when like someone talks to millions, like if joe rogan or whoever mentioned them, that would light the fire under all lawyers asses. but small forums with hundreds of people are legit smaller than trackers themselves
- shoulda added the disclaimer that I'm mainly talking about third-rate sites, like when an anime streaming service goes down and 50 more people pop up to recommend the new ones in the scene in the comments, like, ones that fold at the hint of a C&D
  
  I'm in this post and I don't like it 😔
- while dry snitching is a negative, I think you are correct.

I don't agree with this. It's a bummer when your favorite piracy source goes down, but telling people is the only way other people find out. I want everyone, especially poor people, to know how to easily access pirated stuff.
The IP lawyers are always going to find it anyway, and new sources come pretty quick when the old ones die.
- I read an article from a boomer IP lawyer for Nintendo and he does actually wait for normies to bring it up, particularly articles at bigger sites. They don't seek it out. Maybe others do.
  
  That's gotta be outdated by this point, because Nintendo's notoriously started using AI powered scrapers to automate the process of hunting down ROMs and anything using their characters or assets so they can spam takedowns without regard for accuracy and sick their lawyers on bigger sites.
  
  Hm genuinely surprising to me
- At least obfuscate the URL in some way. Its trivial to do. I've done this and had people literally deobfuscate my links. Such a crime should get posts removed for snitching.

im a suburbanite cracker so im giving myself a pat on the back for the Sisyphean task of not invoking Rapp Snitch Knishes

i don't think IP lawyers are crawling tweets or public forum posts to figure out what piracy sites need to be shut down lol. 99% of the time, like you said, it is because these services are all owned by a handful of people and fold immediately when they sent a DMCA/threatening legal letter.
Things like Switch emulation/piracy, yeah - to a degree I agree with you, but I think 99% of the time, the reason 'popular emulator' or 'popular mod for game' gets shut down is because they wind up taking money for development or forming a goddamn LLC - I'm looking at you Yuzu/Citra.

To be fair, in the end, all this is easily solved by piracy sites/etc doing a simple registration test and/or requiring like a consistent ratio for seeding/downloading; which more should certainly do.
- The companies the IP lawyers use are using ai to find links going by how Vimms got DMCA'd recently
  
  I really doubt this to be anything other than hearsay. For over a decade, Vimm was one of the largest and most consistent sources of ROMs. It still is, in fact. Why would any anti-piracy association not be aware of it?
  Just consider the words on this page if you think the problem was people sharing the site as a place to get ROMs. https://vimm.net/email
- One of the things Nintendo cited in its lawsuit against Yuzu was that the developers knowingly developed Yuzu to enable piracy. How can such a claim be made? How could Nintendo possibly argue that Yuzu developers encouraged piracy, and not just people's legitimate backups of their own games?
  Because the Yuzu devs, in a massive self-own, decided to implement telemetry. IIRC it was opt-out telemetry, but it doesn't even matter if it was opt in or out. Part of this telemetry data was to show what games users were playing, presumably to understand the popular games (as if this couldn't be determined from actual sales data) and possibly to focus on fixing up those titles.
  Well wouldn't you know it, Tears of the Kingdom leaked like a whole two weeks in advance of its actual release date. And guess what showed up in big numbers on the Yuzu telemetry data? TOTK. Therefore, Yuzu developers knew it was used for piracy, because they had the data to prove it against themselves. Moronic.
- This is why I think private torrent sites are the only long term hope for preservation. They have a barrier of entry that brings them less heat, hopefully they're keeping an index of all of their torrents constantly available to trusted users in the case of shutdowns, and p2p sharing is the only way to guarantee reasonable levels of data duplication (and why I'd actually like to see bonus point reductions for seedbox users, but I recognize that's a misaligned financial incentives problem in a space that's less ideologically driven than it should be).
  Hosting in regions that aren't friendly to the country of origin's copyright infringement complaints of whatever content they host is also critical.
  Yuzu was also an exceedingly stupid situation. Terrible opsec, terrible LLC formation, terrible operational separation (Citra main dying as collateral)
  
  Naa. The incentives of these things are fucked. The one time I was on a private tracker I downloaded a bunch of sheet music (because it was a rare, interesting thing I couldn't find on public trackers). I got banned because I could not fix my ratio because nobody else was downloading this sheet music. Private trackers drive people to download and share popular slop to keep their ratios high. They don't do much to motivate people to download and seed rare shit. Good for sharing popular media, but if you go out of your way to download / seed rare files you will be punished. I have absolutely no faith in them as an archival solution, beyond the general rule that it never hurts to have more copies of anything.
  
  Private trackers are absolutely awful. It's completely counterintuitive to the spirit of pirating in the first place. Hopefully torrenting over I2P becomes a thing in the future.

Nah talking about media piracy like it's no big deal is rad actually. Get your movies on lookmovie2.to and your music on soulseek/nicotine, your books on libgen

oh thank god they didn't get ratemyhog.com, these hog rating sites keep going down!
- We can’t connect to the server at ratemyhog.com.
  
  They have bandwidth but not enough bandgirth 😅

First rule of committing cool crimes on the Internet:
Do not talk about your cool crimes on the Internet.

Just so long as no one snitches on the ppb.com I’m good

They'll never get my beloved what.cd

I just checked and https://hexbear.net/PPB is still up

This is like when I was 19 at a Evangelical Christian university and liked to brag about how I could get any drugs off of the silk road (I got expelled)

absolute lemmings
Oh no, people share things that they enjoy and feel like would help their community. So weird and strange and dumb. Anyway, I haven't stopped torrenting and need more hard drive space. :/ I earnestly can't believe that IP lawyers have not heard of 1337x until they were browsing hexbo one day.
(Really though, I sort of understand the concern, and treating online spaces like you would treat a circle of couches with your best friends in person is something I'm personally working on. Apparently I also overshare in person as well, anyone who talks to me for a couple of weeks can rattle off what medications I'm on etc.)

how the fuck am I supposed to find the sites if people don't talk about it
- DMed my preferred resource, but also just kinda ask around in DMs of people who have talked about torrenting in the abstract. it's daunting but it's both more discrete and has had a much better track record for me in terms of getting the good stuff, anecdotally
- It's simple! Just be in the know. Join a discord and then join another discord that splinters off of that discord because of drama, and then eventually get invited to another discord and then ask one of the users there for an invite to Sooper Sekret Private Tracker website and then you can watch your favorite shows there! Oh and make sure to seed everything popular otherwise you'll get banned for being a leech!!!
  
  Join a discord and then join another discord that splinters off of that discord because of drama
  
  this is so relateable

but i can get so many upvoterinos on the tweet site if i mention the site i read comic scans from in my maymay (actual thing that happened)

The Content is no longer the point. All Content has become conspicuous consumption, so the point is that they are Seen being able to Access the Content. Watching/reading/playing is ancillary to possession, to access.

must confirm others share qualia with me
Good to know these qualia are shared with others

GOOOOD post

"Where do you steam full movies like that?"
I just go on Bilibili
- And if you want to pirate chinese shows go on youtube

I should go and edit all my comments where I mentioned the website [redacted] in it now that I think about it.

Can someone explain why a person can find out the hot new piracy website by DMing someone or doing some research but an IP lawyer can't?
- obvious fed barrier, weeds out the ones who cannot hack it in terms of basic social engineering and thus mitigates the issue, though doesn't fully solve it. difference between 75% of IP lawyers being able to report back to their bosses about the scene vs 100%, which means the scene is dismantled at 3/4ths rate, allowing for it to become more robust. it's the difference between password123 and spouse123, both are insecure but one is going to be cracked in nanoseconds and the other takes bare-minimum commitment

how do you know / why do you think they are gen z?
- millennials just go to the pirate bay as is tradition
  gen x still buy physical media
  boomers watch cable tv 24/7
  source: I made it up
  
  it is true i just search for "some tv show" "thepiratebay" and it works 90% of the time
- honestly one of my weaker points tbh and I kinda am receding from it as I let it simmer. got jumbled up with me trying to do the "gen z is trying to cancel eminem" bit. it's an internet culture shift that coincides with Gen Z dominating social media but it's not a clear "zoomers are doing x millenials are doing y" thing, it's more "Zoomers are the dominant force online rn, also everyone forgot what privacy is rn"

I feel OPs got a really good site and this is their way of sharing the good word! Reverse psychology at its finest!

7H15 15 1173r411Y WH47 1337 5P34K W45 1NV3N73D F0r
Or better yet just base64 encode the URL.

I'm waging a protracted people's war against the tyranny of pirate streaming by snitching on these sites, such that torrents will reign supreme /j
Alright but really, in the recent thread on /c/anime on the shutdown of Aniwave, I mentioned two websites, but I felt kind of mixed about doing this. Like, there are websites that I would only mention in DMs, so why did I feel like those two websites could be mentioned openly? I mean, I could come up with reasons — the one has existed for years, has a Patreon, and justifies itself as an educational resource protected by free use; the other is the website used for Hexbear's own movie nights — but the fact that I felt a need to rationalize this in the first place, right?

Right but can someone give me a link to a good public tracker?
- DMs
  
  Me too 👉🥹👈

The kids are dumb, idk what to tell you fam. It’s a side effect of being young, not a generational thing.
With the rise of peer-to-peer e-commerce, they’ll believe anything a random stranger tells them. “Link? W2C?” And you can send them any phishing site and they’ll happily make an account and throw away hundreds of dollars without even checking if the business is legit. It’s incredible and I’m sure I’d have done the same at 13 if I had todays internet.

I love me a good rant, thank you.

fucking snitch-addicted neuron beasts
good and true and correct post. thank you for making it.

Here is a detailed post on how to do illegal crimes posted to my public accounts. Oh who's that knocking on my door?
- I get what you're saying but you could walk up to a lawyer or a police officer and tell them you pirated the new Marvel movie and they would not care in the slightest or be able to do anything about it. It's a civil crime in most places that requires someone to sue you specifically and that doesn't really happen since the Limewire days unless you're a site operator or big uploader yourself.
  
  Oh I know that. My comment is more of an extension on the idea that discretion is good. People be gladly implicating themselves in all sorts of crimes online that do get prosecuted. Generally for the same gotta be cool online reasons above.
- Oh who's that knocking on my door?
  Go away, don't come 'round here no more.
  Can't you see that it's late at night?
  I'm very tired, and I'm not feelin' right.

no more half measures walter

This probably goes for diy hrt also.

70 comments