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Are most of you using Torrents or Usenet? (lemmy.ca)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by Knoxvomica@lemmy.ca to c/piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com

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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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[-] idle@158436977.xyz 5 points 1 year ago

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.

[-] ilikekeyboards@lemmy.world 5 points 1 year ago

So who's hosting all of this movies? Who are you actually downloading from?

[-] PeachMan@lemmy.one 4 points 1 year ago

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.

[-] idle@158436977.xyz 3 points 1 year ago

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.

[-] PeachMan@lemmy.one 1 points 1 year ago

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.

[-] idle@158436977.xyz 1 points 1 year ago

And the reason they don't care is because it's so much harder to get people on it. Hence, it's safer.

[-] idle@158436977.xyz 1 points 1 year ago

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.