Scavenge from the Torrent Wasteland

It's like shitty Fallout

The motto:

With the assassination of Kickass Torrents and the United States cementing its reputation as an enemy of culture (I made that term up - I want royalties), you would think that there would be services outside of that country which would grow a pair of tits and stand up to the pressure to shut down because somebody looked at them in a bad light.

I guess bloody not! Torrentz.eu was a very good service that very many people used for a very long time, and it was so very helpful that I expressed in my Big Ups and Fuck Yous how very damaging it is to our culture that it up and disappeared. Here's another fuck you to English teachers who dislike the use of "very". They state that it's a weak word, and I don't know why they state that, because they did a horrible job of teaching me such. It's an intensifier you see. Like, if you were to see a dude with a big cock (and this is a low-hanging fruit, much like a big cock), you might say, "that's a big cock". But if you were to say it was a VERY big cock, then you know it's a fucking big cock, and it'd tear your asshole like a tampon!

Is the identification of "very" as an enemy to English like the identification of fine words like "but", "really", "said," and "cunt" a symptom of a culture which wants to seem smart without actually being smart? My boys, if you ever feel the need to dress up your sentences like the zebra designed by a committee, then you are writers of poor confidence with little ability to write what you really want to say. If you were to write, say, "But the cock was really big', said the cunt", then that's shitty writing, and replacing them with bigger words would do little to improve the writing. You may say that writing isn't shitty because it made you laugh. Thank you! But it's funny because it's shitty.

This is the start of a bad porno, so I'm going to end this triad right here. I won't have my name associated with such smut! This is a classy blog. There is no swearing or lewdness of any kind, I am not for sexual, and frankly I am insulted you would consider this as such. Vote Ron Paul.

That's enough blatant shandification of my Good Christian Blog (vote Ron Paul). This isn't like Fallout 4 where you agree to do everything half-heartedly and get a bunch of storylines that never matter in the long run because a game that focuses on everything is a game that focuses on nothing (note: assume that every good line I write is actually from Yahtzee). Instead, we will focus on a much simpler topic than English itensifiers - politics! That wasn't a joke you bloody nerd (note: it was a joke you bloody nerd). If you find politics confusing, all you need to know is that I'm right, and if you disagree you're objectively wrong. I call this the "PC Master Race" approach - spout racist, obnoxious, and contradictory bullshit until your enemies give up and pretend you're special. What does it matter that nobody actually agrees with you? So long as they pretend to, who needs real fans when you have memes? Vote Ron Paul.

Dead horse:

One of the marketing mantras is that if a need does not exist, you need to create it. You see, the Internet is simply a system full of content that has search engines in order to help you find it. Some are general search engines, like DuckDuckGo. Some search other search engines, like the now-late Torrentz. Some are specific ones that search for torrents, like the drawn and quartered Kickass Torrents. Let's see, that's two out of three dead services, so that's... 67% of websites dead. Fuck it, that's better math than what the MAFIAA can manage.

But the systemic assassination of torrenting sites, or in Torrentz case the Missing Persons report, point towards an obvious trend of torrenting sites being taken down by people who stand to profit off of the content who are uploaded onto there (and this is despite the economic theory of them losing money off of piracy being debunked as bullshit many times), and so use whatever weapons at their disposal in order to kill and chill as much as they can. They kill the art, and the chill the survivors. The art is what is uploaded to torrent sites, and the survivors have to play a multi-billion dollar cat and mouse game. Multi-billion dollar for the copyright vultures to spend their efforts targeting websites - it costs a few dollars for a website to switch domains.

While production companies are trying to win their personal War on Terror, as opposed to setting up their own distribution sites and making millions off of advertising and sales, the pirates are the refugees being displaced by the actions of a bunch of old cunts so out of touch with the way the world works that they think they can earn an audience by harassing them and treating them like terrorists. I'm not making this up - the Department of Homeland Security, the United States based outfit responsible for stopping terrorism (how well is that going?), was involved in the Kickass takedown. So can I request Homeland Security to take down Google for linking to the Pirate Bay Wikipedia article, or do I have to be a billionaire, first? It's almost like governments give priority to companies instead of the people who keep them both afloat, but that's fucking preposterous.

So while the victims of cultural terrorism are scattering around the Web, waiting to turn into cyberterrorists because they no longer have faith in their governments, the savvy refugees are finding ways to access the content they have the right to have. The pirate of old had the world on his plate and the ability to pick and choose from its bounties, having the means and the desire to get anything he wanted at an instant. Now, the world is shattered, and he simply has to walk over to the pieces and see what he wants from each slice. And so I will help him find the slices.

Defining the slices:

The Install Gentoo wiki has a guide to private trackers, though to say that private trackers are the only way to download content in this day and age is insulting to humanity's ability to get free shit. To wit, "The first thing you need to ask yourself is whether your needs are satisfied by what you currently have at your disposal (DHT/public trackers (TPB and KAT), DDL, newsgroups, streaming, Soulseek, Tribler, DC++, Kad/eDonkey, sneakernet...among other things)". There are a lot, a lot, of ways to get things without paying for them, and we deserve as such. To release content into the world that is forever copyable, and they try to restrict our access to the content on arbitrary terms, is disrespectful to your users, and is a sign of a medium slave who works exclusively for profit. Indeed, as I will demonstrate, it's naive to assume that you can force people to pay for your work. Except for, you know, actually building a fanbase.

So let's go over some of these methods, and talk about their benefits. I will admit that I do not know everything about every protocol, so I'm learning as I go to make up for that descrepency. Perhaps the least popular methods are the best, much like The Scene, or are they just going to disappoint? I don't know myself. I'll talk about the ones I do know about, first.

Public Trackers:

You're probably familiar with BitTorrent, and if not, I have BitTorrent for Babbys to get you up to speed, download privately (use a VPN), choose the proper client (qBitTorrent), and what to do with the files after you download them. I'm suggesting you read it, not to give me the succ, but to teach you how to torrent safely. Scumbags would rather leave you exposed, much like those in abstinence-only sex ed, by misleading you and telling you that it's impossible to torrent anonymously, without explaining why that is the case. My dear, if you use a reputable VPN, plug it into your client, encrypt your files during and after the download, and use your common fucking sense and don't post on piracy sites or use your real IP address, then it's about as private as you'll get with any other form of download.

Right then. Because torrent files are essentially the same, BitTorrent uses trackers to find you peers which then help you download content . Trackers shouldn't be confused with the sites that index torrent files, though they are often used interchangably, because the trackers come with the torrent and are not unique to the site the torrent comes from. Public piracy sites such as The Pirate Bay and the late Kickass Torrents all use public trackers, such as those listed on OpenBitTorrent (though sites like nyaa.se have their own public trackers) because they're the easiest, most widely-used trackers.

While trackers aren't strictly necessary because of peer-finding tech like Distributed Hash Tables (DHT) and Peer Exchange (PeX), the anonymous mode of qBitTorrent disables these features to make it harder for snoops to reveal your identity, so trackers are still vital for the privacy-focused. You can even add more public trackers to a torrent download which lacks them, like those on OpenBitTorrent, though that's more of an act of desperation, as it would only connect you with peers who have also done the same.

The details of how trackers actually work aren't relevent to the other use of the term tracker, which is to refer to public piracy sites that upload torrent files and make magnet links available for anybody with a BitTorrent client to download. If you know of a public torrent site, you can just go onto the web page (hopefully with uBlock Origin, otherwise you'll have horny Russian singles shoved in your face, and not in the good type of way), pop the torrent file / magnet link into qBitTorrent, and then download with damn decent speeds. The content available (on The Pirate Bay in particular) is enough to satisfy almost any user - unless you're looking for something niche like porn or anime, in which case there are plenty of other public sites to look on, too.

Which sites to pick:

It's become harder and harder these days to find decent torrent sites. My last pick was Kickass, as it had its own Tor address, a really good interface / commenting system, and the most selection out of all the sites. Of course it got fucked over by the good old U S OF A (S S) (ASS. IT'S A PUN. I'm not trying anymore), but then so is the entire world, so chalk it up to one more act of plutocratic tyranny. The Pirate Bay has a legendary resilience matched only by RPG raid bosses and AIDS, so you can assume it will always be up and Wikipedia will always link to the correct site. The current incarnation uses Cloudflare, which means Tor users are fucked over (a shame, because it's the most secure way to browse pirate sites), so if you don't have absolute faith in your VPN to keep your browsing history under wraps, I wouldn't recommend it. Or you could just solve the Google Forced and Unpaid Labour RECAPTCHA, though that never occured to me because I usually just exit out of a website the instant I see "Attention!" on the tab.

Seriously, Cloudflare. Fuck you.

A simple DuckDuckGo search for "Torrents" (and always be sure to use the Tor address at 3g2upl4pq6kufc4m.onion so they don't know who you are - that clearnet link is for non-Tor browsers) will list a bunch of different sites that I would say share 80% of the same torrents 80% of the time, and as of this moment there is no go-to website besides those that let you browse on Tor and get you the content you want most of the time. I should iterate that while you should use Torwhile browsing piracy sites to avoid vultures from fucking over your right to culture, never never never use it for your torrenting applications. It doesn't make you anonymous because of BitTorrent being an insecure protocol (most of the security fixes are hacks if anything) and Tor being physically incapable of handling the load. If Tor is ever really slow one day, there's probably a jackass torrenting anime on a network with poor garbage collection. It's okay to download a torrent file, but not to actually download the content that the file is linking to.

As for search engines that are specialised, it is hard to trust any ever since Torrentz shut down and decided to leave our mortal realm like Heracles building his own funeral pyre. Granted it had that whole Cloudflare thing going on, though it was the best and most reliable service for finding any public torrent. Replacements like Torrentseeker are inadequate for most users, as they don't have a privacy policy and end up outsourcing their searches to Google, so that anybody who isn't browsing with Tor or a VPN has their IP address and search query sent directly to Big Brother Google, and the feds adore sending supoenas to Google more than they do shooting niggers. I find it especially scummy how the link points to the torrent site, but then once you click on it, it changes its destination to Google's redirect server. That should be considered a form of clickjacking, and it's fucking incredible how the most popular site in the world has to resort to the same tactics as malware.

So my recommended OPSEC checklist would be to get a trustworthy VPN, use the Tor browser, use the DuckDuckGo onion site to find torrents, set up your torrent client to use your VPN and proper privacy settings as outlined in my BitTorrent guide, and to use your sense and make sure nobody can ever associate you with what you download, as outlined in my OPSEC guide.

Did you know I have a lot of guides? It's easy to look at the high-school visual novel reviews and rants about Valve and the general meme atmosphere, but then that's just a distraction from what Hopsin said: "My existence on this planet's for you, I ain't only here to benefit me". I think one of the struggles I have with myself as a person, a right fucking shame that we even have struggles at all, is that my sincerity is always hidden behind a front of bitchiness and cheap laughs. I don't fake my writing, no. What I say? It's what I mean. Though as to what I want to talk about has been a topic of some discussion, and I feel that so long as it brings some benefit to you, I should talk about it. That includes pirates, dear - not because I'm filling a niche, but because I really like them.

Practically though, I am filling the niche of talking about the Web and its culture, and so I will dedicate the rest of this article for you. You're welcome.

Private trackers:

This entire section can be summed up by "they're a meme". I'm not going to leave this section like that and be a lazy git, so let me elaborate.

The Install Gentoo Wiki makes it clear that trying to get into a private tracker takes a lot of effort. And I can confirm - I have tried a few times to get into private trackers, though each time I disagreed with their policies and so only managed to get into one, whose name I promptly forgot (fortunate that their policies forbid mentioning the name anyway, fucking egomaniacs). The selection was as poor as the download speeds and the strict seeding requirements flies in the face of how BitTorrent works - and indeed would have murdered my data limits.

But then that was a small site I went to, so can we imagine that larger, more prestigious sites like What.CD would provide significantly faster speeds than what you would get from a public tracker? I would say that the reports have been greatly exaggerated, and that the legendary reputation of certain private trackers are a reputation and nothing more.

You see, it's due to the sheer principle of BitTorrent that the more peers you connect to, the more convenient it is to download content in both speed and availability - and downloading a torrent that 1,000 other randies are downloading will, with rare exception, get you better download speeds than a smaller group of hardcore nerds. It's the tyranny of the majority, or however that phrase goes, because downloading from a public site in an instant will always end up being more time-effective than trying to join a private tracker, understanding their rules, and trying not to get banned due to breaking the rules you didn't understand (you ponce. you complete dumpass). I do not say this is a universal principle, but I am saying that it is common enough so that most people don't have to bother with a private tracker.

The Install Gentoo Wiki also makes the case (same link for reference) for other uses of private trackers, which would be speed (just covered), retention, selection, quality control, and privacy (mistaken for security in the article). I considered doing a full article on private trackers, when I was a dumb youngblood just starting out, but there's really not much to talk about for the average user (but then, what type of user visits my blog?) and so I'll just go over the points listed.

Retention is about the availability of media. Perhaps it is true that certain private trackers will seed less-popular content to make it available, though that's also true of most public sites, too. Even on truly ancient torrents I've had little trouble getting a download from a public source (thanks, Brazil), and I doubt that there would be enough cases where private trackers would trump public ones in that respect to justify the effort in joining. In addition, you will be required to seed the content too, so even if you don't end up liking it or it doesn't work or whatever, you'll still need to have it on your computer for a long time. Those requirements don't work for everyone, you see, and so I wouldn't recommend being a part of a private tracker if you want a simple computing experience.

Selection is the amount of media that is available. While it would have been true in the legendary days of online piracy that you could only get the latest and greatest rips from either private trackers or The Scene, it is now 2016, and pretty much every fucking thing that has ever been produced is available online in some form. If not on private trackers, then on public sites, and if not on that, Google can help you find pretty much anything that has ever existed (use a VPN - and Tor if their Google Force and Unpaid Labour RECPATCHAS don't bother you). And that's not even including the other methods I'm detailing in this article. Selection is hardly a selling point when you can download next to anything online, and if you can't, you could always just look on eBay (boo! sell-out!).

Quality Control is the one thing you would legitimately want a private tracker for. The Scene has a long and storied history of arbitrary standards and executions for even the slightest misslabeling of content, so if you're the type of person to turn your nose up when your glass of wine smells different than usual, then you might want a private tracker, so long as you're okay with being their bitch for life. I'm the type of guy who listens to 32kbps Vorbis, so what the fuck do I care about quality? Expect the most format choices and most reasonable encodes for any audio / visuals you come across, even though when you get to a certain age in your life (around six) it becomes a placebo you use to justify your obsession with collecting files.

Without going into my spiel on simple living and how demanding arbitrary and constantly-increasing amounts of "quality" makes you a more materialistic and less self-reliant person, I will say that the content available on most public sites (and even direct-download sites) are decent enough to satisfy the needs of most users, in addition to cultural awareness of how audio and video compression works being a factor in the ever-increasing standards for even the most ignorant BitTorrent user. But to the truly discerning classes of people like audiophiles, I might as well have told you to fuck yourself with a used syringe, and if you're that far deep you don't need help from the man whose headphones are plugged into $10 speakers, waiting for the mosquitoes to chew the mesh so I can justify replacing them.

And the privacy of most public trackers is a load of tosh, seeing as most of them are so paranoid that you'll run off with the goods that they demand to see your real IP address so the can break your kneecaps if they find you betraying a cartel boss. Let's ignore the implications of piracy groups who don't want to share their collections with the world (hypocritical cunts) and instead look at this from an objective standpoint (insecure cunts). Indeed there are a lot of factors to go over, so let me spitball some ideas.

First of all, most private trackers want to see your real IP address when you register, and only after which you may cloak it. This means that in order to access a website for content that copyright vultures would slice your throat for viewing, you have to take off any protective measures that you use for the Web just for the sake of registering for that website. No VPN or Tor, meaning that both your Internet Service Provider and any kid with a laptop can see every site you visit while you're browsing insecurely. Even for public piracy sites which use Cloudflare (I haven't thought of an insulting pun yet), they still give you access to the torrent files and magnet links while using a VPN and Tor, allowing you to download them without anybody knowing who you are - making them even more private than a "private" tracker!

You would think that a collection of individuals who pride themselves on being a high-quality source for currently-illegal content would be smarter than to ask their members to cough up their IP addresses, but I guess they've created their own personal mafia, so the thrill of blacklisting an IP address like the United States does sex offenders outweighs the risks of letting your users leave a massive and obvious paper trail directly to your door. It's really pathetic to see the Internet equivalent of a bunch of kids blocking the classroom door at recess so nobody can get in, but I guess The Scene is famous for its immature attiude (please no hackerinos for opinioninos).

The second issue is that trying to advance through the private tracker mafia ranks will require you to talk a lot with people across the sites and the communities, and as such would require you to either forge an entirely new identity with no relation to your current identity (though you should be doing that on every website you sign up for), or reveal your personal identity to a bunch of people who don't even trust you with a hidden IP address. And as the hacker wars have taught us, they will fuck you over the instant they decide they don't like you. The only winning move is not to play - or to hack them first, but that's a morally ignorant thing to do.

And the third issue would be what would happen if the feds found out you were part of a private tracker. The Install Gentoo Wiki has a point that copyright vultures like to take the low-hanging caracasses, and so will troll around public sites to send legal threats to unsuspecting IP addresses (and this is why you always use a VPN) instead of bothering to join public trackers. It is indeed more worthwhile to stop ten thousand casuals from downloading two torrents than to stop two neckbeards from downloading ten thousand torrents (inb4 banned for plagiarism), though joining a private tracker is a bit like saying you work for Al-Shabaab as opposed to Al-Qaeda. If your proxy ever goes down and some thug motherfucker is spying on your connection, then it will be harder for your lawyer (and not you - you shut up when you're in custody) to explain that you weren't willingly pirating things.

Now that private trackers have proven to be useful for people who sexually fantasise about being a salaryman, I will diversify my market penetration strategies (oh baby) and talk about something else.

Direct Download:

Also known as DDL, for those of you who would prefer to say trisyllables instead of supertrisyllables, is the simple concept of downloading content directly off of the Internet through your Web browser. It's the standard mode of operation for all Web downloads, and as such most users will be innately familiar with it, unless you're a 90-year old lady. Fuck old ladies.

"The signal slowly faded from its motherboard; the beeps in its head became more and more rare, beep... beep..... beep......... beep; it looked up at the smoggy sky but saw something else, something from one of its favorite books stored in its vast database: white shores and a far green country followed by a swift sunrise; but, right before the signal faded completely, it dreamed of electric sheep, branded simply - 'fuck old ladies'"

I ain't having that shit.

Finding DDL sources:

Being on the Web, also known as the "Information Super Highway" if you're Al Gore, contains more of humanity's knowledge than has ever existed at any other point in time. We use this to look at racist memes and argue with each other about our differences. Also porn, which is so deeply ingrained into the Internet that it almost slipped my mind. We can also use it to makes us smarter, more culturally relevant, and more informed people than we ever could before, though this is preaching to the choir, so let me just tell you how to download your fucking anime. I would like to apologise for beating a dead uma (translation note: uma means horse).

Most direct download sites don't have a mechanism to automatically prune content like BitTorrent does, and the content of the download can't be verified because it's on somebody else's server as opposed to being distributed amongst a swarm. Most torrent sites will sort content by the amount of peers on it, and as such provides an easy means to judge whether you'll get the content you expect. The wisdom of the majority applies especially when it's a selfish majority, and no majority is more selfish than downloading pirates. In addition, the way BitTorrent is built makes it tremendously difficult to substitute one download for another without anybody noticing. What you get when you load the torrent file will be what you get as it's downloading, which you can't always assume to be the case on a server which can swap out the content at any time, making redownloads risky.

Yes, this is a theoretical issue, and if a website has a reputation for viruses and scam, then you shouldn't visit it at all. The idea that a website would suddenly go smelly, throw away its reputation, and decide to trick a few users into download something unsavoury would mean it would swiftly fall at the hands of the Web, and you would be very unlucky to be caught in that trap.

The simplicity in finding good websites is the same as its elegance - use a search engine, like DuckDuckGo or Startpage, to search for the content you want. These are some of the most basic tactics you will ever learn, and it's a symbol of their usefulness that they are used by everybody from the complete beginner to the man who wants to go dark and disappear from the Web while still partaking in its bounty. Be sure to search up the site name, too - a simple task, yet one which too many people forget in favour of simply trusting the download source.

As opposed to traditional BitTorrent indexes, DDLs have nowhere near the amount of history, culture, or traditions than you would find on your typical torrenting site. They have no pirate's honour, no formal sense of community, and no umbrella term to dedicate themselves to. Direct download sites are a collection of lost individuals acting on their own accord - most of them taking advantage of people who cannot set up a BitTorrent client and so pump their computers full of malware and other nasty ventures. This poor reputation is why pirates often stay away from direct downloads - unless, of course, they get one from a fellow pirate.

An interesting exception to this norm is that of ROM sites, such as Emuparadise, where it's often dead easy to find video games for old systems - and even play them in your fucking browser! I have learned over the years that gamers, otaku, and tech geeks are groups of people who will always have each others backs, and so it is far easier to trust sites that come from these cultural positions than it is to trust one without one. Don't misplace your trust, though - always check the reputation of the warez site you plan to download from, otherwise you might find it betrayed.

In the event that your search engine fails you, you'll have to go a little deeper.

_Deeper:

While the clearnet will be the source of most of your downloads, we cannot forget the importance of the Deep Web and Darknet for what you may want to find. The Dark Net is a system of website that you can only connect to using a special program, and are tremendously hard for you to find the owner, for the owner to find you, and for any spies to try to decipher who you are and what you two were doing on that website. Because of this secrecy, it's a haven for downloads you may want to find, especially that of low-space downloads like music and books.

Any old darknet will do, and though the most popular uses Tor's onion sites, which you can find on /r/onions (clearnet), there are also ones that not even the people who use Tor might know about, such as Freenet and I2P. I2P is known for encouraging BitTorrent, unlike Tor which will cry if you torrent over the network, and so is popular amongst filesharers who want nothing to do with the regular Internet. I2P keeps a list of "eepsites" - websites you can only access through the I2P network - on the client, and indeed many regular websites can be viewed through I2P using volunteer-run outproxies, though there was none for e621 so I abandoned the network. While the selection is limited (it has the entire Internet to compete against), it's fast enough if you want to play around with it. As for Freenet, I have no idea. People will joke it distributes child porn, but you could distribute child porn on a hacked NES cartridge, so assume that pretty much everything has child porn and it's not exactly a selling point. For various reasons.

In sum, the Dark Net is a simple colletion of private protocols that make up content that is very hard to track and is very hard to censor. Thanks to helpful directories of information from sites like The Hidden Wiki, Reddit, and the Chans, it's dead easy to find the content you're looking for, whatever that may be. Yes, people will distribute NES roms with child porn on it, but the people who want to do that will find other ways to do it if our hidden networks end up being banned by a malicious government. Innocents must never be punished because of the actions of the morally ignoarant. We must allow evil to occur in order for good to exist, because if good and evil are using the same means, but to a different end, then we must never ban that means because to do so is to punish innocents for something that is out of their control.

The less moral and more mundane solution involves the Deep Web - which has little to do with the Dark Net, actually. The Deep Web is simply the parts of the Internet that aren't indexed by search engines, but anybody with a computer can find them if they had a link. These include things like piracy sites, Archive.org links, individual Chan threads (and the 8chan homepage, amusingly), MEGA, Google Drive, and Puush links, and all sorts of content that the average user will never bear witness to. This is a gold mine of content, just waiting to be exploited.

Some of these sources are easy to go onto, like Archive.org, the rogue 8chan (Tor: oxwugzccvk3dk6tj.onion ) thread which will be for media requests and will feature a lot of MEGA links (mostly porn though), and even a Google search for publicly listed Google Drive documents. Getting media from direct upload sites such as Puush and MEGA is much harder, as it's often poorly labeled and without any expectation that the media you expect to get will be what's available to you when you download it.

The Deep Web runs more on the honour system than the clearnet does, just because the added difficulty in getting to it tends to create smarter people. Of course, these smarter people may abuse the trust for malicious purposes, though that is an inherent risk for any platform.

Streaming:

Streaming Introduction:

Streaming is wildly popular these days, damn those kids and their fancy Netflix boxes (note: Netflix will fuck you over and then fuck the wound. Their business relies on digital restrictions management, pandering to copyright, and tracking their users). Damn them and their Hulus and their, uh, fucking Crackle. Amazon Live. iTunes. If I say enough words, I'll proc Google RNG and become #1 in Latvia. Incidentally, Latvia has a higher human development index than Russia, so the stereotype of poor, cold, militant rapists seems to be a Western idea.

Streaming Fundamentals:

Streaming differs from downloading like downloading NES roms is different from viewing NES roms (encrypt your data, kids). By downloading a video file, it's on your hard drive forever, and you're able to do whatever you want with it. When you stream it, the video is lent to you, as it's simply being streamed from the Internet with no obligation, and often no ability, for you to download a file. Simple terms, but I remind you of them because they are easy to overlook.

Streaming content requires a web host to constantly make that content available, at all times, and provide a way for uesrs to view it at any time. This can be a burden on servers with low bandwidth, much like the burden with direct download sites needing to host gigabytes of content instead of a torrent file that's a few kilobytes large, or a magnet link that's a few bytes large. As a result of which, dedicated streaming sites aren't nearly as popular as dedicated piracy sites - just a decade ago, the idea that somebody would set up a website where you watch content without downloading it seemed fucking absurd.

Streaming Forensics:

Streaming sites tend to be more blatant about their content than piracy sites, which will at least be coy and say that they're only indexing the content without providing the actual availability. There's a common misconception that streaming isn't illegal because you aren't downloading anything, which is much like the common misconception that NES roms aren't illegal so long as they're fictional, but it's actually true in that respect (unless you're in a dictatorship like Canada) while streaming isn't. The current law stands that willfully infringing copyright is a crime no matter how you do it - be it download or streams. Of course the law is bullshit, and in practice, it's usually applied to BitTorrent downloaders because it's pretty fucking easy to tell which IPs are downloading what content on BitTorrent, as opposed to having to raid a streaming site's servers and forensically anaylsing which IP addresses accessed the content at what time, so consider BitTorrent the forbidden fruit for people ignorant of the law to avoid.

Streaming produces a lot less evidence than direct downloads or BitTorrent, seeing as you're viewing the content and not keeping it on your hard drive. A single IP address acessing a webpage isn't evidence of any willful copyright infringement, while actually downloading the content is - which is why you always encrypt your hard drive, silly. It's generally not worth it for a copyright troll to go through the trouble of resolving the activity of a bunch of random IP addresses and trying to see who's doing what on the website. Just as well, the use of a VPN and Tor makes the entire effort worthless, seeing as the user is effectively anonymised while using those services (so long as you aren't a dumbass who signed up for an account, et cetera).

Streaming sources:

Streaming sources are just as easily found as their direct download or torrent index counterparts: Duck it. That was unironic, fuck you. You're going to Google Paul Blart sources and then be surprised when they give up that information to the feds? Imagine going to jail for fucking Paul Blart. His jurisdiction only extends to his mall - he can't protect you otherwise. Some manufacturers make pirate boxes, which is basically a Linux (usually Android) computer with Kodi on it with a shit-ton of sources to stream movies and television shows on. You could do the same thing on your desktop PC and hook it up to an HDMI cable, though at that point you'd turn into my dad. And nobody wants to be my dad. I also find it interesting how you would explain the existence of a pirate box in your living room when the cops come over for whatever reason You could say it was a Christmas gift, and that you were too polite to simply give it to somebody who knew what to do with it. Then you could blame the college students for it. They make great little whipping boys, nonsexual winky face: ;-). The nose makes it sexless.

Streaming has penetrated the normie web because of the legality confusion (though I must stress, that legality has nothing to do with morality), meaning that even squeaky-clean sites like YouTube are ripe with rips of such classic shows as Cory in the House and Boku no Pico (these are my low-hanging jokes. give me a break, I'm 90 years old), though all of which sped up by 20% and mirrored. This is what I mean by low quality; YouTube has a strict "no fun allowed" policy, and as such will nuke entire television series if their robots detect that something sus is up. Shout-outs to the bro who uploaded the first three seasons of The Boondocks before his account got terminated, making me stay up to 3 in the morning watching it as a youngster. You're the real MVP of YouTube.

Streaming morality:

Streaming provides an interesting ultimatum: is it better to take the initially convenient option of just looking up a website / YouTube video to stream from, despite the lack of certainty of its continued availability, the inconvenience of not having a file on your hard drive to play with, and the lack of high-quality sources due to the very nature of streaming... or is it better to download the high-quality content and have the freedom to do whatever you want with it, and be able to seed it and share with your bros, at the cost of being a target to copyright trolls and police if you fail to configure your setup properly? The latter. You're a silly boy if you don't use a VPN in this day and age, and sillier if you're not willing to learn about the programs you want to use in order to break the law.

Streaming conclusion:

Streaming should be considered as the emergency rations of getting media - the quality is often terrible, the sites are shady, you don't get to control what exactly it is you're getting, and if the site ever goes down (and it will go down if it's hosted on YouTube or another commercial source) then you have to find a new source for the stream. So what I'm saying is that streaming is like KFC. You have a breast in one hand and a thigh in the other. Wait, wrong type of streaming.

Okay, I'm fucking sick of typing "streaming".

Conclusion:

While there are indeed other protocols beyond these, I have found them either impractical beyond what is currently available, or so small and unimportant that they are not worth mention (fuck you, Tribler!). In addition to Froge being fucking sick of typing "spaghetti", he, or me, or me-to-we are fucking tired of coming back to the same article after three straight days of looking at 8chan and then falling asleep regretting our life decisions. It's also getting quite long, and in the immortal words of Seth Godin, "Write less". Also "Enter your email address" and "I'm moving to New York - burn the evidence and start this shit over".

There is nothing I can say that can supplement what has already been written on this post, though if you did read it all the way through, you're a madman and deserve to be put in a mental hospital. A more manipulative blogger (who has the world in his hands and nothing to stop him) would have said "Great job!" like Candy Crush and tried to get you hooked, but I'm just not that evil. I believe I will burn the evidence and start this shit over, but I'm not moving to New York. Whoops, I guess that statement makes it easier to track me. I hope nobody ends up searching the 4,415 other cities in the world, because that would make me stick out like a black man in Japan, or Canada, or any other racist country.

Always on, always turned on: Froghand.

Today's page was updated on August 16, 2016!

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