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Reposting an old comment of mine here just to see if it can get an interesting conversation going:
"I was daydreaming recently after revamping and dialing in my home media server really well (Plex plus all of the *Arr services plus torrents automatically downloading shows and hosting a large movie library)… Shouldn’t it be possible to create a “virtual media library” that is actually BitTorrent under the hood, powered by people either contributing storage space or content or both, where no one ever hosts any in-tact media and it’s all encrypted enough where each storage provider is basically hosting useless shards of content, and then some client side software can put it all together on demand and serve it up to apps like Plex in a way Plex doesn’t even know it’s not a local file? Assuming everyone has decent bandwidth and there’s enough contributed storage for redundancy to power the torrent network, you could basically have an unlimited and resilient media library…
There’s probably a way to craft an incentive scheme in there for both content submitters and storage providers, probably a decent use case for crypto honestly so it’s all decentralized.
At this point, it seems like content capture and uploading to the torrent world is basically “solved”, and now it’s all about ensuring the network and storage health is there to preserve everything in perpetuity. There’s so many redundant torrents out there, should be possible to merge it all in a giant media library mesh network right?"
The problem is moderation.
Any time you make a new media library hosting platform, it attracts exactly the people who need it most.
The answer is good metadata and categorization, but that requires active moderation.
Moderation is the single most expensive part of the internet, and most of it is being done for free. Big tech like Facebook and Google are making themselves incompatible with traditional moderation, which is why they keep trying (and failing) to automate it.
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I think the best solution is a web of trust. Instead of using a tracker/site like TPB (and its moderation) to introduce trust, let each user make whatever authoritative claims they want (this torrent is good, that one is corrupted, and this other one has a virus), and let other users back those claims via gpg signature. Instead of forum moderators, you get trust curators.
I agree that webs of trust are the way forward.
Power corrupts, and any set of curators will eventually fall to corruption, but the nice thing about having software that lets you explicitly trust people (instead of implicitly trusting the platform) is that the switching costs are low. You don't have to wait for somebody who is both tech savvy enough to build a competing platform and also trustworthy enough to curate the content, you just need the trustworthy part. You just twiddle your trust settings and you've got a fresh start.
I also think that the who-trusts-whom-in-what-category dataset would be incredibly useful. For instance, you can follow the edges until you get a cycle, and that cycle is going to be at the heart of a community of experts.
Or if you're having trouble seeing eye to eye with someone you can consult the trust graph and find a mediator, or if they're not to be found then you'll find thought leaders who exemplify the disagreement.
You'll have to be hygenic about who you trust though, and that's not the lazy path forward. So culturally I think any project of this sort is going to face an uphill battle.
> Facebook and Google are making themselves incompatible with traditional moderation, which is why they keep trying (and failing) to automate it
Its the other way around. They try to automate and fail miserably after spending billions and fallback to manual moderation by farms in asian countries coz its cheaper.
I think an idea of mine is related: index clips from various sources to put together an entire movie. Or index quotes posted to various forums or quote websites to reassemble the original book. No one hosts the full content, all is fair use, and the index is also meaningless by itself. Though I suppose you'd get a similar conviction as The Pirate bay which also hosts no copyright infringing content.
Your idea would be a bit more 'direct' in that the parts are hosted by people actively contributing to have a copyrighted work in full rather than linking to random third parties. A lot more reliable, at least until it catches on and contributors start receiving desist notices.
Can someone tell me what is the appeal of *arr apps? I'm not a hoarder or professional movie/show watcher, why should I set up what is basically a glorified "periodic metadata downloader with a tiles UI"?
I tested radarr and readarr recently. Didn't find out why people use them. Like libgen was better than readarr and I couldn't even select the encoding/file size of a movie title in radarr (there are some predefined profiles and you can define yours too but I expected something waay too simpler to do this. Like if you select fhd, it may download a very large file. You have to manually set the bitrate slider for all profiles, but then you may risk losing some available item if the release is very new and not encoded. I mean the UX was confusing)
And I see people host yet another tiles UI (Plex/Jellyfin) on top of that just to show a folder structure with pretty thumbnails? Each one of these apps is usually written in C#, taking ~300MB of RAM mind you...
What would help me is simply a search box that crawls all available torrents and presents rows with filtering based on size and encoding. I tested prowlarr for this but the UX was poor.
I must be missing something very obvious here.
Is it possible to maintain such a project? I thought it was called popcorn-time, but earlier I remember MythTV. Both projects have seemingly been hobbled from general use, the main idea is to watch whatever you want, when you want, and it doesn't have advertising in it. (If the original source recording had it, then it could be removed.) Maybe it's overly dramatic to say I think this should be a human right, but maybe it isn't? I don't need advertising in my life, I think.
There was such a thing round 2007-2010. People on forums were opening free email accounts, then a desktop app was splitting files into chunks of predefined size and uploading them as emails. Individually each chunk was an encrypted chuink of 7z or zip archive, so it made no sense on its own, but the client was building a repository of email account and email IDs. This index was then shared with other people on a forum and you could download Shrek.
https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/peer-2-mail-file-sharing-...
Someone made a desktop application much like that, it was wonderful, truly wonderful... until I started chatting with the developer about not keeping semi-permanent logs of who [previously] hosted what. I had hoped to solve the puzzle but he started unpublishing his application immediately.
I think simpler things could help more. I would like to see 1) a client that (in stead of just seeding) periodically checks how rare the rare blocks are on a torrent then seed just those blocks. 2) attempt to extend the tit for tad by looking for similar titles and file names (or some other formula) if insufficient seeds are available. So you might have [parts of] foo1 and foo3 and are looking for [parts of] foo2. foo2 is served by someone looking for [parts of] foo3. One could even ask to help seed something they are uninterested in and/or unfamiliar with. It does seem less of a "crime" than getting involved in permanently seeding the motherload.
Copyright holders would still track the IPs that these shards are coming from and sue/threaten them for copyright infringement. 5 seconds of Mulan compressed and sitting in isolation is still illegal to distribute
I believe this was more for storing content, and not streaming, but this was presented at defcon a few years ago.
Project: https://github.com/seantmalone/HiveMind
Presentation: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=GAq86wfeC9E
I had a similar idea, at least in terms of resilience. It was, basically, to compress each piece of content just so that the compressed version would be theoretically uncensorable.
Jon Lech Johansen did this with DeCSS back in the day [1], and the compressed version of the program was a prime number, which gave it a sort of "untouchable" quality.
Obviously, doing this for much larger content (i.e. movies and general videos) would be a challenge, and this technique might not be the best choice. Still an interesting concept, though.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_number#Illegal_primes
Isn't that basically Freenet?
> Shouldn’t it be possible to create a “virtual media library” that is actually BitTorrent under the hood
We actually had bittorrent-enabled video players in the early days of bittorrent. There seems to be some options active today, too. Google suggested frostwire.com
If I'm following correctly, I believe this is basically what Sia does, although not optimized to be used directly as a media server (or maybe it could?).
Please can you tell me if you are using any package managers for *arr services like swizzin/onebox ?
aka Napster
Interesting it's the City of London police doing this. I wonder how many people here are aware the City of London has a government that is elected mostly by corporations, not residents [1] and is separate from Greater London, with it's own police force.
Interesting. I knew it had a separate government but wasn't aware it was elected by corporations. (We have a similar system in the US, but corporations pick their two favorite candidates and then let the people choose ;))
Practically no one actually lives in the business district. It would be ridiculous for those few thousand people to set policy for the City. It would make more sense for it to be under the control of Greater London but no one wants to abolish the historic Corporation of London.
In the UK different police forces have different specialities. The City force specialises in financial crime.
Everywhere in England and Wales has had local government since the 19th Century.
City of London Ward Lists consist of c19,000 individuals, who have one vote each.
Corporations voting = urban myth
The City of London is part of Greater London http://legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1963/33/section/2
Everywhere in England and Wales has its own local police force.
The City of London police run the cyber crime units (National Fraud Intelligence Bureau) and action fraud nationally:
https://www.actionfraud.police.uk/what-is-national-fraud-int...
as someone on the Ward List, it's not elected by corporations at all
companies do get a vote allocation depending on the number of employees they have working in the City, but then these employees can then vote for whoever they want
(and it's a secret ballot)
The pirate bay is just about my favorite torrent site. Kickass torrents used to be good as well. For anything anything anime related, there is still the good ol https://nyaa.si/
Here is another alternative I found https://cloudtorrents.com
Another one I came across recently that's got a great interface:
I downloaded one thing from https://rarbg.to 2 weeks ago and got threatening copyright infringement notice emails and a physical letter from my ISP (AT&T fiber).
The well is poisoned by cheapshot MPAA/*AA monitoring.
the best ones are very private
The interface sucks and the ads are horrendous.
TPB sucks now.
Pirate Bay really has good name/brand recognition. Personally I can't really think of another site for torrents off the top of my head (though I don't really follow the space too closely).
The easiest way is to let the RIAA, MPAA, and other such organizations tell you: https://lumendatabase.org/
Lumen collects and publishes takedown notices sent to third parties, including Google. It's searchable, handy, and informative.
TPB is one of the very few (only?) torrent indexers to remain up since before netflix and the streaming era. The brand is a result of tenacity and good timing. They rode the torrent wave while it was getting big (arguably setting it in motion), and have kept that brand by just sticking around.
rarbg is a great one I use. Easy to filter on HDR/4k stuff.
Fortunately, There are chatbots that will gladly tell you the best trackers to seed your Creative Commons content.
if only they had rebranded as an AI non-profit, they could have gotten away with all the enabling of copyvio they ever dreamed of.
I moved to Usenet about a year ago, the difference is night and day. The downloads are so much faster and you can download stuff that's been up for years without worrying about seeds etc. Much easier to pay the few bucks a month for that then mess about with trying to appease private tracker ratios.
I pay for a seedbox. That way I'm giving back to the community.
Considering all the money I've saved over the years I'm still coming out ahead.
Where do you find the files? Do you pay for an indexer too?
I feel like the people still using TPB also use uTorrent. Both are good examples of the lasting power brand recognition can have.
What do people typically use these days?
what do people use other than pirate_bay or rarbg? Private torrents are too hard to get into.
btmet.com btdig.com filelisting.com