this post was submitted on 01 Dec 2023
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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

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Thanks to whoever posted this on reddit. I hope other clients detect and blocking it.

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Did anyone create issue yet?

[–] catsup@lemmy.one 1 points 11 months ago (3 children)

If it's spoofing them, its going to be more effort than it's worth to actually detect that client. I strongly recommend you to delete this post or you're gonna cause a massive Streissand Effect

[–] duplexsystem@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

Lemmy is not any where big enough of a platform to cause any noticeable Streissand Effect let alone a "massive" one

[–] SchizoDenji@lemm.ee 1 points 11 months ago

Lmao. Lemmy's active users isn't even 1% of people pirating.

[–] WarmApplePieShrek@lemmy.dbzer0.com 0 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

There are more ways to detect than peer ID.

This client is already extremely popular. Before the spoofing update, it's mis-identified as TorrentStorm 0.0.0.8 in qBittorrent. It makes up half the peers on a lot of my torrents. Have you checked?

[–] princessnorah@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 points 11 months ago

Me, using a private tracker: Nope, don’t see them.

[–] southsamurai@sh.itjust.works 1 points 11 months ago

Does this really bother folks that much? I've never cared much about this kind of leeching as long as it isn't dominating my personal bandwidth. And it never has so far, though I have to admit my 4ish tb of movies isn't exactly high demand stuff, so I don't usually have more than one or two at a time being leeched.

Hell, I don't really care much about leeches anyway, as long as the overall ability to find things is still there. I look at it as the price of the freedom of torrents. There's always going to be higher demand for data than there are people with the resources/time/willingness to seed heavily. I'm okay with that because I don't really want to have to keep and seed every fucking thing out there, it would take much more storage than I can afford to be able to keep a ratio on most private trackers since I tend not to keep shit I don't intend to watch at least once a year unless it's something pretty damn obscure.

[–] lido@lemmy.dbzer0.com 0 points 11 months ago (2 children)

I don't understand what's going on. Can someone ELI5?

[–] WarmApplePieShrek@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Torrents are people sharing files with each other, uploading and downloading. Stremio downloads, but never uploads. And now it doesn't want you to know who's using it, because people kept banning it.

[–] lido@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 11 months ago

Got it. Thanks!

[–] DroneRights@lemm.ee 0 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Torrenting is a technology where a network of ordinary people share a file in tiny pieces all together. There's no central server, you connect to one, ten, or a hundred other computers who each give you part of the file.

Torrenting only works if people are uploading the file as well as downloading it. Giving a file to others is called seeding, and taking a file from others without giving back is called leeching. Most people are peers, who take the same amount they give. Ideally, everyone would be a peer, but since some people are leeches, we also need seeders.

I'm not familiar with this stremio app, but if it does what I think it does, then it takes from the network without giving back and it can now pretend to be a different client to sneak onto the network. If enough stremio users watch a show, it'll become unavailable to other pirates.

[–] neosheo@discuss.tchncs.de 0 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Not 100%, stremio is a front end for a debrid service and the debrid service will download the torrent and add it to their cache and stremio users will access the downloaded file directly from the debrid services' servers.

Only the initially download may cause a slow down of torrents. Idk exactly how they distribute the file to their cdn. If all the servers in their cdn download the same file at 1 time it may cause a temporary slow down of torrents but i would assume they don't download directly on each server and instead download on some close to the requesting user and then use some kind of file synchronization technique to propogate the file through the network.

Their cache is pretty huge and for most shows they already have tons of links cached and wouldn't need to keep downloading very often.

Stremio isn't the first front end for these services and like all the rest of them it will eventually get shutdown too and this will continue long after stremio.

The real.issuein my opinion isnt bandwidth hogging by debrid services its that if everyone migrates to them that the majority of the network will be leechers. With less seeders the remaining seeders will need more powerful computers to support the torrents and if they cant afford the upgrade them the whole system could collapse

[–] DroneRights@lemm.ee 0 points 11 months ago (1 children)

A lot of the shows I watch aren't popular to torrent. Infinity Train got taken down by Cartoon Network, and now it only exists for pirates. So pirates need to seed it so it can continue to exist in any form. Same for Generator Rex. I wanted to watch The Flying Nun, but it ran out of seeds and can't be watched anymore. If a single leech downloads a show on the brink like Generator Rex, it could end up like The Flying Nun. Gone forever. I'm not worried about these popular new releases like Invincible or Loki, I'm worried about media preservation.

[–] neosheo@discuss.tchncs.de 0 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I'm not so sure that this would hurt those tho. These services would require their to be at least 1 seeder to be able to stream it, so they arent really taking the seeder away. Most likely the seeder dropped.

If anything this would help the seeder by offloading downloading of the show else where and providing a second place for the file. Typically if you see a low seeded content that you like, it would be courteous to seed it after downloading it

[–] WarmApplePieShrek@lemmy.dbzer0.com 0 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Stremio doesn't seed after you download. It downloads, puts on the screen, and throws away.

[–] neosheo@discuss.tchncs.de 0 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Yes, i get that the best option would be for stremio to seed it but i don't see how it would be feasible considering the low storage capacities of tvs.

The reality is i dont think this will kill torturing because leechers have always existed piracy is about providing things for free to others, can we really expect all the people who can't afford to buy the media to suddenly be able to afford a vpn, seedbox, storage?

Piracy is like tor network, volunteers are the backbone but most users are leechers. The network has been going strong for years with leechers and it wont die now

[–] WarmApplePieShrek@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 11 months ago

Just use real-debrid. It acts as a cache for you for $3/month. Leech off someone you pay to leech off.

[–] i_love_FFT@lemmy.ml 0 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Ok... I like the interface of StremIO, which looks like a service aggregator (ie I can open the movie on a streaming service i have access to), but I don't like the fact that I can't pre-download and seed less popular files. It supports debrid services, but from the technical description, thesec seems to be leech-equivalent to seedboxes...

What would be a good drop -in replacement? Something that works on google TVs and is easy to maintain?

[–] WarmApplePieShrek@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

If you use a debrid service, you're okay because the debrid service just downloads the file once and caches it for everyone, and you pay for the bandwidth to download from them. That isn't excessive leeching, whether they seed or not.