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All threads are salt threads. I think this spiraled from another user posting about how a private tracker was implementing mandatory 2FA, or maybe a user mentioning they were banned from IPT for inactivity of 90+ days.
Rules are rules. Besides, if you can't find something on a torrent search engine, you absolutely won't find it on your PT.
Actually, you should already have a VPN to dodge the rolling IP blocks everywhere on the internet, and you should already know how to sandbox untrusted (proprietary) executables.
There's no real reason to put up with a private tracker's idiosyncracies these days, unless you're hooked on that sweet, sweet sunk cost fallacy. In that case, you need new people to join and improve your own status in the tracker, and that's why they keep shilling this shit everywhere.
Yup! I avoid the ones I don't like. Doesn't mean I can't make fun of it anyway. Safe & sound and far removed from their ability to "punish" me for daring to mock it.
I still tagged it "Winner," but refer to my previous post about the dangers of people monetizing piracy.
ETA:
The user was banned for literally not doing anything, as in "not consuming resources, not logging in, not downloading, not seeding." Not being punished for "leeching," but for "not using the service," which is an absolutely bizarre reason to periodically alter a database record from "enabled=true" to "enabled=false." It's not like a record sitting in a database is "consuming resources just by being there" in any significant way.
If you were actually leeching, or constantly browsing and never downloading to such an extent you were actually impacting server performance (though that indicates other server-side problems, since routine browsing/querying shouldn't kill a service), that'd be one thing. But just "you didn't download anything for three months so you're BANNED!" is autistic and retarded.
If you’re a regular user or at least have downloaded a few things once in a while that’s usually enough to identify your usage habits. But when someone creates an account and then sits on it that gets suspicious. It could be that you’re stockpiling accounts so that you can do a mass download and overload everyone with Hit and Runs, or it could mean that you will begin spamming the forum with botnet posts and ads. It could just mean that you use other sites as your main site with IPTorrents being a fallback for a rainy day, but there’s no way to distinguish between a safe user and a malicious user if there is no usage.
IPTorrents also has a forum where you can post requests or do general talk, and if people are signing up just to spam the forum that would be considered unacceptable.
You only would do this with your friend, in person, by either buying the CDs/DVDs for him to burn to, or pay him $20 for a batch of shit because he had to go get the CDs/DVDs himself.
I seem to have problems with my arr stack and seerr sometimes. I don't know if its my isp but sometimes it is finicky downloading torrents or indexing meta data. I have every single sentai and kamen rider but I cant import it from the torrent properly for it to appear correct in jellyfin.
People discussing things on my discussion forum?!?! Preposterous!
And as I've already said, they're not immune to ridicule for retarded ideas whether I'm a member there or not. See below for a great example why they're not worth even minimal effort to entertain their power fantasy:
I seem to have problems with my arr stack and seerr sometimes. I don't know if its my isp but sometimes it is finicky downloading torrents or indexing meta data. I have every single sentai and kamen rider but I cant import it from the torrent properly for it to appear correct in jellyfin.
what are you using for file naming? the Trash guides usually mention adding tmdb or tvdb tags to the folder name (the tvdb tags requite the plugin to be installed)
People discussing things on my discussion forum?!?! Preposterous!
And as I've already said, they're not immune to ridicule for retarded ideas whether I'm a member there or not. See below for a great example why they're not worth even minimal effort to entertain their power fantasy:
I admit I've learned more about how BitTorrent actually works today than I had in the past decade(s?) of using it, but I imagine they'd want to prune inactive members to prevent some sort of website fuckery right? Null does that with accounts here to my knowledge to prevent them from being compromised and used by bad actors, I'm not sure how much damage an account at IpTorrents can do but that would be my guess as to why they would do such a thing (beyond gatekeeping and generally holding back the day)
what are you using for file naming? the Trash guides usually mention adding tmdb or tvdb tags to the folder name (the tvdb tags requite the plugin to be installed)
tvdb is used for the folder names. I think i forgot to install the plugin or have it configured wrong in nix
edit: the tvdb tags i had were wrong and fucked up all my files and moved it into a folder called TV animal farm. everything is now fucked and has moved into the wrong folders. I have /mnt/media/tv and /mnt/media/downloads/tv for downloads in progress. somewhere along the way I fucked up the organization and its now a mess
The only activity an account there can do is browse, search, download, leech and seed. Those are all apparently "mandatory" activities they expect people to partake in, so how does it make sense for them to want to deactivate accounts to prevent them doing ... the things they want them doing?
Like I said, the more you drill down into the actual thinking behind stuff like this, the less sense it actually makes.
The only activity an account there can do is browse, search, download, leech and seed. Those are all apparently "mandatory" activities they expect people to partake in, so how does it make sense for them to want to deactivate accounts to prevent them doing ... the things they want them doing?
Like I said, the more you drill down into the actual thinking behind stuff like this, the less sense it actually makes.
Funny you should mention the MPAA/RIAA -- they don't do this as much as they used to, but they (along with other "content output entities," including some entertainingly wily and arrogant porn studios) still pay companies sometimes to try to infiltrate these private trackers to grab specific torrents and connect to the swarm to try to scrape "infringing" IP addresses (i.e. other peers that request chunks from them). That's why you're generally advised to use an offshore IP address for your torrenting, just to add international red tape to the enforcement process (they only ever chase after low-hanging fruit; no American company doing this will ever go after an offshore IP to try to track down a pirate). They rely on American ISPs rolling over on demand when they come knocking (which they often do).
They use (deliberately) broken clients that either don't transmit anything (and either try to lie to or otherwise mask their actual activities from the tracker) when chunks are requested from other peers, or sending junk instead of the correct data (less commonly, since doing this too much can get a peer flagged "broken"), operating on the theory that 1) they can't "infringe" on a copyright they're been contracted to "defend" (as presumably the contract permits downloading it even from "unsanctioned" sources in order to identify them) and 2) if they don't re-transmit any portion of the copyrighted material, they themselves aren't engaging in criminal activity (besides opening themselves up to the Uno Reverso™ if they do send even a chunk of the real content (i.e. being prosecuted/countersued themselves for violating the DMCA), it can also be argued if they're busy infringing to try to trap others doing so, that's "entrapment" and not actionable.
I bring this up because this paranoid "expire old inactive accounts" policy would achieve literally nothing to protect their real users, since an "impostor" infiltrating the private tracker would certainly be engaging in "normal" activity with the goal of catching infringers and/or disrupting the swarm with junk data (or convincing other legit seeders to disconnect by pretending to be "super-seeding" while not actually serving up the data when asked). Until somebody takes a personal look, likely with a client capable of debugging torrents and closely inspecting interactions with other peers, they'll look perfectly normal. If the impostor's malicious client is clever enough, it can (falsely) report it's sent data to peers when it really hasn't.
An unfortunate gap/flaw in the bittorrent protocol is that trackers are expected to trust clients when they self-report their sent/received bytes for each torrent; clients don't tell trackers how much they're getting from (or sending to) other specific clients, just their own total up/down rates. That makes it easy for a malicious actor to fake legitimacy to the tracker. This also means you can recompile your favorite bittorrent client and set it to "cheat" a bit if you're a scumbag, by having it multiply whatever "upload" count it reports in each announcement by a factor of 1.1 or 1.15, giving you a bit of a "boost" in terms of what the tracker thinks you've uploaded to others, and there's no way to really prove you're cheating except if someone joins the swarm, explicitly transfers that torrent from only your client while nobody else is leeching it (so you know the total bytes the client should report) and then waits for your client to report a bigger number. Nobody ever bothers with that. Obvious cheaters (2x, 5x and 10x multipliers are stand-outs) are obvious and catching those makes tracker operators feel good, so they never dig any deeper.
So the impostor/disruption companies will use that bit of trickery to fuck with swarms (to disrupt legit downloads) and to try to catch individual peers. And again, a "expire old accounts" policy doesn't protect active users; that's exactly who these companies want, and they present themselves as active users too.
Awesome post @moocow, I appreciate your insight into how exactly the assholes work, I knew they were doing it but yeah, that does sort of strip the whole "we're doing it to protect you" type thoughts about the inactive users getting pruned thing
Question then: you say offshore, is that literal or will Canadian/Mexican/etc (continental) ISPs roll over too? Or is it a case by case with those ones? I presume you mean "non-American" just to make it more difficult but I'm sure Canadian/UK/European ISPs are probably decently pozzed depending upon the actual location
You only would do this with your friend, in person, by either buying the CDs/DVDs for him to burn to, or pay him $20 for a batch of shit because he had to go get the CDs/DVDs himself.
Question then: you say offshore, is that literal or will Canadian/Mexican/etc (continental) ISPs roll over too? Or is it a case by case with those ones? I presume you mean "non-American" just to make it more difficult but I'm sure Canadian/UK/European ISPs are probably decently pozzed depending upon the actual location
It comes down to a simple question (that each ISP evaluates on their own): "how big a pain in the ass can these copyright cartel cunts actually be to us?"
American ISPs can be subpoenaed (and penalized for failing to produce responsive records) and sued, as they're obligated to indulge in all of the DMCA's assorted "delights." So they generally adopt one of three attitudes: 1) roll over immediately and furnish all demanded info, it's not worth fighting, fuck our customers, they're stupid anyway; 2) sandbag, be minimally cooperative as required by law, don't go out of our way to be helpful or a hindrance, they'll probably just fuck off anyway; 3) fuck these assholes, we run our business our way, you want that data come fucking get it nigger, we'll see you in court.
Most ISPs go with option 2, to be perfectly honest. They "comply," begrudgingly, because it's annoying busywork that doesn't help their bottom line (and offends their paying customers), and only just enough to avoid legal trouble. They also have a tendency to switch to option 3 if the cartel gets too uppity with them, just to send a message that "hey, we don't have to make this inexpensive for you faggots, back off." Privately-owned providers, like utility co-ops and the like, tend to lean straight into option 3. Narcing out their customers isn't good for business, and they know it, so they sandbag, stonewall, and bury every demand in as much red tape as possible to discourage the cartel from strong-arming them.
As for the cartel itself, the decision whether to play "hardball" with a given American ISP for a given demand (remember that each DMCA-compliant demand for information is a separate incident, so this sandbagging process can be repeated every single time) comes down to how juicy the payoff could be. To be perfectly blunt, it's simply not worth much effort to push hard against a recalcitrant ISP unless the alleged infringer is a high-value target, like somebody (foolishly) hosting an infringement web site or tracker or indexer from a server in their home on their home ISP connection.
Post-Capitol Records, Inc. v. Thomas-Rasset (the grandmother case; amusingly she was actually only 30-ish during the litigation, and CNET fucked it up and called her a grandmother, and it stuck; thanks again, lügenpresse!), the industry realized the payoff for busting individual infringers, even when they're caught red-handed and punished by the courts, isn't worth the squeeze. That case singlehandedly destroyed the industry's image in the public eye and it's still never recovered. It made the public essentially decide "y'know what? Before, I didn't really care, and even maybe agreed with them, but squeezing a single mother of 4 for $220,000k? Nah man fuck that whole industry" and helped inspire more piracy by everyone around the world. It spurred and accelerated development of everything from The Pirate Bay to the bittorrent protocol itself. They're still smarting from that.
Only ISPs with direct ties to the cartel (i.e. carriers who are owned by conglomerates that also own movie/TV studios or record labels) go with option 1. Even then, unless it's an especially obvious slam-dunk case with a lot of proof of separate infringements, this only generally leads to getting "the letter" from the ISP. Only rarely does it actually result in an ISP taking punitive action (disconnection, fees, etc.), and actual litigation is even more rare.
Outside the United States, it comes down to how cooperative each target nation is with the United States government in two respects. First, how "compatible" is the target nation's copyright laws with America's rather draconian, retarded and obscenely lopsided anti-citizen, pro-business copyright laws? Some nations have succumbed to pressure by the cartel to straight-up enact DMCA-like laws that mandate cooperation with American DMCA-style demands, with others bending over via entering into an explicit treaty specifically concerning copyright protections. These are "unsafe" nations not suitable for piracy activity, as they have codified in law either DMCA-like laws or even worse ones, criminalizing not only copyright infringement, but also sandbagging, stalling or taking steps to obfuscate or otherwise protect customers (the cartel learned quickly from its mistakes in drafting the DMCA). This results in a legal environment where ISPs will immediately narc you out on demand without hesitation or due process.
What that means is, as an American, using a service provider in a DMCA-friendly nation will not protect you, because they will cheerfully hand over all your contact information and detailed activity logs to the cartel on demand without court order or any due process, meaning they'll be able to figure out your American IP address (you're accessing that remote service somehow, right?) and then it comes right back to the American ISP question -- option 1, 2, or 3, and "to sue or not to sue."
Countries that have not indulged the cartel's draconian copyright dreams are potentially more piracy-friendly, but not always. They may already have laws that are either directly adequately comparable to the DMCA or laws or process that can be abused enough to make things painful for ISPs that try to shield their customers.
The second element that matters is the target country's legal process itself. Do they have an extradition treaty with America? Do they recognize American arrest warrants? Do they recognize American copyrights or patent rights at all in the first place? And finally, does the country's government and legal system have the "energy" to be bothered with a foreign entity's whining about foreign copyright laws? In other words, can an American company actually cause genuine, real-world problems for some random ISP in whatever third-world shithole running some hosting service on the side, or will their government's general apathy, corruption, or small scale shield them -- even accidentally -- from zealous persecution by American copyright crusaders? Can the cartel "make an example" of somebody without causing a major diplomatic incident?
As for figuring out which countries are "safest," you can generally identify them by how much the cartel itself whines about a country "not being cooperative." That's how you can trick Grok and ChatGPT to provide up-to-date lists of safe(r) countries -- ask it about copyright cartel enforcement activity and international efforts to "bring countries in line" and any of the bots will cheerfully report all the industry's current/most recent efforts to catch those dang dirty pirates. There's a convenient tool called the "Priority Watch List" that lists all the "naughty boys" the cartel is focused on. Grok specifically says "cooperation is inferred from U.S. government reports (especially the annual USTR Special 301 Report), free trade agreement (FTA) IP chapters, extradition practices, joint law-enforcement actions, site-blocking, and data-sharing. Industry groups heavily influence the Special 301 process by submitting recommendations."
Amusingly, I openly called American copyright/IP interests "the copyright cartel" in my queries to Grok, and it immediately understood who I was talking about and processed my queries without correcting me or scolding me about being a dang dirty pirate. Even the guardrailed AIs know how full of shit these people really are.
Bottom line? "In practice, the closest partners for U.S. copyright enforcement efforts are high-income democracies with aligned legal systems and existing law-enforcement ties—especially Japan, South Korea, Australia, Singapore, the UK, and much of Western Europe—supplemented by ad-hoc cooperation on specific operations elsewhere. The Special 301 lists and IIPA reports are the primary public indicators of where industry groups see shortfalls."
The "bad guys"? i.e. best places currently to get a cheap VPN or seedbox? The "Priority Foreign Country" (the first-ever designation of this highest "naughty boy" category) is Vietnam. Next is the "Priority Watch List" (with "serious IP protection/enforcement problems"): Chile, China, India, Indonesia, Russia, and Venezuela. Then there's the "Watch List" (described as "merits bilateral attention"): Algeria, Argentina, Barbados, Belarus, Bolivia, Brazil, Canada, Colombia, Ecuador, Egypt, the European Union, Guatemala, Mexico, Pakistan, Paraguay, Peru, Thailand, Trinidad and Tobago, and Türkiye.
Those countries either actively infringe (Vietnam, China, Russia, etc.) and not only don't give a shit, but cheerfully tell the cartel and the US to go fuck themselves when they come whining about it, or (for that last list) just don't give a shit and just ignore the whining and just can't seem to be compelled to care enough to do anything about infringement accusations.
I was genuinely surprised to see Canada of all places on the watch list, but thinking about their retarded verbal sparring with Trump, I could easily see Canada being accidentally based enough to say "y'know what? Trump wants to be a dick and make fun of us? How about we stop cooperating with your copyright cartel for awhile?" The funny thing is that's actually a stronger lever of power than their current threats of withholding fucking booze from the US (lol).
From personal experience, I can say just renting a seedbox or VPN in another country that isn't directly on the "content cartel dick suckers shortlist" (Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Australia, the UK, most of western and northern Europe, New Zealand, Brazil, Argentina, Peru, Paraguay and the UAE) is adequate. The "snoopers" are all based in America, and most of the time when they see a foreign IP that's not in that list of "good boy" countries, they decide it's not worth pursuing. Keep in mind that they've got no way of knowing if the person using that seedbox or VPN is even a citizen of that country, or an American, or a citizen of some other country instead. Finding out is slow and costly, no matter how cooperative everybody is. I used Feral Hosting for years without incident, and only quit using them last year when I switched my own "piracy stack" to rely exclusively on Usenet and NZB indexers instead of using torrents.
It's ultimately not about having perfect OPSEC or bouncing off seven proxies. It's just about not being the juiciest target. Like all criminal enterprises, the copyright cartel is lazy above all else. Low-hanging fruit is who they go after. Easy catches, easy wins, easy punishments or payouts. Actually going through the motions of chasing down someone who they suspect is an American using a seedbox in the Netherlands? Nah, that's not worth the hassle. It's not profitable. There's nothing to gain from humbling one American by connecting all those dots and bringing him low in court. At best they'll only get an award of a few hundred thousand dollars and they know Americans make a big stink out of being persecuted by the copyright cartel these days. What few cases they've litigated post-Grandma have almost always settled out-of-court for just a few thousand dollars.
It's technically feasible to put a convincing legal case together to get a civil judgment or even a criminal conviction, but it's a lot of work and requires a lot of things to line up just right, including the seedbox/VPN host keeping logs of not only individual torrents fetched by the client (i.e. you) but also keeping convincing proof that you actually received those files at your home and it was you who orchestrated it. It's harder than it sounds, and never worth the effort.
I honestly think at this point they're just going through the motions to satisfy that fun quirk of American copyright and trademark law that says you have to aggressively protect your intellectual property if you want to assert the protections afforded to you by those laws. There's still some enthusiastic pricks in the industry who seem to enjoy the hunt, but they're rare, and actually claiming a scalp is even rarer. The recent "AI renaissance" (all the recent decompilations and ports of video games to PC, easy modding of previously unmoddable games, deepfakes, etc.) is giving the copyright cartel "thinkers" a whole new bag of scorpions to do battle with, so I don't see them even putting forth a token effort against "piracy" in the coming years. They'll be too busy fighting the AI hydra to waste time going after randos in their apartments grabbing an old Metallica album for old times' sake.
A new softmod has been released for the Xbox 360. This one, however, is a permanent softmod instead of continually needing to perform an exploit on boot with a USB stick inserted. All of this thanks to the Bad Update hypervisor exploit. - The softmod also allows for up to 2TB to be formatted by the X360 itself instead of needing custom software on a computer, SSDs aren't well supported because the exploit are race conditions, where SSDs are too quick for these to be performed.
The softmod is a one-time install and only needs Rock Band Blitz along with its Bad Update exploit to be used once. Afterwards, every boot boots straight into your CFW. Get your X360 now while they're still cheap.
Amusingly, I openly called American copyright/IP interests "the copyright cartel" in my queries to Grok, and it immediately understood who I was talking about and processed my queries without correcting me or scolding me about being a dang dirty pirate. Even the guardrailed AIs know how full of shit these people really are.
Claude does this too, I was troubleshooting my router being an asshole with regards to port forwarding last month and Claude helped me fight it, I even straight up said "I wanna steal things from big companies" verbatim and it basically told me "I really don't care, I just want to fix your problem"
