For the lazy: "The oldest surviving torrent we have seen is a copy of the Matrix fan film “The Fanimatrix”."
this post was submitted on 25 Sep 2023
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But is it any good?
Valid question.
But if it’s the dumbest shit in existence, it’s still worth seeding because it’s a part of history.
It’s like if Terror Toons was the first torrent ever.
It's really neat to see something like this still going. Torrenting is a cool technology, it's fun to download and then seed a file, knowing that now other people will get to enjoy it.
Seeing all the flags of different countries sharing the torrent makes me think this is what international cooperation looks like.
Well... I guess I'm seeding it now too
Ditto. cue "I'm doing my part" from Starship Troopers
Imagine if this article was written just because the author was having trouble downloading it because there weren't enough seeders.
I wonder what percentage of the total internet traffic, since inception, can be attributed to this protocol.
I bet it's pretty high
Also which periods of time was it higher or lower percentages.
Willing to bet at its inception it was higher than it was when Netflix arrived.
Probably less than spam email.
Multiple games has been using it to distribute updates
It's not even a ilegal download. Cool.
Torrenting is the way to go. Especially with VPN port forwarding now.
Seems like some VPNs are pulling back from port forwarding. Was a bummer that Mullvad did, probably due to legal pressure
Not legal pressure, government pressure. They kept getting asked to disclose which accounts had which ports associated with then and share all the info on them they kept (which for some payment methods they do briefly). So they decided to remove the feature rather than potentially violate their founding principle of privacy and anonymity. Kudos to them. Of course f*ck the CSAM assholes who made the government get involved in this and cost us this feature.
That is very depressing. The arms race between bad actors and repressive governments keeps whittling away at our right to privacy
why do you need port forwarding if you have VPN?
Its been a long, long time since i've used torrents in any form, so I have no idea.
You need it for seeding
I do want to note that you can still seed if your port isn't forwarded. For every seed connection, only one person out of the pair needs a forwarded port.
Good point. It just means that only people who themselves are likely to be seeders can download from me. Which is better than nothing, but not ideal!
Why is VPN port forwarding relevant here?
Mostly for western developed countries where you will get fucked up by the government for pirating. ISP's in US Canada and UK will sue normal middle class people for torrenting, unless you mask your IP with the correct VPN.
Canada limits the amount that a company can sue for downloading pirated media to the point where it's not worth it for the company to actually take it to court. The company can ask the ISP to send an email to try to scare the user, but that's about it.
this is great news
Been getting those emails for 10+ years, I just laugh and keep seeding.
You didnt answer the question
I have never heard of this happening. And I've gotten multiple cease and desist letters from my ISP. ISPs don't really have the case for a suit anyways, but there are third party companies that companies like Disney will pay to watch torrents for them and ask your ISP to send you that letter.
A decade or so ago, there were some widely-publicized cases of folks who got absolutely ruined with six- or seven-figure judgements against them for copyright infringement.
Maybe it was a tactic the copyright cartel used in the mid-2000s and then stopped or something, but it was enough to shift folks' behavior such that using VPNs became the norm.
You are correct, it's super uncommon to get sued for pirating unless you're a major player. If you get busted by your ISP too many times, though, they may give you the boot. My ISP has a 9 strikes in one rolling year policy (at least last I knew).
Yeah, we get the VPN part. What about the port-forwarding part?
I might have used the wrong word. I think the term is binding a VPN to a torrenting application so that all data going in andd out of pass thru the vpns servers
But isn't that how VPNs work, binding the network interface connected to it to the applications?
Shit they do that? Man that sucks. People go to jail? Or have to pay fines?
Fines. And say you seeded a movie to 1000 people and a DVD of the movie costs $20, they sue you for $20000, treating it like you broke into a warehouse and stole 1000 DVDs of the movie.
Did Linux OSs move into torrents later? I'm surprised one of those isn't an older active torrent. I mean sure there's no point in actually installing those OSs now but people would still seed.
Ther's really no point in seeding a 20 year old iso of an os that evolves that quickly
20 years ago we were on the 2.4 kernel just shortly before switching to 2.6, wifi was a mess, GPUs were even more mess
now om gaming on my linux machine with better FPS than the windows version
Any Linux distro do HDR / VRR yet?
Iirc SteamOS JUST added it. So clones of it should be seeing it soon
I've just googled steamos, that's Debian 8 right (which is eol, weird...)
So I'm guessing Debian 8 (and hopefully newer) will get support too soon?
I think thats the old steamos. The current one is arch and isn't quite public release yet but there are a few clones of it.
Kde 6 should have basic hdr...and I can't find it, but I swore I've seen in the past week some gnome based os had some support...
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VRR (Gsync module at least) works on Ubuntu 23.04 for sure. It's a bit limited though, but it is improving. I was able to get it working by only having one monitor plugged in and running the game in full screen (not windowed). The arch wiki has a very nice write up of the current state. https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Variable_refresh_rate
I've been using FreeSync for years on Manjaro and Arch.
Most advice I've seen says you shouldn't look for distros on torrent sites, and official torrents tend to disappear after each new release.
Distros with torrents tend to publish their own torrent file or magnet link on their site
Fuck I’m old. I remember discovering Bit Torrent.