this post was submitted on 28 Jan 2026
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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

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[–] ShinkanTrain@lemmy.ml 125 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (5 children)

What, you never downloaded a game divided in 40 100MB chunks off of MegaUpload before only to find out part 27 is broken🫠

[–] Kissaki@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 5 hours ago

There are good file hosters, not only bad. You can see gofile in the screenshot, where you can download full-sized files at full speed.

[–] CodingCarpenter@lemmy.ml 43 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Fucking war flashbacks happening now

[–] nova_ad_vitum@lemmy.ca 8 points 3 days ago (1 children)

When gen Z asks about this the only response we can give is "you don't know man, you werent there".

[–] cheeso@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 23 hours ago

it ain't that far back for early gen z to not experience

[–] locuester@lemmy.zip 13 points 3 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

What, you’ve never downloaded a game divided into 5 1.2MB chunks via a 1200 baud dialup modem using XModem on a WWIV BBS and had your mom pickup the phone on the last file?

[–] Holytimes@sh.itjust.works 2 points 3 days ago

The best I got is 200 10 meg chunks on a 512k ): part 150 something didn't work...

I was very sad.

[–] almost1337@lemmy.zip 2 points 3 days ago

This is basically how Usenet piracy works, only with backup sources in case part 27 is broken

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[–] webghost0101@sopuli.xyz 78 points 4 days ago (3 children)

Thats a good sign actually.

People have been sharing things in storage drives for decades. Fmhy has a list of some big ones, usually for books.

Traditionally i believe these were not advertised and more underground, a way to easily share with friends.

You didn’t really want them easily found and traceable to you though but that is what changed.

Piracy has become so normalised that people take it for granted that there are no legal risks involved. Normalising piracy is the first step for the ideals of software freedom to flourish.

After all what is a digital file if not a bunch of writing that instructs the computer to draw pixels on your screen. You wouldn’t copyright the words to ask a human to make a drawing about a copyrighted something, so why do it for a computer?

[–] moody@lemmings.world 16 points 4 days ago (2 children)

After all what is a digital file if not a bunch of writing that instructs the computer to draw pixels on your screen.

A digital file is just a number, potentially a very big number, but that's all it is.

Oh come on. What's next? "I didn't murder anyone, I just rearranged some atoms. We're all just really big collections of atoms after all." If you remove enough semantic layers, you can make anything sound benign.

I'm not anti-piracy, I just think these lines of argumentation are so flimsy as to be entirely worthless for the cause.

[–] SkyeStarfall@lemmy.blahaj.zone 5 points 3 days ago (1 children)

To be fair, that's also like, all information

[–] matey@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 3 days ago

I think that's the point.

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[–] flambonkscious@sh.itjust.works 47 points 4 days ago (3 children)
[–] yakko@feddit.uk 49 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Let the babies have their fun. This is like their Kazaa

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[–] baka@lemmy.blahaj.zone 34 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

Nothing inefficient about adding another avenue for pirating Decentralization makes us stronger

[–] sonalder@lemmy.ml 8 points 4 days ago (1 children)

It's less resilient, honestly with today speeds it is not that less efficient I would say.

[–] dRLY@lemmy.ml 10 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

More efficient if the file is less popular or super niche with few seeders with tiny upload speeds or no seeds (due to age of the torrent or the before mentioned). Torrents for sure are more resilient as far as being harder to just shutdown a site. It is still nice to constantly have all options possible to make getting files easy. Though I will say that torrents are more efficient the larger the file. 4k media being a very good example.

[–] hayvan@piefed.world 36 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Any pirate born after 2000 can't torrent. All they know is...

[–] LiamTheBox@lemmy.ml 26 points 4 days ago

Be gay, Reddit [REQUEST] and JuegosGratis.com

[–] ragebutt@lemmy.dbzer0.com 36 points 4 days ago (1 children)

This has been a thing for years although it used to be sketchy blogs (and probably still is tbf in addition to this). Back in the days of rapid share, mega before Kim dotcom got busted, etc. some people just can’t figure out torrents or they live in a situation where torrents can’t be used (isp shaping, internet controlled by a 3rd party that blocks torrenting, etc) and usually http downloads are fine in those situations.

If you ever have to rely on this get jdownloader at least

[–] m4a@lemmy.dbzer0.com 9 points 4 days ago (2 children)

Wait, I thought Mega was relatively safe? What happened with Kim dotcom?

[–] 4am@lemmy.zip 26 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (1 children)

Mega used to be called MegaUpload and it was just plain ol’ cloud storage. US media companies coordinated with the NZ government and apprehended Kim Dotcom in NZ and shut down MegaUpload. Dotcom had money and lots of lawyers, so he’s staved off being entirely destroyed and formed Mega, which is E2EE and so he cannot accept any liability because they cannot know what is being stored.

Check out this wild ass video from 2012: https://youtu.be/o0Wvn-9BXVc

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[–] muhyb@programming.dev 26 points 4 days ago

This is a little different from torrent. This is torment.

[–] 0_o7@lemmy.dbzer0.com 24 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Since xitter is only for whiny right wing little bitches and moderation is mostly gone and only applies to political content ego-baby doesn't like, so I guess this flies under the radar, maybe?

[–] jlow@discuss.tchncs.de 6 points 4 days ago

Yeah, thought the same, another sign of Shitter becoming 4chan.

[–] sabreW4K3@lazysoci.al 29 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Back in the day, I'd prefer hosted links over torrents. Felt safer and was less hassle.

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[–] Cassa@lemmy.blahaj.zone 24 points 4 days ago

I'm sure I remember that movies were found in dropbox around 2010s as well - it's sketchy but it exists 🤷 not scary torrent but supersafe download

[–] ILikeBoobies@lemmy.ca 11 points 4 days ago (5 children)

For some reason people use torrents over usenet.

[–] jol@discuss.tchncs.de 7 points 3 days ago

Private trackers are much better. I appreciate p2p as every user helps strengthen the tracker. And usually you pay with that support instead of with money.

[–] RiceManatee@lemmy.ca 5 points 3 days ago

I like boobies and Usenet 😁

[–] ryannathans@aussie.zone 5 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Longevity, trying to find something from 15 years ago is pain

[–] excral@feddit.org 3 points 3 days ago

To be fair, that's an issue for both torrent and usenet. If it's popular enough, you will still find seeder or reupload 15 years later but if it's not, you may be out of luck either way

[–] biotin7@sopuli.xyz 3 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Can you explain please ? What's the advantage of UseNet ?

[–] ILikeBoobies@lemmy.ca 3 points 3 days ago

I was just making fun of OP for hating on cloud storage.

Usenet is basically cloud storage as in it's a server hosting it instead of peers. The advantage being speed. (Oversimplified)

[–] FuCensorship@lemmy.today 2 points 3 days ago

For some reason people like to pay to pirate, go figure...

[–] misk@piefed.social 18 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

If you live in a country that makes telecoms monitor traffic then those have a benefit of not requiring a VPN (because you’re not uploading anything and they usually go for those seeding).

[–] dreadbeef@lemmy.dbzer0.com 13 points 4 days ago (1 children)

it isn't illegal to download, only upload. Torrents get you in trouble because of seeding, not downloading

[–] sonalder@lemmy.ml 24 points 4 days ago (3 children)

It depends on your local laws I think. I'm pretty sure downloading free copyrighted product from an unauthorized source is still illegal in France for exemple.

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[–] Gust@piefed.social 12 points 4 days ago

Reminds me of the undergrad experience of someone who is not me, lol. They had "the dropbox", spoken about only in hushed tones and never openly acknowledged, which may have contained a pdf copy of every single text required by the curriculum of that person's major.

[–] Egonallanon@feddit.uk 10 points 4 days ago (4 children)

Yeah for reasons beyond my knowing torrenting seems to have really dropped off over recent years.

[–] BagOfHeavyStones@piefed.social 10 points 4 days ago (1 children)

I think it's in part because of NAT. Less and less people have a real IP address, so they can't share the torrents to others, and most VPNs don't provide an upload port either.

The tracker websites are also increasingly hostile with malicious ads, so those with ineffective ad blockers can't use them.

[–] hayvan@piefed.world 5 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Qbittorrent works with my double-nat set up (don't ask why, my isp sucks) without any set up. I feel like it's more of a tech literacy issue.

[–] Mondez 5 points 4 days ago

Torrent clients can cope behind NAT but can only upload/download from other peers that have a port open so they are more limited in the pool of peers they can make use of.

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[–] eggdaddy@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 points 4 days ago

All you all know there are entire sites dedicated to cloud storage sharing right? We also have OD's and OGD's. Link shared GD's. None of this is new, it's been this way since you could drag anything down off a BBS or mainframe. We have been sharing in every manner you can think of since it's been possible, digital just made it dummy easy.

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