First they came for the bitlockers...

[Jamie Oliver is fat]

If you consider that everyone would probably want a legit, fully patchable version of a game for 50p, then it's really a case of working up from there to the point where the cost of the game exceeds the effort of finding new patches and cracks each time.

And that's the price you can charge in this day and age.....

[olliebean]

Is it possible to just download an album yet, completely DRM free, without having to install fucking wanky itunes?

Yes, most notably (and usually cheaper than iTunes) from Amazon (although you have to install their downloader software for albums - individual tracks you can download directly).

[glitch]

Is it possible to just download an album yet, completely DRM free, without having to install fucking wanky itunes?

Yes.

Depends on the music you're after and what format though.

[thugler]

Oh no! Not BT Junkie!

I remember using that profusely.

8 years ago.

Torrents (other than from private trackers) are completely useless and slow now and have been for a while.

I'm a rapidshare user currently, but newsgroups and tons of other methods would take it's place fairly easily.

[small_world]

Really?
Ah fuck. I thought I was right up there with the cool kids.

I dunno, I thought it was awesome setting up a load of torrents on a night time and coming in from work the day after and having my hard-drive groaning under the weight of 50gb of stuff downloaded overnight.

Newsgroups? Rapidshare?
What is this foreign muck?

[Big Jack McBastard]

Torrents (other than from private trackers) are completely useless and slow now and have been for a while.

Don't talk such pish, while it's true that often the private trackers are better for obscure stuff, public ones are still a damn site better than Rapidshare (what a misnomer if ever I heard one) and it's ilk.

Rapidshare and the like: To a non-member (I thought the idea was not paying) having to hang around waiting for countdowns/captcha and transfer caps to be lifted once you've gone over are a tortuous pain in the arse and circumventing them with browser add-ons and proxies etc is a drawn out process. Never mind trying to get something pretty big, having to nip back for segments of a file you'll probably not give a shit about by the time you've got it.

vs

Torrenting: Search, click, click.

In the last few months I've shifted terabytes of data through torrenting and that's with my shitty 1.23Mb/s connection

[Jamie Oliver is fat]

Don't talk such pish, while it's true that often the private trackers are better for obscure stuff, public ones are still a damn site better than Rapidshare (what a misnomer if ever I heard one) and it's ilk.

Rapidshare and the like: To a non-member (I thought the idea was not paying) having to hang around waiting for countdowns/captcha and transfer caps to be lifted once you've gone over are a tortuous pain in the arse and circumventing them with browser add-ons and proxies etc is a drawn out process. Never mind trying to get something pretty big, having to nip back for segments of a file you'll probably not give a shit about by the time you've got it.

vs

Torrenting: Search, click, click.

In the last few months I've shifted terabytes of data through torrenting and that's with my shitty 1.23Mb/s connection

Well, the "idea" is different for everyone I suppose, and not paying anything isn't necessarily my highest priority

Therefore Rapidshare fits well. There are sites that upload all the new stuff to it, there is a download manager available, it maxes out my 50mb connection.

Protip: if you're using Rapidshare as a guest, you're doing it wrong

[katzenjammer]

Torrents (other than from private trackers) are completely useless and slow now and have been for a while.

Perhaps you've got your torrent client misconfigured or your ISP are using traffic shaping to throttle P2P traffic.

[olliebean]

Well, the "idea" is different for everyone I suppose, and not paying anything isn't necessarily my highest priority

Therefore Rapidshare fits well. There are sites that upload all the new stuff to it, there is a download manager available, it maxes out my 50mb connection.

Protip: if you're using Rapidshare as a guest, you're doing it wrong

I wouldn't under any circumstances pay to download stuff illegally. That's just screwed. If something is worth paying for, I'll pay for it legally, so that the people who made it get (at least some of) the benefit. If it's not worth paying for, it's not worth paying for either way.

[katzenjammer]

Good luck finding a free ISP!

[Blumf]

Torrent tips:

• Restrict overall upload rate to less than your connection's upstream speed (Upstream speed is usually slower than the headline download speed so check what it's supposed to be). If you overload your upstream it will bog down your whole internet connection.
• Make sure you are connectible and sharing (this may require a fiddle with your router's port-forwarding settings). If your torrent client isn't reachable then other torrent nodes tend to ignore it, thus slower downloads.
• Remember torrent downloads don't work the same as normal downloads:
  
  
  
  • they can take a bit of time to get going at full speed as your client picks up on peers. Don't judge the speed until it's had a minute or two to establish connections
  • If you happen to grab a brand new torrent, you're basically getting the speed that the initial uploader has to offer before the whole thing has been replicated across all clients.

[Tiny Poster]

What's wrong with rapidshare? You haven't had to enter a captcha on there for aaaages, it's as fast as your connection allows, the longest you have to wait is 2 minutes - an extremely rare occurrence - and there's no wait between downloads. No arsing about with trackers.

[thugler]

I wouldn't under any circumstances pay to download stuff illegally. That's just screwed. If something is worth paying for, I'll pay for it legally, so that the people who made it get (at least some of) the benefit. If it's not worth paying for, it's not worth paying for either way.

If the service is as good as rapidshare I don't see the problem, it maxes out my connection and is pretty cheap. Torrents rarely do. I imagine the streaming services people pay for don't always go to the program creators, and the majority of shows I obtain are simply on tv in america, and so noone pays for them anyway.

"If you happen to grab a brand new torrent, you're basically getting the speed that the initial uploader has to offer before the whole thing has been replicated across all clients."

Precisely why torrents are slow when trying to get hold of a newly released tv show.

[Zetetic]

Does Rapidshare allow HTTPS connections these days? I mean, either way you're placing evidence of copyright infringement in a large, centrally-located bank of copyright infringement in the form of Rapidshare itself but I would have thought that providing the same to your ISP (who are more likely to get into bed with a copyright owner) would be a bit much.

I assume the same issue remains for Usenet access these days unless there's been a shift to some kind of encrypted connection there.

[Blumf]

"If you happen to grab a brand new torrent, you're basically getting the speed that the initial uploader has to offer before the whole thing has been replicated across all clients."

Precisely why torrents are slow when trying to get hold of a newly released tv show.

What you fail to realise is that you'll get the torrent down before a rapidshare, which you can only start the download after the initial uploader has completely uploaded the whole file. Therefore, torrents are quicker in this case.

[thugler]

What you fail to realise is that you'll get the torrent down before a rapidshare, which you can only start the download after the initial uploader has completely uploaded the whole file. Therefore, torrents are quicker in this case.

Only if you are the very first downloader.

[BlueSkies]

If you consider that everyone would probably want a legit, fully patchable version of a game for 50p, then it's really a case of working up from there to the point where the cost of the game exceeds the effort of finding new patches and cracks each time.

And that's the price you can charge in this day and age.....

Gabe Newell, head of Valve, said that to compete against the pirates you have to offer a service better than they do, and that's exactly what Steam does so well. They opened a Russian Steam service recently. Yeah, Russia, that festering swamp land of rampant and open piracy. It's now Steam's second largest European market after Germany.

[Blumf]

Only if you are the very first downloader.

I don't follow

[Benevolent Despot]

Precisely why torrents are slow when trying to get hold of a newly released tv show.

Time is fluid. You could... wait a day.

Clicking on BTJunkie yesterday to find it had shut down was probably my biggest shock in a while. Using rapidshare or the other torrent sites seems a daunting prospect, like bittorrent was at the beginning (I didn't understand it). All these other sites look dodgy, you click a link and you are presented with a list of other links to click. Plus they are messy. They all look like fake sites.

I'd echo a previous poster in that I've discovered 90% of the music I like through torrents or similar piracy. Some of which I ended up paying for in the end, usually if they're bands who aren't rolling in $$$. I dread to think what a lost soul I'd be without these services. I use it for the occasional film where I'm unsure whether it's going to be good or not. As for tv shows, I usually just buy the actual DVDs if they're available, I don't like downloading MASSIVE quantities of information, and I've had my wrist slapped by Orange for doing so in the past. Other than that the occasional xxx, and that's more ethical as I'm not funding industrialised misogyny, just masturbating to it, which is fine.

[MojoJojo]

If the service is as good as rapidshare I don't see the problem, it maxes out my connection and is pretty cheap. Torrents rarely do. I imagine the streaming services people pay for don't always go to the program creators, and the majority of shows I obtain are simply on tv in america, and so noone pays for them anyway.

Yes, the Americans are well known for their generosity; all their TV programmes are made by volunteers who do it because the world needs another episode of the "The Playboy Club".

[small_world]

Time is fluid. You could... wait a day.

Clicking on BTJunkie yesterday to find it had shut down was probably my biggest shock in a while. Using rapidshare or the other torrent sites seems a daunting prospect, like bittorrent was at the beginning (I didn't understand it). All these other sites look dodgy, you click a link and you are presented with a list of other links to click. Plus they are messy. They all look like fake sites.

Yup. That's what I was trying to communicate. Those words exactly.
Ease of use. BtJunkie had it, the others don't.

[katzenjammer]

I assume the same issue remains for Usenet access these days unless there's been a shift to some kind of encrypted connection there.

Most usenet servers allow SSL connections and the providers advertise the fact that they don't log anything. I can't really see how you could get caught. Perhaps by the nzb(equivalent of a torrent), but then is downloading that actually illegal?

Bit torrent in comparison is a piece of piss to track, all you need to do is start downloading and see which ip addresses are uploading.

[olliebean]

If the service is as good as rapidshare I don't see the problem, it maxes out my connection and is pretty cheap. Torrents rarely do. I imagine the streaming services people pay for don't always go to the program creators, and the majority of shows I obtain are simply on tv in america, and so noone pays for them anyway.

"If you happen to grab a brand new torrent, you're basically getting the speed that the initial uploader has to offer before the whole thing has been replicated across all clients."

Precisely why torrents are slow when trying to get hold of a newly released tv show.

Depends when you want it, I suppose. Most of the US TV stuff I download is on at 1am or later UK time, so I'm happy to grab it when I get up in the morning, by which time there's enough of a swarm to get a decent speed - usually less than 10 minutes per hour of telly.

[thugler]

Yup. That's what I was trying to communicate. Those words exactly.
Ease of use. BtJunkie had it, the others don't.

Not really, it's just a case of finding a decent source then it's easy. I've been using the same 2 sites for years with no problems and blinding speed.

[Eis Nein]

Suprnova went down, mininova took its place, then btjunkie. I'd be less concerned at being able to find a decent aggregator than the fact that Peerblock isn't updating.

[Puffin Chunks]

Peerblock is next to worthless. Certainly didn't stop me getting a letter from my ISP for downloading a game I neither wanted, nor could run on my PC. Downloading through boredom is great. Either way, the idea that by blocking the IPs of big corporations makes you safe is ridiculous. Their employees have home connections too... which aren't blocked.

Kickasstorrents is a decent BTJunkie alternative, although I tend to use torrentz.eu (aggregates a load of torrent sites) and just click through to a site I know/trust.

Oh and the person up there who said torrents from public trackers are slow. Haha. You're not doing it right.

Anyway, if you were to get caught by 'the powers that be' and you have a wireless router, surely the defence 'it wasn't me' should be enough to get you off? Wireless networks are surprisingly easy to break (ok, not easy... but even WPA-PSK2 is crackable with a linux distro, a packet sniffer and a bit of time), so bar carting your hard disks away and finding the copied files on your hard disk, there is very little that anyone can do. If I was that concerned, I'd just hack one of the many wireless networks in my vicinity and use that for torrents. Of course, that would be illegal...

[Dusty Gozongas]

Regarding BitTorrent clients, I've come across a few mentions lately of Tribler as the one to switch to due to their decentralised network. Unfortunately it seems that high demand has forced them to reduce their homepage to a set of download links, so no screenshots or FAQ at present.

However, Torrentfreak has an article here. Looks interesting.

[samadriel]

Is The Pirate Bay currently inaccessible in the UK or something?  They're working fine for me in Australia; I just went for a name I knew once BTjunkie shut down.

[Jamie Oliver is fat]

I wouldn't under any circumstances pay to download stuff illegally. That's just screwed. If something is worth paying for, I'll pay for it legally, so that the people who made it get (at least some of) the benefit. If it's not worth paying for, it's not worth paying for either way.

It's not illegal.

[Small Man Big Horse]

Is The Pirate Bay currently inaccessible in the UK or something?  They're working fine for me in Australia; I just went for a name I knew once BTjunkie shut down.

It's working okay for me right now. Frustratingly I've noticed that rapidshare links of major tv shows aren't lasting for longer than a few days now, though bitshare seems a bit better on that front. But someone's obviously being paid to surf the major warez sites and then getting the bitlockers to remove content.