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Comment by mpeg | Hacker News Reader

This is a terrible article, full of inaccurate facts.

The most blatant of all is that Popcorn Time is not a site, it's an application (which is why it's been so hard to block).

It uses existing sites (like YTS and The Piratebay) to find magnet links to content to stream (using a torrent streaming library)

Also: "“Mr. Robot” is not available elsewhere, apart from on Popcorn Time." - What the hell? If a series is available on Popcorn Time it's inherently because it's available somewhere else, as they don't host any content

But the one that bothers me most is that they mention how before Popcorn Time, piracy involved: "Aggressive advertising banners, websites popping up unexpectedly and strange porn ads".

Well, guess what? Popcorn Time is an application that most people download in binary form, so it could steal your personal data, inject advertising in other sites, use your computer as a proxy... etc. It's not a step forward.

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> The most blatant of all is that Popcorn Time is not a site, it's an application (which is why it's been so hard to block).

Popcorn time uses a webservice.

It's using third-party APIs for the .torrent content and search engines for content.

But it doesn't even need that. You can use a .torrent or magnet URL from anywhere on the latest builds.

Just drag-n-drop a .torrent file onto the UI or simply paste (Ctrl-V / Cmd-V) a magnet URL that you already had on your clipboard and it will gladly attempt to live stream any arbitrary torrent.

The built-in video player generally works the best with .mp4 video files, but I've seen it successfully stream other media types as well.

When the torrent file in question contains multiple media files, a file chooser dialog appears letting you select which one you wish to watch.

The application could literally be re-written at any time to use any torrent site for showing content.

.. and since it's open source, the genie is out of the bottle.

Given the context I think they mean that Mr Robot is not available legally in Argentina.

They make a point of saying it's only available in Popcorn Time though.

Classic HN comment, complete with a dismissive tone...

Looking at it by the legal implications, I think is significant that its an application rather than a website. The distance between a purely general purpose streaming application and Popcorn time is a very small one, and if a court found that the developers were guilty of inducing crime it could send real shock waves through the software industry and FOSS scene.

The facts in this article are irrelevant. It's an opinion piece, at best, about the nature of humans to spread human related information to each other and the unsavory behaviors of a few humans to try to limit the spread of information.

In that regard, you and the movie industry have something in common. You both spread FUD around to get your point across.

Why are the facts irrelevant, and why is it FUD to point it out?

> Popcorn Time is an application that most people download in binary form, so it could steal your personal data, inject advertising in other sites, use your computer as a proxy... etc. It's not a step forward.

This is FUD.

It's not. There's already two main sources for the Popcorn Time app (popcorntime.io and popcorn-time.se).

Neither of them are distributed by the original devs, how certain are you that they are not injecting malware into the binaries?

> how certain are you that they are not injecting malware into the binaries

This question is a logical fallacy, in that a negative can't be proved in the context of this particular problem set. You would need to prove the inverse, namely that you are certain that significant numbers of binaries of Popcorn Time contain malware, and how you arrived at that conclusion.

Piracy-enabling p2p apps don't have a great track record (remember all the KaZaa clones?)

You just have to do a quick google search to find that even the original devs are concerned about the number of forks, and malware-riddled copies of Popcorn Time [0]

Also, there's been a number of reports that the most famous forks contain adware [1]

[0] https://torrentfreak.com/popcorn-time-warns-users-against-ma...

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/PopCornTime/comments/2lyxnm/time4po...

Facts are irrelevant in opinion pieces. Opinions are internally formed truths, which are attempting to make their way into society as a global truth.

If you want to point out that the author is bias hacking, fine, but don't move into "fact" mode using weakly biased arguments. You have no evidence that significant numbers of Popcorn Time instances have viruses or malware in them. When you do have that evidence, come back here and state it as such, instead of presenting a hypothesis as a fact as you are currently doing.

I would point out that having an opinion about the piece is totally valid. It's just not cool to make a biased argument on your own opinion with "facts" that are simply your own hypotheses.

There also exists an in browser application [0] that they may be confusing it with. There are a few other sites as well

[0]: http://popcorninyourbrowser.net/

Or http://webflix.me/ which actually uses bittorrent (albeit via a headless plugin)

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