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Comment by amelius | Hacker News Reader

With torrent being blocked in so many countries, it seems more like the end of piracy.

I am not disagreeing with your point, but can you most some relevant links to articles about countries blocking the bittorrent protocol?

I meant blocking in a legal sense. See e.g. [1].

And of course you can use a VPN, but what will happen if fewer people seed? Or if everybody moves to a VPN, and anti-piracy contractors start targeting VPN providers?

[1] https://www.settle-in-berlin.com/illegal-file-sharing-german...

Ah, Germany, or how to use public resources to protect private IP. The French decided it's not worth their time. There are more important issues for the police to pursue, like organized crime.

You can't block torrent. You can perhaps block individual DNS entries, but as long as traffic can flow between "random" ip addresses, torrent will exist.

Right, there is no such thing as a firewall or ACL that can block a type of packet... even though it is so common even consumer products have the ability: https://documentation.meraki.com/MR/Firewall_and_Traffic_Sha...

Blizzard and a bunch of other gaming companies have made good use of torrent as a way to distribute patches.

I wish ALL companies distributed their software through torrents. I live in Venezuela and my ISPs throttle each connection, they're also slow and unstable. Bittorrent gets around all this by giving me the ability to resume and leech through dozens or even hundreds of parallel connections.

I've actually had to download pirated copies of Microsoft software that they freely provide as downloads. They offer direct downloads but don't let me use download managers... Long slow downloads always fail for me.

And that is just Venezuela. I know Iranians have exactly the same problems and I'm sure many others do.

I remember my university had to make special exceptions to the network for the WoW and LoL patchers. A few students figured out how to spoof their torrents to look like the LoL patcher in order to torrent on campus. Not really that wise though since your network access was tied to your student credentials.

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