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Comment by uguuo_o | Hacker News Reader

The pirate bay is just about my favorite torrent site. Kickass torrents used to be good as well. For anything anything anime related, there is still the good ol https://nyaa.si/

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Here is another alternative I found https://cloudtorrents.com

Another one I came across recently that's got a great interface:

https://bitsearch.to

I downloaded one thing from https://rarbg.to 2 weeks ago and got threatening copyright infringement notice emails and a physical letter from my ISP (AT&T fiber).

The well is poisoned by cheapshot MPAA/*AA monitoring.

I'm using rarbg with zero repercussions (one of benefits of East Europe, among many drawbacks). But I also have zero moral issues. I'm paying for few streaming services and I don't even get access to their own material (e.g. Westworld), not to mention other content which was available at the time but no longer is. Unfortunately, the only way to have access to older content is to have your own pirated copy.

Even music services are not what they used to be. It happens more and more often that you open a relatively older album and half of songs are grayed out.

Yeah man, it's frustrating. I buy DVDs where I can, but even that's not really feasible for a lot of stuff nowadays, and I'm enjoying everything in English. I can only imagine how obnoxious things get when there's no official translation into your own language and the untranslated version comes with DRM that makes it unwatchable, but you can pirate a great localized copy in seconds

That's nothing to do with RARBG though, that's your ISP.

People who want to avoid that use a VPN, regardless of where they find their torrents.

I feel quite lucky that my ISP doesn't care, as long as you don't start seeding egregiously.

I never download anything without a VPN. I download and seed TBs of data without ever having issues from ISP.

Who's your VPN provider? Aren't they all of dubious trustworthiness?

Most are. Mullvad is the one I settled on. I pay via cash through mail, it has worked pretty well for the last few years.

It’s mostly you use the VPN when doing certain activities so that the copyright notices can go to effectively /dev/null, and otherwise don’t need to use it.

That same torrent could have been discovered from the Pirate Bay, though.

Have you tried using blocklists on your torrent client?

i would have thought that the essentially unlimited access to new ip-addresses via commodity cloud instances would thoroughly wreck any utility of static blocklists, but ten years later, here we are.

why are you talking about GNAA? the nazi org?

Edit: the OP edited their post . The initially made a joke calling RIAA the “Gay N… Association of America”, a neonazi shock-propaganda org ran by the Stormfront admin and then by an at the time Cloudflare employee. Cloudflare knew about this employee and their self proclaimed naziism but it's obscured behind some veil of jokes or weird definition of what racism really means but that's a whole other topic lol

They aren't.

They are talking about RIAA/MPAA. Who also are fashy cuntos.

Whoosh

the best ones are very private

Depends what you mean by best. Back in Bittorrent's first heyday I got into a few but they had ridiculous seeding requirements. Like everyone had to have a seed ratio above 1, which is obviously mathematically impossible (I guess people just faked it). And I think you had to upload new content too which is also a big ask when pretty much everything was already on there.

Definitely a "torrenting is my full time hobby" thing not "I want free stuff".

Mine had none of those reqs. You found bad ones

Agreed, but do you have any tips on getting into them?

Know people or kick rocks, tbh. Any I’m in were over a decade ago, or from a previous one that closed, and some are long closed to invites.

Lurk on r/trackers . They usually have up-to-date information on trackers who are doing interviews. From there you go to invite forums once you contribute enough.

Used to be there was one that did public "interviews." You could use that to get in there, be a good participant in the ecosystem, and eventually gain access to an internal forum where other sites recruited. The specific site I'm thinking of shut down, but there might still be a process like that; I don't know.

The interface sucks and the ads are horrendous.

Interface, yes not great. What are these "ads" people keep talking about?

Please if you have an alternative let me know.

I'm sorry I don't have an alternative. rarbg is very popular but also not very good in my opinion.

The alternative is I2P. It's slow but anonymous.

TPB sucks now.

Why?

For a while they used crypto miners on their site. Not sure if it’s still in effect, but it caused me to look elsewhere.

https://www.bitdefender.com/blog/hotforsecurity/the-pirate-b...

Seems a lot less obnoxious than the ads they used to run (don't know what they run nowadays). Bit sad that JS is too limited to be a miner that can't be implemented more efficiently in something like X86 (randomX) or an ASIC (BTC), I imagine it would have caught on otherwise.

You could use WASM and WebGPU now so maybe it will make a resurgence.

It's pretty much dead. Nobody publishes quality stuff there anymore.

kickass torrents used to be my go to before it got taken down. TPB used to be better, and it has gone downhill for a while.

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