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Comment by mrtksn | Hacker News Reader

RARBG was originally Bulgarian, like many other trackers and warez stuff. Eastern Europe - inside EU or outside of the EU - has always been major player in this scene. RIP.

I'm still curious how it's possible to run such global illegal operations without being exposed or caught.

How is it still possible to remain anonymous on the Internet, considering in this age the thing is very mature and well commercialised?

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The answer to this is easier (and harder) than you might think: just don't say anything.

You can get away with quite a bit just by being silent, and for longer than you'd think. A big way that people get away with things for so long is just by not answering questions. Someone says, "Is this [illegal thing] yours" and you say nothing. Now you've got to burn hours and dollars trying to prove someone owns something so that you can go after them.

You'll find domains, web hosts, countries, and employees who are all onboard with the same philosophy. When everything requires a subpoena at the highest level to move something forward, it can easily take years for anything to happen at all. Some countries are known for having slow legal systems. Stack jurisdictions with slow court systems and you can start with an 18 month window before anything can happen.

You've got a domain in Tonga registered to a company in another country, owned by a large company in another country owned by a trust in a third country. Often small countries with limited resources and archaic or corrupt bureaucracies. And where is it hosted? That's probably another connect the dots. And the site can change hands and then you have to start all over again. Are you going to refocus on the new owner or are you going to spend even more resources trying to track down the former owner?

And any of these entities may lead to nothing more than a mule, fake person, or dead person. Sure, it's someone's fault for having inaccurate records—but who? How long has this been going on? Did they know? Was it intentional? It shouldn't be like this, but it is… what do you do now? Are you going to go after the recordkeeper too?

You can do illegal shit for years or even decades if you just say nothing and respond to no one.

> Someone says, "Is this yours" and you say nothing. Now you've got to burn hours and dollars trying to prove someone owns something so that you can go after them.

The opposite is the German approach. Shower the cuntiest lawyers with money, lobby for laws allowing to easily pick a victim, bully the victim senseless. Lobby even more and if someone uses the word "corruption" in context of copyrights, bully the shit out of them as well. I'm so glad Anglosphere and German copyrights predators have been perfectly impotent for so many years. They know how to create faceless enemies.

Germany really takes the price when it comes to (torrent-based) piracy. The lawyers around it created a nice little ecosystem for themselves. Honeypot torrents and all. They have such a nice system that they don't go for the torrent sites, just milk the torrenters.

It also creates a weird liability where hotel owners have to snoop on their users in order to deflect responsibility. It also stimulates self-censorship. VPNs are likely very popular in Germany.

Law firms must love how many billable hours such quests generate for them.

In my experience law firms would not hop through these. That is the job of hired ethical hackers, police and prosecutor's office.

A law firm would be useful in (a) applying to remove illegal content, (b) seize any profit generated by illegal use of clents' content, (c) (if the client requests) horrify users identified of such illegal services, (d) pressure the authorities to crack down on the operation.

Most lawyers do not understand the technical details. We do a hell of a good job of understanding experts' findings and put them in a clear legal structure though.

Most of the boring but billable job I ever made was searching through company registries, google searches, sanctions searches, panama papers searches, reviewing countless pdfs to either (i) mark them as privileged so they cannot be used as evidence, (ii) scan whether there are any documents that may directly implicate the client and if so try to find a way to legally claim it is unusable.

I believe law firms do provide decent service. Billables are there, but no lawyer I know would willingly generate busywork that does not lead anywhere to charge more. OTOH, I HAVE seen instances where a work got reviewed multiple times by different lawyers, because the client was willing to pay more. But even in these edge cases, multiple reviews did benefit the client and they received a better work product.

My advice would be establish a good working relationship with a lawyer in the firm that you trust, continuously send work. Ask estimates if you are on a tight budget. But do not be cheap and try to get things done with less budget. Law firms provide a service you need, if you pay them decently you'll receive your money's worth. Lawyers will literally take a bullet for you to make things happen when you need them.

Apologies for the long rant :).

> My advice would be establish a good working relationship with a lawyer in the firm that you trust, continuously send work. Ask estimates if you are on a tight budget. But do not be cheap and try to get things done with less budget. Law firms provide a service you need, if you pay them decently you'll receive your money's worth. Lawyers will literally take a bullet for you to make things happen when you need them.

What’s the order of magnitude here? There have been times in my life where I would have found having a lawyer on standby to be incredibly helpful (e.g. car purchase gone bad, property usage rights dispute, etc.), but at the same time spending $100k a year to have a lawyer on standby to resolve an issue of $5-10k in magnitude is foolish.

$2-5k for a retainer. Less in many places.

You could try legal insurance. Costs about 200$ equivalent/year where I live, then I have a place to ask legal questions and escalate as needed. I think they cover the first 150k$ worth of legal costs with any lawyer I pick if it goes that far and their in-house lawyers can’t get the other party to back down.

Most of the times you do not pay for stand by. If there is work to do your lawyer charges you in billable hours. That is the point of the billable hours system. For larger projects you can get a fee estimate, fixed quote or agree on a hybrid solution.

I am also talking about corporate law work. Maintaining corporate records, lease agreements, employment agremeents, director changes et.

Am a lawyer. This is correct. Drafting subpoenas, motions, applications, convincing a skeptical judge that Twitter posts are "real" evidence, or explaining how DNS records work, not to mention actually scheduling a damn hearing, then multiply that by 4 or 5 jurisdictions (therefore 4 or 5 sets of lawyers), and you got yourself easily a few years' worth of work.

Let's say I was observing something similar and this is absolutely correct. Stay low profile, say nothing, don't boast to scratch your itching ego and everything will be fine.

A lot of people will be surprised by knowing what kind of businesses is ran from that shabby house in the corner by visibly low life mate driving 30yo celica.

It's very possible to run such without being exposed, but it involves patience and enough cash.

Most of the time, these services aren't done in direct exchange for money or from people who have a lot of money in the first place.

So what ends up happening is even if they can avoid the shallow legal issues by remaining private, they then run into the problem that nobody can pay for the service (not many options for providing that transaction privately). You might think "just run ads" but the problem there is multifaceted, most are likely going to be using adblockers, on top of that to remain private they'll be locked out of most paying ads and only get the most spammy garbage incentivizing more to use adblocker to visit the site.

Also: ad companies and payment processors are a weak link. They can provide de-anonymizing information to officials and cut off payments when their corporate values shift.

I always wondered this. Many piracy sites have Adsense or some sort of ads. Can't Google just fingerprint which Adsense account is being used and find the person getting paid?

There's an entire industry of buying established accounts set up with an unsuspecting person's identity. Idk about Adsense specifically, but you can get Amazon selling and the linked bank account with docs for like $1000.

And how do you get paid? AdSense requires a bank account registered to the same name.

You buy the accompanying bank account

Yes. For example, Z-Library accepted Amazon gift card donations using an email linked to their identities: https://torrentfreak.com/how-google-and-amazon-helped-the-fb...

This screams poor opsec to me. Accepting anything other than anonymized crypto (Monero, etc) is basically untenable in this era of mass surveillance. Going through a big tech company is a good way to get caught.

if you're the host. the end user can use gift cards just fine, and they're usually pretty fungible.

am 100% okay moving the risk to the operation/operator

> ad companies and payment processors [...] cut off payments when their corporate values shift.

"Sir, is it time for us to claim to have corporate values?"

"Not yet, m'boy, we are still swimming in our private ocean of profits!"

AFOAF belongs to the same pvt tracker now for more than a dozen years. The admins amp and push the community feels and have periodic fund raisers. No ads, and if you want to donate, you buy a jpg of a flower on an different site. Seems to work out well for all concerned and while you have to maintain an u/d ratio, free leach and easy generous ratio reqts contribute to that community feeling.

>I'm still curious how it's possible to run such global illegal operations

Because it is not obviously illegal. A tracker just points to the content, not the content itself. That may seem meaningless, but then so are the arbitrary demands of copyright holders. They want to have their cake and eat it too. So the system works as intended.

What are they doing that is illegal? I thought they were just a torrent tracker?

Linking to pirated content is illegal in many European countries.

But not in all EU countries.

Then Google should be prosecuted.

That's not Google's primary purpose.

Well, printing was going to be for instruction. And then radio. And TV. And the internet.

We're so instructed we've gotta wear ad-blockers.

Instruction.. on what to buy, how to live and what to want.

Google takes down content when they get notified, rarbg doesn't.

I've yet to see Google not return a piratebay link at any point in history. Is it a loophole where they take it down, but their indexer then immediately puts it back in the next pass, lol?

> I've yet to see Google not return a piratebay link at any point in history.

indeed. as it should, if it's relevant for the search.

> I've yet to see Google not return a piratebay link at any point in history. Is it a loophole where they take it down, but their indexer then immediately puts it back in the next pass, lol?

No. If you pay attention there can be a message at the bottom of the search results telling you how many results were removed due to takedown requests. IIRC, they used to even link directly to the request, but now I think you have to jump through hoops to see it.

The "loophole" is that a takedown request has to be for a specific URL, so it requires a lot of constant effort to even try to get them all. Pirate Bay always had dupes and a million mirrors.

I'm not being nit-picky or contentious - I'm asking from a genuine point of curiousity ...

but in the case of Google linking to the pirate bay, isn't the pirate bay the one linking to the pirated content? Google is 1 step removed in that node graph because they are just linking to the pirate bay.

I guess if they directly linked to a pirate bay page that had a magent link on it .... maybe (?)

A court is unlikely to care about the distinction between actually linking to pirated content, and linking to a page with both instructions and a link to the pirated content. To add, enough TPB torrents contain screenshots.

Also, Google's takedown request handling in Google Search is not a matter of DMCA or a legal matter at all - instead, it's like Content ID, where they have their own system for evaluating takedown requests separate from any law. Rights-holders can still send Google legal requests, but it's easier to go through the expedited processes Google provides that also won't increase rights-holders' liability if they happen to submit a false takedown.

Google seems to refuse removing because, according to them, "Whole-site removal is ineffective and can easily result in censorship of lawful material."

Instead of removing, they just remove links by request.

Sources: https://torrentfreak.com/google-opposes-whole-site-removal-o... and https://www.scribd.com/document/286275022/TorrentFreak-Googl...

However they did ban Pirate Bay in the Netherlands after a Dutch court ordered them.

https://www.makeuseof.com/why-google-removed-pirate-bay-from...

Isn't this the same loophole that MegaUpload used? Only removing a link to a file, not the file itself with the claim that other links belonged to potentially lawful owners of the file.

I mean, if the subpoena says "remove a link" you comply with that.

But there's also another fundamental difference: even if there's the expectation of removing all copies of the same exact file, it is "trivial" for MegaUpload to know, by using hashes. They do have access to all files, as it is in their servers.

For Google to delete all pirate links to movie X it would be much more complicated, and would put them on a position of being forced to be the internet police.

> They do have access to all files, as it is in their servers.

not if they have the encrypted content only, and the decode key is only in the hash portion of a url, which never goes to a server.

But i guess crafting a technocal "solution" to a legal problem doesn't work, since the law works off intentions, and how much money you pay lawyers...

That's Mega, the one that still exists. MegaUpload the previous one didn't really have the same encryption.

It's been 5 or 6 years ago now, but one night I searched for torrents for a particular movie, and Google returned hundreds of results from a dozen sites... and the next evening they returned 0. I think it was an October.

While I don't doubt that a torrent link shows up once in awhile, Google no longer usefully searches for such things. Or really anything, legal or not. It's more like a purchase recommendation system pretending to be a search engine.

And a terrible one at that, as it points to the lowest-quality blogspam sludge possible.

Google used to rule the net. These days they're not even the best search engine for legal content, let alone overall net searching.

Bing and Yandex will get you most everything you want.

It seems Google's tech can't keep up with the scale of the Internet anymore. It simply doesn't index a very large portion of the Internet now.

Google does not return links to the pirate bay for me https://i.imgur.com/MkAPoFl.png.

At the bottom there is a message that says "In response to a legal request submitted to Google, we have removed 4 result(s) from this page. If you wish, you may read more about the request at LumenDatabase.org" and links to https://lumendatabase.org/notices/27615507

Odd. Google always returns links to the pirate bay for me https://i.imgur.com/tNo6tbB.png

I'm in Canada though. But I did use Google.com.

that's a different search query. I did get that same result if I use your query instead. (I'm in the US)

edit: it's also for a "proxy" site. I don't really use torrents or follow TPB happenings and don't know how that is/isn't affiliated.

Linking to the site itself (especially when that’s what you searched for) isn’t the same as linking to a torrent to infringing content would be.

Canada has relatively lenient copyright laws/enforcement. It's likely that Google sees no legal need to honor DMCA-style takedown notices in Canada.

Here's a guide to the legal status of torrents here with broad categories, from most lenient to most strict (caution VPN spam): https://www.vpnmentor.com/blog/torrents-illegal-update-count...

Interesting to note that downloading copyrighted content for personal use is explicitly legal (not just overlooked) in Spain, Switzerland, and Poland.

The picture shows that downloading is illegal only in six countries.

In the US: https://imgur.com/a/VjlpwlN

Google will only remove specific URLs, not entire sites/domains. Even if every copyright holder with content on TPB sent a DMCA notice to Google today, new torrents -- at new URLs -- would pop up tomorrow.

Hmm i guess torrent sites can also counter by just not having static URLs for content?

Or by having lots and lots of duplicate static URLs (but only revealing them one by one).

Can't speak for rarbg, but plenty of piracy adjacent sites have a DMCA takedown program[0] to operate under this loophole. That way, most content survives but they are "protected"

[0]: https://annas-archive.org/copyright

Changing the url daily works as the dmca complaint refers to a specific page.

Google has enough lawyers to give the EU and US the run around when they want to.

For smaller players, they'd have to think really carefully about whether they want to engage in multi-year litigation with them.

> Google has enough lawyers to give the EU and US the run around when they want to.

Google has paid something like 10 billions dollars of fines in the EU during the last decade. I don’t think they are giving the run around to anyone.

Are you sure they paid it or they were ordered to do so? Most times, the fine is reduced or appealed ad infinitum.

Yeah, lets wait a couple of decades and see how those court cases actually end up.

Meanwhile, Google will just keep on Googling...

Alphabet is valued at over 1.5 Trillion dollars. If they pay 1 Billion USD in fines per year, maybe their lawyers are actually doing an ok job for their client.

just the cost of doing business at that point

10 billion dollars is a rounding error for the GOOG.

Google does not host it links, it's very different.

Google does not store files it should not.

Well, they do, at Youtube. But they're pretty good about takedowns over there. Including of a ton of content that has no reason to be taken down.

Torrent trackers don’t host the content either.

and just a civil issue, which doesn’t come with priority or the state power that a criminal case would

That’s why magnet links were invented for torrents. They don’t link to any content, just give your client a unique ID to find peers for.

Like saying a site mentioning that you should look for “cannabis” if you want to get high is illegal. Selling the substance is illegal, telling you how it’s called isn’t.

I didn’t know this but would like to know more. Can you expand on how they try to circumvent linking and do they circumvent it?

It is surprising to hear because as a user they _seem_ like a link. Copy the link into something and get the (illegal) files.

Magnet linking is rather like standing on a street corner and regularly yelling "have you got any cannabis"?

Here's a random RARBG magnet link that may or may not work

magnet:?xt=urn:btih:468043aa374080fed5ff65e4cd8d4fed002986b5&dn=Rizzoli.And.Isles.S05.1080p.WEBRip.x265-RARBG

It doesn't link to a file or embed any tracker names but it does name a 1080p HEVC (x265) encoded season pack of season 5 of a US police procedural drama (which is excess and unrequired but humans do like readable names)

What it does provide is a unique hash code that matches the exact torrent ... should you find it.

When you add that magnet link to your torrent client it triggers the act of polling any public trackers your client knows about and any peers that have "hit me up about magnets" enabled.

Ideally word spreads and eventually some other client | tracker hits you back with word of other peers that at least have some cannabis .. (err, bits of Rizzoli&Isles Season 5 HEVC pack).

Great description - thanks.

I wonder if they ‘stand up in court’ and/or have ever been tested too.

A magnet URI is a little bit like a web link in the sense that it refers to a particular piece of data, but it doesn't point to any particular host or location. It is merely a hash of the files it describes. So in other words, the link doesn't tell you where the particular content can be found, it only tells you what the content is that it refers to.

To actually find the content in question you take the link, go on a peer to peer network, and basically ask machines if they have the content in question available or know where it is. There's various ways to do that, in some cases your torrent app might know the location of some centralized "tracker" servers, and ask those servers whether they know locations for those files. Some torrents are "trackerless" and use a DHT, a type of distributed database that keeps information about where to find files.

imo they were a fairly popular and long-standing tracker. someone had to make a statement perhaps? (pb was downed multiple times)

>> How is it still possible to remain anonymous on the Internet, considering in this age the thing is very mature and well commercialised?

Because at the core, identity on the internet is not well defined. Authentication is a hard problem. You might wonder why it's hard, why better more secure protocols haven't emerged. Answer: that makes end to end encryption easy, among other things that give individuals too much power.

AI produced Obits, and death certs and detailed descriptions of the death, and then new documents produced via GPT6+ access to APIs to DMV, Embassies, etc to produce new documents sent to your new PO box in [place] etc...

deep-fake assassinations are going to be a thing...

PHKahler

I think it's effectively just that they operate out of jurisdictions that just don't care.

This, totally.

Well, Bulgaria used to be a jurisdiction that doesn't care but this is no longer early 2000s. Are there really jurisdictions that don't care and still have connections to the rest of the world? I guess DPRK, Iran, Cuba and maybe a few more can do that but wouldn't they be a problem to the infrastructure provider to work with in first place?

They still don't quite care though. For example in western Europe it's quite common to get threatening letters as soon as you start torrenting without VPN. In eastern europe this is not happening.

Perhaps because copyright infringement is not really a criminal issue but more of a civil law one. Without a private party starting lawsuits on behalf of the copyright owners there is nothing happening. It could be they don't have one.

> in western Europe it's quite common to get threatening letters as soon as you start torrenting without VPN

What about the right of the privacy of communication? Oh, right, it's the state-owned postal services that have to respect that right, and only with regards to the paper letters, not the privately operated ISPs that can (and obliged to) wiretap at the slightest suspicion of crime.

AFAIK they don't actually inspect your comms, instead they leech from you to get your IP address and start the legal procedure. The way I understand it, they don't send you a letter for downloading but for sharing. Correct me if I'm wrong though.

Depending on your jurisdiction, even just downloading might be illegal. But you're right, when you torrent, you publish your IP address, where parties unrelated to your ISP might get it and pursue legal action.

Is it they do illegal thing and then try to extort money from you for doing the same thing? Or have they received a royal blessing nowadays and can do so legally?

I imagine it's not illegal for them since they do have copyright, after all (unless when they don't).

You're correct on the methodology except that (in France at least) they also seed, to get the IP of users that download. And you do get letters for downloading.

Initially the plan was to ban those people from internet for a period of that but it got removed since it was anticonstitutional.

It is not that clear cut for Western Europe.

- Germany sends letters and fines

- Czech Republic doesn’t send letters or fines

- The Netherlands doesn’t send letters or fines (unless you share an absolutely ludicrous amount)

- Belgium doesn’t send letters or fines

- UK sends letters and fines

- France sends letters (tiny chance of a fine)

- Switzerland doesn’t send letters or fines

It should be noted that (as far as I know) none of those are actually fines. It's private companies that track down pirates, and they cannot give out fines. They send you a settlement proposal, saying either pay this or risk being sued.

Note that in the Netherlands right holders can request ISPs to proxy their letters but those ISPs are not allowed to share the home addresses or any other personal information so it’s neigh impossible for a right holder to get hold of a torrent user.

Makes sense. If ISPs were allowed to share home addresses then a lot of creeps and scammers could abuse that system.

Welcome to America!

ISPs do that, but it's a lot worse if you consider your mobile provider to be an ISP.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamtanner/2013/07/10/data-brok...

https://www.vice.com/en/article/nepxbz/i-gave-a-bounty-hunte...

I'm pretty sure that sort of thing would be a gross GDPR violation in the EU.

Imagine being doxxed by your own ISP.

Of course they have to obey court orders.

The Dutch ISPs fought this in court but they lost in some cases.

There's a difference between getting a court order and someone saying - "I saw that X IP address shared a copyrighted file - can I get their name and address?"

The situation is the same for Canadians: we get proxied letters, but rightsholders have no access to our personal identification.

almost like copyright enforcement goes hand in hand with your country's relation to the US

The Netherlands is very cozy with the US and yet enforcement is pretty lax, so I don’t think that’s the deciding factor.

in France you can be blacklisted from all ISPs

Does the UK send letters and fines? I haven't torrented without a VPN for years but the worst I ever heard anyone getting was a letter from the ISP saying "that was very naughty, please don't do it again".

Spain doesn't send letters or fines

Do you know what's the situation in Portugal?

This isn't the ISPs detecting you torrent. It's rightholders joining a torrent swarm, getting an IP-address, and asking the ISP for the person behind that address. It differs between jurisdictions whether the ISP has to comply or not. In the Netherlands they do not, (but Surfnet, a university focused ISP complies anyway). In Germany they have to comply.

Lobbying is always happening to require ISPs to cooperate though.

>In Germany they have to comply.

Seriously, screw Germany here. The way they oppressively Gestapo your internet traffic just to catch you downloading an mp3 to treat you like criminal menace, is unheard of in the rest of Europe.

Can't believe the so called "privacy conscious" German public are okay with this invasiveness of their internet privacy when they're the only EU country as hardcore on this "issue".

If only they would invest as much resources in digital innovation as they do in catching people download a DVD rip, Germany would rule the tech world.

Does it need that many resources though? I thought just getting the list of peers in a swarm for an illegal torrent is enough.

Resources not as in tech but as in lack of red tape in invading people's privacy for such trivial issues. In any other country this would get you laughed out of court.

Germany seems like they just do what involves the most policing. If it's going after companies for privacy invasions, they do it. If it's going after individuals for infringing on copyright, they do it.

They got rid of the laws that targeted people by race and background, but they never bothered to dispose of the jack boots.

Meh that's why I stay away from German services. People who go apeshit on you for sharing one 64kb chunk of movie have lost their marbles. Service provider is GmbH, headquarters in Germany? Maybe someone from the other side of the world believes in their "privacy" lunatism.

For US, it's natural that they are aggressive to arrest pirates because US have some biggest content holders in the world. I wonder is Germany content sold well?

No, German copyright predators are a proxy of American ones. Nobody cares about German content.

> If only they would invest as much resources in digital innovation as they do in catching people download a DVD rip, Germany would rule the tech world.

I don't think it's expensive, once you've the software: 1- regularly pull the torrent IDs from the latest releases on most popular torrenting website 2- download and stream the movies 3- wait for German IPs to connect 4- filter out IPs behind a VPN 5- identify the IP provider 6- send the request, probably by Email 7- profit

Not sure how advanced the software, but I don't see much manual input needed, it must be actually very lucrative

> Can't believe the so called "privacy conscious" German public are okay with this invasiveness

Nothing against Germans but there is a lot of hypocrisy in their society: - Energiewende vs. shutting down Nuclear Plants and turning on Coal - Green cars vs. 300km/h on the Autobahn - Go to a restaurant in a big German city, guys tell you they don't accept cards, then hand write the bill on a napkin (...) vs. Greece where restaurants are legally obliged to accept cards and if they don't, then you can just walk out without paying (!..) (all this since the EU driven by Germany bailed Greece out)

Never had any threatening letters in NL, so perhaps this varies by country.

Same in Sweden.

There have definitely been cases with letters in sweden

https://www.domstol.se/patent--och-marknadsdomstolen/om-pate...

Depends on the ISP. Telia will hand out your details to copyright holders, Bahnhof will require them to file the request through the police. Most rights holders just sont bother with Bahnhof or the smaller ISPs and just send batches to Telia and ComHem.

Threatening letters with a payment notice attached, that is.

Huh, I've downloaded torrents for years with no VPN in western Europe and never got so much as an email about it.

Maybe it's changed in very recent times, I wouldn't know.

imo copyright is irrelevant in countries that either can withstand the mpaa's pressure, maybe via good relations to the state department, or in countries that have bigger problems.

Vietnam is probably the #1 place for digital piracy today.

https://torrentfreak.com/vietnam-could-kill-several-major-pi...

Linked from the bottom of the post:

Potential Impact on Major Pirate Sites as Vietnam ISPs Face New Responsibilities, May 12, 2023.

> “Most Voluminous” Copyright Decree Ever Issued in Vietnam

> Global IP services firm Rouse reports that with 8 chapters and 116 articles, Decree 17 is the most voluminous copyright decree ever issued in Vietnam.

> “[T]he Copyright Decree provides significantly detailed guidance on copyright enforcement, especially which disputes can be classified as a copyright dispute, how to establish acts of copyright infringement, and how to calculate damages caused by infringements,” the company reports.

> “The long, detailed section in copyright assessment is also expected to pave the way for the growth of the currently limited copyright assessment services in Vietnam.”

https://torrentfreak.com/potential-impact-on-major-pirate-si...

Also their close neighbor, The Republic of Kinakuta

Current hosting appears to be in Bosnia: 185.37.100.122 which is probably a server colocated with https://www.netsaap.com/contacts.php.

Does Iceland actually care much? I don't imagine they'd let you host an actual warez site a la 2000 or so, but a site just hosting magnet links seems like something they'd mostly allow, and they DEFINITELY have the infrastructure to handle it.

That all said, I'm always amazed that these sites don't just move to i2p/tor. The torrents themselves have been decentralized with DHT and magnet links for awhile. At the end of the day it seems like they've just been hanging on trying to avoid being so in the shadows that they get less traffic as a result.

The problem appears to just be "it's too expensive to run" at least according to the banner

How expensive can a link sharing site be to run, genuinely? They're not serving any of the content (unless they are, in which case, yeah...) But if they're just serving up .torrent files or magnet links, these sites should be pretty cheap to run I would assume?

Comparatively cheap because you're just handing off magnet links, but when you're serving millions of unique visitors daily, it all adds up.

true. but there were also some images on the site

I believe rarbg had many "official" torrents that they seeded. This must be part of their costs.

It tends to run a little more when you're using hosting in a country that doesn't respect US copyright (and similarly for most EU) along with keeping your information private to begin with. When I had looked into it, it's been roughly 2x what a typical western dedicated server provider might charge.

This doesn't count the issues with a site that is very popular, from bandwidth to even simple database search overhead. If I were to guess, it's that RarBG probably spent in excess of $10k/month, which isn't much if you're a startup with a runway of VC capital or a revenue stream, it's a lot more if you're in a smaller country or don't have an excess of revenue.

For example in my EU country, it's legal to download movies for own use. shrug

You can still buy pre-paid credit cards in many places, and many places allow you to pay for anonymous servers with cards.

Worst case if they had enough money they could rent somewhere and pay for a decent internet connection and not actually live there, so only the equipment would be seized.

I think the "new meta" is sketchy popup/popunder ad providers that pay BTC/USDT, njal.la/nic.ru/some Chinese registrar paid with crypto or a virtual card, DDOS-guard/Cloudflare to make getting the origin IP annoying, and hosting in an ex-USSR country (and sometimes even mainstream Western providers like Leaseweb or OVH). But that's just the impression I got by occasionally using these sites, looking at domain/IP whois and using one of those Cloudflare deanonymizer sites when it was still up.

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