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Comment by typpilol | Hacker News Reader

What's the point of risking your freedom to give away stuff for free pirated stuff? I understand uploading to the pirate bay but streaming is a different beast entirely.

I'm not going to lie, I've used some streaming sites. But I can't understand the people behind them.

Who's giving away 100s of TB of video decode and bandwidth for free. And why?

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Ad revenue. But this guy had paying customers:

> While it was, indeed, a subscription website

The thing is called freedom. There was a time on the internet where people shared media not to make any profit, but to supply those who could not afford them. There was a time in my life where I earned 215€ per month. Later 343€. There was nothing left for any entertainment after expenses. No console, no games, no movies and no music. These times are over, plus there is affordable streaming services, but I still know and understand the spirit.

I don't know how old OP is but I did a lot of dumb stuff on the internet 25+ years ago when I was a teenager. Including writing viruses and stealing credit card information. I'm glad things were a lot different back then.

> “… and stealing credit card information”

That goes well beyond doing “dumb stuff on the Internet”

Depends on what he did with them. Likely nothing, considering he's speaking about it so freely on a public website.

Wonder what the implications of just taking the CC numbers 20 years ago would have been?

Probably depends on how they acquired them (breaking into an online store's payment transaction database / trading for the CCs on IRC / lifting them using a physical skimmer / etc.)

Yeah, I never actually used or shared/sold any of it since it was mostly a game for me. But nowadays I understand it is a very bad idea even just to store this kind of stuff.

I was old enough to know better, but I knew a couple of younger people who were doing it because "it was easy" and policing of such things hadn't caught up to the internet yet, so for someone at their age they would have just considered it to be "dumb stuff on the internet".

It doesn't translate to today's Internet.

(This would have been ~25 years ago, maybe a bit more)

That's straight up crime lol

I’ll be 35 in March :)

> Who's giving away 100s of TB of video decode and bandwidth for free. And why?

Not everyone is doing it for the same reason, but there are anarchists doing it because they want people to be allowed to freely access media, and that's the entirety of the reason. No profit motive or clout chasing, they just are frustrated that access to information or media is locked behind a paywall and only available to people with a credit card, or in countries allowed to view that content, or have enough money to subscribe to the services, so they do something about it.

Though I would imagine the majority of the most popular websites are just using client computers as compute, or serving ads.

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