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Comment by voidUpdate | Hacker News Reader

I just use ye old faithful of piratebay, through the tor browser so my ISP doesn't do shenanigans to it, then ffmpeg to get only the streams I care about (video, english audio / japanese audio + english subtitles) and reencode it to h264 mp4 so the files aren't gigantic and are compatible with everything. A bit old-school maybe but it generally works fine for me.

I live in the UK so I'll also sometimes pull stuff from iPlayer, which yt-dlp works perfectly for, and also off youtube

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Can you please reconsider using TOR for piracy? It strains the Tor Network and makes life harder for exit node providers. The Tor Project has advised against it as well[0]. There are many cheap VPN Providers that allow port forwarding and will give you an even better torrenting experience.

Using the Tor-Browser to get the links on ThePirateBay et. al. is of course fine, torrenting the content though is where it becomes a problem.

[0] https://support.torproject.org/about-tor/using-and-sharing/t...

I don't torrent through tor, I just use it to get the links. I've found that if I use TPB on the normal internet, my ISP (or someone who can see my connections) seems to be poisoning the results, since all my torrents result in a 1.89gb executable file that I'm sure as hell not opening. Getting the links through tor doesn't have the same issue, and then I download them over the normal internet, and everything works fine

If you're connecting through a VPN there is no way for your ISP to know that you're using TPB or any other website.

I know, that's why I use tor to get the links

They can if you let DNS leak to their servers so make sure you really firewall your ship off

Can you share the magnet link that they send you and maybe the name of your ISP? I'd be super interested in analysing this!

I'll try to remember to but it'll be about 16 hours away

Impossible. How would your ISP (or VPN provider or anyone) be MITMing the TLS connection to TPB?

> 1.89gb executable file

Add me to the list of people curious about this. It feels more like some sort of bug than a real attack, it would be odd to use such a huge file for every torrent.

There is an uptick of isos and exes masqueraded to look like episodes of popular shows.

On the other hand, the system would be doomed if it relied on 1:1 message board scolding the few good actors to be viable.

that seems like a lot of work compared to click click watch that one can achieve with *arr stack.

Sure, but this way I know what I'm getting, rather than just hoping I get the right thing. I don't mind doing a little bit of cleanup to make sure I'm getting what I want

Just to be fair, the *arr stack can filter by various things so you only grab the releases that meet your requirements.

And if you don't want to torrent at all, there are recent tools (nzbdav) to build a large *arr library that streams directly from usenet, without need for self-storage

in several countries it's fully legal to download anything for personal use, so I don't care :P

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