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Comment by lucb1e | Hacker News Reader

Wait, I don't get it. This is basically the same as running a server with a torrent daemon (like Transmission) on it, except you pay them instead of get your own server?

Also their arguments are somewhat invalid:

> People sharing your internet connection. They hate you! With put.io, you won't disturb them, because you won't be hogging all the bandwidth.

It doesn't matter whether I download 18GB from http(s) or from a torrent, the data remains the same size, except you can usually limit the torrent traffic whereas most people wouldn't know how to limit http(s) traffic in their browser.

> Watch RSS feeds

My torrent server does that too, but I never use it anyway

> Huge torrents are hard to get

Why?

> Get to your files from anywhere

Okay this is the only advantage if you don't have your own server.

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>It doesn't matter whether I download 18GB from http(s) or from a torrent, the data remains the same size

Incorrect. For starters, torrent overhead is much higher than http traffic and so the transfer is actually cheaper for http. More critically is the fact that high connection count, as associated with torrents, results in connection saturation on 90% of consumer routers thus crippling all traffic, especially sensitive stuff like gaming, for everyone involved.

Other than that yeah, but this isn't for people like us. This is actually perfect for people like my father; he comes around every week to grab TV and Movies off me. I could remotely manage his account until he figured it out himself.

The thing that could make this service much better would be a feature to LAN sync content, so that one doesn't need to pull down from the internet when the file is avaliable over the LAN. Kind of like how Dropbox-esque services do it.

I think the primary benefit is plausible deniability. Such a service wouldn't make it impossible to be legally targeted, but it could make it sufficiently unpleasant that they decide to target a more brazen offender. It's a bit like fleeing from a bear; you don't need to be the fastest runner, you just have to be a little faster than the slowest person.

Having the server in someone else's name provides a slight buffer, but is hardly insurmountable. If the server belongs to a company in another country then that could make it difficult for a local court to issue a subpoena that's enforceable in said company's jurisdiction. If you are one of a dozen users of a given server then that could hypothetically make it harder to prove which user was the infringer.

All of that is obviously hypothetical, I am not a lawyer, and I certainly don't have expertise in international law. These are simply the musings of my groggy brain first thing in the morning. Anyone who isn't half asleep care to weigh in?

You won't be uploading which would be the case with torrenting.

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