I grew up in the late 90ies with internet in Switzerland, and as a broke pre-teen and teenager I was used to getting EVERYTHING pirated and this habit sticked with me, even though when in later years I was working as a software developer.<p>Torrenting, sharing with friends and family is still completely legal in Switzerland.<p>Only after pay services like spotify became a thing and were more convenient than managing and tagging my multi TB sized aac/mp3 library, I switched.<p>Same for Netflix. But since fragmentation of streaming services started to happen, I'm going back to things like stremio/torrents/DDL sites.<p>For software, as a hobbyist videographer I wouldn't purchase the Adobe suite and all the expensive VFX tools I use for my family videos. But whatever software I use professionally (at work and at my employer), I'm of course getting proper licenses.
I subscribe to Netflix, Disney+ and Amazon (although that's just a byproduct of prime), and am happy to continue paying ~£30/month (which is roughly what a basic Cable package would cost me), and even pay the occasional £20 one off for a digital purchase of a "cinema" movie (see: Disney+'s recent releases, new bond movie etc).<p>However, when studios resort to pulling tricks like [0], artificially limiting content (john wick 2 is available on netflix, but to watch the first, you have to purchase it on another service), or just being fragmented (which of the 5 apps on my PC has the content I'm looking for?) I start to get super frustrated at the services, and if this continues will either likely just stop paying for the content, or look elsewhere. The content needs to be easily accessible in high quality or it's going to lose to piracy.<p>[0] <a href="https://www.digitalspy.com/movies/a37170236/black-widow-scarlett-johansson-sues-disney-streaming/" rel="nofollow">https://www.digitalspy.com/movies/a37170236/black-widow-scar...</a>
Am I the only one who’s seeing this page as a net negative? It’s basically outing everyone and everything. There’s torrent tracker that is not known by western right holders which is _huge_ and so far we’ve enjoyed it and didn’t talk about this too much. Don’t talk about fight club may be?
I remember most if not all cracked games used to have virus on their executables. People always said that you shouldn’t care about what the antivirus said, but now I am wondering, why the antivirus alerted about viruses? Does anyone know? Were they really safe or not?
The big issue of sports streaming still remains. Sites popup every once in a while that have apps, etc (HeHeStreams, BallStreams) but then get taken down. It's hard to find a good sports streaming site that does the following:<p>1. Has TV apps
2. No ads
3. Reliable<p>I've been doing the Kodi route, but it's such a PIA with streams not working consistently.
>I am aware that a number of websites featured in this list rely on operating under obscurity, and that this list could potentially contribute to their demise through excess exposure. I'm sorry about that - I just like making lists.<p>Well, at least the author is responsible and owns up to being one of the cheaf reasons sites like these die :)
Can anyone on HN help me with this: I'm <i>sure</i> there was a chat widget called something like "arrr!" or maybe "yarrr!" designed to be embedded in a webpage.<p>Can't recall how many "r"'s but I think maybe the exclamation point was there as part of the name.<p>I <i>think</i> it was maybe associated with Mozilla somehow. Or maybe CCC. Or even the Pirate Party?<p>If anyone has any leads, I'd be happy to know.
I thought it was a list of stuff with jokes on pirates and I was sooo ready to open a PR to add <a href="https://bookdown.org/ndphillips/YaRrr/" rel="nofollow">https://bookdown.org/ndphillips/YaRrr/</a>
bit off topic, which torrent websites have a good collection of media (movies, shows,music, anime )? IME it takes a while to search up good torrent files in the usual contenders.
How are films supposed to get funded if people get them for free?<p>The current status quo is that we have two methods of obtaining a film:<p><pre><code> - Via file sharing. You have to wait for the whole film to finish downloading before you can watch it. This is inconvenient.
- Via streaming services. You can watch a film before it's finished downloading.
</code></pre>
The latter costs money, but is more convenient. While certainly some of that money goes towards bandwidth and infrastructure, some of it also goes towards paying the studios themselves. If sharing films were to stop being illegal, then the fixed overhead from paying the studios would go away, and the savings could be passed to users of streaming services. Illegal streaming services are not viable because they're centralised and easy to crack down on. The conclusion is that obtaining films legally via streaming services remains the most convenient option only because copyright gets enforced.<p>So for people who say "MAFIAA" etc. What is your model for how films should get funded?<p>[edit] It's interesting that this is getting so many downvotes, even though it's asking a question and the premises are currently true. As other commenters have pointed out, BitTorrent downloads a file in random order and not from beginning to end, and this is less convenient than streaming.<p>[edit] Even if you can configure your client to download a file in a non-random order, this will still have some trade-offs. I suppose though that this might be less of an issue than I thought. ;) I still think you're a bunch of entitled nobodies and freeloaders tho. (My sympathies to the people battling streaming service fragmentation and region locks).