this post was submitted on 21 Aug 2023
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On the flip side, piracy has never been easier.
Honestly, yes it has been. It's not too bad, but it used to be easier.
I would argue it's easier just in significantly different ways - the Arr stack of applications take more effort to learn and setup initially, but once you have it's absolutely effortless.
The what now
https://wiki.servarr.com/
Explain
Literally everything was easy about it 5-10 years ago. Even 20yrs ago starting with Napster. Shit was the wild west you could pretty much do whatever you want. Apart from the various rogue virus laden crap. Torrent trackers got good about reporting bad ones though.
P2P (eMule/Limewire/etc.)
DDL (Megaupload, Rapidshare, etc.)
Just these two were easier.
In addition, pirated physical media used to be an easy way for non techy people to acquire media in developing countries.
Used to be? As late as 2011 I saw entire businesses dedicated to selling pirated movies.
I mean, 2011 was 12 years ago.
True, but this was in kandahar, I expect not much as changed....Except perhaps the selection.
Not sure how it's easier I can't get near a torrent site without getting dumb letters from ISP. "get a VPN... "
OK. Well that's not easier than ever, is it lol.
Use Mullvad, $5/month prepaid and you can even mail them cash if you have no other way to pay. No subscription or other scammy stuff. Your entire login is a single auto-generated number, and if you use their app (Open source, 3rd party audited) you just punch it in and boom, VPN time.
I think from signup to using the service was under 5 minutes!
For the power users you can log in on their site and generate Wireguard keys, which you can use with Docker to wrap up all your piracy stuff inside a container that can only access the VPN connection for safety and convenience. But you don't have to do that, you can just run the app and put everything through the tunnel when you're downloading.
I take it you're in a country in which VPNs are stringently regulated or outright don't exist?
The tricky part is making sure your VPN is set up correctly and verifying that your torrent client doesn't try to fall back on using your unmasked IP if the VPN connection goes down.
I've gotten dumb angry letters since from ISPs since Napster.
But I'm hard pressed to remember a time when so much content was so readily available so quickly.
And a $4/mo Proton VPN is downright trivial when the cost of a good laptop has fallen from the $1000s to the low $100s.