Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

LunaSea, the open source Usenet monitoring app is pronounced dead for the most part. The developer via a Reddit thread said this:

tl;dr: development focus has shifted to a successor to LunaSea and is slowly being worked on. No timelines at this time, as I’m working on it when I have the drive to spend time on it. LunaSea is in maintenance mode and won’t be receiving any updates unless there is a major breaking issue discovered due to one of the supported modules having a breaking change.

LunaSea was started over 5 years ago and in truth has a really poor code base. Mix of inexperience at the time with good design patterns alongside rapid feature releases has grown LunaSea to a point of being a huge time investment to make any major changes to the project.

• Mix that in with a few other things, I have lost a lot of interest in working on LunaSea. Some things include:
• A tale as old as time in the industry: major burnout. This has triggered me to spend a lot more time investing in hobbies outside of coding and my computer in general
• Getting married late last year and spending more personal time with my wife
• Planning a cross-country move later this year and preparing for that
• Taking up a higher seniority position in my professional career (also as a software engineer) which has me committing more time to my career

You also pointed out a really good fact, LunaSea does not really have any income. As it is now, donations are about equal to the infrastructure cost for maintaining LunaSea. Between donations on all the different platforms and Ko-Fi, I average approximately $40-$50/month.

It’s increasingly difficult to want to invest a lot of time into something that isn’t really garnering any financial gains. I would probably estimate at least 3,000 hours have been spent working on LunaSea, and while I am a huge proponent of open-source and free applications, and I don’t regret making LunaSea FOSS, I do wish that I had more financial gains to show for how much time was invested working on the project over the years.

All that being said, I’ve slowly been chipping away at working on a successor to LunaSea. LunaSea is no longer being worked on but I will publish a fix for any major breaking bugs if they occur. As it is now, LunaSea does have minor non-breaking bugs but is in a state where all intended functionality works, so there is no need for any updates.

The successor will remain fully open-source, but will charge for the client application when installed from a monetization-supported platform (such as the App Store, Play Store, etc.). However, free copies of the binaries (IPAs, APKs, etc.) will always be available officially.

This will be a complete rewrite that shifts to a server-client approach where the user would install/run (via Docker) a server component and the client application connects only to that. It allows me to start fresh away from all of the technical debt while having a much improved experience across the board.

However, I’ll admit I’m not overly focused on this either. I work on it when I want to, and I’m not putting any pressure on myself to meet any timelines or release in any timeframe. I really love software engineering and want to avoid burning out again.

I made the mistake of giving general timelines before regarding this project and have missed them all, so at this point I can only say it will be ready when it’s ready. Progress is still being made (albeit admittedly slowly), and I will remain monitoring feedback and giving support for LunaSea when I can.

Back when we would record onto VHS, is that considered piracy? Found a super bowl XXXI tape from my Uncle circa 1997. I'm curious lol.

Also side note, have any of you dabbled in digitizing old VHS? Have quite a few home videos on VHS and I'm wanting to preserve them for the future. I've done a bit of research and have come across a wide array of information. I know that doesn't really qualify as piracy, if there's a better comm for this, please direct me there!

I have been using this config for qBittorrent for awhile and been working for the most part. Sometimes it gets "connection status: Firewalled" I would fix this by going to settings -> connection and click the "Random" button a couple times and save and then it would work again. This seems to not work anymore. Is there a better fix for this? Back before I used docker I don't remember ever having to do this. I have never done any kind of manual port forwarding my current VPN provider does not do that at the price I have it for right now. Let me know if you need more information about my setup or something

Thanks I guess it is just randomly breaks for now since it appears to be back.

Current Config file (minus the keys and stuff)

services:
  gluetun:
    image: qmcgaw/gluetun:latest
    cap_add:
      - NET_ADMIN
    environment:
      - VPN_SERVICE_PROVIDER=windscribe
      - VPN_TYPE=wireguard
      - WIREGUARD_PRIVATE_KEY=
      - WIREGUARD_ADDRESSES=
      - VPN_ENDPOINT_PORT=
      - WIREGUARD_PRESHARED_KEY= 
      - SERVER_REGIONS= 
    ports:
      - 8080:8080
      - 6881:6881
      - 6881:6881/udp
    restart: always
    
    
  qbittorrent:
    container_name: qbittorrent
    image: lscr.io/linuxserver/qbittorrent:latest
    network_mode: "service:gluetun"
    environment:
      - PUID=1000
      - PGID=1000
      - TZ=Etc/UTC
      - WEBUI_PORT=8080
    volumes:
      - /home/blxter/server/qbittorrent/config:/config
      - /home/blxter/raid/media/torrents:/torrents
    restart: unless-stopped
    depends_on:
      gluetun:
        condition: service_healthy

If you cannot pass on your ownership rights to your purchased games to your children, then you cannot pass on your copyright either, I guess?

Looking for more modern high quality files for a QRS player piano system. New to this, but it seems like midi files are the most likely to find since specialty qrs / player piano file formats seem nearly nonexistent on the internet. Having a hard time finding copyrighted more modern (most available internet midi files for piano are from 1800s) song libraries of decent quality. Can anyone here point me in the right direction?

cross-posted from: https://leminal.space/post/6997656

List of unofficial console PC Ports with Tutorial (Re-/Decompilations)

I have created a list of all the unofficial console PC ports (that are based on Recompilation or Decompilation) I know about, along with easy-to-install versions that have been marked with a star ⭐.

Additionally, I have included short installation tutorials on how to install them. My plan is to keep this list up to date and add new finished PC ports in the future.

cross-posted from: https://programming.dev/post/14680192

I have a VPS, but no root access so I can't use apt, or even read a lot of the system files. I would like to get jellyfin (or any media server, really) running on it. Jellyfin has a portable installation option, so I followed the instructions in the docs to install it from the .tar.gz.

But it says I have to install ffmpeg-jellyfin, and I can't find a portable installation of that. My VPS already has ffmpeg installed on it. Will jellyfin work if I just point it to that instead? Or, how can I go about installing ffmpeg-jellyfin without root access?

May be of interest to fellow pirates... youtube trailer | invidious trailer

Ah, the good old days of Kazaa, Bear Share, LimeWire, and Morpheus. What do you guys think - did piracy permanently devalue the music industry as claimed? Or were the record companies just massively overcharging for music in the first place? Given that record companies have been stiffing artists since forever, what is the best way to support your favorite musicians today?

In the streaming age, the concept of music piracy seems eons behind us. Back in the early 2000s, however, pirates shook up the industry by stealing and illegally distributing MP3s, which listeners would otherwise have to pay for.

How Music Got Free takes viewers back to the ‘90s and early aughts, when the FBI launched a sprawling investigation into music piracy to identify – and convict – those stealing music. Even once the thieves were discovered, mass music piracy was blamed for permanently devaluing music.

Directed by Alexandria Stapleton, the two-part documentary premiered at SXSW earlier this year.

What is considered the best/safest way to pirate printed magazines? On the Awesome Piracy-repo, there are some links, but they either don't work or look sus (except for maybe magazinelib.com).

If you endulge in free printed magazines, what is your preferred way?

Amazon Prime, like many services, is a DRM hell. It won't go to over 480p on Firefox on Linux at my end. However, instead of a rant, I am interested in why this is happening. Say, I rented the same film from YouTube Movies(Yes, such a service exists) and the quality can toggle all the upto 1080p but the same title on Prime Video is stuck at 480p. Is it because both services use two DIFFERENT kinds of DRM?

For starters, I used to live in a third-world country and have been pirating since about 8 thanks to my older bro, and to my knowledge, I never got a virus thanks to good practices and habits like vpn+ and staying only with a trusted tracker (and obviously some luck too). But I stopped when I grew older and made money. Except recently I got caught lacking. I downloaded something from a website I didn't usually go to a while ago and apparently had a silent malware infection. I forgot to have 2FA on in my Google account and saw a login from Russia. I don't have anything particularly sensitive saved even passwords wise in my google account but still I acted quickly by logging them out turning it on ASAP and changing my passwords. They had been doing stuff and deleting their tracks like attempting to log in somewhere and delete the email right after (I knew because my phone would get notifications and then when I clicked on them they would be gone and deleted) This has all stopped as of now.

But I noticed something weird, that they probably did not account for, and that is I had Firefox syncing my info including PW right before it happened. And I noticed that he made an account for AT&T (and saved the info) with what I presume is his very Russian or Ukranian-sounding email, or one of his hacked botnet slaves but his password was literally my GF's name and year of birth. there is no evidence of my gf anywhere besides me emailing her 2 memes when her phone was broken, but even then her email is only her name and not her YOB (if he did go to my sent tho, he would see her right away as i only have sent like 12 emails from that account which would make more sense). This password was not in the google pw manager which tells me he deleted it from there but FF synced it. I tried logging in with those credentials to the ATT website and an account indeed exists, with a $245 payment due with no payment method added. I couldn't see anymore without verifying through text, and the options all looked like random foreign numbers. Has anyone had anything like this happen to them? Why would they go out of their way to do that instead of generating a randomized password? I am willing to share the email address.

Upon closer inspection, the password was created on April 14th and used on May 21 which means it was actually before I got that malware. Another likely scenario is my info was part of a leak. Thoughts?

I'm trying to run Headphones via a Docker container on my Raspberry Pi 5, but things don't seem to be going well. It's like it brings the Pi down to its knees or something and all this despite the fact that it never appears to really start let alone finish the full scan. Anyone got any experience? Any tips? Anything I might've missed?

Does anybody have the impression that Stremio may be a honeypot of some sort?

Thay are allegedly a legal service where some nefarious actors provide torrenting plugins etc. I tried to find out how they were financed, and found northing but a site purportedly selling "Web3" advertising, and filled with technobabble nonsense. No address, no way to purchase their services no GDPR notice or anything...

All I can find regarding their safety are "It's legit, nothing has happened to me so far" comments in reddit and other boards.

They have your email, they host the service, they can track all you do...

Seems kind of fishy.

Ive tried it, ironically, to watch stuff that I pay for, I have Netflix, prime video, Disney... But Stremio gives me much higher resolutions.

Even though I live in a country where sailing the high seas is not persecuted, as long as you are the end-user and you derive no profit, I'm going to delete my account (made with an email address I have for bullshit stuff ), make a new one with a truly disposable email and get a VPN.

I was feeling real groovy about my fresh new ultra.cc VPS, but it's slow as fuck! sub 50 kbps upload. I'll never untank my ratio at this rate!

Is this normal? Any suggestions for another provider? At this rate I wonder if I'd be better off just switching from mullvad to a VPN that supports port forwarding. Any thoughts on privateVPN?

Edit: so the FTP speed is much, much faster than I'm getting on my torrent client. Either i don't have something configured right, or i need to be more strategic about what i seed. If anyone can help me trouble shoot, id greatly appreciate it

If it's multilang it's better.

Thx in advice.

So I've been grabbing a few shows I want to watch reruns of while playing Balatro that don't have good blu ray releases. My piracy is fairly limited these days so I don't bother with private trackers (do have a VPN though). In the past, I never really had an issue with grabbing a few one offs off the popular, maybe honeypot, sites like rarbg and 1337x.

But over the past month or so, I've noticed I have gotten a lot of shitty files. Skips here and there or garbled colors for a scene or two. At first I though it was just a bad file since re-downloading the torrent had the exact same problem.

But, on a whim, I did a recheck and had to download like 40% of a torrent. And then 20% the next time. Which made me assume my NAS was fucked or I was dealing with a lot of packet lsos (... I AM dealing with a lot of packet loss from my ISP). But when I redownloaded a "known bad" torrent I had the exact same corrupted file.

So am I just REALLY unlucky? Or is there an epidemic of shitty/malicious seeds on the public trackers these days?

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/15808940

Tribler *arr integration

Hey selfhosters!

I recently discovered Tribler - anonymity focus torrent client. It made some rounds on hackernews and I'd never heard of it before.

I installed gui and was not impressed - it ran terribly on macos. However, I was able to test download and its anonymity features - it uses TOR inspired onion routing. I saw they had API available - and thought it would be perfect for my selfhosted *arr stack usage. However, *arr apps did not integrate tribler API (understandably, it's a niche client)

I dug in a bit and thought it would not be so difficult to create a shim that pretends to be some better integrated torrent client.

I picked qbittorrent.

You can check the link. I run it in docker. Add it to sonarr / radarr as qbittorrent client (username and password is irrelevant, as tribler shim integrates with tribler through API key) It's not the most secure approach - but managing torrents wihout authentication in my home network is an acceptable risk.

I was not able to download anything with more than 1 hops in between - ie it does hide your real IP address, but only uses one relay in between. It's not perfect, but seems to work as designed. I run my services mostly in Kubernetes, so there's likely something in my networking that. I will poke around more to see what could be the issue.

For now, the torrent management works through arr apps using the shim, however, the category is not implemented. Therefore, you can only use one category for both sonarr and radarr for example, and you will see downloads of both of those.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/15581511

Aarrr

4 panel comic by War and Peas. 1. Panel shows two pirates, the first pirate speaks "Captain, our rivals have been calling us names again." 2. Panel: The pirate continues, "They said we were a bunch of handicaps." 3. Panel: The captain himself says, "That's ableism! And we don't tolerate that kind of talk here". 4.Panel: The ship in full from afar waving a bunch of flags, such as the pride flag, the pirate skull-and-crossbones, the human rights flag, the trans flag and more.

Hi,

Sorry if this has been posted before but I'm looking at trying Usenet instead of torrents.

I've done some Googling and honestly, it's a little overwhelming knowing what Usenet provider to use, where to get quality indexers and which download client would be the best.

If anyone has any resources or advice to help me sail the Usenet seas I would be eternally grateful!

It's not even surprising anymore platforms do this & act all Pikachu face why piracy is spiking

Netflix & all these streaming platforms have completely lost touch & they will lose more customers in the long run

To quote Gabe Newell on Piracy

"We think there is a fundamental misconception about piracy. Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem. If a pirate offers a product anywhere in the world, 24 x 7, purchasable from the convenience of your personal computer, and the legal provider says the product is region-locked, will come to your country 3 months after the US release, and can only be purchased at a brick and mortar store, then the pirate’s service is more valuable."

I've been a good boy for 5 years or so but the seas call to me. Are streaming sites the way to go now or is torrenting still a better bet for mainstream movies and tv? I'd imagine all of my accounts have been deleted on those sites so I'd be starting over.