15 ms·

A curated list of warez and piracy links

373 points by jaboutboul 5y ago

Chris2048 5y ago
Can anyone on HN help me with this: I'm sure there was a chat widget called something like "arrr!" or maybe "yarrr!" designed to be embedded in a webpage. Can't recall how many "r"'s but I think maybe the exclamation point was there as part of the name. I think it was maybe associated with Mozilla somehow. Or maybe CCC. Or even the Pirate Party? If anyone has any leads, I'd be happy to know.
- nielsole 5y ago
  tawk.to might resemble the pronunciation you are looking for and has a parrot as icon which I associate with pirates.
  - Chris2048 5y ago
    It wasn't a customer chat, so much as a chat room specific to a given web-page, so that people browsing there could talk about it; much like an interactive/real-time disqus widget.
Pacers31Colts18 5y ago
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: 1. Has TV apps 2. No ads 3. Reliable I've been doing the Kodi route, but it's such a PIA with streams not working consistently.
- bredren 5y ago
  I also see live sports, or anything people gather to see debut as a frontier. Time shifted content is under threat of leaks or hacks in the pipeline to release and gets duplicated once available.
p2t2p 5y ago
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?
- stronglikedan 5y ago
  Can't stop the signal!
- clsec 5y ago
  For one this is an old list. Two, it's not like rights holders haven't done their own research and made their own lists.
pietroppeter 5y ago
I thought it was a list of stuff with jokes on pirates and I was sooo ready to open a PR to add https://bookdown.org/ndphillips/YaRrr/ https://bookdown.org/ndphillips/YaRrr/
thealig 5y ago
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.
- kingcharles 5y ago
  If you really want to find things, then https://btdig.com/ https://btdig.com/
  - thealig 5y ago
    i'm getting 'we're having trouble finding this site' in my browser, not sure if this has been blocked in my jurisdiction
    - modernyogihippy 5y ago
      seems to be working where i am, so it could be your location
bluepoint 5y ago
Is there a search engine that focuses only on those awesome lists?
- nomorecommas 5y ago
  https://ddg.gg/awesome+lists https://ddg.gg/awesome+lists
m4lvin 5y ago
DMCA in 3, 2, 1, ... ?
- nomorecommas 5y ago
  It's been there for some time, and there are various mirrors in certain places.
- boomboomsubban 5y ago
  What on this list would be subject to a DMCA takedown? Most of it's not copyrighted material nor links directly to copyright material.
  - Brybry 5y ago
    Not DMCA could end up going the way of https://github.com/unblocked-pw/unblocked-pw.github.io https://github.com/unblocked-pw/unblocked-pw.github.io and "disabled by GitHub Staff due to a violation of GitHub's terms of service"
ogogmad 5y ago
How are films supposed to get funded if people get them for free? The current status quo is that we have two methods of obtaining a film: - 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. 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. So for people who say "MAFIAA" etc. What is your model for how films should get funded? [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. [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).
- andrepd 5y ago
  My experience with Netflix: it told me to switch browsers, disable my VPN, and install spyware on my computer, so that I could have the privilege of viewing video in 720p while I had an Internet connection. I just laughed, closed the browser, opened up tpb. In 5 minutes I was watching what I wanted in 4K. I don't need to jump through hoops, install spyware, surrender my privacy, and I have a .mkv I can play on whatever device I want. I'd gladly pay good money for this. Not to mention: I have access to older/niche content, not just endlessly formulaic "Netflix original series", I can lend it to someone else (remember dvds?), I can archive a copy and not be dependent on the whims of my provider.
- vastinfest 5y ago
  There's lots of of places around the world where paying for some streaming is not viable (even less so for multiple services). Same goes for stuff like video games. I myself grew up in the post-soviet baltics and around the time when when I got more into gaming - my monthly income was around 400 and new games were around 60. When Steam (and it's sales), Humble Bundle, GOG became more of a thing and my income increased - I just sort of stopped pirating games. It was definitely more convenient to get something on e.g. Steam than pirate it and jump through hoops to get the cracks working. When Netflix first became available - I started using that. It seemed worth paying even for limited library. But there were lots of things that was impossible to get any other way than pirating. As I stopped watching movies/tv shows - I stopped paying for Netflix. I don't thing I'd be willing to pay for multiple streaming services. My current (largely overpriced) media of choice is audiobooks.
m_a_g 5y ago
I can't decide between mullvad and private internet access. Any suggestions?
- 0x0000000 5y ago
  Mullvad gets a lot of "grassroots" support in comments, I've noticed here. I've had a subscription with them for a couple months, but I recently found out they intercept DNS requests[0] (supposedly to prevent against "DNS leaks"[1]). For the "keeping me private while torrenting" use case, Mullvad is probably fine, but personally I'm planning to move back to a private VPS for tunneling out of my local ISP. [0] https://www.reddit.com/r/mullvadvpn/comments/invjgp/how_and_why_is_mullvad_tampering_with_dns_traffic/ https://www.reddit.com/r/mullvadvpn/comments/invjgp/how_and_... [1] https://mullvad.net/en/help/dns-leaks/ https://mullvad.net/en/help/dns-leaks/
- beeboop 5y ago
  I use Mozilla's VPN which uses Mullvad.
- kiryin 5y ago
  I can't recommend PIA anymore after the acquisition. It used to be my choice ever since using a VPN became a necessity, but these it's Mullvad for me. They're relatively transparent, allow me to pay anonymously in cash, and are based on a VPN protocol already included in my kernel.
- capableweb 5y ago
  Private Internet Access (PIA) is involved in the whole Freenode fiasco, and has Mark Karpelès (of Mt Gox fame) as their CTO of the parent company. They also run ads all over the internet. Everything pointing towards just caring about the profits. Mullvad is a low-profile company based in Sweden (strong guarantees for privacy) where you can even sign up by sending cash in an envelope. It doesn't get more anonymous than that. On the technical side, I've been using Mullvad since probably 2012 or something like that, and lately just their Wireguard implementation. Always have had good performance and never received any complaints, even though I have used it for torrenting and bunch of grey-area stuff. Edit: I see now the author has even highlighted PIA as their "top pick", which for me compromises the integrity of this list. PIA most likely paid the author to add that for them.
ignoramous 5y ago
This list has been all but abandoned, it'd seem. Pull requests and issues have gone unattended for over a year.
- ruperp 5y ago
  That's the beauty of hosting this on github. You can just look at the active forks and find a better list. Though, it'd be nice if Github forks could all come together and vote on a new "primary" when the source repo gets abandoned.
  - drjasonharrison 5y ago
    Plus one for this. Especially for older code libraries.
  - mitchtbaum 5y ago
    http://gitpop2.herokuapp.com/Igglybuff/awesome-piracy http://gitpop2.herokuapp.com/Igglybuff/awesome-piracy sorting forks by stars would be a great feature to have built-in
mikaelsouza 5y ago
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?
- throwaway64643 5y ago
  "Cracked" softwares/games for myself and can confirm that modifying .exe can lead to false positivity from antivirus.
- Bjartr 5y ago
  Often, the alert you get is about a "keygen" or "crack" tool, which is exactly what you wanted in the first place.
- whywhywhywhy 5y ago
  How often did you encounter "false positives" downloading normal shareware applications? There's your answer.
- Asooka 5y ago
  I never ran into that. In fact, I never got a virus from any pirate website or pirated software. I know that you can get infected, but it always seemed obvious when you're offered an actual release or one that has been tampered with.
- anakaine 5y ago
  They generally were false positives if you were getting the downloads from decent release channels. The reason the false positives show up is because of the packers used to make the executable files. Cracks in particular show as infected because they are both packed, but also attempt to access other files with executable code at specific byte locations and modify them.
- ratww 5y ago
  Cracking tools often compress their code for whatever reason. Some antivirus apps often report every compressed executable, such as anything using UPX, as being infected. That also happens with demoscene-style code, like MOD players that tend to be included in cracking tools. The reason for that is that once upon a time some virus used UPX (or some demoscene tool), and the antivirus associated that with the virus. But some antiviruses also often detect cracked stuff and report it as being virus, purely because they're killjoys. Commercial antiviruses are a plague as bad as virus themselves, unfortunately.
underlines 5y ago
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. Torrenting, sharing with friends and family is still completely legal in Switzerland. 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. Same for Netflix. But since fragmentation of streaming services started to happen, I'm going back to things like stremio/torrents/DDL sites. 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.
- danielrpa 5y ago
  Legal considerations aside, pirating can be a fun hobby. In the early days of computers, pirating was one of the best ways to meet other computer geeks! Additionally, thanks to pirates and data hoarders (and the Internet Archive), we have a LOT of intellectual property preserved that would otherwise not exist due to fuzzy ownership and copyright complexities.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- woolion 5y ago
  I would like to share that far from sticking it to big companies, piracy hurt independent creators way more than big corporate interests. Sure, software behemoths would be even happier to squeeze out more pennies from individual purchases, but they make their big bucks at governmental and institutional levels. Meanwhile, _consumers_ compare free software to "free" cracked software. If the equation was "does this software bring me 300 CURRENCY of value, or can I get this value out of a free alternative?", the results would be quite different. Which means we would also deal with better financed alternatives... Netflix etc are legal, but if you care about proper rewarding of creators and improving the situation, well.
gtsnexp 5y ago
Beautiful compilation, took me back to the 90s! Thanks!
maccard 5y ago
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). 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. [0] https://www.digitalspy.com/movies/a37170236/black-widow-scarlett-johansson-sues-disney-streaming/ https://www.digitalspy.com/movies/a37170236/black-widow-scar...
- kristofferR 5y ago
  Yeah, I usually pirate-stream movies using Seren, since even if they are exist in 4K HDR quality, they are just low quality SDR 1080p on the Netflix 4K plan.
- antihero 5y ago
  I find it extremely annoying that I pay money each month to both Amazon and Apple for their video products, but if I actually want to watch most movies they still want £3.49 to "rent" (which I sometimes do if it is the beginning of the month) it and £8.99 to "buy" it. Some TV series that are over ten years old are still £50+ to buy a "box set" like we are some old morons. Absolutely ridiculous. Thankfully I have infuse on my ATV, so if the price is too high, I pirate.
- honkdaddy 5y ago
  If you do end up deciding to pull the plug on your streaming subscriptions (I did last year), an illegal but largely safe alternative is to pay for a Plex share. I pay about $3/mo for access to a fellow's server with another few dozen people and have access to hundreds of thousands of TV shows and movies. It's all a fairly manual process, and it takes some digging (I found mine on /r/plexshares), but when it works, it works great.
theon144 5y ago
>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. Well, at least the author is responsible and owns up to being one of the cheaf reasons sites like these die :)
- gitanovic 5y ago
  Nah, owning up means suffer the consequences of ones actions, in my opinion he owns up to nothing, he barely says he's sorry, but he doesn't care too much about the consequences, that's quite different if not opposite.
  - droopyEyelids 5y ago
    I agree, although he might have to 'own up' if someone found his employer and let them know he's working to enable piracy in his free time.

373 points by jaboutboul 5y ago

Chris2048 5y ago

Can anyone on HN help me with this: I'm sure there was a chat widget called something like "arrr!" or maybe "yarrr!" designed to be embedded in a webpage. Can't recall how many "r"'s but I think maybe the exclamation point was there as part of the name. I think it was maybe associated with Mozilla somehow. Or maybe CCC. Or even the Pirate Party? If anyone has any leads, I'd be happy to know.

nielsole 5y ago
tawk.to might resemble the pronunciation you are looking for and has a parrot as icon which I associate with pirates.
- Chris2048 5y ago
  It wasn't a customer chat, so much as a chat room specific to a given web-page, so that people browsing there could talk about it; much like an interactive/real-time disqus widget.

Pacers31Colts18 5y ago

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: 1. Has TV apps 2. No ads 3. Reliable I've been doing the Kodi route, but it's such a PIA with streams not working consistently.

bredren 5y ago
I also see live sports, or anything people gather to see debut as a frontier. Time shifted content is under threat of leaks or hacks in the pipeline to release and gets duplicated once available.

p2t2p 5y ago

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?

stronglikedan 5y ago
Can't stop the signal!
clsec 5y ago
For one this is an old list. Two, it's not like rights holders haven't done their own research and made their own lists.

pietroppeter 5y ago

I thought it was a list of stuff with jokes on pirates and I was sooo ready to open a PR to add https://bookdown.org/ndphillips/YaRrr/ https://bookdown.org/ndphillips/YaRrr/

thealig 5y ago

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.

kingcharles 5y ago
If you really want to find things, then https://btdig.com/ https://btdig.com/
- thealig 5y ago
  i'm getting 'we're having trouble finding this site' in my browser, not sure if this has been blocked in my jurisdiction
  - modernyogihippy 5y ago
    seems to be working where i am, so it could be your location

bluepoint 5y ago

Is there a search engine that focuses only on those awesome lists?

nomorecommas 5y ago
https://ddg.gg/awesome+lists https://ddg.gg/awesome+lists

m4lvin 5y ago

DMCA in 3, 2, 1, ... ?

nomorecommas 5y ago
It's been there for some time, and there are various mirrors in certain places.
boomboomsubban 5y ago
What on this list would be subject to a DMCA takedown? Most of it's not copyrighted material nor links directly to copyright material.
- Brybry 5y ago
  Not DMCA could end up going the way of https://github.com/unblocked-pw/unblocked-pw.github.io https://github.com/unblocked-pw/unblocked-pw.github.io and "disabled by GitHub Staff due to a violation of GitHub's terms of service"

ogogmad 5y ago

How are films supposed to get funded if people get them for free? The current status quo is that we have two methods of obtaining a film: - 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. 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. So for people who say "MAFIAA" etc. What is your model for how films should get funded? [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. [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).

andrepd 5y ago
My experience with Netflix: it told me to switch browsers, disable my VPN, and install spyware on my computer, so that I could have the privilege of viewing video in 720p while I had an Internet connection. I just laughed, closed the browser, opened up tpb. In 5 minutes I was watching what I wanted in 4K. I don't need to jump through hoops, install spyware, surrender my privacy, and I have a .mkv I can play on whatever device I want. I'd gladly pay good money for this. Not to mention: I have access to older/niche content, not just endlessly formulaic "Netflix original series", I can lend it to someone else (remember dvds?), I can archive a copy and not be dependent on the whims of my provider.
vastinfest 5y ago
There's lots of of places around the world where paying for some streaming is not viable (even less so for multiple services). Same goes for stuff like video games. I myself grew up in the post-soviet baltics and around the time when when I got more into gaming - my monthly income was around 400 and new games were around 60. When Steam (and it's sales), Humble Bundle, GOG became more of a thing and my income increased - I just sort of stopped pirating games. It was definitely more convenient to get something on e.g. Steam than pirate it and jump through hoops to get the cracks working. When Netflix first became available - I started using that. It seemed worth paying even for limited library. But there were lots of things that was impossible to get any other way than pirating. As I stopped watching movies/tv shows - I stopped paying for Netflix. I don't thing I'd be willing to pay for multiple streaming services. My current (largely overpriced) media of choice is audiobooks.

m_a_g 5y ago

I can't decide between mullvad and private internet access. Any suggestions?

0x0000000 5y ago
Mullvad gets a lot of "grassroots" support in comments, I've noticed here. I've had a subscription with them for a couple months, but I recently found out they intercept DNS requests[0] (supposedly to prevent against "DNS leaks"[1]). For the "keeping me private while torrenting" use case, Mullvad is probably fine, but personally I'm planning to move back to a private VPS for tunneling out of my local ISP. [0] https://www.reddit.com/r/mullvadvpn/comments/invjgp/how_and_why_is_mullvad_tampering_with_dns_traffic/ https://www.reddit.com/r/mullvadvpn/comments/invjgp/how_and_... [1] https://mullvad.net/en/help/dns-leaks/ https://mullvad.net/en/help/dns-leaks/
beeboop 5y ago
I use Mozilla's VPN which uses Mullvad.
kiryin 5y ago
I can't recommend PIA anymore after the acquisition. It used to be my choice ever since using a VPN became a necessity, but these it's Mullvad for me. They're relatively transparent, allow me to pay anonymously in cash, and are based on a VPN protocol already included in my kernel.
capableweb 5y ago
Private Internet Access (PIA) is involved in the whole Freenode fiasco, and has Mark Karpelès (of Mt Gox fame) as their CTO of the parent company. They also run ads all over the internet. Everything pointing towards just caring about the profits. Mullvad is a low-profile company based in Sweden (strong guarantees for privacy) where you can even sign up by sending cash in an envelope. It doesn't get more anonymous than that. On the technical side, I've been using Mullvad since probably 2012 or something like that, and lately just their Wireguard implementation. Always have had good performance and never received any complaints, even though I have used it for torrenting and bunch of grey-area stuff. Edit: I see now the author has even highlighted PIA as their "top pick", which for me compromises the integrity of this list. PIA most likely paid the author to add that for them.

ignoramous 5y ago

This list has been all but abandoned, it'd seem. Pull requests and issues have gone unattended for over a year.

ruperp 5y ago
That's the beauty of hosting this on github. You can just look at the active forks and find a better list. Though, it'd be nice if Github forks could all come together and vote on a new "primary" when the source repo gets abandoned.
- drjasonharrison 5y ago
  Plus one for this. Especially for older code libraries.
- mitchtbaum 5y ago
  http://gitpop2.herokuapp.com/Igglybuff/awesome-piracy http://gitpop2.herokuapp.com/Igglybuff/awesome-piracy sorting forks by stars would be a great feature to have built-in

mikaelsouza 5y ago

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?

throwaway64643 5y ago
"Cracked" softwares/games for myself and can confirm that modifying .exe can lead to false positivity from antivirus.
Bjartr 5y ago
Often, the alert you get is about a "keygen" or "crack" tool, which is exactly what you wanted in the first place.
whywhywhywhy 5y ago
How often did you encounter "false positives" downloading normal shareware applications? There's your answer.
Asooka 5y ago
I never ran into that. In fact, I never got a virus from any pirate website or pirated software. I know that you can get infected, but it always seemed obvious when you're offered an actual release or one that has been tampered with.
anakaine 5y ago
They generally were false positives if you were getting the downloads from decent release channels. The reason the false positives show up is because of the packers used to make the executable files. Cracks in particular show as infected because they are both packed, but also attempt to access other files with executable code at specific byte locations and modify them.
ratww 5y ago
Cracking tools often compress their code for whatever reason. Some antivirus apps often report every compressed executable, such as anything using UPX, as being infected. That also happens with demoscene-style code, like MOD players that tend to be included in cracking tools. The reason for that is that once upon a time some virus used UPX (or some demoscene tool), and the antivirus associated that with the virus. But some antiviruses also often detect cracked stuff and report it as being virus, purely because they're killjoys. Commercial antiviruses are a plague as bad as virus themselves, unfortunately.

underlines 5y ago

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. Torrenting, sharing with friends and family is still completely legal in Switzerland. 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. Same for Netflix. But since fragmentation of streaming services started to happen, I'm going back to things like stremio/torrents/DDL sites. 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.

danielrpa 5y ago
Legal considerations aside, pirating can be a fun hobby. In the early days of computers, pirating was one of the best ways to meet other computer geeks! Additionally, thanks to pirates and data hoarders (and the Internet Archive), we have a LOT of intellectual property preserved that would otherwise not exist due to fuzzy ownership and copyright complexities.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
woolion 5y ago
I would like to share that far from sticking it to big companies, piracy hurt independent creators way more than big corporate interests. Sure, software behemoths would be even happier to squeeze out more pennies from individual purchases, but they make their big bucks at governmental and institutional levels. Meanwhile, _consumers_ compare free software to "free" cracked software. If the equation was "does this software bring me 300 CURRENCY of value, or can I get this value out of a free alternative?", the results would be quite different. Which means we would also deal with better financed alternatives... Netflix etc are legal, but if you care about proper rewarding of creators and improving the situation, well.

gtsnexp 5y ago

Beautiful compilation, took me back to the 90s! Thanks!

maccard 5y ago

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). 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. [0] https://www.digitalspy.com/movies/a37170236/black-widow-scarlett-johansson-sues-disney-streaming/ https://www.digitalspy.com/movies/a37170236/black-widow-scar...

kristofferR 5y ago
Yeah, I usually pirate-stream movies using Seren, since even if they are exist in 4K HDR quality, they are just low quality SDR 1080p on the Netflix 4K plan.
antihero 5y ago
I find it extremely annoying that I pay money each month to both Amazon and Apple for their video products, but if I actually want to watch most movies they still want £3.49 to "rent" (which I sometimes do if it is the beginning of the month) it and £8.99 to "buy" it. Some TV series that are over ten years old are still £50+ to buy a "box set" like we are some old morons. Absolutely ridiculous. Thankfully I have infuse on my ATV, so if the price is too high, I pirate.
honkdaddy 5y ago
If you do end up deciding to pull the plug on your streaming subscriptions (I did last year), an illegal but largely safe alternative is to pay for a Plex share. I pay about $3/mo for access to a fellow's server with another few dozen people and have access to hundreds of thousands of TV shows and movies. It's all a fairly manual process, and it takes some digging (I found mine on /r/plexshares), but when it works, it works great.

theon144 5y ago

>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. Well, at least the author is responsible and owns up to being one of the cheaf reasons sites like these die :)

gitanovic 5y ago
Nah, owning up means suffer the consequences of ones actions, in my opinion he owns up to nothing, he barely says he's sorry, but he doesn't care too much about the consequences, that's quite different if not opposite.
- droopyEyelids 5y ago
  I agree, although he might have to 'own up' if someone found his employer and let them know he's working to enable piracy in his free time.