9 ms·

RARBG was originally Bulgarian, like many other trackers and warez stuff. Eastern Europe - inside EU or outside of the EU - has always been major player in this

by mrtksn 3y ago

RARBG was originally Bulgarian, like many other trackers and warez stuff. Eastern Europe - inside EU or outside of the EU - has always been major player in this scene. RIP. I'm still curious how it's possible to run such global illegal operations without being exposed or caught. How is it still possible to remain anonymous on the Internet, considering in this age the thing is very mature and well commercialised?

phkahler 3y ago
>> How is it still possible to remain anonymous on the Internet, considering in this age the thing is very mature and well commercialised? Because at the core, identity on the internet is not well defined. Authentication is a hard problem. You might wonder why it's hard, why better more secure protocols haven't emerged. Answer: that makes end to end encryption easy, among other things that give individuals too much power.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- samstave 3y ago
  AI produced Obits, and death certs and detailed descriptions of the death, and then new documents produced via GPT6+ access to APIs to DMV, Embassies, etc to produce new documents sent to your new PO box in [place] etc... - deep-fake assassinations are going to be a thing... PHKahler
themagician 3y ago
The answer to this is easier (and harder) than you might think: just don't say anything. You can get away with quite a bit just by being silent, and for longer than you'd think. A big way that people get away with things for so long is just by not answering questions. Someone says, "Is this [illegal thing] yours" and you say nothing. Now you've got to burn hours and dollars trying to prove someone owns something so that you can go after them. You'll find domains, web hosts, countries, and employees who are all onboard with the same philosophy. When everything requires a subpoena at the highest level to move something forward, it can easily take years for anything to happen at all. Some countries are known for having slow legal systems. Stack jurisdictions with slow court systems and you can start with an 18 month window before anything can happen. You've got a domain in Tonga registered to a company in another country, owned by a large company in another country owned by a trust in a third country. Often small countries with limited resources and archaic or corrupt bureaucracies. And where is it hosted? That's probably another connect the dots. And the site can change hands and then you have to start all over again. Are you going to refocus on the new owner or are you going to spend even more resources trying to track down the former owner? And any of these entities may lead to nothing more than a mule, fake person, or dead person. Sure, it's someone's fault for having inaccurate records—but who? How long has this been going on? Did they know? Was it intentional? It shouldn't be like this, but it is… what do you do now? Are you going to go after the recordkeeper too? You can do illegal shit for years or even decades if you just say nothing and respond to no one.
- expertentipp 3y ago
  > Someone says, "Is this yours" and you say nothing. Now you've got to burn hours and dollars trying to prove someone owns something so that you can go after them. The opposite is the German approach. Shower the cuntiest lawyers with money, lobby for laws allowing to easily pick a victim, bully the victim senseless. Lobby even more and if someone uses the word "corruption" in context of copyrights, bully the shit out of them as well. I'm so glad Anglosphere and German copyrights predators have been perfectly impotent for so many years. They know how to create faceless enemies.
  - wukerplank 3y ago
    Germany really takes the price when it comes to (torrent-based) piracy. The lawyers around it created a nice little ecosystem for themselves. Honeypot torrents and all. They have such a nice system that they don't go for the torrent sites, just milk the torrenters.
    - Fnoord 3y ago
      It also creates a weird liability where hotel owners have to snoop on their users in order to deflect responsibility. It also stimulates self-censorship. VPNs are likely very popular in Germany.
- Mountain_Skies 3y ago
  Law firms must love how many billable hours such quests generate for them.
  - terminalcommand 3y ago
    In my experience law firms would not hop through these. That is the job of hired ethical hackers, police and prosecutor's office. A law firm would be useful in (a) applying to remove illegal content, (b) seize any profit generated by illegal use of clents' content, (c) (if the client requests) horrify users identified of such illegal services, (d) pressure the authorities to crack down on the operation. Most lawyers do not understand the technical details. We do a hell of a good job of understanding experts' findings and put them in a clear legal structure though. Most of the boring but billable job I ever made was searching through company registries, google searches, sanctions searches, panama papers searches, reviewing countless pdfs to either (i) mark them as privileged so they cannot be used as evidence, (ii) scan whether there are any documents that may directly implicate the client and if so try to find a way to legally claim it is unusable. I believe law firms do provide decent service. Billables are there, but no lawyer I know would willingly generate busywork that does not lead anywhere to charge more. OTOH, I HAVE seen instances where a work got reviewed multiple times by different lawyers, because the client was willing to pay more. But even in these edge cases, multiple reviews did benefit the client and they received a better work product. My advice would be establish a good working relationship with a lawyer in the firm that you trust, continuously send work. Ask estimates if you are on a tight budget. But do not be cheap and try to get things done with less budget. Law firms provide a service you need, if you pay them decently you'll receive your money's worth. Lawyers will literally take a bullet for you to make things happen when you need them. Apologies for the long rant :).
RektBoy 3y ago
For example in my EU country, it's legal to download movies for own use. shrug
bubblethink 3y ago
>I'm still curious how it's possible to run such global illegal operations Because it is not obviously illegal. A tracker just points to the content, not the content itself. That may seem meaningless, but then so are the arbitrary demands of copyright holders. They want to have their cake and eat it too. So the system works as intended.
_AzMoo 3y ago
I think it's effectively just that they operate out of jurisdictions that just don't care.
- wkat4242 3y ago
  This, totally.
- mrtksn 3y ago
  Well, Bulgaria used to be a jurisdiction that doesn't care but this is no longer early 2000s. Are there really jurisdictions that don't care and still have connections to the rest of the world? I guess DPRK, Iran, Cuba and maybe a few more can do that but wouldn't they be a problem to the infrastructure provider to work with in first place?
  - costco 3y ago
    Current hosting appears to be in Bosnia: 185.37.100.122 which is probably a server colocated with https://www.netsaap.com/contacts.php https://www.netsaap.com/contacts.php.
  - cykros 3y ago
    Does Iceland actually care much? I don't imagine they'd let you host an actual warez site a la 2000 or so, but a site just hosting magnet links seems like something they'd mostly allow, and they DEFINITELY have the infrastructure to handle it. That all said, I'm always amazed that these sites don't just move to i2p/tor. The torrents themselves have been decentralized with DHT and magnet links for awhile. At the end of the day it seems like they've just been hanging on trying to avoid being so in the shadows that they get less traffic as a result.
  - wkat4242 3y ago
    They still don't quite care though. For example in western Europe it's quite common to get threatening letters as soon as you start torrenting without VPN. In eastern europe this is not happening. Perhaps because copyright infringement is not really a criminal issue but more of a civil law one. Without a private party starting lawsuits on behalf of the copyright owners there is nothing happening. It could be they don't have one.
Gasp0de 3y ago
What are they doing that is illegal? I thought they were just a torrent tracker?
- gersg 3y ago
  Linking to pirated content is illegal in many European countries.
  - ornornor 3y ago
    That’s why magnet links were invented for torrents. They don’t link to any content, just give your client a unique ID to find peers for. Like saying a site mentioning that you should look for “cannabis” if you want to get high is illegal. Selling the substance is illegal, telling you how it’s called isn’t.
    - creativenolo 3y ago
      I didn’t know this but would like to know more. Can you expand on how they try to circumvent linking and do they circumvent it? It is surprising to hear because as a user they _seem_ like a link. Copy the link into something and get the (illegal) files.
      - defrost 3y ago
        Magnet linking is rather like standing on a street corner and regularly yelling "have you got any cannabis"? Here's a random RARBG magnet link that may or may not work magnet:?xt=urn:btih:468043aa374080fed5ff65e4cd8d4fed002986b5&dn=Rizzoli.And.Isles.S05.1080p.WEBRip.x265-RARBG It doesn't link to a file or embed any tracker names but it does name a 1080p HEVC (x265) encoded season pack of season 5 of a US police procedural drama (which is excess and unrequired but humans do like readable names) What it does provide is a unique hash code that matches the exact torrent ... should you find it. When you add that magnet link to your torrent client it triggers the act of polling any public trackers your client knows about and any peers that have "hit me up about magnets" enabled. Ideally word spreads and eventually some other client | tracker hits you back with word of other peers that at least have some cannabis .. (err, bits of Rizzoli&Isles Season 5 HEVC pack).
PrimeMcFly 3y ago
You can still buy pre-paid credit cards in many places, and many places allow you to pay for anonymous servers with cards. Worst case if they had enough money they could rent somewhere and pay for a decent internet connection and not actually live there, so only the equipment would be seized.
- costco 3y ago
  I think the "new meta" is sketchy popup/popunder ad providers that pay BTC/USDT, njal.la/nic.ru/some Chinese registrar paid with crypto or a virtual card, DDOS-guard/Cloudflare to make getting the origin IP annoying, and hosting in an ex-USSR country (and sometimes even mainstream Western providers like Leaseweb or OVH). But that's just the impression I got by occasionally using these sites, looking at domain/IP whois and using one of those Cloudflare deanonymizer sites when it was still up.
adql 3y ago
The problem appears to just be "it's too expensive to run" at least according to the banner
- maccard 3y ago
  How expensive can a link sharing site be to run, genuinely? They're not serving any of the content (unless they are, in which case, yeah...) But if they're just serving up .torrent files or magnet links, these sites should be pretty cheap to run I would assume?
  - mpsprd 3y ago
    I believe rarbg had many "official" torrents that they seeded. This must be part of their costs.
  - tracker1 3y ago
    It tends to run a little more when you're using hosting in a country that doesn't respect US copyright (and similarly for most EU) along with keeping your information private to begin with. When I had looked into it, it's been roughly 2x what a typical western dedicated server provider might charge. This doesn't count the issues with a site that is very popular, from bandwidth to even simple database search overhead. If I were to guess, it's that RarBG probably spent in excess of $10k/month, which isn't much if you're a startup with a runway of VC capital or a revenue stream, it's a lot more if you're in a smaller country or don't have an excess of revenue.
  - dunmalg 3y ago
    Comparatively cheap because you're just handing off magnet links, but when you're serving millions of unique visitors daily, it all adds up.
    - abwizz 3y ago
      true. but there were also some images on the site
waboremo 3y ago
It's very possible to run such without being exposed, but it involves patience and enough cash. Most of the time, these services aren't done in direct exchange for money or from people who have a lot of money in the first place. So what ends up happening is even if they can avoid the shallow legal issues by remaining private, they then run into the problem that nobody can pay for the service (not many options for providing that transaction privately). You might think "just run ads" but the problem there is multifaceted, most are likely going to be using adblockers, on top of that to remain private they'll be locked out of most paying ads and only get the most spammy garbage incentivizing more to use adblocker to visit the site.
- joshspankit 3y ago
  Also: ad companies and payment processors are a weak link. They can provide de-anonymizing information to officials and cut off payments when their corporate values shift.
  - theturtletalks 3y ago
    I always wondered this. Many piracy sites have Adsense or some sort of ads. Can't Google just fingerprint which Adsense account is being used and find the person getting paid?
    - hattmall 3y ago
      There's an entire industry of buying established accounts set up with an unsuspecting person's identity. Idk about Adsense specifically, but you can get Amazon selling and the linked bank account with docs for like $1000.
      - elorant 3y ago
        And how do you get paid? AdSense requires a bank account registered to the same name.
        3y ago

by mrtksn 3y ago

phkahler 3y ago

>> How is it still possible to remain anonymous on the Internet, considering in this age the thing is very mature and well commercialised? Because at the core, identity on the internet is not well defined. Authentication is a hard problem. You might wonder why it's hard, why better more secure protocols haven't emerged. Answer: that makes end to end encryption easy, among other things that give individuals too much power.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
samstave 3y ago
AI produced Obits, and death certs and detailed descriptions of the death, and then new documents produced via GPT6+ access to APIs to DMV, Embassies, etc to produce new documents sent to your new PO box in [place] etc... - deep-fake assassinations are going to be a thing... PHKahler

themagician 3y ago

The answer to this is easier (and harder) than you might think: just don't say anything. You can get away with quite a bit just by being silent, and for longer than you'd think. A big way that people get away with things for so long is just by not answering questions. Someone says, "Is this [illegal thing] yours" and you say nothing. Now you've got to burn hours and dollars trying to prove someone owns something so that you can go after them. You'll find domains, web hosts, countries, and employees who are all onboard with the same philosophy. When everything requires a subpoena at the highest level to move something forward, it can easily take years for anything to happen at all. Some countries are known for having slow legal systems. Stack jurisdictions with slow court systems and you can start with an 18 month window before anything can happen. You've got a domain in Tonga registered to a company in another country, owned by a large company in another country owned by a trust in a third country. Often small countries with limited resources and archaic or corrupt bureaucracies. And where is it hosted? That's probably another connect the dots. And the site can change hands and then you have to start all over again. Are you going to refocus on the new owner or are you going to spend even more resources trying to track down the former owner? And any of these entities may lead to nothing more than a mule, fake person, or dead person. Sure, it's someone's fault for having inaccurate records—but who? How long has this been going on? Did they know? Was it intentional? It shouldn't be like this, but it is… what do you do now? Are you going to go after the recordkeeper too? You can do illegal shit for years or even decades if you just say nothing and respond to no one.

expertentipp 3y ago
> Someone says, "Is this yours" and you say nothing. Now you've got to burn hours and dollars trying to prove someone owns something so that you can go after them. The opposite is the German approach. Shower the cuntiest lawyers with money, lobby for laws allowing to easily pick a victim, bully the victim senseless. Lobby even more and if someone uses the word "corruption" in context of copyrights, bully the shit out of them as well. I'm so glad Anglosphere and German copyrights predators have been perfectly impotent for so many years. They know how to create faceless enemies.
- wukerplank 3y ago
  Germany really takes the price when it comes to (torrent-based) piracy. The lawyers around it created a nice little ecosystem for themselves. Honeypot torrents and all. They have such a nice system that they don't go for the torrent sites, just milk the torrenters.
  - Fnoord 3y ago
    It also creates a weird liability where hotel owners have to snoop on their users in order to deflect responsibility. It also stimulates self-censorship. VPNs are likely very popular in Germany.
Mountain_Skies 3y ago
Law firms must love how many billable hours such quests generate for them.
- terminalcommand 3y ago
  In my experience law firms would not hop through these. That is the job of hired ethical hackers, police and prosecutor's office. A law firm would be useful in (a) applying to remove illegal content, (b) seize any profit generated by illegal use of clents' content, (c) (if the client requests) horrify users identified of such illegal services, (d) pressure the authorities to crack down on the operation. Most lawyers do not understand the technical details. We do a hell of a good job of understanding experts' findings and put them in a clear legal structure though. Most of the boring but billable job I ever made was searching through company registries, google searches, sanctions searches, panama papers searches, reviewing countless pdfs to either (i) mark them as privileged so they cannot be used as evidence, (ii) scan whether there are any documents that may directly implicate the client and if so try to find a way to legally claim it is unusable. I believe law firms do provide decent service. Billables are there, but no lawyer I know would willingly generate busywork that does not lead anywhere to charge more. OTOH, I HAVE seen instances where a work got reviewed multiple times by different lawyers, because the client was willing to pay more. But even in these edge cases, multiple reviews did benefit the client and they received a better work product. My advice would be establish a good working relationship with a lawyer in the firm that you trust, continuously send work. Ask estimates if you are on a tight budget. But do not be cheap and try to get things done with less budget. Law firms provide a service you need, if you pay them decently you'll receive your money's worth. Lawyers will literally take a bullet for you to make things happen when you need them. Apologies for the long rant :).

RektBoy 3y ago

For example in my EU country, it's legal to download movies for own use. shrug

bubblethink 3y ago

>I'm still curious how it's possible to run such global illegal operations Because it is not obviously illegal. A tracker just points to the content, not the content itself. That may seem meaningless, but then so are the arbitrary demands of copyright holders. They want to have their cake and eat it too. So the system works as intended.

_AzMoo 3y ago

I think it's effectively just that they operate out of jurisdictions that just don't care.

wkat4242 3y ago
This, totally.
mrtksn 3y ago
Well, Bulgaria used to be a jurisdiction that doesn't care but this is no longer early 2000s. Are there really jurisdictions that don't care and still have connections to the rest of the world? I guess DPRK, Iran, Cuba and maybe a few more can do that but wouldn't they be a problem to the infrastructure provider to work with in first place?
- costco 3y ago
  Current hosting appears to be in Bosnia: 185.37.100.122 which is probably a server colocated with https://www.netsaap.com/contacts.php https://www.netsaap.com/contacts.php.
- cykros 3y ago
  Does Iceland actually care much? I don't imagine they'd let you host an actual warez site a la 2000 or so, but a site just hosting magnet links seems like something they'd mostly allow, and they DEFINITELY have the infrastructure to handle it. That all said, I'm always amazed that these sites don't just move to i2p/tor. The torrents themselves have been decentralized with DHT and magnet links for awhile. At the end of the day it seems like they've just been hanging on trying to avoid being so in the shadows that they get less traffic as a result.
- wkat4242 3y ago
  They still don't quite care though. For example in western Europe it's quite common to get threatening letters as soon as you start torrenting without VPN. In eastern europe this is not happening. Perhaps because copyright infringement is not really a criminal issue but more of a civil law one. Without a private party starting lawsuits on behalf of the copyright owners there is nothing happening. It could be they don't have one.

Gasp0de 3y ago

What are they doing that is illegal? I thought they were just a torrent tracker?

gersg 3y ago
Linking to pirated content is illegal in many European countries.
- ornornor 3y ago
  That’s why magnet links were invented for torrents. They don’t link to any content, just give your client a unique ID to find peers for. Like saying a site mentioning that you should look for “cannabis” if you want to get high is illegal. Selling the substance is illegal, telling you how it’s called isn’t.
  - creativenolo 3y ago
    I didn’t know this but would like to know more. Can you expand on how they try to circumvent linking and do they circumvent it? It is surprising to hear because as a user they _seem_ like a link. Copy the link into something and get the (illegal) files.
    - defrost 3y ago
      Magnet linking is rather like standing on a street corner and regularly yelling "have you got any cannabis"? Here's a random RARBG magnet link that may or may not work magnet:?xt=urn:btih:468043aa374080fed5ff65e4cd8d4fed002986b5&dn=Rizzoli.And.Isles.S05.1080p.WEBRip.x265-RARBG It doesn't link to a file or embed any tracker names but it does name a 1080p HEVC (x265) encoded season pack of season 5 of a US police procedural drama (which is excess and unrequired but humans do like readable names) What it does provide is a unique hash code that matches the exact torrent ... should you find it. When you add that magnet link to your torrent client it triggers the act of polling any public trackers your client knows about and any peers that have "hit me up about magnets" enabled. Ideally word spreads and eventually some other client | tracker hits you back with word of other peers that at least have some cannabis .. (err, bits of Rizzoli&Isles Season 5 HEVC pack).

PrimeMcFly 3y ago

You can still buy pre-paid credit cards in many places, and many places allow you to pay for anonymous servers with cards. Worst case if they had enough money they could rent somewhere and pay for a decent internet connection and not actually live there, so only the equipment would be seized.

costco 3y ago
I think the "new meta" is sketchy popup/popunder ad providers that pay BTC/USDT, njal.la/nic.ru/some Chinese registrar paid with crypto or a virtual card, DDOS-guard/Cloudflare to make getting the origin IP annoying, and hosting in an ex-USSR country (and sometimes even mainstream Western providers like Leaseweb or OVH). But that's just the impression I got by occasionally using these sites, looking at domain/IP whois and using one of those Cloudflare deanonymizer sites when it was still up.

adql 3y ago

The problem appears to just be "it's too expensive to run" at least according to the banner

maccard 3y ago
How expensive can a link sharing site be to run, genuinely? They're not serving any of the content (unless they are, in which case, yeah...) But if they're just serving up .torrent files or magnet links, these sites should be pretty cheap to run I would assume?
- mpsprd 3y ago
  I believe rarbg had many "official" torrents that they seeded. This must be part of their costs.
- tracker1 3y ago
  It tends to run a little more when you're using hosting in a country that doesn't respect US copyright (and similarly for most EU) along with keeping your information private to begin with. When I had looked into it, it's been roughly 2x what a typical western dedicated server provider might charge. This doesn't count the issues with a site that is very popular, from bandwidth to even simple database search overhead. If I were to guess, it's that RarBG probably spent in excess of $10k/month, which isn't much if you're a startup with a runway of VC capital or a revenue stream, it's a lot more if you're in a smaller country or don't have an excess of revenue.
- dunmalg 3y ago
  Comparatively cheap because you're just handing off magnet links, but when you're serving millions of unique visitors daily, it all adds up.
  - abwizz 3y ago
    true. but there were also some images on the site

waboremo 3y ago

It's very possible to run such without being exposed, but it involves patience and enough cash. Most of the time, these services aren't done in direct exchange for money or from people who have a lot of money in the first place. So what ends up happening is even if they can avoid the shallow legal issues by remaining private, they then run into the problem that nobody can pay for the service (not many options for providing that transaction privately). You might think "just run ads" but the problem there is multifaceted, most are likely going to be using adblockers, on top of that to remain private they'll be locked out of most paying ads and only get the most spammy garbage incentivizing more to use adblocker to visit the site.

joshspankit 3y ago
Also: ad companies and payment processors are a weak link. They can provide de-anonymizing information to officials and cut off payments when their corporate values shift.
- theturtletalks 3y ago
  I always wondered this. Many piracy sites have Adsense or some sort of ads. Can't Google just fingerprint which Adsense account is being used and find the person getting paid?
  - hattmall 3y ago
    There's an entire industry of buying established accounts set up with an unsuspecting person's identity. Idk about Adsense specifically, but you can get Amazon selling and the linked bank account with docs for like $1000.
    - elorant 3y ago
      And how do you get paid? AdSense requires a bank account registered to the same name.
      - 3y ago