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?
I remember fifteen years ago I wanted to pirate new super Mario bros for Wii but Nintendo hired a lot of bad peers on eMule, it was impossible to download it. It would download it super fast thanks to the hundreds of fake peers that would upload garbage data, but then when completed it would check it and fall back to 0.2% completed. Super frustrating.
In the end I just gave up because I hate and suck at platformers, why would I ever pirate something that I would never play, but at the time in the forums someone said that with IP address filters it was possible to complete the downloads, by blacklisting all the commercial ip address space and allowing only residential (or maybe they were just living in the right spot, at the time in select cities in my country there was an ISP that ran a fiber optic MAN - metropolitan area network, and it was awesome for piracy, as they didn’t block the smb V1 protocol between customers so there were peers that shared gold mines)