Constantly renting a seedbox is rather expensive (a $5/month would be something like 10GB on a 100Mbit server shared between 30 people - a worthless hastle).
[/quote]
I don’t see what’s wrong with 10 GB. You just FTP the download to your computer, delete it from the seedbox, and continue. Even if you’re sharing a 100 Mbit pipe with 30 people, that would still be faster than many residential pipes (including mine). Either way, I’d like to mention that I’ve never actually used a seedbox, so I’m speaking on a purely theoretical level, and not from experience.</p>
<p>
[QUOTE=QwertyKey]
Usenet is a good option, but you have to pay every month for it.
[/quote]
Not true. You can get a pay-by-download plan from Astraweb with no speed or time limits.</p>
<p>
[QUOTE=michuncle]
Bad news this morning for paying Usenet customers… A federal court judge ruled in favor of the RIAA against Usenet for massive copyright violations.
[/quote]
[QUOTE=ArsTechnica]
Usenet.com also resorted to stonewalling legal questionnaires, sending employees to Europe to avoid depositions, wiping hard drives, and failing to turn over e-mail after being sued in 2007 by the music labels.
[/quote]
Sounds like they really pıssed off the judge. Most Usenet providers try to keep a much lower profile.</p>
<p>
[QUOTE=michuncle]
If the settlement includes releasing customer account information for possible copyright violations
[/quote]
Nothing to worry about there…customer account information is not sufficient evidence without actual logs showing that copyrighted information was downloaded by that account, and I highly doubt those are even kept. Even if they were, they would have been the first files to be deleted when Usenet was slapped with the lawsuit.</p>
<p>Hirako, you can’t leave anything on the server to actually seed. You’re suggesting using a seedbox, FTPing down from it, deleting the data from the box, and downloading something else? First off, that TOTALLY disregards the purpose of a seedbox (larger upload pipe than residential), and you have to hit&run on everything you grab. </p>
<p>And 30 people splitting 100Mbit connection (keeping in mind that’s total between up and down) is better than your home connect? Do you live in the woods? It’s certinly not better than any college connection or the VAST majority of residential connections in the US (including my crappy Comcast 6/512K connection). </p>
<p>And for the pay by download amount, you STILL have to PAY for it… Same problem, except you’ll pay in a different time interval.</p>
<p>Could just be that it’s an AT&T hotspot, and I’m on AT&T. I’ve never tried connecting on a laptop, but my iPhone connects with no prompts at all (thank you OS 3.0!).</p>
<p>Many other restaurants have free WiFi, though. Starbucks just came to mind first. (I personally take advantage of Paradise Bakery’s free WiFi the most often!)</p>
[/quote]
The purpose of the seedbox is whatever you want it to be. They are providing a service. You can use it for whatever reason you want.</p>
<p>
[QUOTE=QwertyKey]
you have to hit&run on everything you grab
[/quote]
Not true. You can leave it seeding long enough to reach a ratio of 1+. I seriously doubt that most people will download enough stuff to not be able to seed to 1.</p>
<p>
[QUOTE=QwertyKey]
And 30 people splitting 100Mbit connection (keeping in mind that’s total between up and down) is better than your home connect?
[/quote]
Yes, I get 2.5 Mbit, which is slower than 100/30 = 3.33 Mbit.</p>
<p>
[QUOTE=QwertyKey]
Do you live in the woods?
[/quote]
Nope, I live in suburbia and have the 2nd or 3rd highest tier AT&T DSL connection. Internet speeds in the US suck balls.</p>
<p>
[QUOTE=QwertyKey]
I like how most of the solutions on how to download things without paying for them involve paying for something else.
[/quote]
It’s all about spending the least amount of money possible. If you really don’t want to spend any money, it’s fairly easy to locate XDCC bots on IRC that will serve this kind of stuff for free, but I don’t know if they’re very reliable.</p>
<p>There is also the option of setting up a torrent client with a web interface (such as [url=<a href=“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torrentflux]TorrentFlux[/url”>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torrentflux]TorrentFlux[/url</a>]; I prefer running [url=<a href=“http://libtorrent.rakshasa.no/]rTorrent[/url”>http://libtorrent.rakshasa.no/]rTorrent[/url</a>] in a [url=<a href=“http://www.gnu.org/software/screen/]Screen[/url”>Screen - GNU Project - Free Software Foundation]Screen[/url</a>] session, but that requires considerably more technical know-how) and an FTP (SFTP if you want to avoid DPI by your college’s network administrators) daemon on a computer/server at your home which you leave on 24/7, and then just download to that and (S)FTP the files from it to the computer you have at college. I know several people doing this, as the only real cost is electricity for running that computer 24/7 (which you can minimize by building/using a headless Linux server with barebones hardware), which they can discreetly pass on to their parents (just stick it in the closet in your room, and they’ll never notice; if you use low-end hardware, the restricted airflow shouldn’t be an issue). However, the biggest problem with this method is horrible upload speeds on residential internet connections; it could take days to get a few GBs FTP’d over, even if it only took a few hours to torrent them. Also, you would need to set up a wake-on-LAN system so that if there were a power blip and the computer turned off, you’d be able to remotely boot it again.</p>
<p>Most of the US has cable available atleast. 2.5Mbit is certinly not good.</p>
<p>If you’re grabbing everything from public trackers maybe you can seed to 1. If you’re trying to download from private trackers you’ll have to leave stuff up for days, especially with 3 Mbits. And if it’s anything old, you’ll spend all month getting it to 1.</p>
<p>Paying the least money possible would probably be using a VPN to tunnel traffic through, and using the college’s connection. That way, you get to use the college’s connection, and they won’t know what the traffic is. Filesharefreak mentioned it a while back for people who were being throttled by Comcast (though in that case it was much better to get a seedbox because of the connection speed differences). Only thing was I don’t know about the magnitude of traffic being an issue (and if it is, it would still be an issue with anything else).</p>
<p>As for running traffic through your home connect, probably a great idea for people who have fios (and are getting something like 20/20 or 25/25), but as you said, most of us can’t do that very well (I only have 512k up personally).</p>
<p>BTW, your last quote isn’t me.</p>
<p>LogicWarrior, the solution for not paying at all is to use free http downloads and warez boards. It’s slow and annoying but free.</p>
[/quote]
That’s true, cable is available here, but it is not much better (10M/256K or 10M/512K max). More importantly, it’s even more asymmetric than DSL.
[QUOTE=QwertyKey]
2.5Mbit is certinly not good.
[/quote]
The fastest AT&T DSL connection available here is 5M/512K (and has been so for almost a decade), so my connection is not exactly horrible (by American standards).</p>
<p>
[QUOTE=QwertyKey]
If you’re trying to download from private trackers you’ll have to leave stuff up for days, especially with 3 Mbits. And if it’s anything old, you’ll spend all month getting it to 1.
[/quote]
Most of the private trackers I use require users to either seed to a certain ratio (~0.60) on each individual torrent or leave it running for a certain number of days (~5). I would simply find a popular torrent to buffer my ratio, and then not seed the other stuff to 1 if it didn’t reach that by the end of the required time.</p>
<p>
[QUOTE=QwertyKey]
Paying the least money possible would probably be using a VPN to tunnel traffic through, and using the college’s connection.
[/quote]
That’s another option, and may indeed be the best.</p>
<p>Ideally, the best setup would be for a few people at each college using such methods to circumvent the college’s downloading restrictions to obtain files which they would then share over the LAN with the rest of the college. You can use software such as [url=<a href=“http://dtella.org/]Dtella[/url”>http://dtella.org/]Dtella[/url</a>] to do this. By restricting the client to connecting with IP addresses within the college’s subnet, you can ensure that copyright holders never find out. I know people going to Purdue and CMU who have told me that terabytes of files are available on their internal Dtella networks.</p>
<p>I remember back when we used to download things in the 1.44 meg .zips. When games jumped over to being multi-cd it was pretty much the worst thing ever.</p>
<p>That’s why you download a freeware application that lets you download YouTube videos and convert them to MP3. Then you can listen to whatever songs you want. You just need to find YouTube videos for music videos that have great quality and you’re set.</p>
<p>RacinReaver, you would have been on something like 28.8K back then though. Games may be 300-times bigger but connection speeds are 300-times faster as well. You also didn’t even have warez-boards like there are now. What were you using, BBS?</p>
<p>Yeah, there are always some old-schoolers who refuse to use new technology. I’ve never understood that though; private torrent trackers are able to handle a lot more content and users with much lower bandwidth usage and much longer retention times. They can [scale</a> up](<a href=“http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000795.html]scale”>http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000795.html) in a way that a warez board using the traditional client-server model never could.</p>
<p>This is a novel idea, and you might think I’m kind of crazy… but you could try, you know, <em>paying</em> for music instead of downloading. Downloading is illegal; just because people do it doesn’t mean it’s okay. Just buy the CD or buy the songs on iTunes.</p>