management company Sandvine reveals that cloud storage, YouTube, and other apps have taken over.
X for doubt.
Needless to say, BitTorrent is nowhere to be found in the list of ‘top apps’.
Because Bit Torrent isn’t a freaking “app”, it’s a protocol spread over a hundred different programs and services.
First, sandvine calls it an app for legacy reasons, but 100% that is the bit torrent protocol. I have insider knowledge that this is the case. So don’t get hung up on that. But you’re right to doubt them. They are a shell of what they once were. Their fixed deployments are quite small now and do not represent fiber at all, which just hit over 50% in availability in dense US areas. Sandvine is still in Comcast at 100% coverage and in Cox, but they’re tiny. Sandvine is a bit sparse in mobile, but still there solidly. I believe that bit torrent is rare in mobile. Like no shit. I believe them that it’s down in fixed copper (dsl and cable). But they’re missing 100% of fiber. Sandvine does pattern recognition primarily. It used to be great. I suspect it’s still pretty good. They claim better than 90% accuracy. I’m sure the data they have is correct. But what they get from their customers is definitely questionable at times. They’ve made some huge mistakes in the past, grabbing data for too short a period of time or not across a broad enough customer base. I’m sure that’s still the case. What we need is someone like Kentik, Deepfield, and anyone else doing flow correlation to release a report. But they won’t because no company gives away that kind of data anymore. So we’re stuck guessing.
My head just tried to explode
Lol this is like saying
“Needless to say, TCP/IP is nowhere to be found in the list of ‘top apps’”
Of course it isn’t you numpties
Exactly! Hypertext Transfer Protocol is dead, I can’t find the app anywhere.
It’s a sad thing to see one more sign of how the big tech companies dominated the internet. A lot of people today don’t even know how to use their devices, but only how to use the products offered by those conpanies.
Piracy and torrenting was always a service issue. Sure, there is some core of people who will never pay for content or a service. But, a lot of people will be happy to pay something for content, so long as they can get what they want without too much hassle. And that has largely been the landscape for the past decade or so. Apple Music popped up and gave people the same sort of access to music Napster did, at a cost which wasn’t ridiculous. It also didn’t host a million viruses and didn’t carry with it any sort of moral questions or legal risks. Netflix did the same for movies and TV, shrinking the space for video piracy. And many movie and TV producers are finally accepting the new paradigm and trying to carve out their own space which mimics the speed and convenience of piracy, while still earning them some money. We probably have a long way to go and a lot of growing pains. But, the fact that torrent traffic is falling and official streaming services’ bandwidth usage is growing shows that they are doing something right. That said, I suspect that we will see them fluctuate for a while as customers punish the more outlandish attempt to monetize streaming services. When the official services start getting too bad again, we’ll see more black flags flying. And that’s a good thing.
A lot of people today don’t even know how to use their devices, but only how to use the products offered by those conpanies.
That has always been the case.
It also might appear lower due to people using vpns for for torrenting on residential networks
The article touches on that. VPN traffic is itself a small category, so even if we assume all VPN traffic is torrenting, that doesn’t push it very far up the charts.
Sandvine uses pattern recognition primarily. VPN doesn’t matter. It still gets categorized correctly.
The writings been on the all for a long time. Public trackers are as good as dead. People have held on to a cocky attitude that there will always be somebody to take up the mantle but that hasn’t been true in so long. Anti-piracy has been winning by war of attrition.
The interest in bittorrent usage has been on a gradual decline for good decade at least. Try looking for some recent shows these days and you’ll be hard pressed to find many seeders for even popular ones. You’ll still be able to download it eventually but it’s a long way down from the heyday when obscure content was highly available.
These days everyone has streaming subscriptions or is logging in with someones account. The dwindling number of torrenters will download and watch relatively soon after release. Then the torrent dies real quick.
I’m pretty sure to much of the younger generations piracy means getting content from pirate streaming sites more than anything. The decline of PC usage has got to be a big factor too. There just isn’t anymore nerd culture of your PC being your main device much less leaving it running 24/7 with a torrent client. I bet soon enough as gen alpha comes of age, bittorrent will be a forgotten technology of the ancients.
Pirate traffic did decline dramatically because of fair and convenient streaming options. But now the streaming options aren’t fair or convenient anymore and piracy is on the rise again. The studios got greedy again, feeling that they hold all the power over a helpless and captive audience, and they miscalculated. Yo ho ho!
Exactly - I expect a rise, to be honest. However, I’m also aware of some personal bias…
like it or not. torrenting and keep it on local drive is good for preservation because we have shit like this https://www.ign.com/articles/anime-fans-frustrated-as-funimation-digital-copies-wont-move-to-crunchyroll
Really? We’ve been able to stream torrents for a few years now. I use it more than ever now because of this.
You dont have to be a nerd to run Stremio
Same for “lost media” kinda stuff. I would usually find Torrents with seeds for obscure bands from my dad’s old country, that he loves listening to, but nowadays, all that stuff is gone, and no way to purchase the bootleg of a concert in Eastern Europe, in 1992.
Hell, even official albums are hard to get, with being out of press, the rights being lost to the ages and stuff like that. Even with music from when I was young, and I’m not even 40.
Last time I ranted about it, people told me to just find the stuff on YouTube and download it from there, it was atrocious.
Idk man i have a pirate box running public trackers and it finds everything eventually
For real. My server always finds media within minutes of being posted. Granted I primarily use Usenet, and only BitTorrent as a fall back, but even still, piracy has never been easier for me.
The interest in bittorrent usage has been on a gradual decline for good decade at least. Try looking for some recent shows these days and you’ll be hard pressed to find many seeders for even popular ones. You’ll still be able to download it eventually but it’s a long way down from the heyday when obscure content was highly available.
I’m living in a country of an obscure language, and this is not really a problem here, so I’m a bit surprised to read this.
I believe the low seed counts are due to the absolute trash out there. Actual good shows and movies are still strong. Niche items have always been hard to find. But we’re saturated with garbage entertainment these days. No one really cares to seed what they watch once and then never think about again.
I used to use BitTorrent a ton to download and seed Linux ISOs because their servers would get slammed close to launch, but that hasn’t been an issue for quite a while (they probably use CDNs now) and now I just grab them directly over HTTP.
I wonder how much torrent traffic CDNs have replaced.
Got any good HTTP links worth bookmarking for Linux ISOs? lol
Distrowatch has a torrent RSS that can be added to qbittorrent to automatically fetch new releases https://distrowatch.com/news/torrents.xml
I am always surprised that even tech-savy ppl I know mostly are completely unaware of torrenting. They all use their streaming websites with tons of popups and ads and complain when they have to find a new one every now and then, I don’t get why they just won’t torrent even after showing them.
Edit: by streaming sites I mean pirate ones
I don’t get why they won’t just torrent
You have to find a torrent that hasn’t been subject to a DMCA takedown, research the ones found to make sure it’s good quality, not a virus, and has enough seeders to be viable. Make sure you have a VPN and that it’s up to date so your ISP doesn’t start sending angry letters. Then you have to wait for the torrent to download and make sure you have enough storage space for it.
And you “don’t get” why they prefer a click and go option?
You have to find a streaming site that hasnt been subject to a DMCA takedown, where it has what you want to watch in good quality with the correct dubbing and subs, navigate through the popups (I even know some who do so without ublock), change your DNS in most cases because it’s been blocked by the ISP DNS (favorite method of blocking in france), and make sure the player actually works. Where I live you don’t really need a vpn for torrenting. Streaming is far from a “click and go” option. The only advantage I can find for streaming is not requiring disk space.
Pretty sure folks are referring to streaming sites meaning like Netflix. The person you are responding to said “click and go” referring to services like YouTube and Hulu not sketchy “streaming” sites like what you are describing that require some hoops to go through to make sure.you don’t download a virus.
Sorry I obviously meant pirate streaming sites. Added an edit to the main comment
It takes a weekend to setup initially but a radarr/sonarr pipeline is way way easier to use than a sketchy streaming site. Just add the show when you think of it (even if it hasn’t come out yet) and it’ll handle the rest. You can also share instances easily among friends
Mullvad vpn plus ublock origin plus thepiratebay . org ? That’ll be fine for the majority of stuff
torrent for PC are no longer bound by one website anymore. we can pull many sources at once with Jackett
They are not tech-savy.
They are computer science students who mess around with linux, idk how else you could call them
Because torrenting is strongly enforced by the law where I live, in Germany.
In france neither are enforced afaik
Im surprised Usenet doesn’t get mentioned more, except rare anime or shows Usenet has all the pros none of the headaches of torrents
I have tried to get on this “Usenet” a few times but to no success. The software was ass, and the instructions for it were worse.
Any handy guides, anyone??
I used to be on usenet during the 90s-2000s. And it seemed easier?
I tried it recently around the pandemic and it felt confusing for me! I used SABnzbd. I had to subscribe to two servers to get overlapping coverage. After a month I gave up on it.
Even among pirates, file-sharing is no longer as relevant as it once was.
Oh my sweet summer child.
