this post was submitted on 18 Oct 2024
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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

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[–] [email protected] 106 points 4 weeks ago (24 children)

I'm an older GenZ born in the late 90s and I've had to show a few younger peers how to torrent recently.

The idea of you needing a "special" program just for downloading a file seems to throw some of them off.

I do know a few young people are tech/programming wizards but "generally tech savy" people seem to be declining. It's either you're really into it or barely know anything outside popular apps.

One other thing I've noticed, People just seem to be more paranoid about downloading stuff not already installed on their devices. Which its good people give at least a bit of a shit about security but convincing people Firefox isn't a virus gets a bit annoying (Yes I've had that conversation).

[–] [email protected] 9 points 4 weeks ago* (last edited 4 weeks ago) (5 children)

Why can't browsers treat torrents as just another protocol for downloads, so that if you haven't got a default set for torrent out magnet mimetypes, it just downloads it in the included download manager?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 weeks ago

i think brave browser for the desktop does that but i'm not sure since i switched to firefox a long time ago.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 weeks ago

Brave does I think. I didn't allow it to do so the one time I saw the pop up and I would not want that to happen unless I was always behind a VPN.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 4 weeks ago* (last edited 4 weeks ago) (1 children)

This would be terrible, because any website could potentially make you a seeder for „illegal“ content while normally browsing the web without a VPN. Meaning, your real IP address may accidentally be recorded by some lawerers and you'll get a fine for whatever you accidentally shared (very dangerous, depending on country).

There are already solutions for webtorrents, but at least these scripts can be blocked.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 weeks ago (1 children)

No Herr officer, I was just trying to download my favorite distros, and I don't know where all that Metallica/Disney/Nintendo came from.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 weeks ago

While I appreciate the reference, most kids probably don't know about the whole Metallica Napster thing.

[–] [email protected] 37 points 4 weeks ago* (last edited 4 weeks ago) (2 children)

Because then your browser would itself have to be a torrent client.

The way torrents download is fundamentally different from how a standard http download works, which is why they have a specialist implementation. Browsers dont want to bother bringing a whole load of new code and associated bugs into the browser to do a job which isn't really connected with the browser's main responsibility, which is browsing the web.

Just because torrents come from the web shouldn't make it the browser's responsibility to deal with them.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 weeks ago

I think pocket and quite the slew of unrelated features disagrees with you. Seems like most browsers are happy to be the everything app.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 weeks ago (1 children)

You just reminded me there actually was a browser called Torch that could download torrents like a normal download. It was basically just Chrome with a built-in torrent client.

I remember trying it out when it first came out in 2012. It never caught on and looks like the last release was in 2020.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 weeks ago

Opera had torrent support at the time I stopped using it, I never heard they had discontinued that feature but I'm assuming they did, both because it probably would have been mentioned in this comment chain already and also because making that decision should have been inevitable. I never used bittorrent before joining oink, I think I remember on joining thinking I would just use opera and then installing utorrent after finding out client whitelisting was a thing. Maybe I was already on oink when opera added the feature and I thought I'd try it because I was already using opera. Maybe this is all a fever dream, who can really say.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 weeks ago

I'm sure they probably could but they don't really have the incentive to add support for them.

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