The Chu Forums

Just so you know, don't use isohunt.com anymore. It's one of a couple sites i usually surf that recently somehow automatically installed spyware onto my comp. It redirects my browser giving me false "you have a virus" messages. so dumb... now i gotta clean my machine...

I get those redirected browser things too.. shouldn't be anything too malicious though, just adware. I see it quite often from a lot of sites. Just make sure you don't click okay and just close the window.

stop surfing for pr0n and you'll be ok.

oh, and stop buying viagra online too. and stop shipping it to my house.

isohunt has been fail for ages now. MPAA and CRIA heavily track that site as there are ongoing court cases that have yet to be resolved.
not to mention some honger in richmond runs the site!

in general people shouldn't be using public trackers anymore anyways. way too much attention, not to mention there are conspiracy theorists out there who have suggested MPAA/RIAA/CRIA etc are behind quite a few of these public trackers. leaked documents have already proven the existence of one such website which has since been taken down. even if this is not the case, it's easy to show that at the very least these associations have commissioned bots to seed torrents with corrupt data as well as collect ip address data.

the good private trackers will ban suspicious peers (bots), releases are posted much faster, torrents are seeded for far longer, download speeds are much better, connections to the tracker can be encrypted with SSL, even browsing the index page can be over HTTPS. Still there's no way to be completely certain that big brother isn't watching due to the nature of the bittorrent protocol. The downsides to private trackers are the necessity to maintain a respectable upload/download ratio and the likelihood that you need an invite to join one.

the answer? usenet.
since the connection is from your computer to the server directly there's nowhere for anybody but your ISP to monitor what your are downloading. To resolve even that, many usenet servers offer SSL encryption. most usenet servers will also saturate all your available bandwidth, so download speeds are great. shaw and telus both have usenet servers, but they are not as fast nor do they offer encryption. i pay 10$ a month for unlimited downloading on an SSL encrypted connection. i guess the downsides here are that you have to pay for a good service, and the retention of data is typically only about a year (60days with shaw/telus). the plus? I can download a 1080p blu-ray rip in about 4hours over an encrypted connection.

Which usenet server do you sub to?
And can you send a list of the more reliable newsgroup addies for tv shows?

i vote tys as our resident downloader. give your requests to him and expect to see it in 4 hours.

can anyone find a link for "sing off"? i sorta want to see the other groups that didn't win.

i can d/l if you want.
can burn and bring to work tomorrow if you want to pick it up. i'm only a few min away...

sure. but you have to tell me where your work is and what time you're there. thanks man.