this post was submitted on 18 Oct 2024
763 points (94.8% liked)

Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

55110 readers
575 users here now

⚓ Dedicated to the discussion of digital piracy, including ethical problems and legal advancements.

Rules • Full Version

1. Posts must be related to the discussion of digital piracy

2. Don't request invites, trade, sell, or self-promote

3. Don't request or link to specific pirated titles, including DMs

4. Don't submit low-quality posts, be entitled, or harass others



Loot, Pillage, & Plunder

📜 c/Piracy Wiki (Community Edition):


💰 Please help cover server costs.

Ko-Fi Liberapay
Ko-fi Liberapay

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] spacedout@lemmy.ml 9 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months 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?

[–] tiramichu@lemm.ee 39 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months 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.

[–] ayaya@lemdro.id 6 points 2 months 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.

[–] christian@lemmy.ml 6 points 2 months 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.

[–] spacedout@lemmy.ml 2 points 2 months 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.

[–] Berny23@lemmy.sdf.org 11 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months 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.

[–] spacedout@lemmy.ml 5 points 2 months 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.

[–] entropicdrift@lemmy.sdf.org 1 points 2 months ago

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

[–] HouseWolf@lemm.ee 6 points 2 months ago

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

[–] lightnsfw@reddthat.com 2 points 2 months 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.

[–] normal_user@hexbear.net 1 points 2 months ago

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