VildisJun 27
i spent too much time on this
Show threadKevin Karhan Jun 27

@vildis +9001%

Why they don't go with tar or pax or plain bzip2 / xz is beyond me.

#tech #shitpost #tar #pax #bzip2 #bunzip2 #xz #compression

Show threadJay Jun 27
@kkarhan @vildis It's legacy stuff from the usenet days. One file being broken allows you to just download missing blocks for it from other usenet providers so that you don't have to redownload the entire thing all over again because one piece is missing/broken on your provider. Most tools these days basically make the rar files essentially transparent anyways, so you never really need to worry about it...?
Show threadGraham Sutherland / PolynomialJun 28
@jay @kkarhan@infosec.space @vildis right but torrents literally do the block integrity check and redownload as part of the protocol and infohash, with even better granularity. and if you want to seed you have to keep the split rars *and* the unpacked media, so it takes up double the disk space.
Show threadJay 
@gsuberland @vildis What you're seeing there are people downloading from usenet and just uploading to torrent sites then. There's very little point in uploading split rars to torrent sites as you point out (though there are video apps out there that allow you to transparently play media directly from split rar files) without needing to extract.
Jun 28 at 12:40amWeb
Show threadGraham Sutherland / PolynomialJun 28
@jay @vildis yup, exactly. I know all the scene history, it's just very annoying when people continue to do this. most of it comes down to the idea that it allows you to verify the split rar hashes against the release group's hashes to prove it wasn't tampered with during the reupload, but nobody ever does that anyway, especially on TV/movies, and it's a huge headache.
Show threadGraham Sutherland / PolynomialJun 28
@jay @vildis there's also a bunch of nonsense people get up to like someone uploading to a private group as a split rar, then another group getting hold of it and doing a public rerelease, except of course they want to bundle their group's NFO with it. but they can't do that without changing the rar hashes and ruining the Purity™. so what do they do? they pack the split rars into a *new* set of split rars, just to add the nfo/diz file. and then someone uploads that verbatim as a torrent.
Show threadJay Jun 28
@gsuberland @vildis Ugh, the worst.
Show threadGraham Sutherland / PolynomialJun 28
@jay @vildis so you get utterly ludicrous situations like a torrent of a split rar of a split rar of an iso file and you need triple the disk space free for unpacking if you want to seed.