Vildisi spent too much time on this
Kevin Karhan 
@vildis +9001%
Why they don't go with tar or pax or plain bzip2 / xz is beyond me.
- But I guess they are too lazy to use #BitTorrent and/or #IPFS and merely want to prop up #Filehosting providers...
Jay 
@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...?
StarkRG@jay @kkarhan @vildis It's not so much "legacy" as it is that Usenet continues to be where a lot of pirated stuff originates.
Segmenting a file lets you check individual parts of a large download for errors while other parts are continuing to download, and then can redownload any corrupt segments. Bittorrent does this inherently, but other download methods don't.
Assuming the people making the things know what they're doing, they'd turn off compression entirely and just segment.
@StarkRG @jay @vildis personally I'd rather still compress stuff for speed reasons, as bandwith is the limiting factor, not computational power or storage.
- That being said that too can be done by setting compression factor to 0.
https://infosec.space/@kkarhan/114789676621551304
I don't host, seed, download or distribute anything copyrighted, but like with @vxunderground and @VXShare do for #Antivirus I've seen enough groups also do some basic #encryption as to avoid any #ContentID-style matching and thus automated #DMCA takedowns...
- I just think that #RAR is bad by any modern standards and the whole "streaming" aspect can be facilitated both with #BitTorrent clients (see #PopcornTime) and #IPFS (by sequential-only downloads)…
Kevin Karhan :verified: (@[email protected])
@[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] *I KNOW THAT!* - I literally did that myself 30+ years ago when I had a handed-down #Windows95 *T H I C C "pizzabox"* which didn't have a CD-Burner, only a CD-ROM and even if I had CD-RWs back in 1999, they would've been more expensive than a 10-pack of 3,5" 1440kB FDDs and it would've been wasteful for stuff in the 2-10 MB region. Granted #RAR is outdated and even if we assume we've to split files still to *systematically abuse free tiers of file hosters* (which I disapprove of because it's not only a bit antisocial but also susceptible to #LinkRot), there are now better options like #7zip that are even easier to use than `tar` & `bzip2` & `xz`…
Video is already compressed. Using lossless compression on already lossy compressed data won't get you a smaller file. It's also why transmitting compressed video over a compressed connection ends up seeming slower than transmitting non-compressed data, the actual data rate remains the same, but you're not getting any benefit out of the compression.
I agree that segmentation is unnecessary for bittorrent, but many torrents are just straight copies of usenet posts.
VirusShare ☣@kkarhan @StarkRG @jay @vildis @vxunderground The simple encryption applied to the torrents here is to prevent anti-malware from triggering and deleting the malware a researcher is trying to download. Added benefit is the compression of the zip file because for some bandwidth and storage *is* an issue.
@VXShare @StarkRG @jay @vildis @vxunderground OFC, if their corporate firewall didn't blocklist your domain, most #MITM-based "#NetworkSecurity" solutions and "#EndpointProtection" will checksum files and instantly yeet them into the shadow realm.
- Researchers should OFC only run those said malware only for research purposes and on #airgapped, sanctioned systems but they need to get their hands on them in the first place.
And lets be honest: Like with chemistry and medicine, one wants to have a supplier that isn't shady af but actually transparent.
- The "alternative" would be to go into some "dark corners" and risk getting something else entirely.