Mastodawn

Hacker Memes

@i0null@infosec.exchange

12.2K Followers

510 Following

6K Posts

become one with the zero

Hacker Memes 1h ago

Hacker Memes Mar 9

“They tried to bury us. They did not know we were seeds.”

- Dinos Christianopoulos

Remember that one comic I made about Solarpunk, realism, and dystopia? There's a zine version available now! Feel free to print it out and distribute

Thank you to the person who arranged it ✨ all credits listed in the document

Link to the PDF: https://www.fenestrate.net/imprints/solarpunkrealismdystopia/solarpunkrealismdystopia.pdf

#solarpunk #comic #zine

Show thread

Hacker Memes 1d ago

@Crispius @pancake I've no IDE-a

It’s

Hacker Memes Jun 7, 2024

#caturday overscoping the project

Hacker Memes 1d ago

Ret 3d ago

how it feels to come back to a programming project after a few months

Hacker Memes 1d ago

gene x 1d ago

Activate the gay space lasers!!!! #pride

Hacker Memes 1d ago

Vildis 2d ago

i spent too much time on this

Hacker Memes 2d ago

Chris “nickname” Vreeland May 2

Let the weekend commence

Vildis 2d ago

i spent too much time on this

Show thread

Kevin Karhan

2d ago

@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...

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

Show thread

Jay 2d ago

@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 thread

kajer 2d ago

@jay @kkarhan @vildis you just reminded me of PAR files

Show thread

Jay 2d ago

@kajer @kkarhan @vildis Yep, still use them to this day (entirely transparently to me).

Show thread

Graham Sutherland / Polynomial 2d ago

@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 thread

Jay 1d ago

@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.

Show thread

Graham Sutherland / Polynomial 1d ago

@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 thread

Graham Sutherland / Polynomial 1d ago

@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 thread

Jay 1d ago

@gsuberland @vildis Ugh, the worst.

Show thread

Graham Sutherland / Polynomial 1d ago

@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.

Show thread

Miander 1d ago

@jay @gsuberland @vildis
Huh... I've always seen rars as sus and avoided them.

Show thread

Jay 1d ago

@mian @gsuberland @vildis Not sus at all, just that usenet was a text-only format and the internet wasn't exactly as stable as now so things like PAR files and splitting files for easier transfer/retransfer were needed.

Show thread

Tvorsk 1d ago

@gsuberland @jay @vildis now I'm wondering if this layering of junk might be by accident helping in one way:

if there's a dozen unrelated torrent uploads of the same set of split rars, and none of them are completely seeded, you may be able to mix and match the rar files from all the partial torrent downloads?

Caution, tangent

One thing I personally benefitted from a lot when it comes to rars, back in the floppy disk era, was the ability to create rars with customizable 5/10/20% redundancy of data so it could self heal a few bad sectors away.

It's a feature I wish more backup/archive tools would have today still.

But that's not at all helpful for any kind of internet downloads nowadays (and hasn't been for a long time).

Show thread

xrvs 1d ago

@gsuberland @jay @vildis same for disk files, which even takes more spaces. i just don’t get why people do that

Show thread

Melvin Gundlach 1d ago

@vildis @kkarhan Using file sharing hosts for movies is illegal only for the uploader. BitTorrent and IPFS are illegal for the downloader as well, because of how those things work.
(IANAL, but that’s how it works in Germany)

Show thread

HowToPhil 2d ago

@vildis Okay, .tar.001-.tar.nnn it is then...

Show thread

artemist 2d ago

@vildis movies should only be distributed as uncompressed jp2k

Show thread

XCondE 1d ago

@vildis I can get behind this campaign

Show thread

MisterMoo 1d ago

@vildis Don’t forget the RARs with password protection, like who was that for

Show thread

Pxl Phile 1d ago

@MisterMoo @vildis for people who had all the RAR part files, probably the uploader only

Show thread

Alyssa Voronin 1d ago

@vildis I'm old enough to have split a file across multiple floppy disks. 😅

Show thread

C S 1d ago

@TranshumanBlues @vildis I also remember rar's spiritual predecessor, arj.

Show thread

RejZoR 1d ago

@vildis Parts were for slow unreliable connections back in the day, so you downloaded them one by one and if one failed you just did that piece not whole huge file. When you had it all, there was integrity check when combined that wouldn't be there otherwise and it would tell you which part was corrupted so you just got that one again.

It wasn't for compression purposes, it was for delivery purposes. No one compresses them these days.

Show thread

Simon Zerafa 1d ago

@vildis

But it's 100% spot on and totally accurate 🙂👍

Show thread

Ishan Jain 1d ago

@vildis I had spats with some people over this. I requested them to block rar torrents, they said it's good for saving space! But it saves almost no space when used with video content. I gave up and installed/setup unpackerr

Show thread

Þór Sigurðsson 1d ago

@vildis real use-case for splitting: transferring large files from A to B either over a very crappy network link or via physical media much smaller than the original file. Think diskettes and sub-1Mbit networks over sub-par phone networks.

The problem with pirates is they have a way of doing tihings without understanding why or where that way came from.

TL;DR - Pirates are ignorant at best and could do well to learn their own history.

Show thread