Welcome to Pirate Google!

[milomak]

I think they want to discourage casual downloaders who either do not have the time, the will or the knowledge to use the 'darknets' to download pirate content.

The other danger is that if they do force many casual users to use the said 'darknets' they'll expose them more to criminal activities such as blackhat hackers, illegal pronographers and other criminals. That's more of an argument against cracking down on casual downloaders/uploaders.

i thought i was quite internet savvy but this has all gone over my head.

 

[PeterCH]

i thought i was quite internet savvy but this has all gone over my head.

There are 'darknets' which are hosted on dynamic FTPs, direct download sites, botnets, IRC, P2P with encryption, TOR, usenet, and probably some other older, now hardly used protocols. There are still physical places on earth where you can host virtually anything (with the exception of stuff against the ruling regime) and that probably has a lot of that too, while botnets are also used as storage. Whenever you read stories about black hat hackers and criminals you hear of credit card exchanges, sales of CC, banking and SSN details, virus repositories, places where software crackers upload or distribute their cracks and warez and so on and on.... so there is a 'dark' net out there and you probably have to know someone to get in or hang out in all the right places.

Should kids looking for Hana Montana really rub virtual shoulders with such people? I don't think so.

There's also something else to take into perspective - the deep web. When you do a GOOGLE search, you can get 10,000,000 hits. However, you can only browse the first 50 pages of results. You can't see what the 2 millionth hit will be. Not possible. Yahoo allows you to go a bit deeper but even Yahoo is limited and reaches nowhere near the real depth of the internet.

 

[Nod]

Google also caches a lot of content. Anything you search for, you can look at the cached version of that page, including porn, warez, etc. Isn't google then as responsible as the actual site, for that content?

 

[LazyLion]

Google also caches a lot of content. Anything you search for, you can look at the cached version of that page, including porn, warez, etc. Isn't google then as responsible as the actual site, for that content?

the cached versions only contain html and basic pictures, not files for download. (I think).

 

[milomak]

There are 'darknets' which are hosted on dynamic FTPs, direct download sites, botnets, IRC, P2P with encryption, TOR, usenet, and probably some other older, now hardly used protocols. There are still physical places on earth where you can host virtually anything (with the exception of stuff against the ruling regime) and that probably has a lot of that too, while botnets are also used as storage. Whenever you read stories about black hat hackers and criminals you hear of credit card exchanges, sales of CC, banking and SSN details, virus repositories, places where software crackers upload or distribute their cracks and warez and so on and on.... so there is a 'dark' net out there and you probably have to know someone to get in or hang out in all the right places.

Should kids looking for Hana Montana really rub virtual shoulders with such people? I don't think so.

There's also something else to take into perspective - the deep web. When you do a GOOGLE search, you can get 10,000,000 hits. However, you can only browse the first 50 pages of results. You can't see what the 2 millionth hit will be. Not possible. Yahoo allows you to go a bit deeper but even Yahoo is limited and reaches nowhere near the real depth of the internet.

it sounds like a place i do not want to know. in some ways i guess it relates to the question i asked about child porn. as you say there must be sections of the internet built around who do you know and specific to particular groups. i guess websites that try and ensure they are not picked up by search engines.

 

[Nod]

the cached versions only contain html and basic pictures, not files for download. (I think).

It might contain the content of the .torrent file, as it is plain text, right?

 

[killadoob]

Nod when you open a .torrent file into a torrent manager do you see plain text or do you see the file you want to download?

I see the file i want to download after i load mine into vuze. I see no text

 

[LazyLion]

It might contain the content of the .torrent file, as it is plain text, right?

I doubt it... they take just a snapshot of the page. Very often even the inline graphics don't work. Very often it is only the front page of the site. It is not a comprehensive cache. But you can experiment and see. Do a google search on a torrent and scroll down, then call up one of the cached pages and see if you can download a torrent from the cached site.

 

[PeterCH]

it sounds like a place i do not want to know. in some ways i guess it relates to the question i asked about child porn. as you say there must be sections of the internet built around who do you know and specific to particular groups. i guess websites that try and ensure they are not picked up by search engines.

I would think that not everyone who is involved in those things is into child pron. Most of these sites are run by people who are just as against that sort of thing as everyone else.

But the 'deep' web is also something to consider, people Google for stuff but they can only hope to scrape the very few top spam-vertised/commercial/populist/hyped up sites. It's something to think about whenever you see these hyped up Google results - you can only see the first couple hundred - out of the millions.