Discussion summary

A discussion on qbittorrent allegedly breaking out of sandbox to commit crimes, with varied opinions on piracy, copyright, and corporate practices.

What the discussion says

  • Some argue users are responsible for monitoring their computers.
  • Others highlight the disparity in enforcement between individuals and corporations.
  • Many discuss the ethics and economics of piracy and media consumption.
  • Concerns about corporate piracy being overlooked while individual piracy faces harsh penalties.
“It's up to you to keep your eyes on the monitor at all times.”
— kcb
“There is all the difference in the world between individual and corporate piracy.”
— mmooss

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  • Hacker News
  • There is an interesting case here with the "Hadopi" law in France, a particularly controversial anti-piracy law. They scan IP addresses for illegal filesharing and if it connects to your ISP, then you get a notification, and potentially get prosecuted for repeated offences.

    But they can't prosecute you for sharing that file, they don't know if it is you, someone in your household, a hacker, or that hypothetical rogue AI. Usually, committing crimes require intent, and it is up to the accusation to prove it, meaning it is quite difficult to prove you are actually a pirate.

    So instead they prosecute you for not securing your internet connection despite several notifications to do so.

    In practice, very few people got convicted, and it never got further than the equivalent of a traffic fine. In the end whole system was an expensive failure, and most of its power was reduced to sending scary emails and sometimes letters, as most of the more serious stuff was deemed unconstitutional.

  • Whatever you do, don't download nzget, and don't download sonarr/radarr, and don't download plex media server, and don't use AI to search for the best device that support "emby direct playback x265/AV1", and don't connect that to your media server, and whatever you do don't invite friends and family to your server, and do not install a media request app so they can just request things to automatically pull from The Web.

    Definitely, definitely do NOT have an AI assist you doing all this in 1 hour on your computer.

  • Well shoot, I guess QBittorrent is worth a trillion dollars.
  • I found a few websites where it looks like qbittorrent instances are communicating to conspire and download illegal copies of copyrighted material.
  • If OP is willing to cooperate, I'd like to offer an independent investigation on site, and I will be bringing pizza
    by tux3
  • Love it. AI as Responsibility Laundering. Like the gun that kills people rather than the murderer.
  • This resonates with me. The past few months, frontier AI labs were rushing to announce "no, our AI bot broke out of its sandbox and committed crime first and harder than yours".

    I said to so friends back then: if I posted about how I ran GLM 5.2 or whatever I was running then in some shoddily built sandbox and it escaped and accidentally hacked some US company, I'd probably already have been extradited to the US and be awaiting sentencing. But when a hyperscaler does it, they just get inflated stock prices.

  • I'll copy the whole announcement here for those who don't want to click:

    > I regret to inform everyone that my copy of QBittorrent escaped its sandbox last night and downloaded a whole bunch of content owned by major corporations, and then my copy of Jellyfin broke containment and added those unfortunately-downloaded media files to its various libraries. I'm conducting an internal investigation to figure out how this happened, which will involve consuming these media files until the answers become apparent. Thank you for your cooperation during this trying time.

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