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community weblog

In praise of stealing from thieves

"Every pirate streaming site has the same problem: 47 pop-ups, crypto miners turning your laptop into a space heater, fake buttons designed by Satan's UX team, and a player that makes you question your life choices. Everyone assumes this exploitation is necessary for "free" content. It's not. I spent 5 months proving it by reverse engineering the actual protection systems these sites use. My sleep schedule may never recover, but at least I have data."
Flyx: An Empirical Study in Stealing from Thieves While Maintaining Moral Superiority.. I discovered it on r/PiracyBsckup. I have not tested it yet. But I'm all for piracy, and I watch all my media on similar "free" streamers (cataz, m4uhd, ok.ru, etc., which, with ad-blocking are completely serviceable). Some people are protective of the streaming oligarchs's right to exploit the public. Not me. YMMV.
posted by growabrain on Dec 05, 2025 at 12:35 AM

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Viruses on piracy sites! Is there no honor among thieves?
posted by Going To Maine at 1:12 AM

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Technically not thieves, since the movie is still there after you copy it, but yeah, apparently no honor among copy protection violators.
posted by kaibutsu at 1:46 AM

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web property is theft
posted by chavenet at 1:58 AM

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The writing style here is, essentially, state something, then repeat it five more times, then call it an academic paper when it's more a pile of anecdotes. There's so much pseudo-funny textual static here that I wonder if a LLM was used to help write it.

If I search for "Journal of Questionable Software Engineering", Google doesn't find it anywhere on the web, including this page, meaning it probably has a norobots file. Despite the date at the top being November, and a claim that it was "received" in June, the Wayback Machine has yet to archive it. (It has now because I submitted it using the Wayback Machine Browser Extension.) Maybe the fake journal was intended to be humorous, but that would be a layer of ironic obfuscation at least as worthy as the people they're stealing streams from.

I dunno. I am habitually suspicious. Was anyone else's bullshit detection heuristics triggered by this too?
posted by JHarris at 3:19 AM

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(I'm referring to the writing in the About link from the site.)
posted by JHarris at 3:20 AM

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I dunno. I am habitually suspicious. Was anyone else's bullshit detection heuristics triggered by this too?

I stopped taking it serious after the fourth sentence's claim that "We have developed artificial intelligence that can write poetry".

EDIT: reading up in the reddit post linked above, AI was not just definitely used in this write-up but seemingly also in the creation of the site. Yikes.
posted by bigendian at 3:25 AM

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I've been using The Pirate Bay for decades and have yet to encounter any of these alleged issues. Perhaps that's because I've also been using uBlock Origin (and before it, Adblock Plus) for at least as long.

Perhaps there's no honour among thieves, but it's indisputable that there's none among advertisers.
posted by flabdablet at 3:42 AM

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I looked askance at the poetry claim too, but I was still giving the author the benefit of the doubt at that point.

Wired: AI Slop is Ruining Reddit for Everyone. As I've mentioned multiple times before, I avoid Reddit now and have been looking into alternatives. Lemmy (a Fediversal solution) hasn't worked out badly for me, and I'm in on the Digg revival beta test. But anyway.

I really with the article had gone into a bit more detail. Is there a repo somewhere with their code?
posted by JHarris at 4:19 AM

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Thieves?

Fair use and consumer rights defenders.
posted by neonamber at 4:29 AM

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Guys we have a music site that lets you steal music for free. It's called Spotify. Just don't google the founder.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 4:32 AM

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As long as no-one gets paid for their work and training data for Spotify slop is produced we all win!
posted by davemee at 4:36 AM

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The explainer document is clearly satire, a parody of crypto white papers "published" in a fake journal they made up.
posted by Jon_Evil at 4:43 AM

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I'm shocked, shocked, to find that promotion of piracy is going on in here.
posted by mittens at 4:47 AM

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I think the real crime is keeping Tron Ares stored anywhere; accessible by children or anyone that owns brain cells.
posted by varion at 5:15 AM

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*laughs in qBittorrent*

But, there's definitely a difference in content available via torrents and those on sketchy websites. I devoted an afternoon to downloading an obscure film that only existed on one Russian tube site, like trying to open the Lament Configuration without releasing the cenobites.

(in "honor among thieves" the film had been released by Vinegar Syndrome but was out of print (that's where the rip came from) , so I bought a tshirt from them instead)

However - if you want "pirated" content but not the virii, go search The Internet Archive, they have a lot of movies you might not expect would be available for free. They all have torrent links too.
posted by AzraelBrown at 5:22 AM

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I've been using ShowRSS for some time and had no problems. I use Flexget to get the torrents from a custom RSS feed.
posted by Pendragon at 5:41 AM

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Seconding flabdablet's comment.
posted by Greg_Ace at 8:40 AM

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JHarris: "There's so much pseudo-funny textual static here that I wonder if a LLM was used to help write it."

Says in the reddit thread that they used Claude to help code it, so I would be very unsurprised to find Claude was used to help with the write-up too.

Is there a repo somewhere with their code?

Yep, there's also a link to the GitHub repo in the reddit post.
posted by mstokes650 at 9:29 AM

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Yep, there's also a link to the GitHub repo in the reddit post.

That repo couldn't smell more like Claude if it tried. The eye-watering number of Markdown files alone is a giveaway. This is exactly the kind of code AI should be writing, if you take for granted that AI should be writing code, though.

With Netflix moving to buy Warner, we might all want to become more acquainted with piracy, for sure.
posted by uncleozzy at 11:43 AM

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I stopped taking it serious after the fourth sentence's claim that "We have developed artificial intelligence that can write poetry".

A trivially true statement - nobody said good poetry - used for a bit of formulaic comic juxtaposition and you "stopped taking it serious?"

Genuinely, what the hell is with people on this website?
posted by atoxyl at 7:52 PM

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One thing only: there are a lot of them, they're all different, and sometimes one of them might have a bad day. They're just comments. We're just people.
posted by JHarris at 9:13 PM

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It's the net effect of multiple comments that's making me the guy having a bad day today but it probably wasn't fair to aim that at one person.
posted by atoxyl at 12:52 AM

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There's definitely (dungeons and dragons) honor among thieves -- until it's taken down.
posted by k3ninho at 1:15 PM

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So I've now "tested" it by watching my first movie on it, Jay Kelly, and man! This is some gourmet coffee! It's smooth, clean and a fantastic hi-Rez experience. I've seen thousands of movies in recent years on Cataz, etc. and I'm switching to Flyx today.
posted by growabrain at 4:25 PM

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I'm sure I'm misunderstanding something, but it seems to me that the claim that the user-hostility of pirate streaming sites is unnecessary kinda falls down if you assume that these sites are paying the shadowy backend video delivery services. Like, someone's paying for that storage and bandwidth, and unlike with bittorrent the costs can't be divided over hundreds or thousands of users.

I'm all for stealing from media companies, whether legally sanctioned or not, but it's not a breakthrough insight to say, "it's financially feasible to be an ethical streaming frontend if you steal from your supplier."
posted by smammy at 8:55 PM

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