Anyone who reads the article may be surprised to find that it contains literally no evidence to support the claim made in its clickbait headline. The author of the article comes to pretty different, much more limited conclusion:

Based on the analysis of packet captures above, I believe it is clear that anyone who has sufficient visibility into Telegram’s traffic would be able to identify and track traffic of specific user devices. Including when perfect forward secrecy protocol feature is in use.

This would also allow, through some additional analysis based on timing and packet sizes, to potentially identify who is communicating with whom using Telegram.

This is way more different thing than claiming and proving that Telegram is somehow FSB honeypot.

Furthermore, the author of the article does not even attempt to somehow prove a Telegram/FSB connection and takes this claim for granted based on the article published on websites of OCCRP and its Russian affiliate Istories. Let’s check this article and the evidence it presents:

Reporters obtained the company’s internal accounting documents for 2024 which show that one of its most important government clients is the FSB.

The documents show that Electrotelecom installs and manages equipment for a system that is being used by the FSB offices in St. Petersburg and the Leningrad region for surveillance.

Unlike the conclusions made in the rys.io article, which have a vast evidence base and can be verified, in this case we are simply asked to take the word of the so-called “investigative journalism outlet”.

And what do we know about OCCRP?

In 2024, it was reported that OCCRP receives nearly half its funding from USAID

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organized_Crime_and_Corruption_Reporting_Project

I think that’s enough.

TLDR:

1. Telegram uses a suboptimal method of handling user IDs in its packets, which allows to track which user ID is sending messages to which user ID.

2. The Telegram/FSB link claim is based solely on unverifiable statements made by shills on USAID payroll.

The entire original article is nothing more than a mixture of propaganda and incompetence. Even where it doesn’t lie, it tells half-truths.

I love that it even uses a variation of the good old “when you pirate MP3s, you’re dowloading COMMUNISM” poster as an illustration.

What many users do not know: The website provides users’ data to Russia.

You don’t even have to do much research to come to this conclusion, since the owner of archive.today openly states that he uses Yandex for the search function.

Proof: https://blog.archive.today/post/673695282217762816/just-realized-that-i-can-search-for-keywords-in

It’s quite funny that the author of the original article somehow ignores this.

A look at the website with Webbkoll shows the following Russian domain names: privacy-cs.mail.ru r.mradx.net rs.mail.ru top-fwz1.mail.ru

For some strange reason Webbkoll now shows “No third-party requests”.

Proof: https://webbkoll.5july.net/en/results?url=http%3A%2F%2Farchive.today

This is definitely not true, since if you opened devtools in your browser and loaded archive.today, you would see that it loads some trackers and counters from top-fwz1.mail.ru

I tried many times, but could not get requests to other mentioned domains.

By the way, the screenshot in the article also shows a request to Google servers - a fact that the author of the article happily ignores. In my case, I do not receive any requests to Google servers, perhaps it was already removed by the owner of archive.today along with requests to the other 3 mentioned domains.

First and foremost, top-fwz1.mail.ru/js/code.js is integrated. Further code from Russia is then loaded.

That’s fair, and that’s what I got. But it’s not some random “further code from Russia”, what’s loaded are mail.ru counter and vk.com event trackers:

Proofs: https://top.mail.ru/help/en/code/https & https://ads.vk.com/en/help/general/sites/offline_events

Also, you need to disable your adblock to make these scripts load. As funny as it sounds, the adblock plugin with default settings saves you from the KGB.

It is not just about the full possession of the largest social network (VK) and the largest payment service (Mail.ru), but in the case of Yandex also to influence the entire output of Yandex News.

Mail.ru is not “the largest payment service”, it owns payment service VK pay, which is so big that you won’t find its page even in the Russian wiki. Both the outdated statista and the fresh AI-slop don’t even mention it among the most significant contenders:

Proof: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1056296/most-popular-online-payment-services-russia/

Proof: https://sergioespresso.com/2024/06/16/which-is-the-most-popular-online-payment-service-in-russia/

Also, there is no such thing as “Yandex News” for almost 3 years. It’s not owned by Yandex and it’s rebranded to Zen News: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zen_News

The data collected show which Paywall content is particularly popular in western media, but could also provide insight about their users. One can speculate about the importance of such data in the hybrid Russian war against Europe and the rest of the West.

One can laugh at such speculations. Like: “the hybrid Russian war against Europe and the rest of the West: expectation vs reality”.

Expectation: cyber attacks on critical systems, hacking of military IT infrastructure.

Reality: providing free access to paywalled articles.

In any case, it is difficult to understand which valuable insight you can get from knowing the popularity of pirated paywalled articles.

Incidentally (and in addition), anyone who pays for the paid media content must also expect for user data to go to Russia:

The whole passage is nothing more than propagandistic filler as it has nothing to do with archive.today at all, and the owner of archive.today has no reasonable way of knowing who exactly paid for the article.

The operators of «Archive.Today» do not open their identity. Neither an impressum nor a data protection declaration can be found on the website.

I think that the owner of website with pirated content has no other reason to hide his identity than working for the KGB. Literally no other reason.

I feel I should also quote one sentence from the comments section of the original article. It was written by the author of the article, and it clearly shows his intentions and his goodwill in this case: “but one might wonder whether it’s really necessary to circumvent the corresponding paywall”.

TLDR: archive.today uses mail.ru counter and vk.com event tracker, which are blocked by ad blockers. So if you use any kind of ad blocker, none of your data will be sent to Russian servers.

none of them are worth it

It depends on the content that you seek for. And with that caveat, your statement may be 100% true or 100% wrong.

I am an avid underground metal music enjoyer and also a RED member, and i could name a dozen of public sources (ranging from soulseek to deathgrindclub or metalarea) that would offer you much better libraries then RED. So i’m using RED like once in two monthes and let my FL tokens expire. But that’s just the one specific use case, people with different musical tastes may find RED much more useful or even the main source for expanding their collection.

So actually if you can get everything you need from public sources, there’s no reason at all to bother with private trackers. And if you can’t, then you have no choice but to accept the rules of the game.

Google for VDSina. There you’ll be able to rent VDS which is invulnerable for DMCA, and then configure it for streaming, DDL hosting and so on.

While absence of China in Top 10 may be somehow explained by The Great Firewall, the absence of India, Turkey and Russia is totally implausible. Or they might be scanning only torrents of movies with English audio.

If you gonna host torrent tracker with pirate content then VDSina is reasonable choice and i’m using their service for the same purprose. Their help section clearly says that they would ignore any copyright infrigement complaint which is not enforced by Russian police or court what effectively means that US/GB/EU authorities have no chance to bother you. Obviously you should choose their Moscow servers, not Amsterdam ones (which they also offer). I have no idea if they accept Monero payments but they definately allow to pay in some cryptocurrencies.

Immoral piracy is the killing of the crew during the hijacking of a ship. There is no moral dilemma in downloading anything.

The whole point of “ethical” piracy is ridiculous. It’s old good corporate anti-piracy propaganda but rechewed with some progressive takes. “You wouldn’t download an indie car”, literally. If you need some justifications and excuses for piracy, than just don’t pirate at all. The fact that i’m downloading some game from torrent because i’ve broken purchased DVD with it never makes me more ethical in any way than some other leecher on the same torrent who’s never going to pay for it.

Only the content that i don’t care about.

4pda pretty obviously.

Seizing domains is HUGE blow but never a “Total Destruction”. Such ring is not operated by single enthusiast, it’s runned by a team of professional pirate siteops who do this for pretty comfortable living and who foresee such risks and have a plan for this type of incident. And i’m sure they have another bunch of domains already registered and fed to google. There’s no significant difference between getting domain banned in the country from where 95% of traffic is coming (and this is frequent issue) and loosing this domain at all. Your traffic is gone, your money is gone. So seizing domains without busting servers and siteops is far from winning final battle.

It’s here for ages and it’s called sopcast. I was using it decade ago for soccer translations before moving to IPTV. After quick googling i see it’s still a thing.

It’s required to have literally zero knowledge of worldwide piracy and its current state to post or upvote such things.

The title of the article is a bit misleading, as upon reading it you may came to conclusion that Russian pirate infrastructure is actively hunted by goverment. That’s not really true and the article itself adds some significant nuances.

Long story short: Piracy in Russia over last two years has greatly increased overall (in both demand and supply) due to sanctions making legal options unavailable. Number of piracy takedown requests has also increased, but only reason for that is local streaming services hunting for local content. This effectively means that it’s enough for siteop to remove some Russian titles from the library (or hide them for Russian IPs) to keep operating without any significant legal problems.

So pirates worldwide are benefiting from more pirate services with more content and better speeds that their Russian fellows keep bringing them.

This is actually one of the less effective examples of geoblocking that someone could ever imagine.

Russian warez sites are only “Russian” because they’re run by local admins as pirate sites located in the Global South have tendency to have a longer lifespan and less chances to end their days by being raided than hosted in the Western world. Most part of such sites users / uploaders are from worldwide, for example, if you’ll check your active peers for any active rutracker upload, you’ll see, that only small part of them have Russian flag. So such geoblocking makes literally zero impact, as it never prevents user from any other country from uploading the tunes to such website.

Also all Russian users are already geoblocked, as they won’t buy anything from you (even if they would want to) because most of webservices that you could use to promote your album won’t be able to charge their cards due to sanctions. And if some of such users use foreign VPN + credit card combo and are able to use such services, they are not affected by your geoblocking, as they’re attached to different region.

“running android on the Pi and then using LibreTube on that is my best option” really sounds like best option available. Any mediabox with android is better than anything that smart tv has to offer. Once i got my TOX3, i don’t remember launching smart tv apps once again. What i’ve got installed is Revanced, Televizoro (for iptv streams) and LazyMediaDeluxe (for movies streaming).

Sorry to say, but if that’s your business proposal, then you’re getting your MBA courses wrong 😫 not due to your proposal being clearly illegal, but because it has no monetization (and actually it’s not business proposal per se, but charity proposal).

And regarding your question, while copyright infrigement is illegal worldwide, there’s already a working solution which is used by major pirate resourses. And this solution is hosting copyrighed material on servers which are located on jurisdictions which are hostile towards countries where content owners and you personally live. This means if you need to host popular US/EU content, here’s ISPs from China, Russia, Iran, Belarus and so on for your help. For sure, none of them would anyhow care of your privacy, freedom of speech and so on, but what’s more important, none of them would also care about any EU/US issued copyright infrigement complaint about your server if it’s not backed by local authorities. Needless to say, both your server and ISP HQ should both be placed in such country (server in Moscow won’t save you from anything if you rent it from firm with main office in London).

Promotion of new public pirate resourses always depends on catching traffic from search engines and never on reddit posts. This actually means that promotion of public tracker is by far easier than promoting a gatewalled one. Also this means that active public tracker would have constant influx of new users who don’t know about rutracker, 1337x and so on.

By the way, promoting useful public pirate resourses is always a good thing, so there is no point in treating complaints about this with understanding or respect.

You need ReVanced app, that’s new incarnation of Vanced app that ceased to work

rutracker or 1337x