To anyone who has ever had the misfortune of a painfully-slow internet connection or tried to scour the internet tirelessly for that one show you absolutely loved, you’re probably familiar with plugins like Adblock, Adblock Plus, and uBlock Origin, as well as seeing so many tiny files ending in .torrent. Today, I plan on defending (at least, from my position) both of these internet tools.
We’ll start with uBlock Origin (my ad blocker of choice for the past several years and running). Put simply, ads online are okay, so long as they are non-intrusive! That means maybe a few (no more than five and not plastered every two minutes in the video) ads every ten-to-fifteen minutes on Youtube, no layers on webpages that are invisible and trigger a modern interpretation of “Let 1k windows bloom” for the Macintosh, and (because I’m one of those people who doesn’t use all of the streaming services out there) making some of the “gray sites” where I like to watch old and obscure shows (most of which wouldn’t even be on Netflix, Hulu, and Paramount anyway) actually usable. Believe me, I’ve had more than my fair share of opening up Netflix and looking for a TV show or movie, only to find that it’s not there. To clarify, my family has a family Netflix account that I’m on, but very few things are on there that I’ll actually watch, so for me, streaming means opening up a Linux machine in VMware and perusing DuckDuckGo until I find what I'm looking for and hoping that the video server is still up. Often times, it isn’t, so I have to try other mirrors (if the option even exists) and search the rest of the web. Now, while this seems like it would only apply to the next section (where I’ll talk about torrenting), keep in mind that the hidden ads and “invisible frames” (as I call them) take up so much bandwidth, especially if you are still using an ADSL modem to get onto the Information Superhighway. Until a few years ago, when my father signed up for a few streaming services (sometime after the world shut down due to COVID-19), the internet speed at my house was 3-5 Mbps down, generally on the lower side. That wasn’t per person or per device, that was the max bandwidth for the whole modem. Honestly, ad blockers helped with the speed issue tremendously! Where a page might take ten-or-so minutes to load without the tiny plugin, that same page could load in just under two with the plugin. I still remember the difference with and without the plugins, mainly because of the shock value. Granted, in the long run, it never made the connection lightning-fast (because of the streaming services thing, we’re now at 10-15 Mbps down), but it was and still is able to rescue the bandwidth that can easily get stolen by those pesky popups or banners that make pages completely unusable, and it even makes YouTube usable again on my laptop (even though they're trying to get me to pay so much per month to stop ads… JUST MAKE THEM MORE TOLERABLE! USE AGING WHEELS AS AN EXAMPLE! IT’S NOT HARD!), though that’s starting to take an extra plugin, but it’s a nonissue except for less than five occasions and counting. Anyway, onto torrenting!
Now, I’m certain that most of you have come across a file that ended in .torrent at some point in the past and have been bewildered by what it was. Put simply, and this is coming from someone who frequently makes use of ancient and lost software, it’s just a P2P file sharing thing that doesn’t download linearly. Rather, it pulls what it can from where it can, although most of what you’ll find in the various databases and search utilities can best be summed up by the traffic in Cambodia: it’s a complete-and-total free-for-all; watch all sides, all the time. There's nothing inherently wrong about torrenting (or the dark web, for that matter), but that doesn’t always hold true for what people use it for. Hence the watch yourself warning. Anyway, within the torrenting realm lies what I consider to be my personal bread-and-butter of the internet: animé, TV shows, movies, and software, all of which might not be accessible on the regular internet anymore (namely a huge number of the software titles and animé I like to watch, many of which just aren’t in English to begin with… imagine that) or at all to begin with. Torrenting and the dark web are two ways, as far as I’m concerned, to access a complete freedom of information. A more overt way of seeing this would be to go to China, Russia, Laos, Cuba, Vietnam, or any country with restrictions on information (in any capacity) and ask even the least-savvy computer users if they know what a VPN is. They probably won’t be so quick to respond in public, but they would almost certainly show you how to get access to them so that they can get on the unfiltered Information Superhighway (yes, I’m coming from experience with seeders from China, Hong Kong, Vietnam, Russia, Laos, Cambodia, and Venezuela… why else would they try to make themselves less traceable online?). Torrents can be a way of hiding in plain sight, as the transfer of data via BitTorrent isn’t linear and comes from and goes to several other targets, rather than one at a time in a linear fashion. It’s also for this reason that I don’t use the original BitTorrent client (it’s full of ads, limits your speeds unless you pay, and doesn't have all of the features in the free version… yuck!), though there are plenty of forks and clones out there, I’m sure; still, I’ll leave you to pick your poison here. So far, with torrenting, I’ve been able to find any software or media anytime, though my first stop for software is the well-known Internet Archive (I highly recommend this to anyone working on a project, should you not want to get into torrenting). Anyway, that’s just my thoughts on the matter from the technical mind of someone who believes that all information should be free to access.
Stay safe and С Новый Годом!