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The original was posted on /r/piracy by /u/0gtcalor on 2023-09-01 08:44:29+00:00.

I live in Spain where piracy is not prosecuted. You can download any copyrighted content from direct links and torrents without restrictions. You don’t even need a VPN, no one uses it for this matter. This was all before Netflix landed in Europe so the only way to watch movies legally was TV, going to the cinema or buying/renting a DVD.

So my brother went to study in Germany for a few years. It’s well known piracy is a different story there. He visited us from time to time so I could have handed him a usb with some movies and that’s it, but this felt more fun and I learned a lot during the process. This way he could also request movies without waiting to visit us.

I made a web server with a Raspberry Pi 2B. I made the most hideous, gif-loaded HTML page I could, without CSS. There were also many texts explaining how smart I was. The dns was something like “yourbrotherisbeautiful.com”. It took around 10 seconds to load the page due to all the pictures and strident mp3 music. My brother hated it but it was the price he had to pay. I like making things slightly annoying. For extra “security”, I added a login hidden in one of the images.

It was time for hosting the movies. My server didn’t have extra security, not even SSL, which makes the password login even more stupid, and my brother didn’t know how to use a VPN so any download would be catched by the german ISP. I didn’t have the knowledge or will to secure things so I zipped the movies with 256-bit encryption, 15 char length passwords and hosted them in the raspberry. The file names were modifications of the movie titles translated from the spanish titles to a dialect of catalan, there was no way for a foreigner to know what that file was, not even using Google Translate. I then gave him the file passwords through Facebook chat.

After 1 or 2 years streaming services rolled in and my server wasn’t needed anymore. Sometimes I wish we had to do these things again, it was so fun. At least my pirated movies had more quality than Netflix’s streaming.