Is Stremio a honeypot?

Does anybody have the impression that Stremio may be a honeypot of some sort?

Thay are allegedly a legal service where some nefarious actors provide torrenting plugins etc. I tried to find out how they were financed, and found northing but a site purportedly selling “Web3” advertising, and filled with technobabble nonsense. No address, no way to purchase their services no GDPR notice or anything…

All I can find regarding their safety are “It’s legit, nothing has happened to me so far” comments in reddit and other boards.

They have your email, they host the service, they can track all you do…

Seems kind of fishy.

Ive tried it, ironically, to watch stuff that I pay for, I have Netflix, prime video, Disney… But Stremio gives me much higher resolutions.

Even though I live in a country where sailing the high seas is not persecuted, as long as you are the end-user and you derive no profit, I’m going to delete my account (made with an email address I have for bullshit stuff ), make a new one with a truly disposable email and get a VPN.

ultratiem,
@ultratiem@lemmy.ca avatar

No not a honey pot. That’s now how honey pots work.

JokeDeity,

I’m not sure if it’s a honeypot, but I am sure it’s never worked well for me and just caused more headaches.

kariboka,

Same here

downhomechunk,
@downhomechunk@midwest.social avatar

I use it with real debrid and a vpn. I have it on a few android TV devices. I need the ease of use for my luddite wife and 5 year old.

I never considered the re-seeding issue until now. Do the debrid servers not re-seed?

I’m working on a homelab and will eventually try to set up jellyfin, but this is a work in progress.

USSEthernet,

Same, just need to find the time and motivation. I have all of the equipment I need.

downhomechunk,
@downhomechunk@midwest.social avatar

I’m in over my head a little bit. I’ve got an old desktop converted to a server running proxmox. But I can’t ssh into it or access the web interface. It’s obnoxious.

LiveLM, (edited )

I’m always incredibly skeptical of these super easy “all in one” solutions. Would rather do the work myself just to make sure.

kratoz29,

I did the work first, then filled up my disks and moved to Stremio, no regrets, and yeah both solutions offer a better experience than Netflix, Prime Video, MAX, Disney+ and Star+ (which are the platforms I am have/once had.

Templa,

With PopcornTime it was the same thing, but it got too popular

Templa,

Stremio is a parasite. They are “legal” because the app itself doesn’t contain anything illegal, you have to add the plugins on the side. It is just awful because it just leeches from torrents and don’t seed anything.

We’re just self hosting our stuff and using Jellyseer, it’s convenient and we can just forget stuff seeding as long as we can

Garry,

Shouldn’t the complaint be about real debrid then? People just want convenience, buying a bunch of hard drives setting up jellyfin getting a vpn waiting for things to download when you want to watch something is annoying. Paying 35 dollars for a year of hassle free easy to setup high quality streaming is an amazing deal to most.

Templa,

People that really want convenience just pay for streaming services. Stremio has a shitty transferrate and even with 1GB internet you aren’t able to watch anything 4k, for example.

I can’t relate with the complait about setting up jellyfin/VPN, that’s something you only need to do once. Theorically Stremio would also need a VPN because it is getting it from a torrent, no? Just get stuff you need in advance and you won’t have to wait and will get to watch something HQ if you have the setup to do so.

I also don’t know/care about debrid so I can’t comment on it. Isn’t it direct download?

TwoCubed,

People that really want convenience just pay for streaming services.

Streaming services stopped being convenient a couple of years ago. Introduction of ads, content strewn all over the place, shitty UI, etc.

I went with Stremio because it has everything in one place. Seeding is not an option because Germany is a shit country for seeding Torrents.

Real Debrid does the torrenting while the end user downloads the cached content. I’m not sure if they seed or not however.

Templa,

I don’t disagree with you, but we all forget that the medium user isn’t tech savvy like all of us and it is the main reason they get predated upon by big tech.

Garry,

So most people use Stremio with debrid, debrid caches torrents for you (without seeding) on their servers. With that you can stream blu ray remuxes (80 - 100 gb files) without downloading them and no vpn is required since it’s https encrypted from their servers. It turns into a combination of all the streaming services

Templa,

Well glory to the private trackers, I guess. You need to have people seeding for torrents to work. I really believe this might kill public trackers if it gets too popular.

Imprint9816,

Something can be shady and not a honeypot. It’s much more common. Its like people forgot this and now anytime anyone feels something is sus this type of post appears.

Ilandar, (edited )

You don’t need to make an account. There is a guest login option.

The shadiest thing I am aware of them doing was the time they added a crypto miner and asked users to choose between that or ads.

Sharp312,

For me, the guest login option only appeared on first boot. When i came back to it the next day it was gone and i had to use a fake email to signup :/

Ilandar,

Which version of the application were you using? And where did you download it from? I haven’t encountered this on the Samsung TV version or the APK from the Stremio website.

Sharp312,

I am using the Stremio flatpak for linux. A friend of mine uses the windows version and he says he also experienced the same.

fine_sandy_bottom,

Unlikely.

Seems like a lot of effort when torrent trackers already provide plenty of low hanging fruit.

deezbutts,

It’s legit, nothing has happened to me so far

RobotToaster,
@RobotToaster@mander.xyz avatar

Isn’t it open source?

unknowing8343,

If you are not hosting, it having a repo on Github makes no difference. The server you are connecting to might have a different service running and you cannot know.

elucubra,

Is every open source app audited? Look at the XZ near disaster. And XZ is pretty critical software. Open source doesn’t mean it’s safe by default, it means that the code can be read.

jnk,

The XZ topic was way more complicated than that and overly exaggerated by some people. Open source is still the closest thing we have to “safe by default”.

Still, as someone else stated, if you’re not hosting it’s not truly open source as you can’t really verify the actual code running behind the server.

RobotToaster,
@RobotToaster@mander.xyz avatar

IMO the XZ thing shows the strength of open source, some turbo pedant found the backdoor within about an hour of it being released because a program took 0.3 seconds longer to start. That wouldn’t be possible in a closed source app that can’t be debugged properly.

rufus, (edited )

Yeah, but usually with open-source software you get like 150 Github comments complaining and outlining their shady business practices… If there’s something to complain about.

The XZ disaster is an example for sth else. There are probably more backdoors in proprietary software that we just don’t know about. And they can just keep it hidden away and force the manufacturers to do so. No elaborate social engineering like in the XZ case needed… And no software is safe. They all have bugs and most of them depend on third-party libraries. That has nothing to do with being open or closed source. If so, being open provides you with more of a chance to catch mischievous behaviour. At least generally speaking. There will be exceptions to this rule.

Hugh_Jeggs,

I stopped using it because I figured if everyone did this and stopped sharing torrents, neither would work

It’s kinda selfish

can,

I felt bad leaching too but another addon fixed that

Evkob,
@Evkob@lemmy.ca avatar

Which addon is that, if you don’t mind sharing?

can,

I’ll message you. Also, subscription but very reasonably priced.

UntitledQuitting,

Can I also be a party to the add-on you’re referencing?

Evkob, (edited )
@Evkob@lemmy.ca avatar

They’re talking about Real Debrid, which is a subscription service allowing access to hosters and easy conversion of torrents to direct streams. It’s really cheap and absolutely worth the money IMO, but RD doesn’t seed torrents. Distributing content in that manner would get them in heaps of legal trouble.

I guess it does somewhat solve the problem of leeching, as if anyone has streamed a torrent via RD in the past 30 days you’ll just load their cached copy, but I was perhaps naïvely hoping for an actual addon (RD is not an addon but rather can be configured through Torrentio) that somehow seeded torrents I stream.

UntitledQuitting,

ah yes. I use premiumize+torrentio.

can,

was perhaps naïvely hoping for an actual addon

Sorry for misleading.

i_love_FFT,
@i_love_FFT@lemmy.ml avatar

I would love to self host a real debrid service where i can control what i pre-download using the “my library” feature, something similar to the *arr suite but only using the stremio interface.

Evkob,
@Evkob@lemmy.ca avatar

Not at all, I just misread your comment!

kratoz29,

I started using it since I filled up my NAS and couldn’t keep hoarding stuff for my arr stack and Plex.

To be fair I always seed at least at a 2 ratio, and when I use Stremio (or Kodi) I use them through a Real Debrid account.

Sims,

I read a comment somewhere that Stremio uploads like a normal client. Just a comment oc, but it should be easy to check for a network savvy reader. It may be that the plugin does it, dunno.

Sethayy,

Pretty sure I remember that too, but believe there was some caveat like it only uploads when watching, making made it ‘more give less take’ on average

UntitledQuitting,

Still better than leeches IMO

kratoz29,

I have a network monitor on my Shield TV all the time and I remember when I first tried it with Torrentio I could see my upload monitor having activity.

Sims,

Hmm. I just heard about Khoj github.com/khoj-ai/khoj from worldofai on YT youtu.be/Lnx2K4TOnC4

From the readme:

Khoj is an application that creates always-available, personal AI agents for you to extend your capabilities.


<span style="color:#323232;">You can share your notes and documents to extend your digital brain.
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Your AI agents have access to the internet, allowing you to incorporate realtime information.
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Khoj is accessible on Desktop, Emacs, Obsidian, Web and Whatsapp.
</span><span style="color:#323232;">You can share pdf, markdown, org-mode, notion files and github repositories.
</span><span style="color:#323232;">You'll get fast, accurate semantic search on top of your docs.
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Your agents can create deeply personal images and understand your speech.
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Khoj is open-source, self-hostable. Always.
</span>
can,

Bot?

NeuronautML,

It does when you’re watching. I have sys monitor widgets with rainmeter on my PC and whenever I’m watching something, it cpu is at least 5 or so degrees hotter and there’s 5 mb + network activity on the upload. You can check yourself on system monitor.

Tregetour,
@Tregetour@lemdro.id avatar

The LARPers on c/Piracy are finally taking a break from shouting ‘high seas’ and discovering the tragedy of the commons!

jherazob,
@jherazob@beehaw.org avatar

The so-called “tragedy of the commons” is an invention out of nowhere by a white supremacist

Gsus4,
@Gsus4@mander.xyz avatar

It can be a reductive approach if you look at the world exclusively through those glasses, but the effect the expression alludes to exists in very specific circumstances e.g. street cleaning, overfishing, pollution. It’s like saying overpopulation is not a thing because that social darwinist Malthus was the first to refer to it.

Tregetour,
@Tregetour@lemdro.id avatar

We’re talking about P2P networks bro, not land management. Pouncing on the term like a bot would, simply to post that link, is just sloppy.

DAMunzy,

Maybe using the term was sloppy also?

jherazob,
@jherazob@beehaw.org avatar

It’s a commons, it’s the same principle

DAMunzy,

A great read. Thanks!

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