Movie piracy app Popcorn Time thinks it can thwart a shutdown
About a year after Popcorn Time's death and resurrection show, comes news that the app is taking even more of the legwork out of watching pirated movies online. To further stretch the meaning of "legal," the service is moving to a peer-to-peer streaming system so that its userbase (which is apparently growing by 100,000 downloads per day) hosts the requisite data, according to Wired. "Making all our data available via P2P will mean that Popcorn Time will no longer rely on domains and centralized servers, but only on its user base," an anonymous software engineer said. "After everything we went through, this will be our sweetest revenge and our biggest victory." So there's that.
Wired says the application will use the same P2P protocol for streaming that BitTorrent does, so if the central servers are knocked offline the service itself should remain operational. Another forthcoming addition will issue software updates for the app via P2P downloads that take advantage of "cryptographic signatures" to ensure that no malicious code proliferates the community. The full interview is a really interesting read, but the engineer seems incredibly cavalier about what the app is doing and how long it can outrun the law. Reading through it may remind you of the attitude the original Pirate Bay crew had before the shutdowns and litigation ensued. We all know how that turned out.
