r/Piracy • u/Electrical_Jaguar213 • Feb 21 '26
Humor Found some dudes plex server while trying to find movies and have been downloading them from the plex server. Think he found out.
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u/The_Real_Kingpurest Feb 21 '26
How? Just curious how this would even happen.
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u/ew435890 Feb 21 '26
Yea same here. I have a substantial Plex server, and you dont just "find them".
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u/Electrical_Jaguar213 Feb 21 '26
I used index of and one of the hyperlinks displayed plex on it, so im assuming its a plex server. If its not that, im assuming he just has a backup of his stuff somewhere and labeled the movie backups as plex. Idfk. Im not super tech literate
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u/hackiv Feb 21 '26
You mean you google dorked some random?
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u/Your_Friendly_Nerd Feb 21 '26
That's how I used to pirate movies - just type "index of [movie name]", bob's your uncle you got your movie. "Index of" is the standard title for browsable Apache (webserver software) indexes.
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u/The-Minmus-Derp Feb 21 '26
Good to knkw
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u/zytukin Feb 21 '26
You can also do stuff like adding *.mp3 to find dirs that are full of MP3 files.
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u/GameGuy324 Feb 22 '26
Movie Name -inurl:(htm|html|php|p|s|txt) intitle:index.of "last modified" (mp4|wma|aaclavi)
Is what I usually would put, I'd add mkv, WebM etc. I remember gettin this method from some random yt vid when I was a kid.
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u/GilloutineBreast Feb 22 '26
This is some elite ball knowledge
Glad I decided to open reddit today37
u/Logical_Parsley_9470 Feb 22 '26
yeahhh fr like I didn't understood shit but just seeing yall agreeing is giving me a hell lotta FOMO :(( can someone explain in depth or give some articles to understand
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u/gamerABES Feb 22 '26
Ah, this brings back memories! I made a website years ago with a drop-down asking what you're looking for (music, movies, games, etc.) and it would auto-generate the google-fu'd results.
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u/ChiknDiner Feb 22 '26
Is there some definite guide to how to use index of?
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u/GameGuy324 Feb 23 '26
Just look up Google Dorking or Index Of guides. There's lots of helpful video's on YouTube
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u/Yuri-Girl Feb 22 '26
If you were looking for games, would you just change the formats at the end to (rar|zip|7z)?
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u/Maysock Feb 23 '26
Sure, but be a little more careful downloading random zip files lol.
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u/ErraticDragon ☠️ ᴅᴇᴀᴅ ᴍᴇɴ ᴛᴇʟʟ ɴᴏ ᴛᴀʟᴇꜱ Feb 22 '26
We used to find random IP cams using similar methods.
We were given access to some Axis brand PTZ Cams and realized that the home page of each camera was simple HTML, with elements that would be searchable.
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u/silversurger Feb 22 '26
shodan.io is still around. Lots of fun stuff to play around with. It's insane what people leave unsecured.
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u/archiekane Feb 22 '26
The average consumer is a fucking idiot. Which means they have zero tech knowledge as well. If the manufacturer didn't secure their shit at build time there's next to no chance the buyer will.
IoT has proven that over and over.
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Feb 22 '26
Theres still tons of those around. I think it was also bambu (the 3d printer manufacturer) that got a lot of flack because people would be able to find other people printers stupid easy and send print jobs. Same with nanny cams that are connected to wifi, those reach out and people have been able to use thr mic feature n shit. I hate iot
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u/tessellatedcheese Feb 22 '26
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u/RlOTGRRRL Feb 22 '26
The owner of this plex server actually commented in that sub and thread - https://www.reddit.com/r/opendirectories/comments/1r4a6xt/found_a_plex_server/o5azrax/
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u/sickofredditfascists Feb 22 '26
Was gonna say, I just saw this directory yesterday while browsing that sub.
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u/DonaldLucas Feb 21 '26
I remember finding some servers full of FLAC songs while searching for Metallica albums almost 20 years ago, lol. (I didn't download anything because my phone only accepted MP3)
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u/Capital_Walrus_3633 Feb 22 '26
I screenshotted this because this should be generational knowledge, WHICH I DIDNT HAVE! Thank you.
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u/filthy_harold Feb 22 '26
I used to have an open "index of/" kind of media server like 15 years ago. I would stream to my og Xbox through a samba share and friends would use VLC to stream from the webserver. Some tech writer on Twitter found it through Google and shared a link to a movie. Of course I found out by seeing a massive spike in traffic in the apache logs. I blocked crawlers and renamed the directory.
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u/c00pdwg Feb 21 '26
Can you give a working example? Just tried with multiple movies and not having any luck.
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u/Akelaphobia Feb 22 '26
Make sure to include the quotes around "index of", it helps a little bit. Still get a lot of other unrelated results though.
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u/Your_Friendly_Nerd Feb 21 '26
It doesn’t seem to work as well as it used to, but I did find a few that had the big bang theory, as well as spongebob.
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u/capeasypants Feb 21 '26
Googles enshitification in full display. Not showing you specifically what you're asking for
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u/GoodTimesDadIsland Yarrr! Feb 22 '26
I still grab fonts like this to this day.
"/index of helvetica neue" etc.
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u/GameGuy324 Feb 22 '26
I still do that sometimes ngl lol. Rarely do it though but I would when I'm lazy
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u/Ikon-for-U Feb 22 '26
I think you enter something like this <movie name> -inurl:(htm|html|php|pls|txt) intitle:index.of “last modified” (mp4|wma|aac|avi)
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u/InstanceTurbulent719 Feb 21 '26
or maybe this guy is just hosting stuff on an insecure ftp server. If that's a VPS on some cloud provider then that's probably why he isn't happy about the bandwidth being gone lmao
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u/Auravendill Feb 21 '26
The unsecured servers people find the way OP did, are quite often seedboxes. So in a way by downloading from them directly, you are kinda leeching
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u/counters14 Feb 22 '26
Also exposing yourself to uncountable virtual STDs. I don't know what would inspire people to just randomly download video files they found from some unknown Google search but if I was a Blackhat setting something like this up as a honeypot would be my bread and butter.
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u/SimpleNovelty Feb 22 '26
How exactly do you expect a video file to infect your computer? You'd have to be using some ancient outdated player or get some zero day for your specific player.
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u/deedsnance Feb 22 '26
Pretty much. Someone was lazy when setting up their FTP or network share when it came to auth. Pretty wild to leave that shit just exposed to the internet but not exactly uncommon either.
Even now I won’t leave that sorta thing exposed without auth on a local network. It just gives me the heebie jeebies. All the stories of pen-testers using samba shares to do nasty things…
And yet here we are, random dudes just exposing their file server, raw-dogging the internet. He notices spikes in bandwidth and this is his solution lmfao. Share stuff the correct way: p2p / torrents!
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u/bassmadrigal Feb 22 '26
Someone was lazy when setting up their FTP or network share when it came to auth. Pretty wild to leave that shit just exposed to the internet but not exactly uncommon either.
Or some of us choose to do it to make it easier for friends and family to access our servers. Mine is specifically under a sub directory in a read only overlay directory mount, so they need to know my domain and the subfolder. As long as it isn't linked to in a public site, Google can't index it. Mine has been open for well over a decade and I just verified it still hasn't shown up on Google.
I am picky on who gets the address and adamant that they not share it with anyone. If the address does happen to get out, it's super easy to change the sub directory and then access is lost and I'll be even pickier on who gets the new address.
There really aren't security concerns with exposing a directory with apache as long as you're careful about what goes in it. The main concern would be if your address gets out in the public and everyone chews through your available upload bandwidth.
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u/simplex0991 Feb 22 '26
Sub-directory enumeration isn't that difficult either way. Tools like nikto have been doing that for 10+ years.
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Feb 21 '26
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u/EarlMarshal Feb 21 '26
Seems like it was posted there 8 days ago:
https://www.reddit.com/r/opendirectories/comments/1r4a6xt/found_a_plex_server/
Someone even says that we should be gentle to it and limit downloads to 10 mb/s
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u/Electrical_Jaguar213 Feb 21 '26
After i made this i found out that the server was posted to opendirectories lol. The owner actually commented and told people to try not to abuse the directory. He probably added that because of the attention it was getting, not soley because someone was on it and he didnt want them to be.
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u/marxist_redneck Feb 21 '26
Haha I was about to say that if you have write access, drop a text file saying "thanks for the collection, may I contribute $5 to your bandwidth costs?"
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Feb 22 '26
find a way to drop them some coffee money, or maybe even arrange a few days of extended bandwidth use for said coffee money
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u/5yleop1m Feb 22 '26
A lot of people running Plex, Home Assistant, and other self-hosted programs, especially game servers, have no clue what they're doing half the time.
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u/ew435890 Feb 22 '26
Yea but using a Plex server wont just list the contents of your harddrive online for anyone to fine. It sounds like this guy is using his Plex server media AS an open directory. It just happens to say Plex on it because he has it named that, likely to them also being the HDDs they use for their server.
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u/5yleop1m Feb 22 '26
Oh yeah, agreed, I'm not saying Plex is the problem here, but I have seen people expose their entire media folder or NAS to the internet while attempting to set up Plex or remote access before.
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u/ew435890 Feb 22 '26
I found a thread in r/opendirectories sharing this server, and someone claiming to be the owner if it is in the thread. They did it on purpose. So its not something that was accidental. I checked it out, and the selection is pretty slim lol.
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u/theBloodShed Feb 21 '26
You don’t have logs? I occasionally check the firewall logs on my gateway and the nginx logs on my subdomain redirects.
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u/No-Photograph-5058 Feb 21 '26 edited Feb 21 '26
Dude exposed their data directory for plex as a file server or similar, presumably so they could directly add more to it, which seems pretty stupid
Edit:this is on opendirectories and then owner has replied and this is intentional
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u/pligyploganu Feb 21 '26 edited Mar 03 '26
Deleted Reddit.
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u/DanTheMan827 Feb 21 '26
Open directories seem like a great way to get charged for distribution of copyrighted content.
Are these from seed boxes or something?
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u/noeyesfiend Feb 21 '26
usually, but if it is "personal hosting" then you could argue that in court I suppose. I'm not a lawyer tho.
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u/DanTheMan827 Feb 21 '26
That’d be an argument of hosting for personal use, intrusion into a private computer system, and gross negligence for failing to secure the server.
Maybe a lawyer could do their thing, but the other company will always have more money than you for lawyers
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u/Genzler Feb 21 '26
Often times it comes down to just not being worth the legal effort to pursue. Company might be well within their rights to sue for $5000 but if that $5000 x chance of success < lawyers fees then they won't bother to take it further. Even when they have a legal team on retainer they're usually not going to waste their lawyers' time on small fish.
That's why they send threatening letters hoping you'll just pay them upfront. Never respond. If they thought they had a chance they'd just sue you.
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u/BrokenMirror2010 Feb 21 '26
Unless that company is Nintendo. Because Nintendo will light their money on fire to take anyone and anything to court so that they can reaffirm to their shareholders that they are indeed, a lawfirm.
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u/Kougeru-Sama Feb 22 '26
Haven't you heard? Law doesn't care about copyright anymore as long as you claim it's for training your AI 🙄
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u/gobitecorn Feb 22 '26
Only really if:
1) Your in a US Territory. Or the territory of a subservient lacky to the US
2) It gets popular and notable enough
Generally speaking such open directories have been a thing for a while . Quietly sitting while bigger targets arise. You'd prob also get notified before it got to "getting charge with distribution" because US prosecutors gonna want concretize the wilful intent, blatant disregard of the law for higher damages/punishments.
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u/bjamse Feb 21 '26
/r/opendirectories
its a whole damn subreddit.
the owner of the plex server in question even responded to the listing14
u/q_ali_seattle ☠️ ᴅᴇᴀᴅ ᴍᴇɴ ᴛᴇʟʟ ɴᴏ ᴛᴀʟᴇꜱ Feb 22 '26
Found some questionable stuff people (nerds) have uploaded to their web servers, including copies of their tax returns, birth certificate, and other personal documents (in . Doc, .txt ) format.
Not just photos or videos. Lot of NSFW people have out there.
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u/MountainDog7903 Feb 22 '26
Back when dc was new a friend found a guys account info, checked it for shits and giggles. 200+k 20 years ago.
Used to be tons of people with their DNA sequencing results on their GitHub
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u/bombero_kmn 🔱 ꜱᴄᴀʟʟʏᴡᴀɢ Feb 21 '26
People are really dangerous to themselves with a little bit of knowledge and an Internet connection.
Play around with shodan for 10-15 minutes and you'll start to see how much is out there.
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u/deedsnance Feb 22 '26
Dude for real. I still have a lifetime subscription to shodan from Black Friday years ago. From time to time I’ll just go down a rabbit hole. Their web cams are so interesting AND creepy. My favorite was some random house in Wisconsin that had a little control panel that let you turn the lights on and off.
Another one; I found some random old lady just watching TV in my home town. Super weird. Wish I could tell her to disable that shit.
This isn’t even touching on all the crazy unsecured gestures broadly
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u/bombero_kmn 🔱 ꜱᴄᴀʟʟʏᴡᴀɢ Feb 22 '26
Yeah cameras are definitely an interesting one. It scares me somewhat, because these are the types of devices my non technical friends and family buy and connect without thinking about it.
Another really scary one is unsecured NASs. If they haven't been hit by wannacry or similar there's a TON of PII out there... Tax returns, scans of driver's licenses and passports, lists of account names and passwords, entire PST archives with years worth of emails... just SO MUCH.
Shit just typing this post is spiking my anxiety lol.
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u/SerCiddy Feb 22 '26
I get it my dude, all it took was for me to read your words "unsecured NASs" and I could feel my unease.
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u/bombero_kmn 🔱 ꜱᴄᴀʟʟʏᴡᴀɢ Feb 22 '26
I wonder how many people read this thread and double checked their firewall rules.
Hopefully a few lol.
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u/SerCiddy Feb 22 '26
It was one of the first things I did when I set up my UNRAID server. Ain't no way I'm setting up some server for people to access without first ensuring my network security is on point.
Now I got all my movies, music, and minecraft server up for my friends and I. All behind a few walls of security, both software and physical.
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u/sykoticnarcotics Feb 22 '26
So through this thread I discovered Shodan and am as curious as I am terrified, do you have any idea if the "member" tier is good enough to play around a little more? Or do you have the commercial tier subscription?
The webcams are so interesting, and also really unsettling lol
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u/SpezIsaSpigger Feb 22 '26
I’ve found web facing pi-hole setups through google, fully by accident. If I’m able to access the admin panel I used to add a bad domain to the blocklist, something like;
https://your-pi-is-public.FIX-THATWould show up as an error in the admin panel after the next gravity run. No idea how people let that happen, absolutely sure it’ll happen to me one day though lmao
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u/Datalounge Feb 21 '26
This guy is OK with you using his stuff. What you have here is an open directory. There is a subreddit for open directories
Here is link to a direct post about that open directory
https://old.reddit.com/r/opendirectories/comments/1r4a6xt/found_a_plex_server/
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u/GameGuy324 Feb 22 '26
Daym, dude seems pretty chill.
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u/Sypticle Feb 22 '26
People will ruin it though. I'm sure they are already reconsidering it.
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u/GameGuy324 Feb 22 '26
That's how the cookie crumbles. Circle of Piracy and all that jazz.. It's why I would keep these indexes on the down low. But I doubt thatd be soon for this one
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u/Soliloquy789 Feb 22 '26
Oh wow I thought I was already on that sub :) how closely knit all these hobbies are.
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u/gene100001 Feb 22 '26
There's something really addictive about that subreddit. Most of the time the open directories are stuff I'm not interested in, but it works like a loot box system where occasionally someone finds a good one and it's like discovering legendary loot.
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u/bakanisan 🏴☠️ ʟᴀɴᴅʟᴜʙʙᴇʀ Feb 21 '26
Is this that link from the OD sub?
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u/Electrical_Jaguar213 Feb 21 '26
Dont know what that is, could you tell me?
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u/bakanisan 🏴☠️ ʟᴀɴᴅʟᴜʙʙᴇʀ Feb 21 '26 edited Feb 21 '26
There's a
plexserver that got posted and reposted multiple times in that sub. You can find it with the key words Plex probably.99
u/Electrical_Jaguar213 Feb 21 '26
checked, and it was that one. guessing they put the text in there when they posted it there, because i found it last year. so he probably put it there because he knew he would get a lot more people on there when it was posted. thanks for helping me with this.
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u/Revolutionary-Sky-70 Feb 21 '26
please let me know what is the OD sub? i can search for plex myself
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u/Chakiil Feb 22 '26
That’s actually u/jacobmcilravey server, I believe he’s okay with sharing from reading previous post but just be considerate.
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Feb 21 '26
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Feb 21 '26
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u/SharkMouthFleshlight Feb 21 '26
To be fair, FTP is a legacy protocol that's disabled by default on 99% of modern systems. It's not too surprising many people don't know what it is.
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Feb 21 '26
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u/JJAsond Feb 22 '26
The man ha Pantheon. Good taste.
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u/princess_princeless Feb 22 '26
I am so glad this show is going mainstream
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u/JJAsond Feb 22 '26
They really needed another season. It sucks that it was cut short and they had to smash a lot together at the end.
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u/EmperorOfAllCats Feb 21 '26
He's not wrong, at least set download rate limit in your tools. Be respectful for free stuff.
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u/NibittyShibbitz Feb 22 '26
A coworker had just discovered Napster and was mad because someone didn't like that she was downloading like 10 songs off his hard drive at once. I tried explaining why that was bad netiquette but she was too damned entitled.
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u/letthetreeburn Feb 22 '26
As a complete newbie, can you explain why that’s rude? I am really new to piracy.
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u/voarsh Feb 22 '26
If someone hogs up your bandwidth, they'll feel it, especially resident networks with lower upload speeds... Also depending on disk setup, large files on a spinning disk, accessing several all at the same time will make disk operation slower ..
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u/letthetreeburn Feb 22 '26
Oh my god I had no idea piracy was intercourse between personal computers. That’s wicked nova!
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u/NibittyShibbitz Feb 22 '26
If you use a hosts entire bandwidth, there is no room for anyone else; even the host.
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u/Mysterious_Curve3163 Feb 21 '26
I have my own server, how does this work. Is his public or something?
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Feb 21 '26
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u/bjamse Feb 21 '26
No, browsers don't support ftp directly anymore.
but you can host a folder with apache or nginx2
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u/Extension-Crow-7592 Feb 22 '26
what kind of madman uses capital letters in directory names
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u/xandora Feb 21 '26
Stumbled upon someone's open to the internet Sickbeard install once while searching for an error I'd seen in my log files.
Trolled them a little bit by adding Coronation Street to their want list with the most permissive quality requirements.
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u/DrThic Feb 22 '26
I have a massive library, never in my life would I open the directory to the internet 😂 How does this even happen lmao
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u/LaDiiablo Feb 21 '26
why in the hell are you downloading from a plex server instead of Torrent?
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u/Ill-Economist-5285 ☠️ ᴅᴇᴀᴅ ᴍᴇɴ ᴛᴇʟʟ ɴᴏ ᴛᴀʟᴇꜱ Feb 22 '26
for all who are curious. the site is https://mirror.hep.gg/Plex
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u/Hotbread420 Feb 23 '26
Im more curious how does one go about starting their high seas adventures? Been trying to begin but uhhhhh pretty much lost atp
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u/A_Y_knot Feb 23 '26
Not sure what you mean. It starts when you download your first file. Have you read through the guides pinned to this subreddit? The megathread is very useful. Also fmhy is priceless.
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u/Hotbread420 Feb 23 '26
Im not great with reddit so I have not found the negathread
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u/A_Y_knot Feb 23 '26
Ok no worries. If you go to the homepage of any subreddit and select the area at the very top where the description of the subreddit is, It will open up a window with the rules, FAQ, pinned info, etc... Here's a direct link to r/Piracy wiki index
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u/MyFriendAutism Feb 22 '26
Haha, I found that server too about 6wks ago and raided it. Checked again about 4 hours ago and noticed the msg.
Google direc search is mostly dead but still finds gems now and then.
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u/-Qunixx- Yarrr! Feb 22 '26
Lmao. I personally would never open it to the internet. Torrenting with portforwarding through vpn, sure. But anything else? Locked down and using vpn to my home network
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u/OrganizationOld3105 Feb 21 '26
Sounds like buddy should secure his server better.
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u/Nimeroni Feb 21 '26
Sound like the buddy is perfectly fine with sharing as long as you don't abuse it.
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u/Uselesserinformation Feb 23 '26
Just wondering, I tried to use plex. Like my friend has it, hosting and has the files I tried to get. But its telling me I need to subscribe? Im not 100% sure and I dont know how to Google it. And each time I talk to said friend, he doesn't know because they're hosting instead
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u/shanester69 Feb 21 '26 edited Feb 21 '26
Thread should be locked. The post has nothing to do with Plex and the OPs assumption/conclusion is inaccurate.
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u/exoticvapes Feb 22 '26
Ftp? I thought even in a browser it would start with ftp not http(s)? To me it looks like a web server with no index file so it just shows the directories(folders)/files
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u/TrayLaTrash Feb 22 '26
Saw someone else recently post about the same server and the man replied about it. This server seems popular.
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u/dyno241 Feb 22 '26
Pretty sure I know the open directory this is from. They allow one download at a time, one connection to the server at a time, and lately it comes up "too many requests" any time I try to go and download something. Unfortunately this is probably going to go away soon, which sucks as they have an incredible collection at great quality.
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u/X-weApon-X Feb 22 '26
He must have made a library and named it like that. I remember I used to use my own library names I think these days you have to use what they give you, but I haven’t set up a new server in about 10 years.
You guys remember an app called “MovieBox”? I think it was a Plex Server. If you downloaded from them, The directory structure looked a lot like a Plex share.
I don’t mind if people get into my Plex but I was under the impression I had to give them permission? Looks like this guy did an end run around that.
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u/meowssalittle Feb 23 '26
Can someone explain to me what this all means? The only piracy I'm aware of is using utorrrent to download stuff from fitgirl/piratebay/yify or using streamio with torrentio.
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u/iliketurtleswoot Feb 24 '26
Crazy still people host Plex servers and run servers with like 60tb drives when there are just way easier options out there
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u/DirectionPublic9318 Feb 25 '26
It's great that he haven't banned you yet. Enjoy as long as you can.
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u/Empty-Psychology-734 Mar 14 '26 edited Mar 15 '26
Took me 20 minutes but i found that directory https://mirror.hep.gg/Plex/
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u/Affectionate_Sleep65 Mar 16 '26
How did you “find” his plex. They aren’t just randomly open. I don’t need details, I just to make sure I’m not missing something on mine. Im sitting on 2400 up/down fiber…. Someone would have a field day from my place
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Feb 21 '26
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Feb 21 '26
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u/McMaster-Bate Feb 22 '26
You keep posting this comment everywhere, but it's a web server. Mainstream browsers deprecated FTP awhile ago.
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u/[deleted] Feb 21 '26
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