Torrent files are pure metadata. There is no copyrighted (or copyrightable) content in them.

Then use more sophisticated methods.

If only OpenAI had access to a giant computer brain that could analyze this problem and offer some solutions...

What the fuck is unfair? If you don't like how they are using your service, stop them. Cut them off, feed them garbage, get clever and solve the problem.

What are lawmakers going to do about it? Order President Trump to nuke China? More tariffs? Sanctions on Russia?

You are incorrect. No one has given any ethical reasons. They just claim that it would be unethical without giving any reasons.

Sorry, I didn't realize that you were such good friends with these 100 million people. I guess if you are sure that every last one of them skips the current flu shot for political reasons, and not because they aren't particularly at risk from the flu, who could argue?

Are we talking about $20 worth of sterile saline here? What is that on a per-taxpayer basis? I can spot you a few millicents if you are short this week.

It would certainly be unethical to do it without telling them, but I don't see what would be unethical about conducting the trial after obtaining informed consent.

Roughly 100 million American adults currently don't seek the annual flu shot. Surely a few thousand of them would be willing to take part in a trial where they have a chance to be no better or worse off than they were before. Tell them what each group is going to get, and their odds of being assigned to that group.

Gosh, if only there was a way to compare to placebo and to the previous standard at the same time. Someone should get on that right away. We could revolutionize medicine.

Can you imagine how great it would be if we expected most new drugs to demonstrate their risks against a placebo and their effectiveness against the previous drug, at the same time?

On the one hand, you are making up thoughts that you imagine I'm having. On the other, if you can't find a useful cross section out of a population of 100 million people - plus billions in other countries if needed - I'm going to assume that you suck at your job.

But the meat, meager though it may be, is your hypothetical scenario, wherein you don't need to run any trials at all because you've already imagined how it will go. Consider instead the opposite scenario - equally imaginary:

If your group of people who actively seek out the flu vaccine disproportionately contains people who cower in terror and rarely leave the house, the vaccine may appear to be much more effective than it would be in the general population.

I'll point out that your imagination is extra useless, because the absolute effectiveness isn't really at issue here. For each volunteer who has made an informed decision to be part of the trial, you flip a 3-sided coin. Heads, he gets a saline injection. Tails, he gets the new shot. Belly, he gets the old shot. You either need to recruit a few hundred more volunteers (out of a population between 100 million and several billion people) or you lose a small amount of resolution. But now you can compare both safety and effectiveness against the both placebo and against the old shot. You could even make it a 4 sided coin and capture the old+new combo.

I really don't understand the objections. Why the hell are so many people up in arms and committed to not gathering this information while pretending to respect "the science"? Are there other fields where you prefer not to collect data? Do you all have some personal stakes here? Or do you simply object because the "wrong team" is involved?

You can test safety glasses in a lab without putting anyone at risk of anything. Put them in a fixture and throw things at them first, then put them on a simulated human head and throw more things at them. You can keep at this until you are pretty sure that the new safety glasses are at least roughly as good as the old ones before you put them out to market.

But the only "lab" we have for testing vaccines is human bodies. Fortunately, we are talking about the flu and not deadly super-ebola.

I bet that you could get plenty of volunteers willing to take the informed risk of having a 50/50 chance at getting either the new flu shot or a placebo. Some people are at high risk from the flu and would want the (supposedly) proven shot.

But roughly half of all adults in America feel no particular danger from the flu, as we know because they don't get the shot now. It would only take a few thousand people from that group of ~100 million to establish a proper baseline. Unless the new shot literally has negative efficacy, they are at no more risk for participating than they had already accepted.

Wait - do you think that current flu vaccine trials have follow up visits where the doctors intentionally infect the patients with the flu to see if the shots work? No, of course not. That would be insane.

It isn't forestry that we want the cabinetmaker to learn, it is that we don't want them to stack their errors.

Imagine if the cabinetmaker made the first cabinet they built against the blueprints, but then they built each successive cabinet against the previous one instead of the blueprint. With each generation, the errors stack up and before long, your cabinets look like something Dr. Seuss would draw.

How badly have the errors stacked up in this case? We have no idea. We haven't done actual placebo trials in this field for many decades - and in some cases, actually literally never. The only way to know is to compare against a proper baseline - a known inert agent. Maybe you don't need to do it every time, but you sure as hell can't do it never - that's madness.

It is buried in the story, but the objection is that Moderna wants to compare their new product's safety against their last product, and not against an inert placebo.

For anyone who has ever built anything, you know that you must always measure from the same baseline, and never measure from your last hole. When you are mentoring a young person, you tell them "Don't stack your errors." Try building a cabinet some time by putting the holes for the shelf pins an inch from the previous hole instead of X inches from the bottom - you'll end up with shelves that get more and more crooked as you go up because each hole will have the previous hole's error, plus a new error. You can get away with it only if the errors are randomly distributed, and they pretty much never are when humans are involved.

Today, in 2026, you'd have to be a complete retard to be in this industry and somehow fail to notice that the current administration has been saying all year that it wants vaccination products to be evaluated against actual placebos, and not merely against the most recent turtle on the stack. (RFK Jr has been saying this for decades.) Most new drugs are tested against actual placebos, and it is a bit crazy that we are now many decades into this bad habit of error stacking in this one product category.

Key management is a huge pain in the ass. If you aren't personally dealing with the keying hassles, your communications are neither private nor secure.

At best, there might be a corporate policy somewhere that says that employees should not snoop.

You are wrong about 2A supporters. You should read these guys: https://x.com/mnguncaucus

Also, he commits at least two crimes that we can see in the videos, and supposedly also a $25 fine petty misdemeanor (not carrying his card and ID).