- Jan 2, 2006
- 10,455
- 35
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I'm in China and recently a Chinese friend was downloading a torrent while I was over at this house. It didn't have many seeders so the speed was "slow" at 200 KB/s using this Chinese-made torrent client software. My friend commented that he didn't want to wait so he started chatting with the customer service of the torrent client. Since I can't read Chinese, I asked him what was going on and he said, "oh, you just have to pay them 25 cents and they will increase the download speed for you."
"Uhhh... of a torrent? How does that work? Isn't the speed limited by the available seeders?"
"I don't know."
Sure enough, a QR code popped up on his screen, he took his cell phone and opened up his WeChat app (which is China's Facebook but is also China's version of Google Wallet and even OKCupid) and scanned the QR code on his monitor via the WeChat app, and the download instantly increased to 5 MB/s in the torrent client.
This got me really confused. I supposed that this "torrent" client company also integrated UseNet into their business model, but surely this shouldn't work for newly-released torrents right?
One night, after a certain show had been released, I saw it pop up on a torrent site with a grand total of zero seeders because it had literally been released 1 minute ago.
I asked my friend if we could do an experiment and see if the download speed trick would still work, despite there being no seeders and the torrent having been 1 minute old.
Sure enough, it did. 25 cents and 5 MB/s later, we had the complete file.
What. The. Hell. Only thing I can think of are:
1. The file gets uploaded to UseNet much earlier than torrent trackers (but in my experience for other files this is not the case).
2. The Chinese people are really close to the source of the release groups.
3. The Chinese ARE the release groups.
"Uhhh... of a torrent? How does that work? Isn't the speed limited by the available seeders?"
"I don't know."
Sure enough, a QR code popped up on his screen, he took his cell phone and opened up his WeChat app (which is China's Facebook but is also China's version of Google Wallet and even OKCupid) and scanned the QR code on his monitor via the WeChat app, and the download instantly increased to 5 MB/s in the torrent client.
This got me really confused. I supposed that this "torrent" client company also integrated UseNet into their business model, but surely this shouldn't work for newly-released torrents right?
One night, after a certain show had been released, I saw it pop up on a torrent site with a grand total of zero seeders because it had literally been released 1 minute ago.
I asked my friend if we could do an experiment and see if the download speed trick would still work, despite there being no seeders and the torrent having been 1 minute old.
Sure enough, it did. 25 cents and 5 MB/s later, we had the complete file.
What. The. Hell. Only thing I can think of are:
1. The file gets uploaded to UseNet much earlier than torrent trackers (but in my experience for other files this is not the case).
2. The Chinese people are really close to the source of the release groups.
3. The Chinese ARE the release groups.