Without the full info hash, they can probably keep lawyers away. Unlike BTDigg. You are one step away from the hash anyway, there are other online and offline databases.
a) This is not hard evidence, even though it is mostly correct.
b) ISPs do not need to rely on some random server on the other side of the world watching a tiny amount of requests, they see the user traffic directly.
c) ISPs do not have the legal authority to investigate or penalise anyone, or even peek into private communication.
d) As we all know, c) is just a show, and governments and corporations routinely offer helpful services to each other under fake legal covers and self-lobbied decrees that make both sides seemingly not responsible for anything.
It depends on applications and users (home, mobile, corporate). Some anecdotal evidence suggests that 2/3rds of user pairs can't connect without a relay server with all the tricks deployed (NAT traversal, IPv6 when available, client side port guessing for certain predictable NAT implementations), in other case it is 9 out of 10, or almost everyone. However, if you and your friend can't connect, what are the benefits of knowing that 100 other users succeeded?
That's why WebRTC supposes that the service provides some TURN relays from the start, and any commercial application comes with its own relays or uses third party infrastructure. That's why when you see any mention of “peer-to-peer” in this context, it actually means “which percent of monthly traffic on average we can offload”.
Notice that those are stats for unique data transmissions between one user and another. When data is not unique (same live video segments to many users), we can have one-to-many sharing, and the percentage of offloaded data can grow much more. Candidate selection for reliable seeding role is non-trivial, though, and it might only make sense when the swarms are big enough to contain enough peers that accept incoming connections.
As other said, quite a lot of those services exist. When they don't provide TURN servers, they have questionable utility (but can be used in the same local network). When the author does host a server for others, you obviously don't want to shove gigabytes of data into it (and the safe bandwidth limit is usually too slow for that anyway). Network connections do not seem to be the main problem, writing the client code properly, and in a way compatible with multiple browsers and unexpected events does.
If you have a non-recurrent need to transfer some data, and no server at hand, Syncthing volunteer-run relays seem to have some capacity available.
Things that need to be taught need to be taught. Reading, writing, and counting can also be kept for later. Misanthropic heralds could even say that many strata of modern society don't really need literacy, and should just be given smartphones with cameras. “Later” easily turns to “never”.
A student should be given the best examples of human art, not some watered down versions, otherwise there is a chance that people will never try to reach that level. A lot of them won't (and reading some books never was a guaranteed path to a good life anyway), but by deciding what is “good enough for the common person” you artificially limit their world on that path (thankfully, there are other paths).
Whether they realise it or not, people are shaped by their environment. A book that you don't like can still point that certain questions and ways of thinking exist. Its place can easily be taken by seemingly “more appropriate” pop cultural or pop psychological works that, unfortunately, don't reach that level in order to be as “accessible” as possible.
The problem here is the existence of “required reading” lists, and mass education in general. That institute is completely flawed, bureaucratised production process of “studying”, and only the heroic actions of individuals who have to fight it from the inside make it less dumb. A good teacher can teach why the good book is good, but where to find so many of them?
International politics are fake. There is a gentleman's agreement that secret services can kill “traitors” and “enemies” anywhere as long as no one objects (or the objecting country is not important enough anyway). The hirelings get the fake documents that are perfectly known to the officials to be the token of non-diplomatic immunity, and also allow them to pretend they were once again fooled by the bad foreign state. In Skripal case, killers spent the day before waiting for some agents to appear at the location to tell them to go sightseeing somewhere else. Nothing happened = UK was OK with what they were doing. Only after the fact British officials started to create a scene, and what they were worried about most was the fact that Russian officials have sold the “special” passports to way too many “irrelevant” thugs and oligarchs who wanted to be untouchable when travelling abroad (hence the leak of the existence of those passports, and silent confirmation that they were respected by so-called free and lawful countries).
You need to understand that those “above” are dumb bureaucrats playing dumb bureaucratic games. This is how societal selection works in current historical period.
As for this case, Kadyrov (or his inner circle) is known to be emo about any critic, and has been successfully killing the Chechen refugees in Europe for decades now. Ukrainians also seem to operate freely, which is a bit ironic when you remember that Ukrainian agents were taught in the same secret military schools Russian agents graduated from, and that Ukrainian oligarchs have mansions on Côte d'Azur and similar places right next to mansions of Russian oligarchs. I sometimes worry about their travel logistics in such complex times. Poor creatures!
Some people use My Little Pony characters as avatars, some use history books characters and propaganda poster characters. It means nothing in itself, people rarely stick to what they preach.
If you think that dumb nostalgia about “good old times” and complete ignorance/acceptance of any murders if they are considered state-sanctioned is somehow different in your own country (any country at any time), you must come to conclusion that some people inherently have lesser “quality” than others based on papers that they are given at birth by this or that organisation calling itself a state. Problematic, as they say.
You look like you are completely unaware of the wave of big and small early nineties games that used flat shaded 3D renders for art, sprites, and full motion video segments. Unlike fully textured polygons, they could be rasterised quickly on older or entry level Silicon Graphics workstations (or cheaper alternatives, but with more sweat). It was one of the distinctive styles of that era.
Step 0 is missing: having a great taste. One look at the video example is enough to figure out that the author keeps things in balance and in style. Explanations of why pixel grid mismatch looks wrong, or why mismatch between texture density and geometric complexity (in both ways) looks horrible, or why smoothing does not blend with pixel art are then made in retrospect.
Some details are a bit too cool for 1993, though, and assume high frame rate (won't work that well at low fps). Smooth weapon animations with a lot of frames, tiny per-pixel effects on bullet holes and flash sprites, smooth movement and object position calculations that use precise math instead of fast rough estimates resemble Chasm: The Rift or Quake (the concept of idle animations, e. g. objects moving in the starting view of difficulty selection room, assumes that there is some performance to waste on details that make the world less empty).
There is a dozen of existing Quake ports ready to run the moment you feed them the game files, and you recommend a version re-implemented on top of Xash3D, which is a GoldSrc-compatible engine. Why?
Laws do nothing without people who believe in them (just like they believe any other idol), or profit from them, or make an excuse that they are getting paid to enforce them, therefore “it is OK”.
People should be pre-conditioned to lose their marbles at the mere idea of someone being naked, and rush to the saviours in power as a consequence. It is not universal, there are many places where people are not trained by hyper-sexualised culture to treat children as sexual objects first and foremost (of course, it's always because of some “other” maniacs “everywhere”). That does not mean that those places are “better” or “safer”, just not that crazy.
In simple terms, viewers taught how to feel by the Jerry Springer Show (and by that I mean all “respectable” globalised media together, the difference is superficial) put on the cork hats, and dictate how everyone else should act. All while being 100% sure they are “progressive”, unlike those “savages”.
Obviously, certain people really like that they can keep any international hosting company, or business in general, on a leash, and they like it to be that way forever, so it's essential that you keep supporting the hypocrisy.
People always retroactively justify anything they see as convenient and uncontroversial, stick to “everyone's opinion” (which does not exist, and is the product of their own projections).
One needs education to explain that, for example, hentai manga has little to do with realism, that character drawing styles have a long history that is only partially intertwined with lolicon wave started in the early 1980s (and that they even cross-pollinated with female-oriented manga along the way), or that the strict indecency ban (again, thanks to US) had created it in the first place (so little girls were actually used to portray proverbial 900 year old vampiresses because you could not draw those vampiresses that way).
Then we can see that any kind of image, even highly realistic, even photographs, is a deliberate set of choices made by the author, not a 1:1 copy of of “reality”. Then we can switch to the viewer side, and study how the contents of people's head define what they see, and how they react.
Here's a party trick. Japanese entertainment industry still produces a significant amount of media with young women in bikini. Weekly Young Magazine (one of the biggest manga periodicals) keeps placing idols on the front cover to this day. Ask someone about it, and listen to the expected comments about “questionable”, “seedy”, and “exploitative” nature of those (which are obviously true to a large extent). Then compare that to Western media products, global pop stars and such, and enjoy the excuses about it being completely different, “suitable for the whole family”, and “playing by the rules”.
Disapproval is only the first step. After that you can start looking the other way in certain cases. Not always in exchange for the money, just for public reverence and praise, i. e. the symbols of power.
You seem to suppose that those businesses are really independent, only focus on goals they advertise, and exist in a vacuum. I can't even imagine how many “services” they offer to governments to keep their market shares.
The non-government organisations involved in those cases are either proxies that always support local politicians, or have been deliberately created to create opaque decision making source that is outside of legal or public scrutiny. As always, the ones who decide morals for the masses are the ones you can not even criticise. Unfortunately, even if you don't have such activist group, there is always a queue of well-intentioned citizens full of dreams of getting in bed with any politician, and having their 15 minutes of fame.
So one thing is to show who is the boss. Just as a slave owner who randomly kills a couple of slaves just to make others tremble in fear, US reminds others who sets the rules of international trade. The pretext is not that important.
Another is to keep public in check. A citizen who says “Sonic and Mario BDSM Chamber game? Wow, so unbelievable”, and shrugs it off is a bad citizen. Good citizens must react as prescribed to any real or imagined horror stories, be attracted to sexual content in media (or outraged by it, which is the same thing), and always fear the dangers that exist “outside”. The more they do that, the more they ignore the real world around them, and rely on imaginary protections the system and its members provide.
As political entertainers are interested in keeping the status quo that benefits all of them, they always choose the lowest common denominator views on such topics. It does not matter what you really think about it, it matters that you do the trick when the command is given: gasp with others, murmur with others, shake your head with others, decide that it must be stopped by existing powers with others (and therefore let them decide for you).
PornHub was famously not immune to the same thing. Porn industry attacked free streaming sites to remove everything that was not actively copyrighted, and directly provided by industry. It probably cost them a lot to organise that through politicians, journalists, activists — and payment processors. Ironically, the rhetoric you might call religious was used to help porn business.
Given that general public uses social network services for electronic messaging today, and those don't even pretend they want to be interoperable, we've got parasites of a totally different class on top of the Internet infrastructure.
Before Windows Internals book we all know (called Inside Windows NT in its first editions), there was Windows Internals and other books and articles by Matt Pietrek. It starts from disassembly of WIN.COM studying the insides of DOS to figure out under which more or less common version of MS-DOS Windows is being run.
It is a typical solution from the 90s, first steps of interactivity after hand-written HTML pages served by Apache. POST request is handled by some Perl script that rewrites the HTML page, then redirects to it or directly sends it as a reply. See the most basic frame-based chats (no Javascript, no nothing).
It only handles massive traffic if reads of those static pages are frequent, and updates are rare. When thousands of users are posting, you have to either block everyone on each write, or subdivide the required synchronisation between boards. Also, the regenerated pages might be used just a couple of times before the next rewrite happens (or not viewed at all, like far away board pages, but you still have rewrite all involved pages as a batch), and not much caching happens. In addition to that, each short comment causes multiple full long pages to be regenerated, and stored on disk. You basically get a very ineffective database with very ineffective primitives.
So usually every image board owner starts with decoupling of message posting and page updates to only regenerate pages once in a while, and process multiple edits at once, then some things stop working, as they assume each state change happens in full in multiple places, then they try to rewrite everything or switch to a real database engine.