Right now I am living in a country that despises bit-torrent. Once I heard a guy downloading stuffs using the bit-torrent protocol on the college internet, the system admin flagged his activity and then he was dropped from the college. Tracking who is downloading illegal stuffs from bit-torrent isn’t something hard (trust me the tricks are ridiculously simple). To avoid that, there are few options to consider: 1) do not download via bit-torrent at all, 2) use VPN for secure connection, 3) use cloud bit-torrent, 4) if you insist to use it, do not seed after the download is complete.

I would like to go with the first option. Does it mean I am resorting to file-hosting services like MediaFire? Well, kinda… sorta. Current trend that I am aware of is that uploaders upload illegal files with weird file extensions on the file-hosting service, for instance, Anime2Enjoy uses .a2e file extension (and you have to rename it to .mkv after that) to avoid being flagged.

I would go with seemingly archaic solution: IRC. Specifically we are talking about XDCC here.

XDCC (Xabi DCC or eXtended DCC) is a computer file sharing method which uses the Internet Relay Chat (IRC) network as a host service.

If you asked me about the download experience, I’d say “Great! Blazing fast”. Well, that depends on the host upstream bandwidth and (obviously) my download speed.

How it really works in the backend mystifies me. Say that I have spare time to kill (about 2 hours), I would try to set up an IRC server, and then setting up the XDCC bot, and the web-parser for the XDCC. More often than not, research phase consumes time the most.

Here is the how-to to use XDCC by Haruhichan and HorribleSubs. As stated by the article, you need a desktop IRC client. I tried with qwebirc webchat client, but apparently the webchat doesn’t have appropriate module/extension to handle XDCC request.

Not sure about nirc webchat client but I guess it could have the very same ending as qwebirc if it doesn’t have module/extension to support XDCC. FYI, I am using Colloquy (Mac), and I am not sure about Xchat, and the tutorials from Haruhichan and HorribleSubs require you to have mIRC.

By the way, I was trying to set up XDCC-Fetch on my Xubuntu netbook. Luck wasn’t with me, and I didn’t bother to dig deeper.

p/s: Just now I learned there’s a secure version of DCC, called SDCC. Just figured out that it allows you to have a secure AES-256-DCC chat, and there is an extension for SSL DCC chat between Eggdrop (IRC server) and psyBNC (IRC bouncer).

Old technology is always something worth learning!