It’s widely thought that there’s two internets: China, and everyone else. This is thanks to the Great Firewall which keeps Chinese consumers on domestic networks and web services. Europeans might use websites from around the world everyday: Whatsapp, Facebook, Youtube, BBC.com, rutracker, VK, and Spotify, while a Chinese user would typically only use websites hosted within the borders of their home country.

This leads to home-grown piracy that largely goes unchecked due to a lack of DMCA enforcement. It’s laughable to imagine getting a warning from your ISP in China about copyright infringement, so there’s very easy methods of piracy within the Great Firewall. I’ll go through a few concepts here.

Thunder (迅雷)

Thunder, or in Mandarin Xunlei, is a proprietary P2P filesharing client very similar to uTorrent. Instead of magnet links or torrent files, thunder links are the preferred method of filesharing in China. Within the client, you can search for content, transfer files, and even pay money to the Xunlei company to make your torrents download faster.

It’s very easy to use this, just download the client and get to searching. But be warned: This is Chinese software. That means it will display popups, associate plenty of files with the client, probably transmit information insecurely, and maybe even install communist rootkits on your computer. Maybe it’s better to do this in a VM!

Alternatives: Translating Thunder to Bittorrent

Thunder has their own proprietary links they use to keep people on their services. For example, if you’re trying to get a raw video file for the movie “Women who Flirt” (撒娇女性最好命) by searching on Badiu, you’ll find a link like this:

thunder://QUFodHRwJTNBJTJGJTJGeHouNjZ2b2QubmV0JTNBODg5JTJGMjAxNCUyRldvbWVuLldoby5GbGlydC4yMDE0LjEwODBwLkJsdVJheS54MjY0LVdpS2kudG9ycmVudFpa1

However, the part of this URL after the thunder:// is a base64 encoded string. We can easily decrypt it to find where the thunder client will download the file or metadata from:

Ahttp://xz.66vod.net:889/2014/Women.Who.Flirt.2014.1080p.BluRay.x264-WiKi.torrentZZÔ

There’s some characters at the beginning and end (A and ZZÔ) that when removed reveal a URL to the torrent link.

Now I’m sure that putting the thunder link into the thunder client would be faster, as they have different methods besides the typical bittorrent protocol to allocate traffic. After all, you can pay the company money to make transfer speeds faster.