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this post was submitted on 25 Sep 2023
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Running modified executables you find on torrent sites seems worse
Software is software. You're downloading shady software off the Internet anyway, but there's one key difference:
I mostly agree with you, except that The Pirate Bay is mostly regarded as risky for software. https://rentry.co/megathread-all-purpose under "untrustworthy websites".
do you think gen-z is able to somehow hover over the icons to see the tooltip and understand what these skulls are for when they're using their phone for everything?
Who is torrenting stuff on their PHONE?!
(Unless using it to control their PC remotely)
it was mostly a joke and an exaggeration, but it still baffles me how much more they use their phone for things that objectively one can do much easier in a pc or laptop. Like things that require you to have 5-10 tabs open and constantly jump between them to compare things or fill a form with 20 fields etc
This assumes a bad actor doesn’t flood the torrent with their own peers. It would be trivial to set up a couple hundred peers to distribute malware.
Not sure if it was ever confirmed, but some years back it was speculated that the MPAA or associated groups were putting out bad torrents full of broken files to stop people from pirating movies.
A "couple hundred peers" is a lot easier said than done. That being said, it does happen and you are correct that having a lot of seeders doesn't guarantee a safe download.
All of the three conditions I mentioned are neither sufficient nor necessary for a safe download, but there is a strong correlation. Unless the torrent is official (e.g. official Linux distro torrents), there is always some chance of a bad download. The chance can be low but is never zero.