this post was submitted on 06 May 2026
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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

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I actually never got a virus from torrenting back in the day. I never could understand why everyone got viruses and why people could never get software packages to work by reading the instructions. People would say "this doesn't work." I'd install and it would work the first time I tried. Seemed like all software torrents had the same stupid comments with perfectly good wares.

[–] TigerAce@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

Back in my day we had usenet communities without viruses and with high speeds and privacy, which still works great. These days we have it fully automated (radarr and sonarr) so every new episode or newly released movie is downloaded in the preferred format, size and language, with subtitles, which is all extracted, renamed and moved to the right folders while kodi keeps track of everything newly added and what is already watched.

[–] MissyBee@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 points 1 day ago (2 children)

I torrented and direct downloaded stuff before but never understood Usenet. Some kind of closed circle where you get invited by offering something or a buy in?

[–] TigerAce@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 1 day ago

There are free options, but it's best to pay a monthly subscription from a provider. They have servers where things are posted. A decent provider has a long retention. I have Eweka, their retention is like 900 days or something, maybe even more these days. Then you need a download application, I use sabnzbd. To find posts, there are websites like with torrents or applications. Binsearch.info for example, and spotnet. There are also some closed communities. I pay for 2 indexers, which is 10 euros per year each, which will grab the post I need. The applications sonarr (for series) and radarr (for movies) download everything I add automatically when released, within the parameters I like. So, I don't want movies which are 90GB so I have limits. Also I don't like French or German dubbed stuff, so only original languages and with subtitles (if they at missing, I van download them through a kodi plugin from subtitles.org).

[–] I_am_10_squirrels@beehaw.org 1 points 1 day ago

I haven't used it yet either, but I believe it's buy in nowadays. It was buy in for a while, then ISPs started offering free usenet access to attract customers, now it's buy in again.

[–] PotatoesFall@discuss.tchncs.de 62 points 3 days ago (3 children)

uhhh people still be using torrents for movies and shows

[–] Damage@feddit.it 0 points 6 hours ago

nah, no way, absolutely not

[–] queerlilhayseed@piefed.blahaj.zone 14 points 2 days ago (2 children)

I honestly don't know how else to do it. I'm sure I could figure it out, but I don't know why I'd fix what isn't broken.

[–] cyberpunk007@lemmy.ca 19 points 2 days ago (1 children)

The meme suggests extensions. Lol. That's an odd flex. Sounds manual and tedious as fuck compared to arr/sick rage/etc

"Move along grandma, your automobile is no good, we use camels"

[–] hexagonwin@lemmy.today 3 points 2 days ago

camels sound based tho

[–] dermanus@lemmy.ca 9 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Thats my attitude. Torrents have risks but so do random Russian streaming sites. By now I have it going with Jellyfin and *arr and I barely have to think about it

[–] glibg10b@lemmy.zip 13 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Torrents aren't risky for movies as long as you don't have "Hide file extensions" turned on. Unless someone's wasting their zero-day video player exploit on you, which is unlikely, you wont find malware in an mp4 or mkv unless it's actually an exe in disguise

[–] Cassa@lemmy.blahaj.zone -3 points 2 days ago (3 children)

sry, but that's just straight up wrong. You can hide malware in video files (both mp4 and mkv are great containers!) and you can disguise your virus as a video.

[–] glibg10b@lemmy.zip 6 points 2 days ago (1 children)

That's like encoding malware in a picture and calling it dangerous

[–] Cassa@lemmy.blahaj.zone 0 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

yes? opening a picture with malware could infect your computer.

It would be a combination attack, so the virus would either target the correct media player or several of em.

here is a older vulnurability with vlc and avi file https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2021-25801

it is absolutely far less risky than downloading programs that run code, but it's not without any risk

edit: windows programs also lets files call home. Script Command in windows media player f.ex 🤷

[–] glibg10b@lemmy.zip 5 points 1 day ago

Like I said, no one's wasting a 0-day on a lemming like you or me

[–] whoami@sh.itjust.works 2 points 2 days ago (1 children)

But malware wrapped as video (or any other doc or media format) still needs to be executed, right? So if you don't give that file execute permission (which Linux doesn't give by default) and open it through media player or something, could said potential malware still run? I thought it couldn't unless the player itself is vulnerable

[–] Cassa@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 points 2 days ago

no, these things would try to exploit the program that read them.

it's not a likely attack vector, you need both a malware file, and the right program trying to read it. it might not also be transferrable across different os.

so yes, it needs a media player to attack. https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2021-25801 this one f.ex

[–] IAMgROOT@lemmy.wtf 1 points 2 days ago

kern.exe.mp4 LOL

and the rest are 0days that sell for millions

[–] Naho_Zako@piefed.zip -1 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I'd be fucking nervous to torrent a game tbh, or at least a game that runs on PC. Like I'm not as concerned about my hacked 3DS getting a virus but, to each their own I guess...

Also I basically only torrent anime/shows and music so far...

[–] Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Gaming on Linux via Wine is great in that sense - not only is most Windows software not really designed to connect to the Linux side of things when running on top of an adapter layer like Wine/Proton (which are NOT emulators so don't sandbox anything) but you have way better security tools and a kernel designed with it in mind in Linux, so for example you can actually start your games inside a proper sandbox like Firejail to block it from accessing stuff outside the wine instance directory.

On the other hand, forget about all the nice automated configuration scripts that just make the Windows game seamlessly install and work in Linux when installing a pirated repack: you have to actually understand how Wine and Wine-tricks works as you're likely to have to dig through logs of a game that's not running to figure out which DLLs are missing from the wine instance and install them yourself.

[–] mizule@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 points 2 days ago (1 children)

i've never had the issue you're describing in the end, you are using proton-ge right?

[–] Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

In all fairness, I've had that issue only with the first game I pirated to play in Linux, which I actually own but the official version won't run in Linux (under Steam, so that was using Proton) hence why I got a pirate version (which, once a couple of missing DLLs were added, worked fine - so the pirated version is the superior product).

My point does stand that if you're used to using things like Steam or Lutris to run your games in Linux, with pirated repacks there's no help from scripts that make sure there are no missing DLLs, so either it's a recent game from a good repacker like Dodi or you're probably going to have to check the logs for missing DLLs and add them via Winetricks.

Switching to proton-ge as the runner in Lutris does often solve the problem running a game in Linux (pirated or otherwise), just not always.

[–] mizule@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 points 2 days ago

Mhm that is fair. For me, with repacks, the only thing i had to do was add WINE_LARGE_ADDRESS_AWARE=0 as an environment variable in my prefix and then i had no more issues.

[–] Chronographs@lemmy.zip 51 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

“Free converters” FFmpeg came out in 2000 come on

[–] LiveLM@lemmy.zip 31 points 2 days ago

Yeah the viruses live in these wacko extensions y'all are using now

Even back in my day only dummy's got viruses from torrents.

[–] benny@reddthat.com 10 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

The only viruses I ever got were on irc warez (pretty harmless too). I got smart by the time torrents came around. lol

[–] fushuan@lemmy.blahaj.zone 10 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Video and subtitle downloader extensions...? Bruh the arr stack works mostly via torrents (let's ignore Usenet).

[–] hexagonwin@lemmy.today 4 points 2 days ago (2 children)

tbh it's find to hard good torrents for non-english stuff these days, so those extensions are kinda useful for ripping off local pirate streaming sites

[–] Alvaro@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Find a local private tracker, most countries have something like that (I believe) and usually has all the localized content you need

[–] hexagonwin@lemmy.today 1 points 2 days ago

i'm not aware of any decent one. torrenting is not popular here anymore, the ones that exist are extremely sketchy, on decline and mostly copies stuff from english language trackers.

[–] fushuan@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

Dunno, I usually watch stuff with the original voices subbed to Spanish. Most series are pirated from streaming services subtitles included, and for the ones that have no subtitles I have Bazarr linked to opensubtitles and that's fine.

If you want dubbed stuff tho, that's harder I agree.

[–] rebelsimile@sh.itjust.works 17 points 3 days ago

What do you mean dbz_episode_001.exe is a virus?? I got it directly from limewire dumbass.

[–] muhyb@programming.dev 6 points 2 days ago
[–] JebanuusPisusII@szmer.info 7 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Hijacking the thread. Does anyone know how to block exe and scr downloads in Sonarr?

[–] fushuan@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 points 2 days ago

How is it even downloading that? Wouldn't the sonarr quality profiles grab an actual video file? An exe has no resolution for instance.

Also in my case most video files are transpiled automatically so jellyfin has to work less when serving, so the transpiled would fail. Shit would never run unguarded.