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.
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.
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?
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 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.
“Free converters” FFmpeg came out in 2000 come on
The only viruses I ever got were on irc warez (pretty harmless too). I got smart by the time torrents came around. lol
uhhh people still be using torrents for movies and shows
nah, no way, absolutely not
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…
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.
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”
camels sound based tho
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
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
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.
That’s like encoding malware in a picture and calling it dangerous
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 🤷
Like I said, no one’s wasting a 0-day on a lemming like you or me
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
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
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.
Video and subtitle downloader extensions…? Bruh the arr stack works mostly via torrents (let’s ignore Usenet).
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
Find a local private tracker, most countries have something like that (I believe) and usually has all the localized content you need
Hijacking the thread. Does anyone know how to block exe and scr downloads in Sonarr?
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.
It doesn’t run, but it is downloaded and seeded to other potential victims.
Okay, understood, you would indeed be promoting the malicious file even though it wouldn’t be an issue for you personally. Then agree with the other comment, block it in the torrent client directly.
