the most important thing to have when pirating is common sense
the second most important thing to have is a vpn
Still don't know why I'd need a vpn. My country doesn't go after individuals pirating (yet). That's the only reason, as far as I understand, to have a vpn for pirating. So until they start to take come after individuals, I'm gonna save my money.
You only need a VPN in very few countries, some where it is needed to avoid getting your internet connection cutoff from your ISP are the US, Germany, Greece, and a few other countries somewhere in Europe, the rest of the world doesn't care about people downloading movies online.
I am in Greece pirating without a VPN, and even after the new anti-piracy law passed, I haven't received a notice (yet).
Oh I didn't know that, are you using public trackers and leeching popular stuff too ?
Yes.
Also, I kinda should use a VPN anyway but I don't want to buy it yet.
In Germany they won't cut off your Internet connection. They'll send you a cease and desist for a few thousand euros.
That's even worse 😳
I think you've exactly described why some people need a VPN. My ISP does 3 strikes when they get complaints :/
Also VPN makes you rather anonymous. The sites won't track you and sometimes the trackers on public torrent files are notorious for tracking.
That is not true, the sites do still track you. VPNs don't prevent tracking, they just make sure the tracking is done through a secure tunnel.
VPNs don't prevent tracking, they just make sure the tracking is done through a secure tunnel.
The extra hop adds a significant barrier for the website in knowing the actual source IP. The fake source IP is likely used by many other users, and the user you are trying to track can easily rotate VPN IPs.
Its one less identifier for them to use.
Adtech relies on the OpenRTB 2.5/2.6 spec for tracking, you would have removed 1 identifier out of a hundred (one that isn't really used anyway given SSAI is so popular). In addition to that, cookie expiry timers are typically set to 365 days meaning you're VPN would need to enabled at all times to not invalidate multi-hop. WebStorage API based trackers tend to be indefinite.
ORTB spec: https://www.iab.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/OpenRTB-API-Specification-Version-2-5-FINAL.pdf
...specifics about WHY IP addresses and multi-hop don't matter.
...you would have removed 1 identifier...
So it can matter.
barely, efectively meaningless
Yeah, multi-hop is pointless for tracking. The logic to it is crazy too. People think VPNs make them anonymous (they don't), but they also think multi-hop makes them MORE anonymous. So anonymity is kind of an absolute concept. Either you are or you are not anonymous. You can't be more anonymous than anonymous. There is no +1.
Yeah, multi-hop is pointless for tracking.
The logic to it is crazy too. People think VPNs make them anonymous (they don't), but they also think multi-hop makes them MORE anonymous.
Whether multi-hop matters to tracking is far and away a different discussion than whether multi-hop "makes you anonymous".
I too disagree with the original comment, but also believe the pendulum swung too far the other direction in your replies.
Situations differ. Threat models differ. More hops can, from direct personal experience, make the difference in tracking. Your claim of "...multi-hop is pointless for tracking." has too broad of a scope to be correct.
What specifically about multi-hop makes you think it improves your security? Be specific. What is your "direct personal experience"?
What specifically about multi-hop makes you think it improves your security?
I haven't mentioned security.
I'm sorry, that isn't evidence.
So it can matter.
Remember to read the rest of that sentence:
1 identifier out of a hundred (one that isn't really used anyway given SSAI is so popular).
So, no. Not really.
Remember to read the rest of that sentence:
It doesn't change the contradiction.
You almost had the rest of the sentence there:
one that isn't really used anyway given SSAI is so popular
You almost had the rest of the sentence there:
That doesn't change the contradiction.
You're trying to argue without evidence (like I had provided). To summarize these exchange so far its:
- You giving some marketing crap you read from a VPN provider site on their multi-hop service.
- Someone pointing out that it is incorrect with evidence.
- You get mad and basically come back with "Nuh-uh!"
Is there some evidence you'd like to provide or is it going to be another "nuh-uh!"?
- You giving some marketing crap you read from a VPN provider site on their multi-hop service.
I'm sorry, but that isn't correct.
I'm sorry, but that isn't evidence.
I'm unsure what evidence you are referring to.
Threat models differ. More hops can, from direct personal experience, make the difference in tracking
Evidence, or it isn't true.
Evidence, or it isn't true.
Unrelated, but absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
Anyways, your own statement:
Adtech relies on the OpenRTB 2.5/2.6 spec for tracking, you would have removed 1 identifier out of a hundred (one that isn't really used anyway given SSAI is so popular).
Removing an identifier that is used. (1/100 = matters, "isn't really used" != unused). This contradicts your other statements:
Yeah, multi-hop is pointless for tracking.
...IP addresses and multi-hop don't matter...
Broad statements that don't take into consideration the threat model of other users. Servers you connect to might not be using source IP in any way to track. You might be leaking so many other identifiers, that its completely useless to worry about multi-hop. But this is not true for everyone in every situation.
If its worth anything to you, the Tor Project seems to think multi-hop and IP addresses matter for protecting against tracking.
Unrelated, but absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
So, I'm not allowed to ask you for proof of your statement? And if its unrelated, then why did you post it? Its unrelated. Also, you're saying you have an absence of evidence, ergo you have no evidence. Having no evidence does not qualify as evidence.
Removing an identifier that is used. (1/100 = matters, "isn't really used" != unused). This contradicts your other statements:
Just because an identifier exists doesn't mean it is used.
BidRequest.imp[i].tagid exists, but advertisers don't use it.
I think you are confusing having an option with something being mandatory.
And Tor nodes are not the same thing as VPN multi-hop. If you think that they are, wow! VPN multi-hop is you connecting to a provider's server that connects to another one of the provider's server then out. It's all the provider's network.
And again, if you connected your Firefox browser to Tor, we could still track you. You'd get cookied or localStorage() tracked. When you disconnect from Tor, that stuff is still present in your browser. Almost like the number of hops you take or the IP address used doesn't seem to really matter, huh?
EDIT: I just realized you think that Tor is built using multi-hop VPN. Its a real life Dunning-Kruger effect! I've never encountered this. You are going to do something really stupid and end up in prison.
So, I'm not allowed to ask you for proof of your statement? And if its unrelated, then why did you post it? Its unrelated. Also, you're saying you have an absence of evidence, ergo you have no evidence. Having no evidence does not qualify as evidence
Asking for evidence wasn't the issue, believing that the truth relies solely upon a discussion providing such evidence is.
I think you are confusing having an option with something being mandatory.
You misunderstood. Some of your own statements say it matters and is used. Mandatory wasn't mentioned nor implied.
And Tor nodes are not the same thing as VPN multi-hop.
I just realized you think that Tor is built using multi-hop.
I didn't state they were the same. Tor uses "multiple hops" (you can find that string the the link I posted earlier). It is critical to the limiting of information seen by any single entity.
And again, if you connected your Firefox browser to Tor, we could still track you. You'd get cookied or localStorage() tracked. When you disconnect from Tor, that stuff is still present in your browser. Almost like the number of hops you take or the IP address used doesn't seem to really matter, huh?
All that state can be removed. And the server might not be tracking that. Situations vary, adversaries vary. If you cannot imagine a scenario in which hops or IP address would matter, I would suggest doing some research.
Its a real life Dunning-Kruger effect! I've never encountered this. You are going to do something really stupid and end up in prison.
Personal swipes mark the end of this discussion. I would suggest you to leave those out next time as It detracts focus from constructive learning.
This will be my last reply. You can also reply if you want (but I won't see it).
That is a good point indeed, but also applies for regular internet use..
It’s a general rule, there are exceptions. I’d think it would be obvious why a VPN is needed for some even if you don’t need it.
I think it's the older way around. There are really only 3 or 4 countries where using a VPN to pirate is needed. I'm just willing to bet you live in one of those countries.
You want a tray of cookies for that original line?
Oatmeal please. If you want to be anonymous on the internet, use TOR not a VPN.
Torrenting over TOR. Fantastic idea. You clearly know what you're talking about.
Use cases are important.
Wanna torrent anonymously and don't wanna pay for a VPN? Get into I2P
If you want to download at dial-up speeds for most of your stuff.
It's still new so that's expected, as more and more people start using it, the speeds will get better automatically.
There's also private trackers, you won't need a VPN if you get your torrents from them.
Does I2P utilize nodes or something that can be hosted? I’m lucky enough to live in a location with symmetrical gigabit internet, so even if I don’t use it myself I could at least donate some bandwidth. Could run next to my TOR relay.
Private trackers are a very handy option. I’ve found their rules can often get restrictive. Although it makes sense - gotta protect the swarm.
If you’ve got a symmetrical gigabit line, you'd be a great fit for hosting a high-bandwidth I2P node, it helps the whole network scale and makes things faster for everyone. Though I'd recommend reading more about i2p before diving in.
Thanks for the links! I’ve got the I2P Router app configured and running as a daemon process.
the most important this to have when pirating is common sense
We disagree actually, it's to have well written tutorials and not to rely on the idea that people can just know things from nothing.
We get the frustration in this meme but honestly, we never liked this kind of attitude in tech spaces, it's exclusionary, gatekeepy and harms people. We understand not wanting to answer every single question but some well written tutorials etc to link to are better than having everyone starting in ignorance amd getting in trouble or being harmed for it.
Especially if said tutorials keep up to date and add more answers to people's questions over time.
After all, being helpful actually helps the pirate community in that more people seed, so helping others is actually win-win. There's really no downsides whereas expecting others to know everything or being rude stops this from happening and thus is a loss for all of us.
Tutorials can't cover everything. Once you encounter something completely new, you need common sense to extrapolate from your existing knowledge (which could be from a tutorial or experience, etc).
In the end, whether we're talking about piracy, work or life in general… You need to be able to adapt to situations, not just read guides.
That's not to say well-written tutorials shouldn't exist, but the common sense part is still more important IMO
Who is "we" in this?
Dissociative identity disorder...
Dunno man. Common sense for us in IT is different compared to layman. For example, I thought it was common sense to treat incognito mode only as a shortcut so I wouldn't have to clear browsing history and local cookies everytime. Then I read about users thinking incognito mode actually protected them against snooping or fingerprinting.
Common Sense™ 2015 still going strong
the second most important thing to have is a vpn
😉🤭
third most important is a good torrenting application
Verizon sends me a letter every time I pirate something newer than a year old. Congratulating me I guess because they never do anything else.
You don’t need a VPN if you have a good enough private tracker.
I pirated this meme in the highest quality I could but lemmy compresses the image to 60-70% of its original quality, that's why it's so blurry 😅
A serious question: what's wrong with pirate bay? I have been using it to download movies, shows and language learning content for over a decade, and I never had any problems.
Those aren't typically risky media. When you're downloading games though, you're downloading executable programs. You can do some serious damage if you execute the wrong things. You're not executing a mkv or a pdf, you're only reading it.
You're not executing a mkv or a pdf
You're half wrong and half right, .mkv files are completely safe but the same can't be said about .pdf files, attackers can embed malicious code, such as JavaScript or hidden executables, within a PDF file.
People really underestimate the capabilities of this .pdf file format. I remember some time ago, someone managed to run doom inside a .pdf file.
Theoretically, there could also be a MKV file that exploits a bug in the video player to get execution.
Far less likely, but definitely possible.
There's a difference between exploiting bugs that haven't even been found and spreading malware through a method that's known by pretty much everyone and is still used to spread malware today.
It's also theoretically possible that your system is already infected by some Advanced Persistent Threats but does that happen that often, No, and have people been infected by running random pdfs they found online, Yes.
Ah, so that's what apt stands for. Gives a new meaning to apt-get!
You can embed 3d models in PDF.
You shouldn't but you can!
Tell that to circuit board designers. It's horrible every time a 3d model of a circuit board is added. The component height gives no visual advantage, and it's slow as shit on corporate computers.
My first job was extracting text from pdfs, in the end OCR was the most reasonable way. This was back in like 2010 when it was waaaaay harder.
Everyone who enjoys cosmic horror should read the PDF spec. https://pdfa.org/resource/pdf-specification-archive/
The worst pdf file is epsteins best friend
Don't download games and software from it and always check the file extensions and make sure they're not something like Movie.mp4.exe or Movie.mkv.exe**, other than that you're good.
But I want to see the funny colours
Also watch out for any link files, .com files and .bat files.
Also watch out for any link files, .com files and .bat files.
I think you meant .lnk files instead of link files.
.scr and .uue are also becoming popular means to spread malware through torrents.
I like how Microsoft came up with an obscure extension for screensavers, which is just an .exe in disguise.
Nothing is wrong with it. I imagine you'd be the type to survive in the wild west because you're equipped to do so while people around you die of dysentery.
it's just guilty of being around for so long so it's popular which attracts a lot of attention.
This seems like a meme about piracy for script kiddies. These issues don’t really exist for anyone who knows what they’re doing.
Hence the “starter pack” lol they do indeed not know what they are doing
I thought starter packs weren't supposed to be ironic, did I miss something?
It literally is a meme, an ironic one.
Fat girl bad, noted.
One of my favourite things to do online is browse the comments of their torrents looking for the people saying "you're so pretty" etc
{intitle:game I wanted}{infile:*torrent}
This was how I used to format my piracy searches. 13 years later I recognize that forcing the search engine to generate direct links to the torrents instead of handing me pages I could get was probably where those viruses came from 😅
Why no one is speaking about Dodi-Repacks 😔
This meme is older than Dodi.
Razor1911
Back in my day, we didn't use VPN!!! We would download unfiltered!!! /J
This was me basically before I started to learn how to do shit properly.
Ie. when I was a teenager and learnt about pirating through low quality youtube vids
In Linux, if you run games with Lutris, you can have them sandboxed with your sandboxing app of choice (personally I use firejail) by changing the "command prefix" option in the configuration for the game (or setting it as the default in the global Lutris configuration).
Also Lutris defaults to a different Wine instance per game, so Windows-specific malware would only ever affect the wine instance of that game.
So if you're worried about pirated Windows games might contain Linux specific malware meant for when the game is running under Wine (as Wine is just an adaptor, not an emulator or sandboxing layer) you can go as crazy as you want in blocking what that executable can access, all fully under your control.
Ever since, fitgirl and Dodi repacks came the fear of malware were completely removed - well atleast for me!
It also protects your machine from any spyware in the original game, as it's very easy to have the sandboxing deny network access beyond localhost.
Personally I run everything inside the sandbox with networking disabled.
I don't understand folks that pirate games. I don't think there's a particular service issue currently between all the platforms and sales.
If I'm boycotting a publisher/studio, I just don't play their games. If I find them too expensive, I just don't buy it and won't play it. And if it's not worth buying it at full price, I'll just might buy it on sale later.
Movies and TV shows on the other hand... There's definitely a service issue there.
Money doesn't grow on trees, also people just like free stuff?
It's not free. The associated cost is searching for an appropriate release, potentially eliminating any issues with it and then still risking becoming part of the botnet.
In contrast, buying games on deep sale is pennies and it just works.
I wanna live in your world where all games cost pennies
I didn't say all games. I'm a patient gamer. I buy when they go on sale, years later. Unless it's a really well received indie game. I try to pay full price for those.
Steam (and I assume other platforms as well) change prices depending on region. So what may seem unaffordable in Canadian Dollars, is likely well priced in Hungarian Forint or Czech Korunas.
Thankfully I don't have to deal with any of that shit on private trackers
We used to had demo version of games, often made with care. Now we have 2h play on Steam while we can refund, instead.
Devs* learned to make first 2h nice and intense and to scream it's awesome and the wow effect, and everything later super bland and repetitive. Nice 2h long game may be worthy 8€. 2h long fun and 200h boring fuck is not worthy 80€ the devs request.
As devs I point some devs and often publishers who own dev studio and makes orders too.
I don't trust the bitches.
If I find whole game fun and worthy the price, can pay even 80€, can put it on the wishlist to buy on promo later, or in extreme cases, even buy few copies for friends includes pricy dlc. IF I find it worthy as whole.
Good for you. You do you. I'll keep pirating all the games I can, and if they are from a respected developer (fuck you Ubisoft, EA, Blizzard, etc.) AND I like the game, then I'll certainly buy it.
We don't disagree. Our approach is just different. Neither of us are throwing much money at these companies.
Just the other day I've bought the FO4 GOTY edition for (checks email) C$13.37 (lol), which included all DLCs, and I thought it was a fair price for the quality of the game and content it provides. With the 30% cut that steam takes, I hope Bobby or Todd or whoever is in charge now is happy.
I don't understand folks that pirate games. I don't think there's a particular service issue currently between all the platforms and sales
Capcom puts invasive DRM on all of their games now, and retroactively added it after people bought said games. All of the Borderlands games had spyware retroactively added over the past yeat spyware. And Ubisoft can't be trusted to not take away games from people who paid for them.
Right. But again, that's on the individual for buying it for loads of cash upon release. The writing was on the wall for all these shitty AAA producing companies for years, yet the preorder FOMO train never stopped.
I agree about piracy/cracks for stuff that you already bought, but the publisher broke it in some way. But these are the exception, not the norm.
Hey, whatever makes you feel superior
What about games that are no longer being sold?
As in abandonware? Or delisted due to cultists? Either way, the answer is yes.
I'm a Linux user and the games I play are usually not supported, so troubleshooting time often exceeds the two hour return window. This is nearly a non-issue these days though.
I'm a Linux user as well (arch btw) and I just look at protondb and https://areweanticheatyet.com/as a reference. If something comes up as less than stellar, I'll just skip purchasing it.
Longest I had to tinker with were Project Zomboid (due to ancient gfx before I bought a new one) and Jedi Fallen Order (just to fine tune for performance/fidelity, took about 15 minutes).
I understand if you regularly go for games that require a lot of tinkering you might need more time though, but the Steam return is 2hrs of played time, not 2hrs of owning the game.
Oh I did pirate that woke game, was it dustbuilt or dirtborn or something? Didn’t play it tho
on a sale later
Or just show the publishers the middle finger by sailing the seven seas.