the most important thing to have when pirating is common sense
the second most important thing to have is a vpn
this post was submitted on 27 Jul 2025
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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ
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Common Sense isn't common
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 countries where it is needed to avoid fines/getting your internet connection cutoff from your ISP are the US, Germany and a few other countries somewhere in western Europe, also don't pirate polish films without a VPN if you live in Poland, 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).
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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 😳
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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.
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 and 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
Sure, but the problem is that people aren't taught those skills necessarily. So it does help when people are willing to help out in case those skills or ability to do that or for many other reasons aren't possible.
We get that not everybody can or wants to, but a quick "I'm unable to help you" is fine, yet we see so mahy people being rude instead. Leave space for those who can or want to help instead 🙂
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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.
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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 😅
Fat girl bad, noted.
But she's a girl right?
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.
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!
The worst pdf file is epsteins best friend
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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.
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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
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It literally is a meme, an ironic one.
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chrome, mcaffee, pirate bay, utorrent. am i back in 2010
{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 😅
Back in my day, we didn't use VPN!!! We would download unfiltered!!! /J
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