there's now more ads in "legit" sites (YouTube, amazon) than in piracy sites

I remember iTunes only letting you change computer like 2-3 times max before the drm would make mysic not work any more, but maybe it was no-drm in the beginning.

I had a chinese 1GB shuffle though so IDK if that's correct.

The chinese shuffle also doubled up as a usb key (very useful back then) and also didn't need iTunes to function smh.

Meanwhile, in a dark and forgotten corner of my PC, I STILL have several thousand MP3s I downloaded from Kazaa back in the day.

I feel like most of the kind of people who go out of their way to pirate also go out of their way to avoid ads.

It causes genuine harm, I'm visually impaired and I've wandered into construction zones because advertising billboards are mounted near and "road work ahead" signs and everything is all just bright and bold.

I don't know what's official, everything is competing for my attention but I have very little capacity to dedicate my full attention to a visual sign. The end result is incredibly fatiguing, seeing a bright sign and straining to ensure I read it because it's colours look important, nope, it's an ad, that was a waste of energy, oh look another one with the same blurry colours and type setting it's probably the same ad.... Nope that one actually needed my attention, and now I'm somewhere I shouldn't be and I'm in danger.

I'm also hard of hearing, but fortunately audio adber in the public isn't as bad, but anyone who's hearing impaired knows how fatiguing it is to try and filter through noise. It's the exact same for visual impairment.

I’m pretty sure that Amazon, google, etc do far more nefarious shit behind the scenes in terms of tracking/fingerprinting you and collecting data to sell

You even get to pay more and more for this privilege…smh

This is all spanish (as in castilian) media. The torrents are sparse and usually really badly encoded, I'm talking stuff like AVI codec in media produced in 2024.

There's a better chance if you try to find it in the open with those sketchy links you mention or you are "lucky enough" to get invited to a Telegram group that has it uploaded to the platform, severed in hundreds of multipart files.

I've seen more Spanish people using the outdated Ed2K protocol through a/eMule rather than torrents even, it's so depressing.

Bless MySpleen, OR, AR, and AT! Ain’t no ads nowhere no way

I don't think that's necessarily true - maybe it depends on (a) the owners of the platform and/or (b) whether there are sources of funding besides advertising

E.g. here in the UK, the BBC and Channel 4 are both broadcasters owned by the government, and both are funded at least in part by adverts. But I think both of them are relatively healthy and aren't on the brink of destroying themselves.

I think most of the BBC's funding comes from the licence fee (British people pay for a TV licence) but they make some money from ads shown to international audiences. Channel 4 is solely funded by adverts I think, but it's owned by the government and I think they have to abide by certain rules and targets.

Panics while using Boost to view this post

Ublock does such a good job at blocking the old janky torrent sites, especially compared to the increasingly aggressive and intrusive new shit.

I'd love it if we started the internet from scratch again with no search engines, just webrings and link books and geocities pages everywhere

Where you find the torrents

There are in the videos as sponsors for a lot of channels on YouTube, and as sponsored results on Amazon

Brand awareness gets you subconsciously

Here's a really horrifying fact about ads, they don't expect you to go right out and buy their product. Ads target your subconscious and manipulate your way of thinking. There was a study done by some university and tested by a few people across different fields of study that proved this to be correct. I wish I could remember off the top of my head where this was published. If you do a little browsing you can probably find it and you should because you can't trust a stranger like me to properly relay the information.

They're already consolidating in streaming services that bundle content packs.

What do you mean as intrusive, none of the piracy sites are trying to work around my adblocker.

What ads, on what pirate sites?

Sorry, what exactly kind of content are we talking about? You know, the one "legit" sites have to pay for but piracy sites don't.

You've never seen a DNS poisoning attack have ya? I've seen Google infect systems just because they looked up a particular football game, because some bad actor somehow poisoned the DNS cache.

So no, "legit" sites aren't always safe either.

I remember my first time on the internet

Edit: Ublock Origin, Sponsorblock, Violent Monkey with anti script and ad block blocker scripts. Countdown bypass, autoclick skip ad and shortlink scripts, and what ever other specific scripts for your needs

I decided to be helpful for others instead of just a smart ass. Not you OP, you have it coming for spreading misinformation

Who gets malware in 2024? Lol what

Ah no, most "malware" is just false positive of AV software, since repacked games look pretty similiar. And no such dangers with media files, as long as your system is uptodate.

Wasn't there statistics a while ago already, that most malware comes from "legit" sites, especially newspapers (malvertising), by quite a margin? Hard to find now, too much noise.

Not to say you don't need to be careful. But not much more than always with executing something from the internet.

One rule of thumb: torrent sites usually have a colorful pirate skull things for torrents from reputable groups (if not, look for a better site). They have a reputation to lose if malware gets slipped in. And they do what they do mostly for reputation and competition.

Edit: found this, SO had maintenance today.