Thanks. This community needed your logical input. I've been following this over the past few days and it seems like a blatent Reddit-type pitchfork situation. Based on the mods response and the absolute lack of proof surrounding the mods profiting from the crypto miner (honestly who the actual fuck even came up with this?), I think we need to all take a beat.

Also I don't follow cracked games but this Emperess person seems like a fucking psychopath and the fact that literally anyone here believes a word she says is absolutely astonishing.

I am asking this community to PLEASE STOP REPOSTING THIS. Don't let this community follow the ways of Reddit, please. We are better than that.

You can feel their frustration in this post. Being a mod is a thankless job.

So why did he defend the torrent in the comments and said it was not dirty and the uploader is not banned? This defence is laughable.

You should pin it

You looked at that screenshot and said, "Ah yes, here's someone speaking sense" ?

Something something broken clock

Yeah, except EMPRESS was just complaining that her own torrents got deleted, not that others were unsafe

There should be an Empress translator bot

So you only pirate music and movies? How do you play games and use expensive software, then?

If I were to wager a guess, empress is not a first language English speaker, and to her , it’s just a preferred general severe insult.

I'm gonna guess you've never played COD

Well, doing something "wrong" for money is basically the definition of a removed, so yeah it fits in this case if the alligations are correct.

That post is a bit older IIRC, couple of months.

Someone posted it because of relevancy i guess. Your point might still stand, i haven't heard anything about him.

I guess if you lash out at absolutely everybody, eventually one of them will do something to deserve it.

What's wrong with empress? I really don't follow this stuff much.

I learned about https://torrentgalaxy.to/ recently. I'm not positive it's a good alternative though.

private trackers are the only truly safe option left

31337x?

At the risk of asking a stupid question: is there a viable alt?

Look for releases on the sites of the groups / ppl releasing them. Most offer trackers they seed to.

Other than that and private trackers, I like torrends.to to meta search for torrents, but there proceed with caution.

I bet torrentleech will open for 1337x refugees

80085X

For games? cs rin ru

thepiratebay.org what else would it be? #sweden

WINE is not safe to run malware in, it's not a secure sandbox. AFAIK, anything expecting it can do anything a Linux binary can. (Also, not an emulator, it's in the original name - WINE Is Not an Emulator)

wine is a windows api implementation, it's specifically NOT an emulator

This is a piracy community.

1. You could trivially verify an emulated game with a checksum
2. If a game is released on GOG, there are Checksums that are hidden from the user. GOG games are DRM-free, so there's no reason anyone would modify the installer.

Are cracked games no good anymore? You used to be able to get just about any cracked game back in the day. Sure, some of them might be malware, but it was easy to find one that wasn't.

I’m on multiple private trackers, and they all hosted the infected version (they’ve been taken down now). Private doesn’t make it safe, especially when people are using automated tools to be the first to upload a torrent.

The best way to get invites is to make friends with as many people on irc as possible

Thanks. Looks like the registration window is closed. I’ll check back soon!

I think there's been comments calling out the malware that have been deleted, possibly by the admins. In addition the infected torrentes stayed up for a long while (not sure if they still are or not)

Literally nothing. This entire thing is one of the stupidest controversies that I've ever seen. One idiot made a wild accusation about the 1337 mods based on no evidence and apparently that was good enough for this community....we are better than this people, grow up.

See my reply to Whiskey Pickle for the evidence.

It's definitely a real Tweet but I agree, if you visit the site to take a screenshit why not just copy that damn link!

Risk is practically nothing in your case, because you're being careful, and know what you're doing. You won't run a binary when you were expecting the Barbie movie, for example.

If you were downloading binaries, then your risk is significant, but even then, unless you're downloading new releases immediately, it's likely that your antivirus will catch the new popular ransomware after a few days, when a few thousands of people have become infected. Governments won't employ valuable zero-days on any rando who just wants to see their new isekai episode.

This is about a game, which is a .exe. In your case, it's probably not an issue, but games will be. Pdfs also had an issue for a while, but I think that's solved. As far as I'm aware, there aren't any video/audio codec or VLC issues to be worried about though, so you should be good.

Movies and audio are very rarely infected, almost never. That depends on bugged software, so that you can be relatively safe of.

Executables... well... no anti virus can protect you in reality from dumb double-clicks. This is because viruses are trained against anti virus software until they can't be recognized. There are mathematically an infinite number of patterns to run a program to trick all kinds of anti viruses. So in reality you can't be safe. Once that's done by an expert virus creator, the best you have to protect you is a behavioral detection of viruses, which may or may not work.

So, don't rely on anti viruses. They barely protect you from script kiddies and legacy viruses.

why do you have to pirate VLC, just go to the website and download (or even compile from source)

A cryptocurrency miner. It uses your computer to generate currency, which costs you resources (electricity, compute power, etc.).

The problem isn't that there is malware on the site, it's linked to admins as distributors.

There are plenty of good torrent sites with upload verification. They are rarely public though.

If the admins endorse malware, it's best to assume the entire site is compromised.

If the admin are in cahoots with the crypto mining douchebag, then no part of the site is safe.

Meh this is one instance that just keeps getting reposted every couple days. Pirating executable files has always been a risk and brought with it issues like this. There is little risk with music, tv, and movies.

No. 1337x isn't any more or less dangerous than any other torrent site (except rarbg, rip). Can we all stop this nonsense?

TL had the same copy apparently

There is a discord group in the official 1337x subreddit, the user was just a vip user, not a staff/moderator and he deleted comments after posting a malware in order to keep the release alive. Maybe he was trusted before posting it, and 1337x staff are a few people (lately even less) so he wasn't blocked quickly. Nothing more. I hope 1337x will make an announcement. The user who posted malware was under a blue nikname:

• Black - admin
• Green - moderator
• Blue - vip
• Yellow - uploader
• Red - trial uploader
• Grey - user

There wasn't any member of the staff that was helping the vip user to delete comments. He was just deleting comments under its own post by himself.

I'm very doubtful too. Crypto mining isn't profitable on computers nowadays. You would need millions of infections to even generate a dollar a day. It doesn't make any sense that someone would work on such malware

Part of the reason I moved to Usenet

I use torrentgalaxy.to now. Or some search engine like solidtorrents.to, this one's neat since it does not have any ads.

There are few. For most of stuff there's fitgirl and for things that are outdated or not available there (like empress) there's dodi.

bitsearch works

From what I read, the admin of the site is long gone and they don't have the power to ban uploaders.

Nowhere. It's just baseless accusations and manufactured drama.

If possible, turn networking off!

Dealing with viruses:

• Get a linux iso and scan potential threats with ClamAV/TK.
• Fresh install (If you are paranoid.)
• Manually find and remove dangerous software. (VirusTotal may help.)

Who the hell sees ads? If you choose to let your browser run them, well, what do you want?

Igg has a shit reputation for adding malware to their torrents. I think it’s hit and miss, but better to avoid them than risk it.

Just get it from fitgirl. Can't confirm for this game as I actually bought it, but I never had issues before.