Piracy Starter Pack

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 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 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.
  
  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.
- 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
  
  Who is "we" in this?
- 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
- You don’t need a VPN if you have a good enough private tracker.
  
  You really trust those private trackers not to get infiltrated by the government or groups of lawyers at some point?
- 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.
- Common Sense isn't common

- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- We all have to start somewhere, it's better to help than gatekeep.

chrome, mcaffee, pirate bay, utorrent. am i back in 2010

Fat girl bad, noted.
- But she's a girl right?
  
  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 😅

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

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

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.
- 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 removed.
  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.
- 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.