• @[email protected]
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      22 years ago

      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!

      • Pons_Aelius
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        2 years ago

        Uploads are disabled for new accounts

        This is simple to bypass. Accounts must be 30 days old to upload?

        Create an account or 3 each day.

        Post using the newly mature accounts till they get banned and move on to the next one.

        how can it be so hard?

        A simple solution to a complex problem is usually wrong.

    • AnonTwo
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      522 years ago

      Isn’t this ignoring the whole thing in the link about negative responses being removed?

      Sure you can’t have mods being vigilant 24/7, but the link seems to be arguing they’re being vigilant in keeping the bad link up.

      • @[email protected]
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        102 years ago

        Tbf, people comment on almost any software with “keygen flagged as Trojan! Avoid!!1!” There are a lot of folk who aren’t as on the ball with this stuff that don’t know how anti-virus works or what a false positive is. It does get annoying dealing with those folk.

      • Clairvoidance
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        They’re not really backing their claim up though in regards to “related to admins” and “admins are deleting other people’s warnings”.
        And as far as I know the torrent has been pulled even.

  • @[email protected]
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    2 years ago

    For those asking “private trackers what’s that?”

    /r/trackers (on the bad site I know) has a lot of info

    For those who may be interested in getting into private trackers, you should start with Myanonamouse.net in my opinion. They do an interview on the irc which is easy and you can join that way https://www.myanonamouse.net/inviteapp.php

    It is a tracker for ebooks/audiobooks/comics that is easy to maintain a ratio on (via their generous bonus point system) as long as you are a decent seeder.

    Once you’re on the site for a few months you can access the invite forum which can get you access to other private trackers. Think of it like a ladder.

    Torrentleech (a general private tracker) occasionally has open signups throughout the year.

    • @[email protected]
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      322 years ago

      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.

      • @[email protected]
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        72 years ago

        I didn’t say anything about that and don’t disagree but private trackers definitely have less of it due to their content having more scrutiny and standards.

        Nothing is perfect. My comment only strived to let people know about private trackers as I saw multiple people ask about it.

      • @[email protected]
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        132 years ago

        I’ve been on private trackers since demonid went down. Its the only way to sail, I’ve had zero issues and the content is heavily moderated for quality.

        • @[email protected]
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          2 years ago

          I like private trackers but they sometimes have arbitrary limitations on some clients and I don’t like that

        • @[email protected]
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          132 years ago

          seems like an unreasonable amount of hassle i always found everything i needed on public trackers

          • @[email protected]
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            Then that just means everything you’re looking for is common or freshly released/uploaded.

            Ppl looking for niche content, it’s not gonna be on public trackers as often.

            Also the main benefit of private vs Public is that you can find a 10-15 year old torrent of some niche content and it will still be actively seeded.

            With public trackers, there is less retention of seeders, even more so for less common content.

            Public trackers often end up with tons of dead torrents with 0-1 seeders after a couple years pass.

            And on a private tracker there is incentive to keep old torrents alive. On public there is none. Ppl grab and run.

          • @[email protected]
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            152 years ago

            No kidding. I pirate for the convenience of downloading whatever I want. I’m not interested in joining the cool kids club by trying to keep up with what’s freeleech and stress about how to maintain a ratio lest face their wrath.

            • @[email protected]
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              2 years ago

              I’ve never stressed over my ratio

              Public trackers are great for when everything you’re looking for is common or freshly released/uploaded.

              Ppl looking for niche content, it’s not gonna be on public trackers.

              Also the main benefit of private vs Public is that you can find a 10-15 year old torrent of some niche content and it will still be actively seeded.

              With public trackers, there is less retention of seeders, even more so for less common content.

              Public trackers often end up with tons of dead torrents with 0-1 seeders after a couple years pass.

              And on a private tracker there is incentive to keep old torrents alive. On public there is none. Ppl grab and run.

              • @[email protected]
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                12 years ago

                If you don’t mind me asking, do you think it would be possible to keep a an account on a few of these chillest private trackers without a seedbox? The main reason I’ve been avoiding private trackers for years now is that from the way people talk, those are a necessity.

                Things get downloaded in an orderly manner and seeded forever(in a much slower rate that I’d like but), it’s just that Seedboxes are mostly a US and Europe run service and my country’s currency can’t handle that lol

                • @[email protected]
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                  12 years ago

                  some private trackers economies are easier than others and let you benefit off seed TIME rather than upload amount, so as long as you actively seed you still can gain points to gather buffer, etc. So yes it is possible.

                  Also depends on your internet speeds. I don’t use a seedbox and have done just fine, though I’ve had the luck of having had 300 mbps -> 500 mbps -> gigabit ethernet within the last 5 years.

    • krolden
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      2 years ago

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

    • 00
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      162 years ago

      i mean shes a terrible person but she is pretty comical. Also her being told in a dream that she has to crack games is pretty funny lmao

      • @[email protected]
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        62 years ago

        The woman cracked Denuvo, keep in mind. Multiple groups have declared this feat impossible.

        When your dream tells you to do something impossible, and you proceed to do that thing successfully, then maybe the dream wasn’t so crazy after all.

    • M. Orange
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      42 years ago

      She’s one of the strangest, most insane individuals I’ve ever seen on the internet, which is only compounded by the fact that she’s insanely good at what she does. I love her too.

  • @[email protected]
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    382 years ago

    I know this is probably obvious to many people, but if a charitable soul could explain to me what a miner is and why the admins are involved in it, it would be very much appreciated. Also, explain like I am 5 if possible

    • Vahtos
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      542 years ago

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

  • krolden
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    252 years ago

    Public trackers have never been safe. Why not find a better tracker for your games or just buy it. Assume anything you have to install is infected

  • @[email protected]
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    652 years ago

    I wouldn’t trust anything from a P2P site that purports to be:

    1. A cracked game / application for desktop and mobile platforms. Maybe it’s legit but assume it is malware.
    2. A serial number generator. If you absolutely must run one of these do it from a throwaway VM, or via WINE emulation to mitigate what it might do.
    3. An encrypted archive with a README. It’s a scam designed to make people sign up to other scams to release a non-existent password.
    4. A movie / audio with an extension such as .scr, .wma, .com, .exe etc. It’s malware.

    Movies, audio & books are generally safe providing they use a recognized extension - mp3, mp4, pdf, mkv, aac, flac, epub etc. Stuff that runs under emulation like console games is generally safe. I say “generally” because an exploit could still be crafted to escape a popular media player or emulator and cause actual harm to your computer.

    All the ads and 3rd party scripts should be considered malicious too and should be erased with an adblocker, or even better use Tor.

    So basically use some common sense and if you really want some game or app, just buy the damned thing or wait for it to go on sale.

    • @[email protected]
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      22 years ago
      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.

    • SokathHisEyesOpen
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      12 years ago

      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.

    • halva
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      162 years ago

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

      • @[email protected]
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        62 years ago

        Read their own FAQ. It’s not an emulator in the classic sense of emulating the OS. It is however emulating the API of Windows. I quoted the pertinent line of the FAQ elsewhere and made my point clearer

        • @[email protected]
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          2 years ago

          Not sure what the thumbs down is about. It’s right there in their own FAQ.

          In fact it ends by saying - “Wine is not just an emulator” is more accurate.

          • @[email protected]
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            42 years ago

            There is a storied history in computing to use tongue in cheek self referential acronyms to denote some humor and finality in distinguishing things that purposely fill a niche in the world of competing, often pricey, commercial software and other hackable reasons.

            So I bet you’re rubbing wrong those of us who remember that gnu is not unix, and more specifically wine is not an emulator. Because they really aren’t.

    • KubeRoot
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      232 years ago

      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)

      • @[email protected]
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        I know what WINE is and the gist of “Wine is not an emulator”. I have used it extensively and for a while it even contained some of my code (not sure if it still does). But it is still emulating but not in the way people think. WINE is not emulating the operating system but it is emulating the interface that an executable interacts with Windows, aka the Win32 APIs and other DLLs.

        They even touch on this in their FAQ - *That said, Wine can be thought of as a Windows emulator in much the same way that Windows Vista can be thought of as a Windows XP emulator: both allow you to run the same applications by translating system calls in much the same way. Setting Wine to mimic Windows XP is not much different from setting Vista to launch an application in XP compatibility mode. *

        As far as a potentially malicious executable is concerned, you can create a throwaway wine folder to run the thing and delete it as soon as it is done, e.g.

        e.g.

        export WINEPREFIX=~/tmpwin
        winecfg
        # disable wininet from libraries tab, remove Z:, unlink all desktop integration folders
        wine keygen.exe
        # when done...
        rm -rf tmpwin
        

        It doesn’t matter if keygen.exe is evil because it can write anything it likes to the fake C: and the fake registry and it’s blown away. As a precaution disable networking so it can’t reach out either. In the extremely unlikely event that keygen.exe had code to detect it was running under WINE, it would still be subject to the permissions of the uid you had run it as, so you could take even more precautions if you felt so inclined. You could even use a dockerized WINE if you felt like it.

        • KubeRoot
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          42 years ago

          On the topic of whether or not it’s an emulator, sounds like semantics in the end - fair enough, I disagree but you make a fair point.

          That said, in terms of security I think it’s very important to point it out that it isn’t any more secure than running a random Linux executable. In my view, the original comment is advocating for running unknown executables under wine as a security measure, and the further argument is that it’s more secure because most attacks don’t target that.

          Sounds like if people rely on that for security, malware will just start targeting that after people get used to assuming it’s safe.

          • @[email protected]
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            12 years ago

            I doubt many people are ever going to do what I suggested so the effort / payoff for malware writers makes it very unlikely they’d bother. They’ll just assume 99.999% of people running the binary are doing so on Windows and code accordingly. Of course anything is theoretically possible.

  • @[email protected]
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    1882 years ago

    I’ll translate: “I find actions of the 1337x admins disappointing. Deleting my torrents causes confusion for the user base, and these actions reflect poorly on your character, suggesting pusillanimity and insufficient discretion when selecting a sexual partner.”

      • @[email protected]
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        That would be possible now with GPT technology. Just not OpenAI, because I assume everything Empress says is against their terms of service.

  • @[email protected]
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    162 years ago

    I have seen multiple posts about the situation by now with various claims but no one seems to have actually looked into it so I have questions! Is it true that moderators defended the upload and silenced criticism, is it true that the crypto address in question can be linked to the sites admins and is it true that the same malware is all over the internet in countless releases? Not all of those are from this particular pist but if someone here knows the answers I would be happy to read them!

    • Mubelotix
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      32 years ago

      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

      • @[email protected]
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        12 years ago

        With enough machines (especially powerful gaming rigs) you could probably still make a really decent amount and since the malware is detected by common antivirus tools and even Windows Defender as far as I can tell it’s most likely old and just used again by someone but you always have to be careful with all claims in the cracking scene and considering how long that site has been reliable I definitely have my doubts!

        • Mubelotix
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          22 years ago

          Even if 100% of all pirates on earth downloaded it, it would still earn shit

    • @[email protected]
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      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.

      • @[email protected]
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        12 years ago

        Thanks! I don’t know why a VIP would have this kind of power but that’s exactly the kind of explanation I was looking for because (as usual) a lot of people claim all kind of shit whenever they get a chance and it can be hard to understand what actually happened, glad it’s not as bad as it seemed at first glance! :)

        • SRo
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          22 years ago

          But that doesn’t make it better. It makes it worse. So there is a VIP who uploads a miner. First the mods defend the VIP and the upload but later have to admit that it’s a miner. Then mods can’t do anything because the admin, the only one who could ban the VIP and uploader is AWOL since who knows; a long time. So effectively the topic is correct, the site is not safe. Uploaders can do what they want and cannot get punished because the few mods left can’t do anything and the admin is missing.

          • @[email protected]
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            22 years ago

            So the VIP can’t even be banned by a mod? That’s a fucked up system and I can only woder why it worked at all for such a long time!

            • SRo
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              22 years ago

              That’s at least what the mods claim in defense that the uploader is not banned. But don’t forget, the same mods also said that the upload is “not dirty” until they had to admit it had a miner included.

              I honestly don’t get why this behaviour gets defended here. Only because Empress was quoted? And that quote hasn’t anything to do with this incident.

      • @[email protected]
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        42 years ago

        There is no official 1337x subreddit or discord group. Go to the 1337x official chat room (link on the front page of 1337x.to) and ask about a discord group or sub reddit and they will tell you its fake.

    • TOR-anon1
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      52 years ago

      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.)

  • Adori
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    2 years ago

    I got baldurs gate from igg-games, does anyone know if I’m safe? I’m asking for advice dunno why I’m getting down voted xD

    • @[email protected]OP
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      02 years ago

      Rule of the Internet do not trust anyone and it’s always wise to scan anything you download from Internet.

    • @[email protected]
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      32 years ago

      Igg-games is a very bad site to download anything from. There has been known malware in the past and the owners of the site are garbage.

    • @[email protected]
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      82 years ago

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

    • @[email protected]
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      62 years ago

      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.