I wrote this post for a friend, I’m sharing it here for anybody it might help. I got asked multiple times how I download cracked music software so I figured it’d be easier to write it down once. It’s meant for people with very low technical skills who just want to start torrenting software without major risks, and it includes a bunch of safety tips that are already known in this community.
If you have feedback, let me know and I’ll update the post.
Thanks for the report about ProtonVPN, I haven’t used it in a bit so I didn’t know. Do you know a better free VPN which does allow torrenting? I know a paid one would always be better, but this is for people who are just not willing to spend money. A shady free VPN is better than none.
For VirusTotal I know about the false positives, that’s also why I included the reddit post on how to interpret the results. I still find a scan to be good practice to weed out the more obvious malware.
In that case, direct downloads (in conjunction with ProtonVPN free) would be a superior method. The article makes piracy sound synonymous with and exclusive to torrenting, but DDL and Usenet also exist. Many of the megathread categories have DDL links right at the top.
Cs.rin.ru is mainly gaming focused but has an FAQ that covers general DDL concepts like source trustworthiness/scene names and workarounds for filehoster limits. You could probably paraphase/quote or screenshot with credit (ironically) to save a login. The same people not wanting to sign up for a VPN might also look askance at a .ru domain.
It was only meant to be a guide about torrenting pirated software specifically, not pirating software in general. I also started by linking to the megathread to link people to other resources.
I don’t really want to add a whole other section about DDL just because I feel I couldn’t do it justice, and people have probably already done a better job at that.
I don’t, sorry. There are free VPNs which have been recommended in the fmhy wiki, though I don’t know if they support torrenting and/or port forwarding.
Edit; just remembered about windscribe, you can torrent on the free plan, but data is very limited so might not be a good option either