Looks like I was wrong…

this is from an older thread before the final closing announcement:

24 February 2024

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Yesterday, we received unfortunate news from one of our trusted admins stating that the owner of the site intends to shut it down due to insufficient revenue.

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well, also it was not long ago with a short-time frame…

If it all turns out to be a prank / main account was hacked / etc, great … but could see someone who expects a lot of negative feedback or even somene who have a lot going on offline not really bothering to look at commentss

plus we all knw silent legal / state presure is a thing… rarbg, kat, and many others had people willing to take over but ithink they got legal pressure to stop.

my plan is just have a few glasses of boubron and relax. we are hydra and all that lol

prety sure MAM dont allow vpn

ain’t got none but hyptotheticaly, sure. better’n them gettin busted with a dcma or whatever cuz they dont know how to chekc for dns leaks and use failsafes to block non-vpn access. most of us started off and had to lern ho wto do shit the reight way. why nt help em do beter

i woldnt want my kibds to be soem kind of normies that dont even know wtf a vpn is

FOr anyone else reading this while slightly inebrinated, note: AR = AlphaRadio (a private tracker). Nothing happening to the Arr tools.

Everyone else, pardon my and my whiskey.

Is why I like to have multiple aliases and always connect via vpn… harder to sue me if they can’t figure out who I really am.

On that note, it would be really cool if there was a TOR-based github alternative (or even an I2P-based one) for hosting project repos somewhere that take-downs have no effect and servers can’t be seized. Anybody aware of anything like that? then again, I’m not even sure how I would configure git / ssh to use a TOR-based server lol

my bad. deleted my previous guesses since it seems i missed a few key words there

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lol good points and so true. reading this just makes me think of the old quote If the penalty for a crime is a fine, that law only exists for the lower classes. When I think of record labels and big film companies, let’s just say that the first thing that comes to mind isn’t starving artists but coastal elitists getting pissy bc they can’t charge people even more.

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I use a mix. Sometimes, I’ll read stuff in the foliate app on Linux from my desktop outputting onto a big screen tv.

But I also do an old kindle while lounging on couch/bed and Librera reader on phone (android/f-droid) when I’m on the shitter.

For the most part, I load different things on each and just jump back and forth between several stories. Keeps things interesting and no need to sync bookmarks and whatnot.

I understand the chances are low and my media player needs to be exploited but is there a way to be certain?

Personally, even if I was on a highly targeted OS like Windows, I wouldn’t really worry too much about video files being infected - with the obvious exceptions of making sure they are actually video files not something like .mkv.exe and that your system isn’t compromised some other way (e.g. installing / running random apps or scripts off the web / email / etc).

But if you want a little extra peace of mind, you could run an antivirus file scan on it or take steps to sandbox it in a VM or security container.

If you are on Linux, you can run the media player apps like vlc / mpv / smplayer / etc in security containers which would limit their capabilities if there ever was a successful exploit on the player software via something embedded in a video or music file. There are several different apps you can use to make use of such security containers. The easiest is probably to just use flatpak versions of applications (flatpak is a “universal” linux build format - most of these are available on flathub.org - and have a built-in security container called bubblewrap which you can control with a tool called flatseal). There are also other options besides flatpaks such as firejail (which I use myself), which has pre-made profiles for a lot of the more popular linux apps so like for vlc I could simply launch firejail vlc in shortcuts or I think there is a graphical app for it too. edit: jsut checked and yup, there is a gui called firetools: github | their blog which has screenshots and a 2min video demo.

Linux security containers rely on features built into the Linux kernel so I’m not sure if there are comparable alternatives for Windows or Mac. But I suppose if you were on one of those, you could always just run things in a virtual machine.

A post on reddit said to use mkvtoolnix to check all the elements but I honestly don’t know what to look for. Any help?

Without an actual link to see what they said, I’m going to go out on a limb and guess their assumption was that you would either have some kind of corrupted exe that is NOT a valid video OR a valid video. I mostly agree with that assumption - there are things like steganography that can hide data in some other data files like pictures or videos but that is more just extra crap than exploit.

IF you accept this assumption, then what they probably meant was that you could use mkvtoolnix to confirm that the mkv file loaded successfully and had audio + video streams (e.g. a really really basic test for it being a valid mkv file). You could do the same thing with the mediainfo tool (I believe this is also crossplatform since that’s what RARBG used to use on their media detail pages… and God do I miss that, wish other public trackers all did the same thing).

Possibly stupid question, but how does one manually tag things on lemmy when using desktop web ui from browser (as opposed to mobile apps that specifically have a tagging feature). Is it as simple as add some #SomeWord thing? Asking bc I thought that when using markdown for comments (which I do), the # at the beginning indicates a heading level, not a tag. So… guess I’m just saying I have no idea how tags work in lemmy (don’t know how to add them, don’t know how to search by them, etc).

It might be worth mentioning - or at least linking to - how one can do so manually on lemmy in the readme.md file for dummies like myself.

not really sure what you mean (maybe i didnt notice or it was before i started using it?) but to each their own I guess?

I agree that that is a very nice feature. So are the rss feeds.

But to me “best” is anything that makes it easier to avoid getting caught so the network interface binding is still my favorite 😉

Maybe? Been awhile since I’ve messed with my setup and while I don’t like slow, I prioritize security over speed so my settings might not be what you want anyway. so I’d recommend just looking up a guide; it is an extremely popular torrent client and there should be tons of guides out there. Or if you not sure which guide to use, just create a new post here - lot of people use it and probably have set it up from scratch more recently than me. I know some people say to open ports on the router but i’ve never liked the idea (I view it as less secure) but some people swear by it.

I can recommend that you test the following:

• make sure you are using a VPN server that isn’t too far away. If you were in say San Franciso and selecting a VPN in New York or Europe, your speeds will be less than if you selected one in Seattle or Los Angeles
• do a speed test off your vpn vs on it (e.g. speedtest.net). ALL VPNs will be slower than regular non-VPN due to the encryption and having less hops. But you can see how much difference it makes when you switch servers and if you have more than one VPN service, then you can find servers in the same city for both and compare which service is faster.
• If your VPN has a modified WireGuard service (PIA and Nord both do IIRC), then that should be faster. I say modified bc the unaltered Wireguard spec has a privacy red flags so if you have a VPN service that offers it, make sure you read up or at least skim some reviews and whatnot to make sure they handled those issues that in a way that doesn’t leave your identity exposed. PIA and Nord both did that (I think Nord’s was called something else not actually WG but idr).
• make sure you do your testing on popular torrents - but if it is anything you could get in trouble for, then you should do all the leak tests I mentioned above FIRST. Only mentioning, bc I had a friend that was testing his shit on some obscure thing he was looking for and saying it was slow but when i helped him configure his settings, we tested with something popular (i think whatever the current hottest show was) and he was actually getting a lot better speeds than he thought.

edit: just searched on dbzer0 and wasn’t seeing much on this. I did find a reddit post and a makeuseof guide that both mention stuff about improving speed. For the reddit one, I think the patched exe they are talking about is likely a dev build and since that was from a few years ago, whatever fix is probably already merged in and no longer needed. will compare the other settings vs mine and post back

edit2: are are the differences i have from the guide:

• makeuseof has (Tools > Options > Speed) “Upload and download rate limits are set to infinity by default, and it’s recommended not to tinker with these limits. Most often, users limit the upload rate to save bandwidth and get faster download rates, but the torrent client’s choking mechanism compromises download rates when upload rates are limited, making the download process much slower.” - on mine, i had infinite down and was restricting upload. But I kind of think MUO’s advice is better and increased my upload amount. Mine was 100 KiB/s, now 1000 KiB/s. Only reason I don’t put it on infinite is I am on a capped internet and tend to leave my downloaded stuff around for sharing so I want to avoid uploads consuming too much of my monthly bandwidth and I don’t leave my client running 24/7 so not sure how reliable bandwidth settings are.
• makeuseof has (Tools > Options > BitTorrent) "In the dropdown menu next to Encryption mode, select Allow Encryption. " but on mine I have it as “required Encryption” - probably this would make mine slower than the suggestion tho
• Tools > Options > Connection settings I have “TCP and uTP” (same as MUO) but that old reddit thread was recommending only TCP.
• MUO has (Tools > Options > Connections) : "Ensure the box beside Use UPnP / NAT-PMP port forwarding from my router is checked. " - as I mentioned, I don’t do port forwarding so I leave mine unchecked but there is probably a speed hit for this.
• There was also something about "Don’t download multiple torrent files at the same time. This will then allocate all available bandwidth to downloading a single file, resulting in a faster download. " - I generally ignore this but there IS some truth to it. I have had hundreds of things queued before and gotten awful speeds. I recommend just not going overboard with how many you are running at once.
• Tools > Options > Advanced: Find the network interface and select the one that corresponds with your VPN. If you aren’t sure, for most Windows users you can connect to VPN then find from command line using ipconfig /all and look for something that is NOT disconnected and probably has TAP-Windows Adapter Vx if using OpenVPN-Protocol (most VPNs) but might be different for wireguard. For Linux users, to show network interfaces run ip -4 -o -br addr - usually in linux ethernet interfaces start with an E and wifi interfaces start with a W, lo is localhost, and 99% of the time the vpn interface will be named tun0 if you are using a VPN with OpenVPN-protocol (most of them) but might be something different for wireguard or if you have customized things.

Thanks, I hate goodreads and hadn’t known about BookWyrm … which is ironic since I am currently reading a series that has a dragon-creature that is literally called a book wyrm (Divine Apostasy)

Most of the alternates that I looked at, tend not to have basic info (obv it should have author/title but also i like it to have series info like book # in a series, when it was released, and category/theme tags) or else the sites would have a lot less book coverage (especially in niche genres) so I always seem to end up back on GR which I hate. Will see if some of the bigger BW instances do a better job

some games won’t run this way for one reason or another even though they’ll run if you own them (usually, I assume, because of Steam Deck specific tweaks or install stuff that are only used when you’re running them on the Deck via the normal method.)

A lot of this is just easier to do from legit steam setup, not impossible. I don’t usually pirate games (I want to support devs making things playable on Linux when I buy from Steam or making DRM-free stuff when I buy from Gog). But I do have a lot of stuff that I run outside of steam in plain old wine without proton or wine-wrapper tools like lutris. I haven’t come across many games that I have on Gog that you can’t run in wine itself but I will agree that it is sometimes a lot more work. I’m also on a desktop PC using Linux, so not completely the same as a steam deck but runtime-wise it should be pretty darn close.

want to also add that people using ublock origin would probably benefit from enabling more than just the default filters.

if you go into your extension prefs for UB, there’s a lot of other stuff in there. I usually select everything except the other languages. I occasionally come across a site that has a ‘we see youre using an adblocker’ type message but its not very often. and even then, most of the ones that I have seen let me dismiss the message and still view the content.

i don’t use any social media except lemmy/reddit and the like tho, so no clue how it works on facebook and other trash like that.

Funny thing is… you can still find it with duckduckgo, search.brave.com, qwant, searx…

plus even on google, you can click any of the first several links - including wikipedia - and the link is easy to find. sadly ‘reddit pirate bay’ is easy to find TPB link from but ‘lemmy pirate bay’ doesn’t have TPB link without more searching (and even more sad, the first result isn’t dbzer0 but a community on the ml instance)