Deletecat

After a quick glance over your post, I have some thoughts;

Free: ProtonVPN

ProtonVPN is good for torrenting on the paid plan, not the free plan. Proton doesn't allow torrenting on their free plan. They will block your connection if they detect that you are torrenting, or they will disconnect you from their VPN tunnel - exposing your real IP on the torrent.

Paid: Mullvad

Mullvad is a decent choice, though they no longer support port forwarding. You are still able to download, though you won't be able to seed iirc

VirusTotal

The problem with a virustotal scan is that pirated software is often false flagged for malware. It's difficult to tell what is safe from what you've downloaded. It's best to download from a trusted uploader, though that doesn't always guarantee safety as they can always go rogue (As an example, FTUApps were seen as safe until one of their uploads to 1337x contained malware).

Older uploads tend to have less false positives in my experience, though it can be very easy to become complacent.

edit; score out comment about mullvad seeding, others have pointed out that it still works fine! oops

Avoid uTorrent and use qBittorrent instead (not to be confused with BitTorrent, a client by the same team as uTorrent)

Can someone make a switchpirates community? I miss that

Already exists: !switchpirates@lemmy.dbzer0.com - although it's not really active right now

Here is the post that Daniel made claiming that he will be stepping down: https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/5235-stepping-down-as-project-leader-of-grapheneos

It's also available on his twitter and mastodon iirc

They also thought that FileCR was dangerous because they also got a defender alert on a download 🙃

https://vimm.net and https://myrient.erista.me are my go to sites for ROMs! Especially myrient since you can use FTP to download files. https://archive.org works too, though downloads are quite slow for me

For BIOS files, you can find them on the emulation wiki: https://emulation.gametechwiki.com/index.php/

r/GenP talks about the safety of monkrus in their wiki: https://www.reddit.com/r/GenP/wiki/patchmethods/

Most people who claimed they got malware from the Adobe collection repack had either downloaded it from an unofficial source, downloaded from YouTube, or downloaded other pieces of sketchy software - just so happens that a monkrus repack was the last thing they installed. Then there are others who have been using monkrus for years and haven't had issues.

In the Quttera analysis, the malicious files are from a blacklisted domain [M.BL.Domain.gen], fv20[.]failiem[.]lv - this is a file host from Latvia. The files being flagged probably aren't malicious, though if this host isn't taking down malware, it would make sense that they are blocked by some antivirus companies. Especially since Quttera isn't checking the torrents - they are uploaded to other sites.

All in all, if you have any doubts, don't install it. Check out GenP instead of you don't really trust monkrus!

Try irc.IRCHighway.net/6697 instead, your client may not have IRCHighway in its list of servers

nope

I've been playing the Sims 3 from fitgirls repack (steam release). Both my steam account and EA account are fine!

airplane mode 24/7

Highly suggest people do this if they are transferring books using calibre. Connecting to WiFi removes book covers, keeping it in airplane mode should prevent this!

It also helps to reduce battery usage in my experience, but that might be a coincidence

I don't know of any free vpns for torrenting, though I believe ProtonVPN (paid), Windscribe (paid) and AirVPN (paid) offer port forwarding at the moment. PIA can be used to port forward, though they are owned by kape which is kinda sketchy to me.

You can use windscribe free for torrenting, but you will quickly hit the data cap they have in place

Just a quick question, have you port forwarded in Mullvad in the past?

They stopped people from opening new ports last month, September is when they will get rid of the remaining ports. If you aren't port forwarding, I will edit my initial comment!

I don't see how it could possibly go wrong!

I've scored out that part of the comment now.

I was under the impression that you couldn't seed without port forwarding, guess I was wrong :p

No such thing as a stupid question :p

Yes, you can self-host a VPN! Though there are a few things to keep in mind if you are going to torrent using one:

• A self-hosted VPN on your own network isn't good for torrenting. Your own IP is still shown to other peers on the torrent, you might as well torrent without the VPN.
• Depending on your server host, you may not be allowed to torrent on their network.
• If you are allowed to torrent, you will have to watch your bandwidth limit*. I have a cheap VPS - for other things unrelated to VPNs/torrenting - and the limit is 20TB of traffic
• Many hosts will respond to DMCA/Abuse complaints - very few are relaxed and ignore DMCA complaints, others may shut off your access to their services after a single complaint

*some hosts do not have a limit though cheap servers usually do.

From what I can tell, most server hosts don't care about what you are doing with your server, unless your server is gathering abuse reports or using an excessive amount of resources constantly. I would go for a subscription to a VPN instead of self-hosting but that's just me.

guess we'll find out if the data gets leaked somewhere

I'm not sure if there is another community for it, lemmy.dbzer0.com is the instance that hosts that switch pirates community as well as this one

Do you know a better free VPN which does allow torrenting?

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

Most people are shifting towards the AI trend instead. Read a post which somewhat describes it well, people integrate the new trends into their projects to get more investor money. Nothing looks better to investors other than 'We have AI Blockchain nano technology behind our service'.

Last year, 'we have blockchain' earned lots of money. Now it's 'we have AI'. In both cases, the technology probably isn't needed, it is there just to be there.

Might be a setting in your IRC client to not trust self-signed certificates, it worked for me

• uBlock Origin
• I still don't care about cookies
• Simple Translate
• Tabliss
• Fast Forward

I probably should have specified - downloading cracked software from a YouTube video. Downloading videos from YouTube is fine with tools like yt-dlp.

Thanks for this, changed the point in my main comment to remove the part about seeding!