The article makes piracy sound synonymous with and exclusive to torrenting

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.

Yup, exactly. We can’t gatekeep this too much, even if it’s warranted, otherwise people will just give up and never actually spend time to learn about this.

You’re right, I guess, but if we only recommend paid ones people will just google for free ones and use whichever shady provider is at the top of the google results. People are really averse to subscriptions.

I’ve added a warning about free VPNs and switched to recommending Windscribe, which still has a decent reputation.

Yeah I’ve updated the post to have Windscribe as the recommended free one, with a warning about free VPNs

You’re right of course, but it’s hard to communicate this level of nuance in a post targeted at newbies. If you don’t disable your antivirus, 9/10 times it will quarantine the KeyGen automatically, and you don’t get anywhere.

I’ve added a warning about the risk of infection. Do you have any recommendations on how to tackle this in a way that’s appropriate for non-nerds?

No worries, integration between Mastodon and Lemmy is still confusing at this stage :)

What?

Yeah I was also thinking that using “OS” might not be obvious, but I also don’t want to explain too much. Like, I don’t want the reader to feel treated like a child. I expect someone who’s trying to pirate software to at least know that they’re running Windows.

I added (Mac / Windows / Linux) as examples there, hopefully it’s enough…

I mean you’re right, but it’s already probably too technical for the kind of target I’m aiming at with this post. I wrote this for a friend who didn’t know what a torrent is but wanted to get cracked FL Studio. I cannot expect them to dive into firewall rules.

I already have a paid one, but I wrote this for people who don’t care enough to pay for one. Basically the alternative is either a free one or none. If I’m talking to a friend I’d rather they use a shady free VPN than none at all.

Well it has embedded GIFs and videos, it’s not gonna work without JS…

On a side note, people are way too paranoid about JavaScript for privacy. Browsers are much better at sandboxing and restricting webpages than they used to be. Sure, I guess only viewing static pages like it’s 1995 is better for privacy, but it’s a bit unreasonable of a tradeoff to make.

Thanks for the tip about the archived Reddit link, I’ve updated it!

For the seed to leech ratio you’re right, but I feel like it might be a bit much to throw at somebody who’s just figuring all this stuff out. It’s not a guide on how to seed safely, I don’t want to encourage people to put themselves at risk who don’t yet have the skills to protect themselves.

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.

It’s there… Step 4 of the section “Download A Torrent Client”. I didn’t call it “binding an interface” because the intended target of this post would have no idea what that means.