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this post was submitted on 08 Oct 2023
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All that matters is if you trust your VPN. You can torrent on Windows with a good VPN, and you won't get caught. You don't need linux to torrent safely.
If you're worried about copyright notices, VPNs can help with that. If you're worried about viruses, most viruses aim for Windows systems, but you can avoid them by keeping an eye out. There's viruses for macOS and Linux, but due to the smaller scale of users, most people don't bother hosting them online.
If you're afraid your law enforcement is going to bust down your door, that isn't going to happen even if you torrent hundreds of movies and shows a month. They mainly crack down on the people who host the content, your ISP would probably end your service before you went to court.
That said, if you want a more "secure" operating system, Linux can help beyond tormenting. Fedora, Linux Mint, Debian, are all solid choices for your first time use. Just know there's going to be a learning curve, and if it gives you an error, read it carefully and search online, as others have had the issue before and are willing to help.
thank you for all this info.
Keeping an eye out for viruses? 😂🤣
Guess you missed the recent exploit with RAR archives where malicious actors can execute code without you even knowing, conveniently not long after Windows integrated RAR support.
Keep an eye out for what? Any RAR from this year forward can carry a hidden embedded virus.
Do you mean the winrar exploit? I don't know of or can find any other exploit related to rar files. If this is what you mean, it only affects winrar which is only on windows and most people use 7zip anyways.
RAR is an archive format. Whether people use RAR or not today is besides the point, it's an archive format. Many people (including myself) still have RAR archives from 20 years ago.
You think I'm just gonna ditch 2 decades of archives because of a security flaw recently discovered? I literally can't, unless I just said fuckit, lemme burn my whole existence down and start over. Cuz someone on the net says they like 7zip better...
Now don't take that the wrong way, I get it. 7zip most likely is more secure. But I can't just jump ship and burn all my previous archives in a bonfire, nor am I about to try converting terabytes of archives from RAR to 7zip.
Also, RAR is totally a thing on Linux, as well as Wine..
Hey, I'd like to help here with some clarification: the vulnerability affected winrar, not the RAR archive format. In fact, it happened when opening zip files, not rar files.
7zip is not only capable of extracting 7z archives, but also zip and rar. Thus using 7zip to open a malicious archive would prevent you from being a victim of said attack, which is what the previous author meant.
So you wouldn't need to change the archive format of your existing files, as this was only about not using winrar to open possibly malicious archives.
https://arstechnica.com/security/2023/08/winrar-0-day-that-uses-poisoned-jpg-and-txt-files-under-exploit-since-april/
https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2023-38831