I still recommend it. I’m not fully happy with the situation but for now I consider it my best option.

1. I consider Chromium-based browsers out of the question as they give too much power to Google. This is already showing to be a problem with new APIs and “features” that Google is pushing into the web platform and the bigger the market share gets the more control they have.
2. Web browsers are the biggest attack surface that most people have. Displaying untrusted webpages and running untrusted code is incredibly difficult and vulnerabilities are regularly discovered. I don’t yet know a Firefox fork that I trust enough to reliably respond to security vulnerabilities quickly and correctly.

So for now I am staying with raw Firefox. Not to mention that as a disto-built Firefox I have some insulation from Mozilla’s ToS. But I am very much considering some of the forks, especially the ones that are very light with patches and are mostly configuration tweaks.

Wine will mount your root folder as a Windows drive by default. So if the malware is scanning all connected drives and encrypting/uploading them you still have a problem.

IDK, how are we counting? Digestible calories? I don’t think you are getting much energy from any amount of swords that you can fit in your stomach.

Oops, I linked the wrong one and got fooled because the most recent post is actually open again.

!opensignups@lemmy.ml is more active. (Although not bustling either)

!opensignups@lemmy.world is active enough.

Yeah, public trackers definitely raise your chance of a notice by at least an order of magnitude. New content also tends to be more noisy than old content. I also found a drop by selecting “require encryption” although I can’t imagine why it would help (IIUC most of these scanners just connect to everyone in the swarm, not sniff random internet traffic.

The most likely situation is that the torrent isn’t good. I would also force a recheck of the torrent to double-check that the files on your disk haven’t been corrupted. But if that file is still saying “0 B” remaining (don’t just look at 100% as it may be rounded) after the recheck then I would bet pretty good money on a broken torrent. If this is a public tracker it is fairly common.

However even if it is broken you may be able to play by using a different players. Different apps can skip over different forms of corruption, so you may get lucky.

If you don’t need to watch Jeopardy live it is pretty readily available via torrents. Probably in better quality and without ads.

Sports are much harder to find. There are trackers but they are much harder to get into and I can’t attest to the completeness (I’m not really into sports) and watching it live is probably more relevant.

The main issue is accepting incoming connections. When you are behind a NAT (as most VPNs are for IPv4) you need some solution (such as port-forwarding) to make your torrent client connectable. This causes a number of issues when torrenting.

1. When someone starts a download they will try to connect to the seeders. If the seeders are not connectable this will fail.
2. As a fallback when the seeders notice the leachers they will try to connect to them. If the leacher also isn’t connectable this will also fail.

If neither party is connectable the download can’t happen, so you may fail to get content that you want.

This is extra relevant if you are on private trackers where seeding is tracked, has direct value and is competitive. If you are not connectable every new downloader will immediately connect to the connectable seeders and finish the download before your client even knows that they exist. (reannounces for seeders can be very infrequent, such as hourly, so it will take an average of 30min for you to notice a new seeder and try to connect to them). This makes it very difficult to acquire much upload unless there are very few other seeders.

NAT is evil, all hail IPv6.

I’m pretty sure every microwave just splits the input in to the last to digits as a number of seconds and the digits before that as minutes. Then runs for 60 * minutes + seconds. So 0:99 is equivalent to 1:39 and 1:80 is equivalent to 2:20. I mean it is a little weird that the seconds can be >59 and extra weird that you can do 6:66 but it isn’t exactly wizardry.

I don’t think this is a major “this is why people pirate”. Pirate sites also regularly get cracked (possibly more often the the average streaming service). It isn’t like bank details were leaked here so the only real difference is that in some pirate sites you don’t need a login at all.

IDK, what else do they use? Email has to be the least bad option. At least with email you can choose your provider (or be your own).

YAML is fine as a configuration language and ok data input language.

YAML is absolutely cursed as a programming language. As in Ansible has created a really shitty programming language inside of YAML. Should be burned with fire.