The actual situation is that the people who benefit from you continuing to pay for overpriced content you don’t own on the internet ALSO pay bots to flood your world with overblown warnings about the dangers.
1: Use a VPN so your ISP can’t tattle on you for downloading things.
2: Virus scan stuff you download before opening/running it.
3: Keep good backups (you should be doing this anyway) so you can restore from backup if some kind of virus/malware manages to evade your virus scan.
Do those three things, and the risk of downloading pirated shit will be incredibly low. (And streaming isn’t zero-risk, either. The streaming apps or the streaming files themselves could theoretically be compromised, after all.)
There’s mild risk in torrenting only because the upload side of torrenting is “sharing”.
Practically speaking, if you aren’t financially profiting off piracy (like the guy you pay for your stream access), you are vanishingly unlikely to see any consequences for media piracy. And the methods to make you significantly safer are not a big leap.
But streaming is sick. The difference between deciding you want something and then acquiring it is very different from an IPTV subscription where there’s just like 40,000 channels of shit streaming RIGHT NOW.
I’m a stream pirate, since all I’ve *only ever heard is to never download anything. Isn’t there tons of risk with downloading content?
What others have said is valid as well, but joining a good private tracker means content is moderated so risc is very low.
VPN is only needed if you live somewhere where either ISPs or some organization sends letters.
There is also the Arr suite that basically allows you to build your own streaming service.
I haven’t used a live antivirus in more that a decade, by avoiding just raw dogging the open web I’ve never had a problem.
The actual situation is that the people who benefit from you continuing to pay for overpriced content you don’t own on the internet ALSO pay bots to flood your world with overblown warnings about the dangers.
The risk tends to be hugely overblown.
1: Use a VPN so your ISP can’t tattle on you for downloading things.
2: Virus scan stuff you download before opening/running it.
3: Keep good backups (you should be doing this anyway) so you can restore from backup if some kind of virus/malware manages to evade your virus scan.
Do those three things, and the risk of downloading pirated shit will be incredibly low. (And streaming isn’t zero-risk, either. The streaming apps or the streaming files themselves could theoretically be compromised, after all.)
There’s mild risk in torrenting only because the upload side of torrenting is “sharing”.
Practically speaking, if you aren’t financially profiting off piracy (like the guy you pay for your stream access), you are vanishingly unlikely to see any consequences for media piracy. And the methods to make you significantly safer are not a big leap.
But streaming is sick. The difference between deciding you want something and then acquiring it is very different from an IPTV subscription where there’s just like 40,000 channels of shit streaming RIGHT NOW.