I added the word “reported” because I don’t trust VPN providers to not keep logs, but ideally they should report that they don’t keep logs and have an established history of not providing logs. Tor is really not ideal if you’re trying to download anything large and you’re still vulnerable depending on who controls the exit nodes.

I was trying to give general advice, since it didn’t sound like they had a trusted private tracker already it’s a good idea to have a VPN to mask your IP. I agree, it probably won’t help against malware.

Simple, trust no one. Get a no-reported-logs VPN, don’t download anything that has a strange file size or extension, look at comments, look at the number of seeders if it’s a torrent. If you can, join something like a private tracker where there’s moderation too. If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck then it’s probably not the movie you were looking for and there might be a Trojan army inside waiting for you to let the duck enter your computer… That metaphor may have fallen apart on me…

Yeah, but you’re gonna be competing with all the fastest seeders with popular torrents on private trackers from my experience so you probably won’t get much of any upload credit until the hype dies down. If you need the credit and have the file already somehow I would even suggest bringing a torrent back from the dead that has a leecher or two trying to download.

Why are you trying to mass seed popular torrents? You’ll just wind up splitting your bandwidth per torrent so much that people will go to other seeders. If you do less popular torrents you may get less activity but you’ll seed a higher percentage each time and probably be doing more of a service.

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Fuck that’s a lot of lines…

I’m confused, normally threats happen before the thing it’s threatening… Have I been imagining piracy all these years?

Bottle it up