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Chrome and Firefox Block Pirate Bay Over 'Harmful Programs' (torrentfreak.com)
An anonymous reader shares a TorrentFreak report: Chrome and Firefox are actively blocking direct access to the The Pirate Bay's download pages. According to Google's Safe Browsing diagnostics service TPB contains "harmful programs," most likely triggered by malicious advertisements running on the site. Comodo DNS also showed a "hacking" warning but this disappeared after a few hours.
Only way to be sure.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Works fine for me, and that's not something I get to say very often when using Safari.
If God forks the Universe every time you roll a die, he'd better have a damned good memory.
I already block them for that reason.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
It isn't a block, it is a warning. Works just fine.
It is true there are advertisements that have malicious effects, if you load them and/or run their javascript (which is idiotic to go running). It is also true that malicious native OS executables can be found on sites like TPB. Even moreover, it's almost certainly true that I could work around whatever "block" they have put in place.
However, let's hold the bus just a sec. Harmful things exist, but I do NOT want Google / Mozilla / the US Govt / China / the EU / my homeowner's association / insurance company / whoever making my choices for me about what I should see, run, what sites I can visit, and what information is harvested for who to sell to who.
What we need here is a reset back to the 1980's. I had a computer on my desk - well, probably under, at the time. It did whatever the fuck I told it to. It answered to me. It could access the (then pre-web internet), and there was nobody trying to tell me what was "acceptable". Not that it was bug free, but it generally was written to accept my commands. The FT-fucking-P program was not written to check back with the homeship whether the site was "safe". More and more we see big companies and bigger governments all wanting to tell me what I should be doing, reading, saying, and running. For my own protection. For the children. For the RIAA.
Control freaks: do please fuck off. Yes, I know, using Chrome and Firefox is optional. I know the internet is not safe, particularly if you are uneducated. But this big brother shit is becoming neigh well unavoidable unless you want to live in a fucking cave.
I'm not sure about torrent freaks, but TPB and KAT would spawn no end of pop ups and new tabs suggesting you click on their links for free "security scans" and "disk repair tools" of dubious provenance. And Adblock seemed powerless to stop it. No way would I ever take them up on their "generous offers", but I'd bet that many a less savvy or careful user got themselves pwned that way.
Imagine all the people...
You realize those are usually put there by the game's manufacturer's, right? They are trying to put the "fear of God" into people (like you) downloading the cracks, etc. as their twisted form of anti-piracy.
Game crackers/release groups thrive on getting it out first, and doing it right, so why would they promulgate viruses? It would surely ruin the groups' reputation if it got out there.
Plus, all the anti-malware programs flag such stuff as harmless keygens all as "PUP" or worse, "trojans" or other unspecified malware. This doesn't help the confusion either, as you really don't know if it's benign or an actual piece of malware. Running in a VM is the only solution, and restore prior state after running the "crack", because you really don't know whether it did anything malicious or not.
-- You are in a maze of little, twisty passages, all different... --
I can assure you, as a professional game programmer, that I've never even heard of such a practice. That's not to say it hasn't ever been done or tried, but I certainly haven't heard of such an instance, at least from inside the industry. I'm pretty sure that videogame companies don't want people to associate their games with malware either, even if they're not getting a sale. I also don't believe that it's the groups who crack programs' DRM that do this. Like you said, they've also got a reputation that would be damaged.
As an author myself, I'll be releasing my game DRM-free (well, the PC versions at least, but other platforms are out of my control) and cryptographically signed. Even when it's pirated (which is pretty much inevitable), people will know it's not been tampered with and is safe to play. I'd prefer them to have fun with the game, and maybe in the future they'll become a paying customer.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
Nah, he's just a fucking retard. P2P filesharing in the early 2000's was a clusterfuck of bogus files masquerading as legit ones, music with jacked up metadata, and slow, unreliable downloads... "Yeah, lets bring back KaZaA," said no one ever.
Most of the malware is in movie downloads. If a movie is in .wmv format, it's malware (Windows Media Player will prompt you to download the "drm" the file is supposedly protected by which will infect you). If it's an .exe, it's malware. If the movie is inside an encrypted .rar or .zip, then it's fake and the accompanying readme.txt will pretend you can get the key if you visit a site serving malware or some other scam.
Where the fuck are we supposed to get 0day samples of new trojans?
---signed, Antivirus industry
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.