Slashdot Mirror
ESET Spreading FUD About Torrent Files, Clients (welivesecurity.com)
An anonymous reader writes: ESET has taken fear mongering, something that some security firms continue to do, to a new level by issuing a blanket warning to users to view torrent files and clients as a threat. The warning came from the company's so-called security evangelist Ondrej Kubovic, (who used extremely patchy data to try and scare the bejesus out of computer users (Google cache). Like all such attempts at FUD, his treatise ended with a claim that ESET was the one true source whereby users could obtain "knowledge" to protect themselves. "If you want to stay informed and protect yourself by building up your knowledge, read the latest pieces by ESET researchers on WeLiveSecurity," he wrote. Kubovic used the case of Transmission -- a BitTorrent client that was breached in March and August 2016 with malware implanted and aimed at macOS users -- to push his barrow. But to use this one instance to dissuade people from downloading BitTorrent clients en masse is nothing short of scaremongering. There are dozens, if not more, BitTorrent clients which enjoy much wider usage, with uTorrent being one good example. Kubovic then used the old furphy which is resorted to by those who lobby on behalf of the copyright industry -- torrents are mostly illegal files and downloading them is Not The Right Thing To Do. But then he failed to mention that hundreds of thousands of perfectly legitimate files are also offered as torrents -- for instance, this writer regularly downloads images of various GNU/Linux distributions using a BitTorrent client because it is the more community-friendly thing to do, rather than using a direct HTTP link and hogging all the bandwidth available.
Betteridge's law only applies if the headline ends in a question mark. If you're going to troll, at least do it properly.
ESET... Not a clue. But The Google tells me it's some anti-virus solution from Slovakia... So right off the bat, I'm not trusting them as an unbiased source. But really I stopped reading when that the guy pontificating is and "evangelist", which are usuanlly some sort of über zealot which, again, is not the way to aquire unbiased information...
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Not sure if this is a clever slashvertisement for eset or a new push by the mpaa riaa anti-piracy mafia...
~ People that think they are better than anyone else for any reason are the cause of all the strife in the world.
To be fair, hosting torrents of popular TV shows and movies is about the only way to get your cable provider to cut the cord to you.
It is also usually a lot faster to torrent your Linus ISOs.
First law of people: People are generally stupid.
https://archive.org/details/di...
like EVERYTHING that can be downloaded from the Library of Congress has a torrent available
https://archive.org/download/d...
You'd WannaCry if you saw a jpeg of APK or creimer and you would likely catch a disease
So he wasn't laying.
If it was a naked picture you'd want to burn your eyes out with a flame thrower.
Torrents are controversial. The reason is that the technology vendors that built torrent technology, couldn't build the technology in such way that it wouldn't be widely used for piracy operations. While improving technology performance is good goal, it's not the only criteria for technology vendors. Avoiding areas where there's high risk of illegal operations is one important aspect of any technology development. If you think you're being innovative, and other "vendors" just couldn't figure out your groundbreaking ideas, you need to consider again. Usually the reason why other vendors are not implementing the technology, is because it's risky or too near illegal areas. Innovation shouldn't mean stretching the legal limits every time you want to have groundbreaking technology.
Every technology vendor needs to consider the consiquences, if piracy groups start to use their technology. Torrent and P2P technology has bad reputation because these checks are not being done in the technology development.
These articles that try to combine GNU/Linux and torrent technology together to buy legimacy for the torrent files, is completely wrong about it. Combiining two technologies using some far-fetched link about how the bits are being transferred, does not make torrent technology any more legal. The tech developers just missed the boat completely, and now these articles are trying to buy more legimacy for the activity they're doing.
On the one hand, we have so-called 'social media' telling us "You should SHARE everything about your life with everyone, it's NORMAL and NATURAL and only BAD PEOPLE want privacy and hide things!".. but if you want to 'share' a movie, or a song? "Oh, no, you shouldn't SHARE those, that's BAD and WRONG and you're a BAD PERSON!". The message works out to this: "We want you to SHARE things that MAKE US MONEY, but you can't SHARE things that COST us money, because we want YOUR money, too!". Them, them, FUCK THEM. I'm going to go home and share a shitload of stuff on Bittorrent just to be an asshole and SCREW THEM.
That's too cryptic, even Yoda will have difficulty with your syntax.
I know torrents are used to share ISOs for Linux distributions which is legitimate. How much of the torrent traffic is to share copyright content?
The article cited three well documented cases of torrent client published malware, not merely one, and all within the same calendar year. That seems a good foundation to mistrust them.
Sweet. What's ESET?
Let me get this straight--you're complaining because at least one Slashdot editor knows how to compose headlines correctly, is that right?
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
Who says it's correct? Title case is utterly pointless. At best is does nothing, at worst it introduces ambiguity. Replacing "and" with a comma always makes a headline harder to read, if not also ambiguous in some cases.
Just because an arbitrary rule is in one of many different style guides doesn't mean it's a good idea. Some papers used to write headlines all caps; why not go back to that?
Write it like you'd say it; capitalise it like you'd write it.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
I haven't bothered to download a torrent in years. Almost invariably the torrent site was either wanting me to download an .EXE (which was often malware or virus-infected .. yes, I checked) or a torrent which itself was misleading, misidentified, or itself containing infected executables.
It just wasn't worth the hassle.