Empress, though an interesting individual herself, is at least correct this time.
even alex jones is right once per year…
And then probably follows it up with denying the holocaust.
its almost like you cant trust crazy bastards!
where to go now?
Nowhere. It’s just baseless accusations and manufactured drama.
What’s the alternative?
I use torrentgalaxy.to now. Or some search engine like solidtorrents.to, this one’s neat since it does not have any ads.
bitsearch works
There are few. For most of stuff there’s fitgirl and for things that are outdated or not available there (like empress) there’s dodi.
What else is there for movies and TV tho? 1337x and pirate bay are all I really know, and they’re both pretty dubious.
I miss Demonoid so much 😭
I like torrentgalaxy so far, coming from rarbg
Gog-games.to also very good.
It’s one torrent that’s not safe. That doesn’t make the entirety of the website unsafe!
If the admin are in cahoots with the crypto mining douchebag, then no part of the site is safe.
what evidence is there that this is the case?
edit: oh, I see. that’s… pretty damning!
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yikes! what assholes!
1337x mod response on Reddit, seemingly confirming the existence of the torrent: https://i.imgur.com/ij4CXIm.png
They appear to be implying that it was only checked, verified to be malware and deleted… after the listing was vigorously defended by mods and users complaining that it was malware were banned. Very odd.
EDIT: Found an archived copy of the listing before it was taken down by 1337x mods. Includes some comments (up to yesterday).
User comments provide proof that malware was uploaded (and 1337x mods themselves admitted it was malware in the Reddit response), yet VitaminX remains unaffected on the site: https://1337x.to/user/VitaminX/
There are preserved comments from the 1337x mods, such as:
Ex0duS5150: the next user posting, “Trojan found” is getting the ban hammer. Stop it with the n00bishness. this torrent is not dirty if you dont know what your doing stop DLing torrents.
reply:
IGGGAMESCOM: @Ex0duS5150: thank you so much for this reassurance buddy, now I can breathe a sigh of relief instead of having to “fight” with those guys, lol.
Can you link the preserved comments or give a screenshot or archive or something?
Absolutely. It took a bit of digging, but I found an archive with some of the comments: https://web.archive.org/web/20230805153327/https://www.1337x.to/torrent/5753101/Baldurs-Gate-3-GOG-Digital-Deluxe-Edition-Multi13-Baldur-s/
It only goes up to yesterday, so some of the recent comments (especially from mods) are missing - but this should provide sufficient evidence. Mods’ combative and defensive comments from today were widely viewed (just look at Reddit), their authenticity is not under question. That being said, comments from Ex0duS5150 are present, proving mods were aware of the listing early on.
User comments provide proof that malware was uploaded (and 1337x mods themselves admitted it was malware in the Reddit response), yet VitaminX remains unaffected on the site: https://1337x.to/user/VitaminX/
That mod is definitely the same guy posting on reddit as his complaint is literally almost word for word identical on both comments.
yikes! what assholes!
TBF, it’s more likely just overconfidence/incompetence. Cracks are OFTEN flagged by AV, and it’s usually nothing malicious. The guys at 1337x aren’t dumb enough to think a crypto miner wouldn’t be found pretty quickly.
Hanlon’s Razor: Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
Maybe, it’s definitely a possibility. What’s weird is the original uploader (https://1337x.to/user/VitaminX/) remains unaffected and users were reporting this up to 3 days before it was taken down with very compelling evidence - the miner was barely hidden and only when it blew up on Reddit was any action taken.
If the admins endorse malware, it’s best to assume the entire site is compromised.
I got baldurs gate from igg-games, does anyone know if I’m safe? I’m asking for advice dunno why I’m getting down voted xD
Igg-games is a very bad site to download anything from. There has been known malware in the past and the owners of the site are garbage.
Just get it from fitgirl. Can’t confirm for this game as I actually bought it, but I never had issues before.
Rule of the Internet do not trust anyone and it’s always wise to scan anything you download from Internet.
That’s true, thx :)
Igg has a shit reputation for adding malware to their torrents. I think it’s hit and miss, but better to avoid them than risk it.
Before even worrying about the content of individual torrents people should worry about the sites themselves being full of ads, spyware and other garbage that generates revenue for shady people. There’s a reason beyond just privacy that people use rss and magnet links. In an ideal scenario you never go to an actual torrent website.
Part of the reason I moved to Usenet
Buddy it’s been posted here a dozen times since BG3 release
The difference this time is that Empress was angy wangy and had to cry.
In reality it was indeed a few bad releases of a popular game on a popular site… 1337x constantly had these. Just like Pirate Bay had them. I never go there expecting safety in the first place.
I just don’t pirate games or software, not worth it. I feel safe that mkv and mp4 files aren’t malware ridden
Can we stop reposting this ragebait bullshit?
Response from the admins
From where I’m sitting it looks like classic overconfidence. I would say keep your eyes open in the future but don’t pick up the pitchforks just yet.
You can feel their frustration in this post. Being a mod is a thankless job.
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So why did he defend the torrent in the comments and said it was not dirty and the uploader is not banned? This defence is laughable.
Thanks. This community needed your logical input. I’ve been following this over the past few days and it seems like a blatent Reddit-type pitchfork situation. Based on the mods response and the absolute lack of proof surrounding the mods profiting from the crypto miner (honestly who the actual fuck even came up with this?), I think we need to all take a beat.
Also I don’t follow cracked games but this Emperess person seems like a fucking psychopath and the fact that literally anyone here believes a word she says is absolutely astonishing.
I am asking this community to PLEASE STOP REPOSTING THIS. Don’t let this community follow the ways of Reddit, please. We are better than that.
I agree, this entire thing looks very blown out of proportion to me. It’s not the first time and not the last time there will be malware in a brand new game torrent on 1337x.
This exact situation has happened before with a new game torrent that had malware, torrent eventually got taken down, and nobody raised a huge fuss other than not to download that torrent.
I feel like this community and the reddit one are made up of 14 year olds who figured out how to torrent 2 weeks ago and are freaking out over the prospect that downloading exe files isn’t safe…who would have thought!
You should pin it
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What evidence has been found that links the crypto-mining wallets with the 1337X admins?
Literally nothing. This entire thing is one of the stupidest controversies that I’ve ever seen. One idiot made a wild accusation about the 1337 mods based on no evidence and apparently that was good enough for this community…we are better than this people, grow up.
I think there’s been comments calling out the malware that have been deleted, possibly by the admins. In addition the infected torrentes stayed up for a long while (not sure if they still are or not)
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See my reply to Whiskey Pickle for the evidence.
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They admit the listing existed in that statement, and there are easily accessible records of 1337x mods defending the listing prior to its deletion (such as the comment I had also provided in my post). You may need to re-read it?
I can provide additional sources if necessary.
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You replied to this comment:
I think there’s been comments calling out the malware that have been deleted, possibly by the admins. In addition the infected torrentes stayed up for a long while (not sure if they still are or not)
… with this reply:
Haven’t seen any evidence of either of those things though…
Can you see how I would misunderstand what you were talking about here?
See my reply to Whiskey Pickle for the evidence.
I read through the wayback link you had, but it really just sounds like admin are busy with their other lives and getting frustrated with new users spamming “trojan found” which is an extremely common thing to see from new users and they don’t have time to verify everything out there. Even saying it has “unpacker.exe” wouldn’t mean anything as the release was packed. Unless the wallet address can actually be tied to admin/mods, then that’s just heresay.
That VitaminX user sounds shady as all hell, but that doesn’t mean admin are doing backhanded deals with some users.
At the risk of asking an incredibly stupid question, but if I only ever torrent video/audio, scan everything I download with defender, and only ever use a recently updated version of vlc, what’s the risk?
I remember getting viruses in ye olden days, but afaik the main problem is malware now.
Movies and audio are very rarely infected, almost never. That depends on bugged software, so that you can be relatively safe of.
Executables… well… no anti virus can protect you in reality from dumb double-clicks. This is because viruses are trained against anti virus software until they can’t be recognized. There are mathematically an infinite number of patterns to run a program to trick all kinds of anti viruses. So in reality you can’t be safe. Once that’s done by an expert virus creator, the best you have to protect you is a behavioral detection of viruses, which may or may not work.
So, don’t rely on anti viruses. They barely protect you from script kiddies and legacy viruses.
why do you have to pirate VLC, just go to the website and download (or even compile from source)
He doesn’t pirate VLC, he pirates the audio/video he plays with it and asks if there is any danger in that.
Not what they’re asking, read closely. They’re curious about the risk from using pirated audio or video material (not executables). VLC is only mentioned as their player of choice, so it’s easy to assume they’ve already got it installed.
Risk is practically nothing in your case, because you’re being careful, and know what you’re doing. You won’t run a binary when you were expecting the Barbie movie, for example.
If you were downloading binaries, then your risk is significant, but even then, unless you’re downloading new releases immediately, it’s likely that your antivirus will catch the new popular ransomware after a few days, when a few thousands of people have become infected. Governments won’t employ valuable zero-days on any rando who just wants to see their new isekai episode.
If you’re using Windows, just make sure file extensions are visible and that your file isn’t named Movie.mp4.exe
This is about a game, which is a .exe. In your case, it’s probably not an issue, but games will be. Pdfs also had an issue for a while, but I think that’s solved. As far as I’m aware, there aren’t any video/audio codec or VLC issues to be worried about though, so you should be good.
i was never really convinced of that site anyway. the agressive ad monetization made me feel like they were just in it for the cash.
Who the hell sees ads? If you choose to let your browser run them, well, what do you want?
i have all of the top 3 most popular adblockers and i still get redirected to scam porn websites.
Three ad blockers? One of them is fake and serving you ads. Or is allowing ads through because they are getting kickbacks. Or one of your other add-ons is serving that crap. Purge all that shit and start over.
Just use uBlock Origin and the site wont show any ads unless you have adware on your computer
In the middle of this controversy there is just one thing I don’t really understand: why haven’t they banned the offending account?
From what I read, the admin of the site is long gone and they don’t have the power to ban uploaders.
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![ATTENTION: 1337X IS NO LONGER SAFE [Reposted from Reddit]](https://lm.madiator.cloud/pictrs/image/46fa2d88-10a1-4ec6-81ee-c487321a15e1.jpeg){kind=link}