The generation that grew up with the internet isn’t invulnerable to becoming the victim of online hackers and scammers.

Gen Z falls for online scams more than their boomer grandparents do::The generation that grew up with the internet isn’t invulnerable to becoming the victim of online hackers and scammers.

    • @[email protected]English
      34•9 months ago

      Yes, it’s called torrenting software. If you are just downloading regular things using a “download” button, that’s amateur piracy.

      • phillaholicEnglish
        3•9 months ago

        Running modified executables you find on torrent sites seems worse

        • @[email protected]English
          7•9 months ago

          Software is software. You’re downloading shady software off the Internet anyway, but there’s one key difference:

          • Torrent sites (such as The Pirate Bay) usually have systems of trusted uploaders. These are marked with a green/purple skull next to the file in search results.
          • A torrent with a large number of seeders (think: hundreds or thousands) is less likely to contain a virus because nobody honest would seed a malware torrent and it’d cost a lot to fake that many seeders across the world.
          • Torrenting software verifies the integrity of downloaded data. It uses a cryptographic hash function for this so it’s impossible for a seeder to send you a tampered file (that is different from the file you intended to download). When you use a torrent file or magnet link, it contains the hash of the file so if what you receive does not match the hash then the torrenting software will discard it.
          • @[email protected]English
            2•9 months ago

            These are marked with a green/purple skull next to the file in search results.

            do you think gen-z is able to somehow hover over the icons to see the tooltip and understand what these skulls are for when they’re using their phone for everything?

              • @[email protected]English
                1•9 months ago

                it was mostly a joke and an exaggeration, but it still baffles me how much more they use their phone for things that objectively one can do much easier in a pc or laptop. Like things that require you to have 5-10 tabs open and constantly jump between them to compare things or fill a form with 20 fields etc

          • phillaholicEnglish
            2•9 months ago

            This assumes a bad actor doesn’t flood the torrent with their own peers. It would be trivial to set up a couple hundred peers to distribute malware.

            Not sure if it was ever confirmed, but some years back it was speculated that the MPAA or associated groups were putting out bad torrents full of broken files to stop people from pirating movies.

            • @[email protected]English
              3•9 months ago

              A “couple hundred peers” is a lot easier said than done. That being said, it does happen and you are correct that having a lot of seeders doesn’t guarantee a safe download.

              All of the three conditions I mentioned are neither sufficient nor necessary for a safe download, but there is a strong correlation. Unless the torrent is official (e.g. official Linux distro torrents), there is always some chance of a bad download. The chance can be low but is never zero.

      • z500English
        3•9 months ago

        I feel like it’s one of the internet’s better kept secrets that you can just Google for blogs that have music downloads, and as long as it’s not too obscure you’ll probably find it. No fake download buttons, at least none that I’ve noticed with an ad blocker. Generally, the gaudier the blog and the goofier the name, the more reliable it is.