wizardbeard
This is even better if you’ve ever looked at the comments on the ads that have them enabled.
Also, why would any company buy ad space when they can buy accounts and astroturf? I forget the corporatized name for it, but studies have shown that just bringing your brand up in discussion on social media is often much more effective than paying for ad space.
A large portion of my job is automating things, and whenever there’s a discrepancy my immediate response is to check the automation for issues. Automation brings speed and consistency, but there’s a significant difference between consistency and accuracy.
I love when the boots on the ground tell me I screwed up, because then I can pick their brains and make things better!
I understand the importance of maintaining history, but I’m curious about what historical info is there that you think is worth saving? News about sites/trackers will be available elsewhere. We’d just be losing the Reddit-local community comments.
In my opinion, the main thing that would be useful would be bringing info over from the wiki, or stuff that should have been on it. Guides and such.
Unfortunately the info would need to be migrated manually right now. There’s a decent number of posts across the fediverse right now looking for people to make a bot or script to copy content from reddit over to the fediverse. Apparently no suitable tools exist for automating it yet, and I’d imagine the Reddit API changes are just going to complicate efforts as the tool would probably need to use web scraping rather than the API.
It is less likely, but viruses can absolutely come in non-executable file types. A quick look at VLC media player’s changelogs show that there are a lot of updates to fix security issues. Same with PDF files and security issues in Adobe Reader (to relate to your ebook mention). Can’t speak to music, but image files are also a common choice for malware embedding. For a good while the easiest way to run homebrew on PSP was by taking advantage of an oversight with how it handled image files to get it to run unsigned code, and similar exploits exist in image reading software.
The only thing someone spreading malware needs is an opportunity. It’s not hard to imagine someone tracking torrents for things like cult classic films and then taking advantage when seeders dry up by uploading their own torrent and faking seeders (or sockpuppeting them by using botnet machines) to get their compromised torrent listed at the top of results for that search. I’ve lost track of how many times I was surprised to find something I thought was reasonably popular with only 15 seeders. It wouldn’t take much to game those numbers.
Hell, it’s probably even automatable with enough of a media library and time spent scripting. Theoretically could be a good way to build a botnet, or collect endpoints for a shady residential proxy service.
For the record, I’ve only had issues with TPB content when I was being unreasonably risky (in retrospect) and my antivirus caught things before I was truly infected.
That said my rambling point is: why take the risk when there’s plenty of safer options even just in the public tracker space?
I see a lot of comments about how TPB tends to have the most seeders.
I’m not knowledgable enough to answer this myself, but is there any reason when downloading things from a public tracker to not just chuck every public tracker from one of the automatically updated github lists into the trackers section for it in your client?
The reverse would be to add the TPB tracker to public torrents from other sources, if you wanted to grab any seeders for the same torrent from TPB, right?
Screenshot of the message they recieved from the mod code of conduct account (that admins are using to send these threats and etc anonymously) stating that polls will never be a proper way to gauge the will of the community.
Please note that there is no mention or suggestion of any alternative way to guage the will of the community. Reddit doesn’t want solutions. They are scrambling to come up with the most thin justifications they can find to protect their interests as a business.
