Comment on DVDs and public transit: Boycott drives people to ditch Big Tech to protest ICE
pemptago@lemmy.ml 1 day agoHow does one keep their system secure with all that torrenting? A large mkv of a new movie seems like an effective container to deliver a payload.
Carefully.
Seriously, I don’t know if any/many issues caused by downloading and playing a legitimate video file (MP4/MKV/AVI).
I feel like, if there are, those are being saved for a nation state level attack and not Fred downloading Shrek 2 questionably.
So long as you are careful about file formats you shouldn’t have any issues, but there are a decent amount of measures you can take.
It doesn’t have to do with device security, but you should only do downloads over a VPN with a kill switch enabled to stop your ISP from sending you a cease and desist letter. Keep in mind that you are just trading your ISP for your VPN server when you do that though, so you may want to pick one that has been proven to not record logs, I use PIA for that reason, but I have also heard that mullvad also got subpoenad and demonstrated that they didn’t hold logs.
Is TOR a practical alternative for VPN - never tried it, but it seems tempting…
I wouldn’t consider it so. Imo it has a different intended use case.
Similar to a a VPN’s server, if a TOR exit node is compromised, so is your traffic.
However, TOR is significantly slower than just torrenting over a VPN. It speed loss could make a 15min download take 6-8hours. For a movie that could be a few gbs in size it would take even longer.
I’m not too well versed in it, but just based upon how it works I would imagine you would be at greater risk without taking at least as many precautions as the normal internet.
In theory, sure. In practice, we don’t see much of that.
Don’t run the video player with administration credentials, and keep the video player up to date and it’s likely to be fine.
Auli@lemmy.ca 6 hours ago
What is the mkv going to do? It is not a executable format.