Because there aren't very many places that let you wear eye patches anymore?

Yup, the whole farce of pirated games hosting trojans, virus and backdoors are just stories made to scare children. Heck, some of the bigger pirate groups are probably more sincere than some of our "favourie" publishers...

Activism against piracy is like using buckets to keep the tide from the beach. You can do it if you want, but I will sit on the beach and enjoy my Mojito.

What is PirateBay?
http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4084/5059286742_eb649aaae3.jpg

No, seriously. Just don't visit this web-site at all, OK?

Since the PB torrents and links are provided by users, has PB ever removed any links from its pages, especially on publisher request? At least if we are talking only about pirated material, not kiddie pr0n or anything like that?

I'd think not, but then who knows...

Sadly i dont think we can eliminate piracy even if a game is £0.01 they would still pirate it than bother paying for it epople want things for free and they will go and get it. All we can try and do in speak to friends and stop them from pirating and buying them instead.

You are aware that you are not supporting the developer in 90% of these games on GOG? You support GOG first, plus the evil publishers that hold license deals like EA, Ubisoft or Activision.

You know how the web was born?

Porn!

On the whole it is usually much harder to infect a modern PC by just visiting a hazy web site, than willingly running or installing some unknown "utility" on your PC. Both happen, though.

While not directly related to (pirated) PC games, one pretty well-known example from the recent years were the fake mp3 music files being passed on p2p networks, which apparently were small video files which claimed you are missing an audio codec that you must install on your Windows PC before being able to listen to the "music file" you had downloaded. The video files would point you to a web site to download and install the needed "codec".

I'll let you figure it out whether those "audio decoder drivers" were trojans or not.

An uneducated guess of mine would be that most of the bot nets and otherwise heavily infected computers are those by people who don't even know what a torrent is. Considering the amount of people still using ancient software like IE 6, windows 2000 and generally don't update their software I would say those are the majority of infected computers on the net.

And porn makes people do the weirdest things, like "downloading free access tools".

Especially the pirates on the pirate bay (puntastic!) are more of a community. If a widely used torrent really has a virus in it, you can be sure that it will not only get reported in the comments, but it will die off, because nobody is torrenting those files anymore. Pirates are usually more aware of their PC and security issues than the average user.

This a personal opinion, I have no evidence beyond personal experience. But the most heavily infected comps I came across were by people who didn't pirate simply because they didn't know how. Yet, they had more viruses than a cheap thai hooker.

I presume the infected copies of Windows 7, as well as e.g. IWork, were passed also through pirate sites. EDIT: As a matter of fact, the IWork version with the Trojan was apparently shared through PirateBay:

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/apple/pirated-version-of-iwork-821609-may-contain-a-trojan/2834


What you said about the "community" taking care of trojans: it takes time before the trojans are detected because by default they try not to do something that the users can see, and virus checkers are always lagging behind. And the rarer the file is, the less people will be there to comment on it.

And yes, someone would still be sharing those trojan software, namely the people who want you to install it on your computer so that they can make money of it.

Plus, if someone says his virus checker gave a positive, someone else is probably quick to point out "It must be another false positive, so don't worry about it.". I think you see that everywhere. Heck, I got a virus warning from an utility that was supposed to let me root my Android phone (in order to install Clockwork mod and Cyanogen mod on it). I had to google it a lot to make an educated guess whether it really is a false positive or not. I decided it probably is, MS Essentials still insists it is malware.

It is not only the pirated software, but could be also all kinds of "freeware" utilities, games or whatever. The net seems to be shock-full of all kinds of freeware from unknown sources, nice little games or whatever.

This occurred to me when some kid (relative) of mine wanted to play some Super Mario freeware clone, ie. I should install it on my PC so he could play it. I really couldn't tell from the site whether it was safe to install it.

That's the crux of the problem: if I install a crack, pirated game, pirated OS or even some unknown freeware, I willingly give it access to change pretty much anything on my PC, good or bad. Usually rogue web sites can't do the same, unless I let them willingly install something on my PC.

I'm not saying that torrents are safe by design, I'm just saying that the "torrents = trojan" scare run by the industry is just another part of their spiel. You can, very easily, "pirate safe".

And I still believe that the majority of botnets are people that install "free games" from dubious websites or some "all site access tools" for porn. That and those nuts who think upgrading their software would give MS backdoors in your system.

In the end, if the only reason for somebody to not pirate is because he is afraid of malware, he missed the point. You shouldn't pirate not because it is illegal, unsafe or you could get cought but because you don't want to.

I don't see a lot of demo's these days... so I can understand why people download GOG games from The Pirate Bay. You don't really have a choice if you really want to try the game before buying it here.

Now I know that most people who download it there don't buy it, but there are a few that do. I do this myself because I don't have a lot of money and I hate to spend money on games that really aren't worth it. If game designers don't get it right, I don't want to support them by giving them my money. But if I really like the game (which with GOG games is about 99% of the time) I buy it.
And I think it would be a good idea to post a message like "If you like the game, buy it on GOG.com" on there to remind people that they can obtain the game legally for a fair price.

Well my original comment about avoiding malware by avoiding pirate sites was just intended to mean if I never visit unfamiliar places like that, I never need worry. It's not that I think they are all infested with viruses. Nor do I think you cannot pirate safely with some attention and care. I'd assume you probably can. I just meant if I never, ever visit any of those places and never, ever download any of those files I can be absolutely certain I'll never get an infection that way, either via the site or the files it contains.

I'm a big fan of sticking to established, trusted sites in general and that way of surfing has served me well so far.

I approve of this.