third most important is a good torrenting application

Verizon sends me a letter every time I pirate something newer than a year old. Congratulating me I guess because they never do anything else.

You don’t need a VPN if you have a good enough private tracker.

Dunno man. Common sense for us in IT is different compared to layman. For example, I thought it was common sense to treat incognito mode only as a shortcut so I wouldn't have to clear browsing history and local cookies everytime. Then I read about users thinking incognito mode actually protected them against snooping or fingerprinting.

Still don't know why I'd need a vpn. My country doesn't go after individuals pirating (yet). That's the only reason, as far as I understand, to have a vpn for pirating. So until they start to take come after individuals, I'm gonna save my money.

the most important this to have when pirating is common sense

We disagree actually, it's to have well written tutorials and not to rely on the idea that people can just know things from nothing.

We get the frustration in this meme but honestly, we never liked this kind of attitude in tech spaces, it's exclusionary, gatekeepy and harms people. We understand not wanting to answer every single question but some well written tutorials etc to link to are better than having everyone starting in ignorance and getting in trouble or being harmed for it.

Especially if said tutorials keep up to date and add more answers to people's questions over time.

After all, being helpful actually helps the pirate community in that more people seed, so helping others is actually win-win. There's really no downsides whereas expecting others to know everything or being rude stops this from happening and thus is a loss for all of us.

I pirated this meme in the highest quality I could but lemmy compresses the image to 60-70% of its original quality, that's why it's so blurry 😅

Hence the “starter pack” lol they do indeed not know what they are doing

Those aren't typically risky media. When you're downloading games though, you're downloading executable programs. You can do some serious damage if you execute the wrong things. You're not executing a mkv or a pdf, you're only reading it.