This is why I don't pirate. Not because of any moral opposition, I can just never seem to find the right download links and don't want to **** up my computer.
im assuming you meant how do you know if a magnet link is a virus or not and just look at the url that it shows in the bottom left or right of your screen while hovering over it. if it says something sketchy then dont click it
you dont klick on wrong download links that way
also, if you want to use pirate bay try to make sure what you download is uploaded by someone with a skull next to their name, that means they are trusted by pirate bay
if you're on a torrent site like the pirate bay, you can just press the magnet link which will automatically load it into your torrenting program, the **** kinda shady sites do you go to.
I recently reinstalled windows and needed an editing program to cut some videos for uploading.
I asked my friend (He works with computers in various ways, mostly fixing/debugging) which program he recommended, to which he said Sony Vegas.
I've heard good things so I look up how much it would cost and he interrupts my search to tell me he has a torrent for it.
I generally don't like to torrent things, mainly because I feel I should pay for it, but then again, Sony Vegas is so overpriced I decide to make an exception.
I'm not overly familiar with torrenting so I ask him to make sure it's safe, he replies (Instantly, which should have been a warning I guess) that it's perfectly safe.
I download it and "Start" to install.
I have to read roughly 20 pages of add-on crap that the installer is trying to put on my machine (again, should have been a sign) and decline or deactivate each one.
Before I even get to the proper installation I try to google something, but oh, what's this? My search engine has changed, change it back to google, won't change back.
Turns out the computer had at least 7 programs running that were altering things and I had no idea what they were.
I always thought he was good with that sort of thing as he works with computers, never trusting him again with anything computer related.
In the video editing section, Windows has very little to offer for non-linear video editors like Sony Vegas that are open source but I found Shotcut that is a pretty decent one if you want to try it out: www.shotcut.org/.
that's a rookie mistake sometimes **** like babylon or other toolbars disguise themselves as the terms and conditions in a agree disagree prompt. Even trusted up loaders sometimes have **** like this if you are careful they are avoidable but often the actual program you download does work the uploaded has to make money too.
did you ask him about his method's, what you should and shouldn't be clicking, legit sites, legit torrent programs like bit torrent and Utorrent ect, all that bad **** happening to your PC could'a easily been prevented if you had ask more or did a bit more research so you are wrong to mistrust your friend if all you did was ask if pirating is safe, a bear trainer can say "yea its safe to touch yogi the bear" but don't be surprised when that ****** got's the craving for some sanguinemybrother meat
you might have missed a few of the decline addon stuff. did you check your addons after the installation? they like to throw some on and change homepages like you said.
hope you got a antivirus installed at least avast and malwarebytes together. also you can try adaware
Yes I checked my addons, even when removing the addon and deleting the program that was running it and deleting it's registry it was still overriding my search engine, eventually i did a system restore to two days prior.
what antivirus do you have? also if you go to task manager and go to the processes tab you might be able to pinpoint some weird processes you didn't recognize before
Play it safe like me. Use thepiratebay, only download from users with the trusted icon, try to only download from ones that have comments on them, so you can check for complaints of viruses.
so i was trying to find the star wars movie. realized i knew jack **** about what counts as a real looking file and what doesn't, other than filesize. i assume a real file would be about 1GB