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Gen Z falls for online scams more than their boomer grandparents do (www.vox.com)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Gen Z falls for online scams more than their boomer grandparents do::The generation that grew up with the internet isn’t invulnerable to becoming the victim of online hackers and scammers.

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[–] [email protected] 34 points 1 year ago (14 children)

Yes, it's called torrenting software. If you are just downloading regular things using a "download" button, that's amateur piracy.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (7 children)

Running modified executables you find on torrent sites seems worse

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (6 children)

Software is software. You're downloading shady software off the Internet anyway, but there's one key difference:

Torrent sites (such as The Pirate Bay) usually have systems of trusted uploaders. These are marked with a green/purple skull next to the file in search results.
A torrent with a large number of seeders (think: hundreds or thousands) is less likely to contain a virus because nobody honest would seed a malware torrent and it'd cost a lot to fake that many seeders across the world.
Torrenting software verifies the integrity of downloaded data. It uses a cryptographic hash function for this so it's impossible for a seeder to send you a tampered file (that is different from the file you intended to download). When you use a torrent file or magnet link, it contains the hash of the file so if what you receive does not match the hash then the torrenting software will discard it.

[–] ramblinguy 3 points 1 year ago

I mostly agree with you, except that The Pirate Bay is mostly regarded as risky for software. https://rentry.co/megathread-all-purpose under "untrustworthy websites".

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