I was working on a comment to a general post asking how to start pirating games. I tried to submit it but then soon realized that the post was deleted by the moderators while I was working on the comment. So, here you go:
Yarr welcome to the ship. Three rules you must always follow, lest the empire tracks u and sinks ur ship. Penalties for piracy vary by region (in the US if the ISP receives letters from copyright lawyers too many times about your file sharing behavior, they can suspend your internet)
First thing is a bittorrent client. There is really only one true bittorent client, which is qBittorrent (https://www.qbittorrent.org/). Stay away from uTorrent, they aren’t good anymore. Others like Transmission are good as well.
Second is a VPN. My personal favorite is hide.me, since they have a Wireguard VPN (see https://hide.me/en/wireguard-vpn) and port forwarding. A very important thing to do is to choose one with port forwarding.
Port forwarding is the ability to open ports through your VPN. Basically, it allows you to be seen by Seeders even with closed ports, so they can establish a connection with you. This usually dramatically increases your download rate initially (because seeders can sometimes connect with you even if they have closed ports, it’ll just take a while). Also, it’s good for seeding as well and it helps the swarm! Here is a more complete explanation: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/35669790
Another very pro tip is to bind your VPN to your torrent client. In qBittorrent, simply change Preferences -> Advanced -> Network Interface. (To know which one, go to your terminal and type “ifconfig” if you’re on Linux or “ipconfig” if Windows. It will show you a list of all your network interfaces. Type this command two times, one with your VPN off and one with your VPN on, and whichever interface appears should be it)
Thirdly, come to a pirate site. There’s fitgirl-repacks.site, or there’s dodi-repacks.site. Download the installation folder and run the installation file.
Any of these guides address the danger of downloading compromised games?
There must be a lot of trojanized torrents, and with the understandable need for secrecy in release groups, there’s always the danger of a supply chain attack. Also, games usually can’t be run on virtual machines without significant speed degradation, making them the perfect application to get direct access to your machine/network.
One way to avoid it is to prioritize GOG copies if they’re available. Since GOG has no DRM they tend to generally be untouched.
Gog games are also digitally signed. So you can check the signer and know it hasn’t been tampered with.
TIL, thanks for the info!
You can use virtual machine if you manage to set up direct GPU passthrough.
Fitgirl is one of the best repackers out there, I have never found a compromised torrent coming from her. Dodi is too a very good and equally safe one. I’d say you can trust any torrent coming from their sites without any worry.