Yeah shame it’s hidden behind 50 pop-under triggers and infectious scam ads. Literally unusable without an ad blocker. (Which you should use anyway but it means they’re not a great choice for Joe user on his unprotected windows pc)
A bit deeper into the scene, there are no ads anymore. And the biggest problem for most people in the west, is rather just using torrents without a VPN will get you lawyers letters quite quickly. But Joe average can use youtube downloader without danger.
They only send them to ISPs in major markets such as the US, and some providers just redirect them to /dev/null, but a lot of providers that are larger will terminate your service for repeated violatioins.
I hadn't done it in years either... Then just recently downloaded a show. Less than 5 minutes later, I have an email from my ISP with the name of the show telling me to stop it.
The principle of torrents are, everyone downloading has the ip of all the other participants for p2p to work. All it takes is one node recording that other nodes send copywrited data to them, to get the real adresses of them (via ISP).
yep: seedbox + this + jeyllfin = unlimited streaming of anything i want for $15/month. no ads, no terrible app UIs, no autoplaying previews, no content getting removed, not having 4 different streaming subscriptions that are hard to cancel, no fuckery at all.
I set this up for my husband who barely knows which end of a PC to use. He's filled up the 4TB media array and now I need more disks (or better retention policies)
One, people should be using uBlock Origin as you mentioned. Two, there are many search engines without such ads. Three, qBittorrent has a search right inside the client, there is no need to even access the websites to perform searches.
