Yet another Hacker News

Someone on Torrent Sites Kept Fucking with My Sonarr

418 points speckx 1 day ago 207 comments

comrade1234 1 day ago | parent

Tell your downloader (in my case qbittorrent) to not download .exe, .scr, .zip, etc, etc, etc. It’s been this way for years. You do have to clean out qbittorrent every few days so that sonarr will search again, so that’s a pain. But hey, I’m pirating media. Someone trying to scam me at the same time is expected.

yborg 1 day ago | parent

Yeah, this whole post felt like some weird deja vu from 25 years ago on a web forum. "Bastards are putting malware exe's on file sharing, wtf??"

queenkjuul 1 day ago | parent

Join a private tracker and never think about it again

serf 1 day ago | parent

yeah!

let's all join a private tracker!

that'll fix the problem, the bad actors won't chase the crowd, and it definitely wont end in a burning of the library of alexandria loss-of-history what.cd style event again and again if the public can't archive it.

how about we just create an exe/bat/com exclusion on our dumb-as-dick media downloaders like sensible people have been doing for 30+ years?

queenkjuul 1 day ago | parent

I mean i just joined a private tracker and so I don't have to think about it. Several, actually. It's hard for me to imagine someone taking torrenting seriously enough to set up an arr stack and not belong to a private tracker. Beyond malware, there's the rightsholder spies on the public trackers, and I'm not trying to lose my ISP over copyright strikes.

And i also truly cannot understand what your point is. Trackers are not really legal, they come and go. I don't think a few hundred or even a few thousand HN users joining across the ecosystem is going to suddenly cause them all to get raided

47282847 1 day ago | parent

> a burning of the library of alexandria loss-of-history what.cd style event again

I don’t agree with that framing.

All metadata has been preserved and published, and the sucessor sites to what.CD have long outgrown it; and their successors will again. Anything you find missing, you can request and typically it will be filled within less than 24 hours.

c-hendricks 1 day ago | parent

Plenty of my iso's intentionally contain those names though. Really, sonarr / radarr should have implemented this a long time ago since they're the ones doing the searching, downloading, and inspecting of files: https://github.com/Sonarr/Sonarr/pull/8775

Using settings on the indexer isn't great since with Prowlarr the user doesn't actually interact with the indexer portion of Sonarr.

Doing it in release profiles by bumping down their score is a cute workaround but then the torrents will just stop saying ".exe" in their title.

Really it's a thing Sonarr have to do, as evidenced by the multiple PRs they have to try and finally do it.

Dylan16807 1 day ago | parent

The setting works on filenames, not titles.

alt227 1 day ago | parent

> Tell your downloader (in my case qbittorrent) to not download .exe, .scr, .zip, etc, etc, etc.

This is literally one of the advice points at the end of the article. Did you get that far?

shmoil 1 day ago | parent

If you are too lazy to join private trackers, at least use TraSH guides to set up quality profiles

https://trash-guides.info/

gradstudent 1 day ago | parent

Join how, exactly, and for what benefit? The private trackers I've heard of are not open or you have to pay to join (lol!). From what I understand they also maintain ratios and seeders race to get credit for newly uploaded files. Its the 2026 version of the 90s warez courier scene. I bet theres a leaderboard somewhere with weektop and sitetop numbers. I'm too old for that shit.

torben-friis 1 day ago | parent

You can get into some not paying. You're just required to either have a minimum ratio or share several days, whatever's reached sooner (so you don't get stuck sharing something nobody wants for eternity).

In practice, it's just adding an API key, setting a rule in the app to remove after x and then you can go back to ignoring it.

SSLy 1 day ago | parent

I'm on them for over 10 years. Last time I've cared about ratio was 9.

lelandfe 1 day ago | parent

> The private trackers I've heard of are not open… From what I understand they also maintain ratios and seeders race to get credit for newly uploaded files. Its the 2026 version of the 90s warez courier scene

TBF this isn’t a revival of some arch 90s thing, this is just how private trackers have been. What was the same in the aughts, for instance.

0x457 1 day ago | parent

> The private trackers I've heard of are not open…

That's why they called private? Nice thing about private trackers is that you can just download without VPN (with DHT off...). Downside of private trackers, you get banned for weirdest thing, like my seed box was offline while I was out of country on vacation, I didn't download or seed anything for two weeks and got banned. Newsgroups are much better.

shmoil 1 day ago | parent

If you are basic, then Torrentleech will cover 99.999% of your needs. It costs a few $ to join (a one time fee, and you get 1 month of free VPN), or just sign up for r/opensignups, and wait until they are open for registrations (typically once per year).

If you are too old for trackers, then just sign up for usenet. You will have to pay for it though.

wackget 1 day ago | parent

For 99% of users who want to download TV shows/music/movies, The Pirate Bay is enough. I don't understand why you'd ever pay for a private tracker or Usenet unless you're looking for obscure/old stuff.

cowlevel 1 day ago | parent

I don't understand why you'd use completely unmoderated and full of malware TPB instead of a competently run public tracker like 1337x

ferngodfather 1 day ago | parent

Because 1337 is behind Cloudflare meaning the Sonarr stack can't use it properly

willy_k 1 day ago | parent

Fwiw, this can be worked around with byparr ( / flaresolverr).

walthamstow 1 day ago | parent

You just reminded me that I even have flaresolverr running, I must have set it and forgot it

ferngodfather 18 hours ago | parent

I could never get either working sadly.

flaresolverr even had an open issue or similar that acknowledges it's basically dead last I checked?

IAmBroom 22 hours ago | parent

TPB has a "good sharer" reputation flag system. Sticking to those has never failed me.

And thus, it's not completely unmoderated, nor full of malware.

vegenaise 1 day ago | parent

i bet youd pay for the top trackers if you actually knew how good they are. cool thing is, if you put in the time and effort, even the top trackers are free.

bulbar 1 day ago | parent

For torrent, you need to have a VPN, at which point you can also use Usenet, which, at least in my jurisdiction, you can effectively safely use without.

loeg 1 day ago | parent

You shouldn't pay money to join TL but otherwise, yeah.

pessimizer 1 day ago | parent

> they also maintain ratios

This can get stupid sometimes like when they're expecting everybody to keep over 1.0 when there are people with 10.0; but usually when they're doing that it's because it's a scammy tracker (all private trackers that you have to pay to join are scammy no exceptions) and they're trying to extort people who fall below 1.0 to give them money.

But expecting people to upload is part of the deal. That's not about being old, that's about being selfish. Non-scammy private trackers make it very easy, and some just concentrate on gatekeeping and don't worry about ratios at all.

Your basic point is very true, though. The way many private trackers have lasted is to stop letting people in almost entirely. To get into a non-scammy tracker you have to know somebody irl who is on and active, and they still might not be able to get you in. Or they will pretend like they can't - inviters sometimes get punished for the quality of the people they invite, and you think sharing back is something children do.

ThrowawayTestr 1 day ago | parent

A good private tracker will give you upload credit for keeping the torrent seeded even if no one downloads.

PorciiVorbesc 1 day ago | parent

>or you have to pay to join (lol!)

Why lol? Still better value than paying the IP holder what they want. And maintaining well curated torrent platforms costs money.

flatline 1 day ago | parent

Seedpool has regular open registrations, no fee, lots of freeleech content. You can pay $10 for a VPS that gives you a TL membership and get 5 TB upload credit with a couple hours of effort. All you have to do is seed and sign in like once a month to show you are still active.

zzleeper 1 day ago | parent

I used private torrents for the best part of 10 years but life got in the way, and when I tried to go back after my last Pvt torrent closed (Morethan..) I realized the bar was much higher than before. I only managed to get into MAM and perhaps and some point that would open more doors and so on, but it's anything but trivial lol (unless you never lost access to Pvt torrents or maybe if your friends do)

flatline 1 day ago | parent

MaM actually has one of the higher bars, but they have the most regular signups and the community to support it. That’s a good point of reference from 10 years ago, though.

bramhaag 1 day ago | parent

> or you have to pay to join (lol!)

There are zero good private trackers that you can pay for to enter. Buying invites will get you banned, and paying the site directly is only possible on scummy trackers.

There is a lot of good information here [0]. Most notably RED is open via interviews conducted on IRC, and has a big invite forum to join other trackers. But yes, they do force you to contribute through maintaining your ratio.

[0] https://igwiki.lyci.de/wiki/Private_trackers

downut 1 day ago | parent

Ok, I have not indulged in the new paradigm of work your way to the interesting stuff. I just did occasionally dabbling back in the day, but I wonder: I fully understand the intent of making a prospective good citizen demonstrate commitment and the level of service-side management effort to make this social network paradigm work.

But isn't this sort of structure just completely transparent to [Nation|Narco]/State Actors? Feel free to widen the set of economically interested actors.

How do you scale video interviews?

I think I am missing something about this scene. I really want to dive in tho.

loeg 1 day ago | parent

Yes, it's trivial for any state actor that wants to to get into these sites as users.

robertwt7 1 day ago | parent

for quality control, amount of seeders, internal encoders. heaps of stuff to avoid issues like this as well. as someone has said TorrentLeech will cover 99% of people's use cases with buying seedbox as entry only. you only want to get to cabal trackers when you really need top quality remuxes which I don't think you'll get invited without any efforts as well

bpavuk 1 day ago | parent

idk if there are fellow Ukrainians reading it, but I remember getting an account somewhere in exchange for an AFU donation. just a screenshot from your bank app confirming that the payment is within a few days of sending a registration application, and you are in. that tracker also had decent English originals somewhere, and a friend who's there tells that experience is great, but for foreigners he'd advise to turn on Google Translate or whatever.

the point is, some trackers don't even take these one-time payments for themselves and still provide service on the level as if you pay tenfold of that, monthly, to them.

loeg 1 day ago | parent

They're not especially closed and minimum ratio really isn't all that hard to maintain (if it's even required). There are usually mechanisms by which ratio isn't zero sum.

zaik 1 day ago | parent

Does this website have a *.nix translation?

acka 1 day ago | parent

s/lazy/poor/

throooooo 1 day ago | parent

You can join private trackers for free if someone invites you. Ratio and minimum seed times are requirements.

danpalmer 1 day ago | parent

I'm not too lazy to join a private tracker, I'm too lazy to maintain the presence necessary to use one. You're really signing up to be a part of a community. Mostly that's enforced through ratios, but those ratios are often set in such a way that you have to be uploading, or you have to be optimising what you choose to share in a way that gets you to those ratios. If the content you want is popular enough you just can't build ratio on it.

zdc1 1 day ago | parent

I've found the best way to do private trackers is to seed everything you download, all the time. If you seed enough of the long tail of things, ratio becomes easier. This also helps people get into a show that peaked a few years ago (after most of the seeders have moved on), which can be harder on public trackers.

danpalmer 1 day ago | parent

That's a good idea, seeding the long tail in time rather than in popularity in a sense. This would probably be the best way for me to do it, but even then it requires a different sort of investment – more storage, and more constantly online storage.

My setup is optimised for being quiet and low power, and part of that means bulk HDD storage that is mostly spun down. Seeding a large long tail of data would probably mean a lot more disk activity.

cowlevel 1 day ago | parent

Downloading activity is much lower than you think on private trackers since they have relatively few members, but yes, if you do this, every now and then your HDD will start making noise.

danpalmer 1 day ago | parent

Fair point. I've been burnt by some private trackers before, and their seeming expectation of time investment, but I'll give one a go with this strategy at some point if I see one open for registration.

cowlevel 2 hours ago | parent

Most expect that you'll at least log in once a month or get banned for inactivity.

shmoil 1 day ago | parent

It sounds like you are more interested in complaining and arguing online, rather than solving your problems.

Meanwhile, I joined my first private tracker 3 years ago, and now I am in all of them (ptp, btn, etc). I do not have to worry about the ratios (cross-seed is set and forget), and after awhile you have more "upload" and "ratio" then you need for a lifetime. I barely have to seed anymore. I log in once in a while, but otherwise do not have to participate in the communities, and the selection is awesome (they basically have everything, even Mexican B movies from the 1940s, whatever floats your boat). They saturate my fiber when I download too.

But do keep complaining and arguing, you will feel better.

yreg 1 day ago | parent

My experience is the same as GP's. Any time I joined a private tracker I was eventually kicked for not enough activity or low seed ratio. I tried to seed the stuff I downloaded, but usually no one seemed to want to leech from me.

jamesnorden 1 day ago | parent

It's complicated because there will always be multiple seedboxes seeding a torrent, which is excellent for keeping torrents alive, but then a normal user barely gets any chance to upload the torrent and maintain ratio.

shmoil 1 day ago | parent

Pretty much every tracker has bonus points for seeding, you dont need actual upload to have high ratio.

IAmBroom 22 hours ago | parent

You provide an anecdote without any data, and proceed to complain and argue for three paragraphs. Even if you were right, you'd still be worse than GP.

IG_Semmelweiss 1 day ago | parent

its not lazy. Some of us are very busy. This is stuff that agents can't vibe on their own.

joloooo 1 day ago | parent

Haven't seen this on usenet so far. Wonder if its more torrent prone.

redrove 1 day ago | parent

Got this in my sabnzbd instance and had to do .exe rules there too. An exe in a linux container…very smart.

I’m as upset as OP, get a job skid.

bhaney 1 day ago | parent

It's by far the most common on public torrent trackers, but I occasionally see it on usenet too. Never bothered to check which indexers they tend to come from.

Havoc 1 day ago | parent

> It even grabs your Sticky Notes for WHAT????

The whole sticky notes next to monitor is not a joke. I bet you could grab some crypto recovery keys this way

baud147258 1 day ago | parent

If it grabs all sticky notes, including those in the history, that might get a password or user account info that got pasted in a sticky note that got saved and not deleted

wickedsight 1 day ago | parent

And seed phrases. I'm pretty sure it's mostly about seed phrases.

dd_xplore 1 day ago | parent

The same happens for other series as well! I was frustrated with it! Good thing you decompiled this monstrosity

hparadiz 1 day ago | parent

This has been a thing since torrents have existed.

bhaney 1 day ago | parent

Sonarr has an advanced setting in "Settings > Indexers > [Your indexer] > Fail Downloads" which you should add "Executables" to. Then these kinds of downloads get automatically marked as failed/blacklisted and a new search and new download is attempted without you needing to manually intervene. You may also have to tweak some conflicting settings on qbit.

Alternatively, if there's a way to have qbit itself mark the download as "Failed" when it detects and refuses to download an executable, that would work too. I don't use qbit personally so I don't know if that's a thing it can be configured to do.

ramon156 1 day ago | parent

Still waiting on this https://github.com/Prowlarr/Prowlarr/issues/2329

bhaney 1 day ago | parent

That'll be good for new installs down the line, but I don't think it's something to "wait on" right now. I have around 30 indexers configured in Prowlarr, but going into Sonarr/Radarr and just changing the no-executables setting for each indexer that's actually active only takes a minute or so and never gets reverted.

robot_jesus 1 day ago | parent

30 indexers!? I’m seriously behind the curve with my 2. :-)

Are many of them highly specialized? Just lots of redundancy?

bhaney 1 day ago | parent

Just redundancy. I keep fewer than 10 active at a time, and most of them are common usenet indexers that all pull from each other anyway.

CharlesW 1 day ago | parent

Good stop-gap in that thread: https://github.com/Prowlarr/Prowlarr/issues/2329#issuecommen...

riley_dog 1 day ago | parent

https://github.com/cleanuparr/cleanuparr

gib444 1 day ago | parent

The ecosystem is way too fragmented. Another app !!

cowlevel 1 day ago | parent

Has to be, from necessity. If there's one big central site it's easy to shut down, so there have to be lots of small sites

quietsegfault 23 hours ago | parent

... they're open source apps that run on your computer. The apps themselves are not illegal. How will it be "shut down", again?

TaLiTr 20 hours ago | parent

As we've seen in the past, the app doesn't have to be illegal. It just requires evil corpos with unlimited funding to allege that it is. Then the open-source developer is put in the position of spending money they don't have on lawyers or closing up shop.

Gareth321 1 day ago | parent

This is the only thing which fixed this problem for me.

pentakkusu 1 day ago | parent

Jesus Christ, anotharr..

para_parolu 1 day ago | parent

Ince I discovered usenet I rarely want to deal with torrents

stronglikedan 1 day ago | parent

As someone who still pays for usenet, the benefit of torrents is anything older than a couple of days, since stuff gets pulled from usenet servers almost as soon as it's posted. Of course, if you have everything pre-configured to find and grab everything you're interested in, you won't even notice, but sometimes I just get an itch to watch something older off the cuff, and that's where torrents shine.

SoMomentary 1 day ago | parent

Age isn't such a big deal if you get a block account with a different backbone.

ssl-3 1 day ago | parent

Different backbone and region (eg, DMCA vs NTD) seems like the best ticket.

hoppp 1 day ago | parent

An excellent read. Thank you. I enjoyed it!

LoganDark 1 day ago | parent

> But you put the address in the malware anyway so what's the point for fetching from Gist and YouTube????

The ability to change it, dude. Have you never written a malware before?

Often a primary concern is the security response, so you want redundancy for the ability to work around enforcement action, such as website takedowns.

Hardcoding a scapegoat into the malware itself also buys you time, so that the first enforcement action is less likely to spend your backups right away.

> And to whoever made this: you probably spent weeks or shit ton of tokens on ChaCha20, AES-CTR, runtime API hashing, anti sandbox scoring, Chrome app bound encryption bypasses, just to make a shitty skid malware.

People have been making infostealers that support hundreds or thousands of different apps and corners of your computer for decades. Plenty of vendors pride themselves on it.

Meanwhile you used LLM to write a bunch of your article, and seemingly to do the RE too...

bastard_op 1 day ago | parent

Welcome to piracy, you must be new here. This has been occurring for some time, I've seen it for years to occasionally find a media named exe to delete and manually redownload.

Scammers always have a new trick up their sleeve.

josu 1 day ago | parent

Everything got flooded with those exes, not just South Park. All most seeded TV episodes on most public trackers were (are?) those EXEs. It will be interesting to know who launched the attack.

LoganDark 1 day ago | parent

Started running bitmagnet a few weeks ago after getting fed up with BTDigg dying and other DHT crawlers actually complying with DMCA notices for some reason (???). Pretty much everything even slightly popular that I search for has one of these EXEs lying around. Sometimes multiple.

bsagdiyev 1 day ago | parent

Bitmagnet has some good filtering to remove garbage like that but not great examples lying around ready to use. I bet an LLM can be pointed at the schema/docs and get you something useful setup though.

LoganDark 22 hours ago | parent

I haven't made any configuration to filtering. I don't mind seeing this stuff, I just skip over it when searching. Not even really an inconvenience.

karel-3d 1 day ago | parent

btdigg is fine? (on tor)

LoganDark 1 day ago | parent

Meh, I don't keep Tor running all the time, so the startup delay just to get to BTDigg would be a turn-off. Besides, getting bitmagnet running in a container let me put both it and Deluge behind a VPN, so I don't have to enable a system-wide VPN to torrent, or stop my torrents to turn the VPN off!

egberts1 1 day ago | parent

Sonarr could have ignored those EXE filetypes, no?

aftbit 1 day ago | parent

How is the *arr stack so fracking complicated? Once upon a time, all you needed was a browser, a torrent client, and VLC. Maybe your torrent client had an RSS feed built in.

Now you need 9 different pieces of software that end in *arr, all of which implement parts of the solution that you want and parts that you don't, and none of them is even a torrent client!

And they don't even work with torrent sites reliably, so people then spend money on a Usenet subscription like it's 1990 again.

RIMR 1 day ago | parent

Blame copyright laws.

Any all-in-one solution is going to be considered illegal at face value if it is obviously designed to circumvent copyright.

But if you split all the pieces of the solution up into separate pieces of software that can't do much illegal by themselves, you can always claim plausible deniability as the maintainer.

After all, you aren't going to be downloading torrents with Sonarr, you aren't going to be looking up information about shows with Jackett, and you aren't going to be automating your downloads with qBittorrent. If you link them all together with APIs, though, they do everything automatically.

As for the issue demonstrated here, it's just a long-standing problem in Sonarr and Radarr that even when it detects that a torrent is bad, it just sits there holding onto a virus until you override it with a working torrent, instead of just dumping the bad data and trying again.

cowlevel 1 day ago | parent

Best example of this is the IYKYK-io stack (not real name). 90% is a generic video watching system, then you just need one add-on from a different website to make it search torrents as the source for those videos.

behringer 1 day ago | parent

It works great. Family loves being able to self serve media requests.

mcsniff 1 day ago | parent

You can still manually download a torrent, open it in your client, and then open the file in VLC.

You can also automate 99% of it with the *arr stack and completely forget about it.

What is the issue? There is more choice now?

wackget 1 day ago | parent

For what it's worth I agree with you. I've never understood the appeal of these bloated apps.

Mashimo 1 day ago | parent

The appeal is automation.

luaybs 1 day ago | parent

how are they bloated exactly?

russelg 1 day ago | parent

You don't need any of the *arr stack, they just make media management easier for us hoarders with huge libraries. I couldn't imagine maintaining a collection of thousands of TV shows and movies without them. Every single arr program is a progressive enhancement over the "once upon a time" stack you mention.

Not that your old stack doesn't still work exactly how you'd expect it to, nothing's changed there.

shepherdjerred 1 day ago | parent

Just ask your favorite LLM to set it up with Docker compose and you're done. It's really not too difficult.

Or, I don't know, make some application that combines all of them like https://github.com/rivenmedia/riven-ts

aftbit 20 hours ago | parent

I tried this but it did a ton of things wrong, and wanted me to wire up a bunch of stuff that I didn't specify. It also forgot cleanuparr and flaresolverararr or whatever its called. I'm sure I could get it there eventually with the vibes, but I gave up in disgust just like last time I tried.

Maybe if I made a VM dedicated just to this behind a VPN gateway, then let Codex go wild in that VM with no guardrails it could eventually get something working.

TaLiTr 20 hours ago | parent

Nothing is stopping you from doing it manually.

Or you could put in the work and end up with a system that will let a non-technical family member type the name of a show that comes out next week and it will automatically search, download, tag, and add every episode on release to a Jellyfin instance for them to watch.

trog 1 day ago | parent

Feels kind of weird that Windows Defender doesn't have something that catches this kind of behaviour? I mean if you have the Defender settings jacked up you're not going to be able to run executables anyway without a bunch of mucking around which should at least stop accidental running, but feels like some heuristics to stop these kinds of stealers should be a high priority for the Defender team. Not sure how you'd go about it though?

queenkjuul 1 day ago | parent

Defender automatically removes malware (or more correctly, game cracks it thinks are malware) the second it hits my disk from my torrent client.

But usually I'm downloading TV on Linux not windows

TaLiTr 20 hours ago | parent

It's also great at cleaning up build artifacts of software I'm trying to compile before I even have a chance to run it. Wow! It was also very cool when it interfered with git in a way it couldn't detect, so I spent 2 hours diagnosing a bogus FS error.

Very cool Microsoft.

WrtCdEvrydy 1 day ago | parent

It's kinda funny because Windows Defender will catch some of these as Trojan:Win32/Ravartar!rfn

I find it funny that great minds think alike because I was just thinking of analysing these EXE files this week and doing a quick writeup at medium:

https://lazherrera.medium.com/analyzing-that-exe-file-youre-...

sporedro 1 day ago | parent

Is this a joke? Who’s upvoting this? It should be titled “I didn’t even bother asking an LLM to configure my server”

bstsb 1 day ago | parent

the interesting element of the article for me wasn't "somebody put malware on a torrent site", it was how the author reverse engineered the .exe to see why the file ended up there

internet2000 1 day ago | parent

How the author *asked Claude to reverse engineer the exe

venzaspa 1 day ago | parent

I got sick of this shit a few weeks ago, so now as soon as the torrent client starts downloading an executable it removes the torrent. Definitely seems to be an increase recently.

ShowalkKama 1 day ago | parent

Joining private trackers is hard only if you are trying to join the niche ones which is totally unnecessary if you are trying to watch relatively recent and popular movies.

Just get into a decent general tracker and you'll literally never have this issue again (along with getting torrents with more seeders and better tagged content so your "4k" download will never be 480p again)

mikeryan 1 day ago | parent

No. I’m a casual arr stack user with general trackers only and had two episodes be exes yesterday.

davkan 1 day ago | parent

Consider paying for usenet or investing some effort over a month to get into some private trackers.

LukaD 1 day ago | parent

But won't you still need a decent private indexer with usenet or are paid indexers with open registration good enough these days? I've been using an invite-only indexer and haven't tried any other indexers in a while.

davkan 6 hours ago | parent

Not sure, I haven’t used Usenet myself but some friends do. From how quickly they were up and running it seemed to be less effort than getting into good private trackers.

dan_wood 1 day ago | parent

This is also happening on UseNetCrawler, not just torrent sites.

sergiotapia 1 day ago | parent

Private trackers have this bad habit still in 2026 of being super strict about ratio. You have a hard time uploading because as soon as someone uploads something, 20 seedboxes are already saturating the 3 other people downloading.

You're left with just paying for upload credits. Makes no sense.

I miss demonoid from the 2005 era something fierce. It was private but also super chill, the way it's supposed to be.

I'm a member of two fairly private trackers but haven't downloaded anything from them in a long time. It's not really worth the hassle. :( the only thing I would still say it's worth it if you find super niche private trackers with stuff nobody else has, like cinemageddon

scratchyone 1 day ago | parent

if your "private tracker" lets you pay for upload, it's a scam site and not at all a trusted tracker in the community lol

opan 1 day ago | parent

On first reading I took it to mean exchanging BP for upload, a common site feature with no real money cost. Perhaps they meant that seeding is pay to win and you need a seedbox, though (not my experience, FWIW).

fishgoesblub 1 day ago | parent

> bad habit

I wouldn't consider a requirement that people to upload as much as they download a "bad habit" it's called not being a leech.

sergiotapia 1 day ago | parent

It's not 2008 anymore. People want to upload and can, but can't when there's 20 seedboxes for a torrent with one leecher.

fishgoesblub 23 hours ago | parent

I make do on multiple trackers with a home connection and a spare computer. If you cannot, then either you're doing something wrong, or should move to a different, easier tracker.

why_at 1 day ago | parent

I think the seeding requirement is not bad, but bytes uploaded is a bad metric when there's just not that much traffic.

Since bittorrent prioritizes peers with better bandwidth and so many people use servers with 10G connections, you won't get much upload off your home network. On some trackers I've been seeding 24/7 since I joined and uploaded only a few gigabytes. Fortunately many of them are generous with other ways to get credit for uploading so I've never had a problem.

SparkyMcUnicorn 1 day ago | parent

It takes a small effort up front to pick out some freeleech content and/or set up autobrr, then you pretty much never have to worry about ratio ever again.

maeln 1 day ago | parent

There was always people trying to make $$ with piracy (I mean, didn't the tpb owner basically all became millionaire thanks to it ?), but I feel like in recent years it had become worse. It's likely because since the 2010' many countries (mostly “western” country tbf, but also Japan and now Korea) have become way more aggressive with hunting and prosecuting piracy services operator. So in a way, like with drugs, higher risk means that a lot of “in it for the love of the game” kind of people left the scene and only more, errrmmm "money focused" people stays.

00deadbeef 1 day ago | parent

Usenet is still better. I max out my gigabit connection for a few dollars a month.

fg137 1 day ago | parent

A few PT are getting much more lenient towards ratio, seeding time and other requirements (some used to ask you to meet certain upload "goals" in a quarter), seeing the trend and what's coming for them -- there is just less overall activity, including fewer torrents and less seeding/downloading.

Yet a few stick with all the existing, stringent rules they have, as if they are irreplaceable. I haven't touched them for a while. Let them die.

BowBun 23 hours ago | parent

Pay 10/mo for a seedbox, it derisks your life and is extremely handy. On most sites, you can download batch torrents freeleech and then get your ratio up by leaving those seeding for a while. I use this box for a bunch of stuff so I don't feel like I'm paying just for torrents

sergiotapia 22 hours ago | parent

I pay for usenet and nzb crawling. I won't play that hand wrangling over ratio anymore, it's a relic of days gone by where fewer people had internet and slower speeds. Not nagging against you btw just in general you know

bjackman 1 day ago | parent

You can also just run Bitmagmet for a few weeks and then you have your own tracker. (I think "tracker" might be technically incorrect jargon but it solves the same problem).

maeln 1 day ago | parent

If anybody ask, it's not me who said it, but you can also easily use Shodan to find a lot of open Bitmagnet instances. Many people who self-host do not seem to be aware of the “questionable” decision of docker to always listen on 0.0.0.0 by default and make a firewall rule to expose your service to the entire web (you can also find instances of jackett and some *arr stack, but most of them are at least password protected).

sergiotapia 22 hours ago | parent

There's also my project that also crawls the DHT and other sources.

https://github.com/sergiotapia/magnetissimo

internet2000 1 day ago | parent

Skill issue. Configure your Sonarr better.

SCHiM 1 day ago | parent

> XOR a global. XOR it back. Do nothing. Hundreds of times. It exists purely to make the decompiler output look like shit, and it does, congrats.

No, that's to exhaust sandboxing without being able to trust sleep() or time API calls by the only way you can: generating heat.

oscarteg 1 day ago | parent

The new sonar version v4 has made it even more easy to get around this. But yeah. You can configure sonar better

sbstp 1 day ago | parent

Ran into the same issue, I created a small program that scans qbittorrent with their API and removes torrents that contain these file extensions and aren't downloading https://git.sbstp.ca/sbstp/qbittorrent-sentinel

mcv 1 day ago | parent

An .exe? Doesn't everybody run their *arr stack on Linux? Well, that's what I do at least. Even so, crap like this has to be easily blockable. And I wouldn't mind if there was a service that handled that for everybody.

ribosometronome 1 day ago | parent

Yes but it’s a torrent, the target isn’t Sonarr, it’s manual downloads.

machomaster 1 day ago | parent

> Not even a folder with a fake .mkv and a "codec installer" next to it like the "good old days". Just the exe. Are we deadass.

We can thank Microsoft for their willful support of criminals by having file extensions be hidden by default in Windows.

daveidol 1 day ago | parent

I rarely use Windows these days but that is the first setting I always change. MacOS hides a lot of them too by default, sadly.

fn-mote 1 day ago | parent

But on MacOS it doesn’t matter, right?

asdf88990 1 day ago | parent

Correct, on most unix-like it doesn’t matter because extensions are for the Desktop Environment not execution.

waltbosz 1 day ago | parent

And it's even on by default on Windows server builds. :|

jaharios 1 day ago | parent

Most users nowadays don't even know what file extension is .

cpburns2009 1 day ago | parent

It doesn't help that Windows has hid file extensions since 7.

iamtedd 1 day ago | parent

Nope. Try 95.

https://nunzioweb.com/misc/show_file_extensions.htm

junon 1 day ago | parent

Ehhh been a lot longer than that, if memory serves.

fsckboy 1 day ago | parent

for executable files, unix has always been rid of file extensions.

(please don't feel the need to point out how you can use more words to say more, that's always true, our goal here is to use less words, no need for extensions to that)

helterskelter2 1 day ago | parent

I've heard horror stories of recent generations not understanding files and directories, or even how to use a search engine.

machomaster 1 day ago | parent

Tell me if you are using "directories", "cabinets/drawers", "folders" or "collections/projects/groups/vaults" and I can tell about this person's technical background. :-)

deepsun 1 day ago | parent

I use tables, columns and rows.

Am I DBA, accountant, or data engineer?

nvme0n1p1 1 day ago | parent

You're an interior designer.

machomaster 20 hours ago | parent

You are a wood worker.

dennis_jeeves2 18 hours ago | parent

You are a monkey, a code monkey.

walthamstow 1 day ago | parent

What about My Briefcase?

rzzzt 1 day ago | parent

What about my Lifestream?

zenoprax 1 day ago | parent

Air-gapped Dropbox for a pre-rsync, pre-ssh world.

machomaster 20 hours ago | parent

My Vault.

101008 1 day ago | parent

Noooo, the memories! As a kid who owned the computer at home, I tried playing with it, moving files to it (I think?), but I never understood what it did or how it worked. Good times where computeres were there to explore!

lmz 1 day ago | parent

As opposed to OSs that use an invisible execute bit?

machomaster 1 day ago | parent

Not really relevant to the discussion.

But I do personally agree, that better extensions (e.g. for exec files) in Linux would be a really good thing. I have the same gripe with Linux's case sensitivity of files and dirs. Fine if you want to make the file name more legible by using CamelCase or something, and this needs to be displayed as such. But it's madness that one directory can have the files with the same exact name (case written notwithstanding).

Heck, I fondly remember my DOS days when directories and files were easily distinguishable, since the former ones were always written in CAPS. Not saying that we should bring it back or anything.

lmz 1 day ago | parent

Of course it is relevant. It's not like other OSs make it more visible: the x bit is invisible. Bashing Windows for making it invisible without an alternative is just populist point scoring on HN. I guess the x bit is less likely to be transferred over BitTorrent although it wouldn't surprise me if there was some extension for it like there is for ZIP files. (BEP 0047 seems to cover the x bit).

machomaster 20 hours ago | parent

It is not relevant because we are not talking about the bad original CORE DESIGN choice (and in here I agreed with you regarding Unix), but about the willful choice to keep a terrible SETTING TOGGLE. The latter you can change, the former have to live with. Bad design in one OS should not be an excuse to keep bad settings on in another OS. One has nothing to do with another, like I said.

lmz 15 hours ago | parent

You accused them of "willful support of criminals" by hiding the extension that makes it executable. To me that is only justified if there was a common practice of showing it, and Microsoft then hid it for some reason. If everyone else is also hiding it there is NO REASON to treat it as "willful support of criminals". In fact they would be superior to the competition in that you could set it to visible if you wanted to.

martin- 1 day ago | parent

> Heck, I fondly remember my DOS days when directories and files were easily distinguishable, since the former ones were always written in CAPS.

That must have been the conventions of some third-party file manager (Norton Commander?), because DOS stored and showed everything as uppercase, both directories and files.

machomaster 20 hours ago | parent

My memory might have failed me.

But I did mostly use Dos Navigator.

zer00eyz 1 day ago | parent

> Are we deadass.

As someone who remembers Napster being new, I am happy to see the kids rediscovering the real joys of Piracy!

madaxe_again 1 day ago | parent

Napster! I remember when you had to wait for your malware that you’d ordered from the back of a magazine to arrive by post, on floppy discs!

Of course, once it had collected your data, you had to post it back.

IAmBroom 22 hours ago | parent

Bah, youngun! Punching holes in a card cut out of a Frankenberry box built character!

INTPenis 1 day ago | parent

I'll never forget when they autorun everything on an USB. Good times.

Dwedit 1 day ago | parent

"Just a gaming channel"

JoshTriplett 1 day ago | parent

> I chopped the 118 KB off the front and threw it into IDA

How long until someone uses AI to find an exploit in IDA and starts putting that in their malware, so that if you try to disassemble it you get pwned?

gmerc 1 day ago | parent

Maybe easier to find an exploit in sonar and patch it to rewrite everything it writes to disk into executables

dd_xplore 1 day ago | parent

That's not how it works!

rbran 1 day ago | parent

This event is probably related to ITorrent (a torrent hosting site) being compromised, it was hosting a very similar malware: https://threatcluster.io/cluster/itorrentsorg-compromised-to...

For a while all torrents downloaded from that site where replaced by a torrent of simple exe, it disguised itself by using a directory icon, plus having 800M of padding to simulate a real torrent.

keithnz 1 day ago | parent

I run regular reviews with my AI, it's added quite a lot of rules to stop this happening. Though I have this all on linux, but still.

fnord77 1 day ago | parent

> WHO is actually falling for this in the big 2026????

some 13 year old on his dad's Dell

TaLiTr 19 hours ago | parent

I remember torrenting Tom Clancy's Endwar for the Nintendo DS. I downloaded the torrent, thought "the size is weird", unzipped the RAR file using the password on the site, and finding an executable instead of a ROM. I rolled my eyes and went to look for a different copy.

I was 11 at the time.

cowlevel 1 day ago | parent

AI written?

Are you using The Pirate Bay, which is unmoderated? Otherwise why wouldn't your tracker have quickly deleted this?

diebillionaires 1 day ago | parent

This is what the anti-piracy companies do to try and dissuade people from torrenting. Just create a custom rule to give .exe files a -1000 weight and never worry about it again.

ferngodfather 1 day ago | parent

I'm glad someone actually took the time. I've been running into this for weeks and it as thinking to myself isn't this a rather silly and old trick to be bringing back.

Mainly with new Mobland episodes.

anilakar 1 day ago | parent

Luckily I'm safe because I'm too busy to sit down and watch anything.

vivzkestrel 1 day ago | parent

- i see your blog has a lot of posts on reverse engineering https://thereallo.dev/?explore=blogs

- as a guy whose s too broke to afford claude pro or gpt pro, i ask you

- what llm models have you tried to reverse engineer exe files or decompile or disassemble or whatever the term of the month is?

karel-3d 1 day ago | parent

Getting random scammy ads and occasional malware is what you pay for pirating. It was always like this.

botanical 1 day ago | parent

How does the bittorrent protocol deal with removing bad torrents? I torrent from time to time, and luckily I've never come across malware; it seems the only way to avoid it is to not download a video with an exe extension.

63stack 1 day ago | parent

It does not, the protocol just defines the way the bits are exchanged. It's the torrent sites that can deal with bad torrents and your hunch is correct, the only way to avoid malware is not downloading suspicious torrents (or to be precise, not executing the downloaded files, downloading the torrent is not harmful even if the file is).

FluffyPancake 1 day ago | parent

The blog is trying hard to be very casual and written in an informal style but then you get some claudisms like "so nothing actually landed on disk" in the middle. I found it jarring to read.

vallerie 1 day ago | parent

Feels like OP asked Claude "please rewrite to be more casual and gen-z" ...

stratos123 21 hours ago | parent

I don't know why you got downvoted, I also noticed this and Pangram agrees this is fully AI-written.

polyterative 1 day ago | parent

I don't get it. Is this guy admitting of doing piracy? Is that like a thing you do?

luaybs 1 day ago | parent

who cares?

neuroticnews25 1 day ago | parent

It's a great way to watch whatever you feel like watching on whatever device, frankly I don't even know what are the alternatives.

tortasaur 1 day ago | parent

Media distribution companies are like health insurance companies (though not to the same degree) in that they can't stop themselves from squeezing their customers to the absolute limit. Majority opinion and the definition of ethical consumer behavior can change very quickly under those conditions.

stratos123 21 hours ago | parent

You're posting on a site called "hacker news" and you draw the line at cartoon piracy?

IAmBroom 19 hours ago | parent

If you continue to clutch your pearls like that, you'll break the strand.

jamesnorden 1 day ago | parent

"It even grabs your Sticky Notes for WHAT????"

People unironically put users and passwords in those.

kjs3 1 day ago | parent

I guess I noticed this recently. I dropped into a TPB mirror because I was being lazy and saw the 'recent' torrent feed was filled with .exe files, all the same size, in every category. Grabbed one out of curiosity and threw it at Virustotal (I wasn't remotely interested enough to RE it), and VG said yup, it's a malware dropper (yes, I'm aware VT isn't exactly definitive proof).

Just thought "does anyone actually fall for that?", but I guess a few must.

mixdup 1 day ago | parent

>It even grabs your Sticky Notes for WHAT????

Because people very VERY often will stash passwords/account numbers/other commonly needed secrets in Stickies

IAmBroom 21 hours ago | parent

My friend's wife stored her Windows password in one, because he told her to just write it on a Sticky Note.

He meant the physical kind.

Yeah, when she forgot her password the only hint was stored on the computer.

I am forbidden to laugh in her face every time I see her. He insists.

beAbU 1 day ago | parent

So thats what's been going on. I was wondering why all of a sardine my *arr stack started downloading executables.

I found the "ignore and blacklist executables" setting easily enough and moved on with my life.

But props to the OP for taking it this far!

vilos1611 1 day ago | parent

Yeah that's definitely pretty fishy.

khaoohs 1 day ago | parent

I see what you did there.

pixelpoet 23 hours ago | parent

Brevity is the sole of wit.

honeybadger1 22 hours ago | parent

I've already built my own ARR stack replacement that does away with this risk, handles anime better by integrating with anidb, and more... Got sick of the limitations.

apexalpha 5 hours ago | parent

TIL the *arr stack has windows ports!

No idea. But any software that autodownloads from untrusted sources should NOT be run in an environment with information available.

My *arr runs in a Linux container on a VM, suggest you do the same.