Also, if plex goes down so does your server. I love plex but if any of the 100% self hosted stuff catches up I’m absolutely jumping ship.

That’s only for authentication and some apps. You can set an IP whitelist so it doesn’t require auth from certain ranges - when I changed ISP a little while ago, I was still using Plex offline.

If you don’t already have a private tracker, this is a good one to start with. Easy to maintain ratio even without a Seedbox. I often download common torrents on DCC because it’s so easy to maintain ratio (I was over 100:1 for a while.

A “free” VPN is worse than no VPN. They have to pay for the service somehow, and you’re not paying, so they are making money off you somehow.

TBF, it’s more likely just overconfidence/incompetence. Cracks are OFTEN flagged by AV, and it’s usually nothing malicious. The guys at 1337x aren’t dumb enough to think a crypto miner wouldn’t be found pretty quickly.

Hanlon’s Razor: Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.

I’m on multiple private trackers, and they all hosted the infected version (they’ve been taken down now). Private doesn’t make it safe, especially when people are using automated tools to be the first to upload a torrent.

modern words ribbon-trash

Modern? The ribbon is 17 years old.

Are you port forwarding? You’ll have more possible peers if you have a port open, so better speeds on average.

I have a ratio of >100 on one of my trackers. 10GbE Seedbox, lots of freeleach, a little cross-seeding, that’s all it takes.

PIA have port forwarding.

I know they’ve been one of the top recommendations from TF for years.