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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

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  • This is 100% not true as I have personally had several times where I got ransomware (though still the thing I wanted to download somehow?) in late 2000s / 2010s. Hasn’t happened a single time since, even downloading the most sketchy torrents. For a lot of younger people, if they want to torrent something they’re not looking at trackers or much of anything, they just want the download. Windows defender used to be complete trash at preventing viruses so you’d need to know to download things like malwarebytes and be a lot more wary of what you download, and even if the torrent is 100% legit you’d have random registry/driver/software issues. Now these issues are rare unless you’re downloading some custom software or a much older game.

    The one thing I would say was a lot easier back then is it would say “xyz free download” and it actually would be the thing itself instead of random bloatware.



  • I can think of a couple situations, one being if you live in a place where abortion is illegal and you’re talking to someone else/someone who knows someone who wants to get one. Doesn’t matter if you did nothing illegal but now you’ve likely gotten them in hot water. Another is if you’ve loaded a website that hosted something illegal unintentionally, now you have to explain why that’s in your cache/history/whatever (lemmy had a big problem with CSAM being spammed on some instances). Innocent people get put on trial/sent to prison for weak evidence, and your phone is an immense amount of information for the cops to look through and see if they can make anything fit.



  • I would’ve agreed with this a few years ago, but when you realize things can have subtle effects on our body that aren’t easy to measure or readily apparent, you shouldn’t fully trust something just because studies say it’s safe. A study can’t really show that “50 years of repeated exposure caused slightly more exhaustion,” for example.

    However, we DO know tooth decay is a major health risk for our whole bodies. Avoiding a maybe possibly slightly harmful chemical isn’t stupid, but avoiding something that prevents known and documented dental harm and the effects that has on your entire body, that’s just letting fear override rational thinking.