top gear nonsense

[erod550]

How safe are sites like these? Can you get viruses from them?

I know this is a couple months late but I forgot to check back on this thread lol. No matter where you are downloading stuff from there's a chance you can get a virus. And you're not actually getting the stuff from binsearch.info itself, that's just an indexing site for Usenet. An even better site (with comments like on thepiratebay) is http://www.merlins-portal.net. They have everything categorized and searchable using NZB files, which are just index files that tell your newsreader (I use Newsbin Pro) which files to download. I would have posted about Merlin's before but they got hacked and were down for a couple months.

I do use torrents occasionally, but only if I can't find what I'm looking for on Usenet, which is pretty rare. Usenet has TV shows available less than an hour after they air, games and movies are often available before they are even out in stores, and the best part, if you are looking for something that's kind of old, it will probably still be available, whereas with torrents if it's old there probably won't be any seeders and it could take forever to actually download it.

[chromal]

If you have Windows7 (maybe also Vista?), Microsoft Security Essentials is free as in beer and better than nothing. In truth, if you're running Windows7 x86_64 edition, you're a lot 'safer' against exploits than Windows XP, on account of improved data execution prevention and address space randomization, only on the 64-bit windows7 OS kernels.

If you're on XP 32-bit, you're probably the most vulnerable: most virii and malware were written specifically for you. Definitely upgrade to IE8, IE6-7 are not secure, or possibly consider an alternate browser like Firefox or Google Chrome (which also benchmarks as faster, maybe squeeze some extra life out of an older computer). Mozilla Thunderbird is an excellent free e-mail client, too.

Regardless of what browser you use, make sure you install the newest Adobe Flash available, older flash plugins are vulnerable.

With serious/legitimate computer virii/malware infection, reformat hard drive + reinstall OS is often the best course of action. Be careful, most exploits out there arrive as a web page or an e-mail, as a home user, make those your first lines of defense...

[RX-7 Chris]

At home I am running W7 64bit and IE8. I have the free versions of AVG, Malwarebytes, and CCleaner. I also have the newest Adobe Flash.