There are rumors that YTS.[whatever they are on now] is a honeypot, and I can confirm during outages I have seen IIS with ASP.NET 500 error pages. If you’re not familiar with web dev, this is the setup a Fortune 500 company would have in 2008, not how a modern server run by random piracy bros on the internet would. It’s clearly corporate bros overpaying a contractor to run the site if it’s on Windows stack, especially in 2025.
I would recommend using tor browser, since there are major known honeypots like YIFY out there. I’ve also seen IIS/.NET errors during downtime on watchsomuch just like YIFY, which NO non-corporate entity (or corporate entity founded after 2010) is going to pay a premium for over Linux for, basically guaranteeing it is also a honeypot. Watch yourself out there.
Debian literally used a de-Mozilla’ed fork called Icewesel for like a decade. It’s fine. I never noticed any differences.
Just wait or switch distros. All the security updates they hold hostage for money come eventually. If you’re not a bank or wanted by a major world power, I doubt anyone is going pwn you with a security fix Ubuntu is slow walking to force people into pro. Since they started that shit I don’t put Ubuntu on new hardware, but I’m not going to purge servers I have it on because I’m worried someone’s going to deploy a sub-month old vulnerability against me as a rando doing nothing important.
Remember when the Obama admin made Aaron Schwartz kill himself for ripping some JSTOR articles?
Anyone using any torrents needs to get them from a source. That source is probably a web page. Any web page offering free shit may well be a honeypot. Given copyright extortion exists, best to use tor, which as per anyone’s best real knowledge can only be resolved by a few state actors at great cost and over time, which they won’t exert to figure out you visited the pirate bay.