JDownloader free replacement?

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Night457
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Re: JDownloader free replacement?

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mimzy wrote:Possibly, but these are things that even anti-virus programs cannot detect.
I know! I have to wait for the white hats to find the botnets and make them public. And I have to be reading tech news when they do.
Moreover, how do you know that anti-virus software itself is not spying after you?
That is the fundamental question of ANY service I have ever purchased. How do I know doctors are doing what is best for my health rather than what will get them the best insurance payment? How do I know auto mechanics are not fixing one thing and damaging another so they will have more work to do in a few months?
Dead Kennedys wrote:Trust your mechanic to plug your holes
Trust him to make more somewhere else
Trust your mechanic, he'll always come through
And rip you off
Maybe the fact that Kaspersky was related to KGB is not a coincidence...
If you want expert information on internet security then go to the experts, right?' I used to have Kaspersky back when I used paid security packages rather than just Windows Defender. The question is, can I trust Microsoft to be looking out for my best interests either?

Eugene Kaspersky of course is Russian and "graduated from The Technical Faculty of the KGB Higher School in 1987 with a degree in mathematical engineering and computer technology."[1] Of course that is an excellent place for that kind of education! Reading about his company is quite fascinating. While he has consistently worked AGAINST cyberwarfare, there are some troubling accusations. I was surprised to find this quote in Wikipedia that is totally pertinent to our discussion:
In August 2015, two former Kaspersky employees alleged that the company introduced modified files into the VirusTotal community anti-virus database to trick its rivals' programs into triggering false positives. The result of the false positives was that important uninfected files would be disabled or deleted.
There. VirusTotal has been hacked to produce false positives, and it is exactly false positives that I suspected. I attributed it to incompetence on the part of the security packages rather than a malicious attack, but still ...
There is of course lots of control data that goes along with actual payload, so small overhead is nothing to worry about
It seems like ALOT to me at times, and I look in Task Manager to see what is visibly running and using bandwidth but never see anything particularly suspicious. But I am not knowledgeable enough to know what I should find suspicious in the first place, particlarly when Windows processes are routinely given indecipherable nonsense names.
Open-source software is usually developed by hundreds of people around the world and the code is public to everyone. All code changes are tracked. It is very difficult to deliberately sneak something malicious into the code so that no-one notices.
And then when one of them says "Danger, danger Will Robinson!" I have to investigate their credentials to find out if they know what they are talking about and are not just trying to sabotage a software competitor.
But even such vulnebarities are usually discovered and fixed quickly in open-source code (that's why you should always upgrade to the latest version).
WHEN was the latest version of eMule released? :D

(We are screwed, totally screwed!)
Python is an open-source package and if you download it from official source, it can be trusted.
Why are official sources trustworthy? Why should we trust a software creator to have good intentions? Even if their work is legitimate, how do we know their site has not been hacked and had code replaced? Open-source code I admit is a good start, but we have to wait for the public code-peepers to review, decipher and report. I may have used it for some time at that point. And honestly, I find it a chore to keep up with tech news. I just recently had to upgrade my 3G emergency phone because the 3G network was being dismantled. I found out about it by accident when I noticed an article on CNET. Nobody freaking told ME!
but I do remember reading about malware in jdownloader and the response of developers was something like "what's the problem, just clear that checkbox". That was several years ago, though.
That sounds like a developer attitude to me! Assume software users are all experts who can take care of themselves. I would prefer software not be bundled with unnecessary addons at all, but that is not going to happen.
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Re: JDownloader free replacement?

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Ziggy Plock wrote:When I uploaded it, something odd happened: It had zero community score (see link below) while with your link above the community score is 102... Weird
Not odd at all, they have different hashes so they are different versions. I hashed a version that was already on my computer, which I am sure is different than the version you have. I think it gets updated every month or so, but since it is a command-line exe and not some stand-alone software package, it does not prompt for updates. I update it when it breaks because I forget about it.

I am going to guess you got the latest version, and it just has not been investigated thoroughly yet. Mine is from 9/18/2021!

Also ... since my MD5 generator had some bad reports, maybe it was hacked to deliberately create a FAKE HASH that will register as "clean" when the REAL hash will show something BAD!

Anyway, I found the official youtube-dl documentation on GitHub but I have not read through it:

https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl/ ... /README.md
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Re: JDownloader free replacement?

Post by mimzy »   1 likes

Night457 wrote:
Moreover, how do you know that anti-virus software itself is not spying after you?
That is the fundamental question of ANY service I have ever purchased. How do I know doctors are doing what is best for my health rather than what will get them the best insurance payment? How do I know auto mechanics are not fixing one thing and damaging another so they will have more work to do in a few months?
And how do I know that I even exist :think
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Re: JDownloader free replacement?

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:icon_biggrin2 So we go from my rather mundane paranoia and misanthropy to pondering the philosophy of existence ...
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Re: JDownloader free replacement?

Post by Ziggy Plock »   0 likes

philosophy of existence? or physics of existence?
You see, mimzy's question is easily answered: 1. go to top of building. 2. take step of roof.
If nothing happens to you, you didn't exist.... easy peasy
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Re: JDownloader free replacement?

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But if something DOES happen, you may not spend much time pondering it.

"I no longer think ... therefore I am not."

Anyway, lately I have been using youtube-dl Command Line to get what files I can. It certainly works for some sites but speeds can be wildly inconsistent. On one particular YouTube file yesterday I compared its speed with https://9xbuddy.org, which was recommended here at FLM because it can get age-restricted YouTube videos without logging in. It will also extract subtitles.

The file I was getting was not age-restricted. For some reason youtube-dl was running more slowly than usual - now only about 60kbps - and promised to finish in under 3 hours. https://9xbuddy.org ran at about 1.5Mbps and finished in less than 10 minutes. Well, how about that?

I deliberately avoided looking into the relative "safety" of the site. I don't wanna know!
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Re: JDownloader free replacement?

Post by Ziggy Plock »   1 likes

Night457 wrote: https://9xbuddy.org ran at about 1.5Mbps and finished in less than 10 minutes. Well, how about that?

I deliberately avoided looking into the relative "safety" of the site. I don't wanna know!
Well, this really worked like GREASED LIGHTNING ..... i now also don't wanna know about the unsafety of the site. I advise to use it with old version of firefox, like 53 and below, that one is so old, scripts don't work.

only thing is, I tried this here youtube vid with subtitles and it didn't work, but that's no biggie
Without it, it did work.
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Re: JDownloader free replacement?

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I have become a real fan of 9xbuddy so that it is usually my first choice. If it does not work, I try other options. I am really skeptical of the notion of older versions of software and browsers being safer. But 53 may be so old that any potential attacks are now also expired and the baddies have moved on to other targets! Still, I use FF for most of my browsing (Chrome for most of the rest) so it is kept up to date.

If your YouTube link is supposed to be a music video, that particular video does not have any subtitles so that is why you could not get them!
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Ziggy Plock
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Re: JDownloader free replacement?

Post by Ziggy Plock »   0 likes

FF53 might not be safer, but it's what stop annoying ads and pop-ups.
Also, the SearchWith Add-on doesn't work with newer FF's. This add-on allows you to search for one thing (like a movie name you've highlighted/selecte ) on 48 sites at the same time with just one click, via the context menu in the background.
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Re: JDownloader free replacement?

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I use adblockers. They are not perfect but they help tremendously.
Ziggy Plock wrote:Also, the SearchWith Add-on doesn't work with newer FF's. This add-on allows you to search for one thing (like a movie name you've highlighted/selecte ) on 48 sites at the same time with just one click, via the context menu in the background.
48 sites you have chosen as your favorite useful ones? Or 48 random sites?

I definitely can see how quickly doing multiple identical searches at my favorite sites could be REALLY REALLY useful! I routinely do same searches on at least 5 torrent sites. This Add-on seems like something that someone else would do another version of. I quickly found Trufflepiggy, a much more recent Add-on that MIGHT do the same things.
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