Comment by lukan
15 days ago
"What about kids?"
They usually have someone more mature watching over them as there are also other dangers in life except malware on their phones.
(Also, when I was a kid there was no one to explain me the internet, so I learned on my own and understood it better then those responsible for me.
But it was a different internet back then. )
Don't know about a mature but I wanted to play pokemon yellow on my mum's phone and I was in 2nd grade iirc and my brother just told me to search pokemon yellow rom myself and learn how to download/pirate it. He didn't help me at all, even though. he had pirated it earlier.
Made me learn pirating which went into more and more technical untill I think nowadays I dabble in playing pirated games in linux and linux scripting and just general coding.
There was no mature watching over me. I was downloading everything dude, heck I had once downloaded hollow knight as an apk to play it and I am pretty sure that it was a malware which i had quickly deleted as it wasn't working but now yes we've even migrated over from the phone.
So in a way my mature watching over me was saying, Idk learn it yourself, fuck around and find out.
I kinda think that grapheneos would be really nice for protecting your phone from something like malware from what I've heard.
downloading ROMs helped me learn how to do things the right way too. but even back then those kinds of places were filled with traps, remember pop-ups and pop-under ads? from that point forward, learning how to safely download ROMs and whatever else I wanted to do on the internet just felt natural.
What worries me though is that maybe we weren't the norm, maybe we were the exceptions.
r/piracy was something that I discovered really late but I am glad I am.
I recommend it to every of my friend who comes to me begging me to download X or Y or pirate it.
I remember those links where you had to go through the entire article and it would give a (1 of 2) and you have to do that again and again for them to finally get to the final download.
Yes downloading them were indeed a hassle but idk i guess those feelings are really compensated by me playing pokemon, like I genuinely have forgotten some of those popups but I do know that they were really shitty.
here's what I would recommend anybody now:
r/piracy is your best friend, try to read it and prefer to get the goated version of things use brave browser if you don't want ads/ librewolf/firefox with ublock on pc.
I am not advocating piracy because well, I just can't pay for products and my frugal living doesn't really find it to have peace. I would much rather donate to them directly with a thank you message but maybe that's my ideal.
The only game I was thinking to buy was silksong but my brother has a ps5 and he would've had to download it seperately and I wanted to split even 20$ lol.
I wanted to buy silksong as a way of saying thank you to the devs for finally making things cheap enough and making me feel like my money is worth it even if I am frugal y'know.
I feel like everyone iscammed by 70$ games bro, I am never paying them.
One time, idk what i downloaded, but it was prob malware in the sense that even if no app is running/removed that app, it would still open up browser and open up some link automatically sometimes..
And pop ups on websites were a nightmare to dodge, pop under ads yeah. I remember it all now. it used to take me definitely 15 minutes or more to download a rom but that was compensated by the hours I used to play bro.
I love pokemon johto with my ampharos of level 75, it used to one shot everything except rock/steel. Electric was goated in johto. And I had a water type pokemon too/there was one fighting type move that I taught my ampharos. I think I even defeated red from gen 1 ( I am talking about the actual gen 2 pixelated game and not the next silver games, I think it was the crystal or silver or gold, I am not sure mareep was only available to play in one of these games and dude mareep is goated and makes me remember my childhood)