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Comment by jaxonrice | Hacker News Reader

How do we know that this is the official website, and not simply a clone with (possibly) malicious content. The official popcornti.me site had that exact issue back in March:

"@mediatemple hey they cloned our site getpopcornti.me in http://getpopcorntime.com - they linked some downloads as virus - watch out!" - https://twitter.com/getpopcornapp/status/442519692067241984

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I worked on the project since the first developers left. I am the one who fixed and released all versions since 2.5. I guarentee that http://popcorn-time.tv is mine and the build are safe. Source used are https://github.com/popcorn-org/popcorn-app/releases/tag/v0.2... .

Thanks. I hope the other developer is fine.

Thanks for the clarification

We know it is a legit fork because it is sanctioned by isra17, one of the two official developers. We know it's him because he updated the readme on his own personal github fork to lead people to this new fork [1].

The other developer (jduncanator) went completely missing, and took both the github repo and the website with him.

[1] https://github.com/isra17/popcorn-app

Well, it's certainly not an exact copy of the old website; I remember that it had ASCII art of the "mascot" in the source. This one doesn't. Which is an odd difference; the new "owners" appear to be a little less cute about it.

It is because I'm using cloudflare plugin to minify everything. Source used by the server are available at https://github.com/popcorn-org/popcorn-site. Pochoclín is still present in index.html!

Exactly, and without some explanation by the maintainers of what happened this could be malicious in a number of ways (heck, they could be cooperating with authorities for all we know).

I don't think I'd ever recommend installing binaries designed for illegal file sharing

What if he/she lives in a country where popcorn time is not illegal?

I wasn't making a legal or moral judgement, but a practical one: applications designed for downloading copyrighted content disproportionately tend to contain malware.

Nonsense. For every legitimate example of such a malware-infected program you can think of or find, the community can point you to at least X others that are completely clean.

Your suggestion is not a practical one, but rather an opinionated one.

Sony rootkit?

Maybe it's because I'm on linux, but torrented content never gave me any viruses. So as far as I'm concerned, the legal stuff is more likely to infect your system with malware.

> applications designed for downloading copyrighted content disproportionately tend to contain malware.

That used to be true for web browsers but IE got a major update. Now with less drive-bys and exploits.

eli is referring to the binary downloaded from the website possibly containing malware. Not that the website might possible infect you through a drive-by-download.

Web browsers are designed to download copyrighted content, so I guess i'm missing his point.

If the source is still up one can safely compile from there no?

For very weak values of "safely". If, for example, the app has an auto-update feature, like many apps have, then they can simply push malware onto you at some point down the road. Even if they don't have an official one, it wouldn't be too hard to hide one in the code.

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