Laptop for Porn Only?

[lizardblizzard]

I always use the same laptop for everything i do, whethers it for email, banking, porn etc and obviously that is a bad idea since you could get viruses downloading these videos. I know there are many ppl here who have lots of porn on their hard drive. I read in another forum there was a person with over 10TB of porn in multiple hard drives. The most porn i ever kept on a computer probably was 30gb and that was when i had the full collection. I had asked ppl who had lot of porn in their computer how they store it and they say by having multiple 1tb hard drives. And obviously if you don't download much movies, 1tb is more than enough for almost everyone. Some people who have laptops and dont download much probably dont ever need more than 120gb at the very max.


Does anyone here have a laptop where they specifically use it for porn and other similar activities and thus you never log into your banking or email or stuff like that where you could get a type of virus? Obviously if you have another laptop thats mainly for that only, its no big deal if it gets a virus b/c your information such as banking, email would never get compromised b/c you never typed that stuff in. So basically this laptop will be all the type of porn, or *******s that you download and u use it only for that. So even if you get a virus or anything like that, well you can do a system restore of the laptop and that should clean it. And even if it doesn't clean it fully, its no big deal if it stops working or still have virus, its no big deal b/c you only use it for that.


I would like to know is getting another laptop the only way to do this where you won't have to worry about your email/banking information compromised? I heard about external hard drives where ppl buy where they connect it to their main laptop. I assume that wouldn't work since the external hard drive with the porn when connected to the main computer would then transfer a virus to the main laptop since you would open the file?


Obviously if you get a new laptop for porn only, spending a lot of money on it would be ridiculous. I have an i7 laptop that i use mainly for regular things. But if one gets a laptop for porn, what processor would be good enough? I see ppl talking about getting a $300 laptop for porn where the processor is like intel cellleron or amd... i know those are very slow. But if thats all you are doing, downloading porn videos etc... does it matter what processor you have? I know those laptops will have 4gb ram only. Would it be a waste to upgrade it to 8gb of ram? I assume porn downloading or watching a lot of it uses taht much ram right? Also i heard ppl mention get a laptop where its small like 13' for it. I have a laptop thats 14' and i find it really small for watching porn. I prefer to connect it to an external monitor thats 20'. I assume a 15' laptop would probably be the best for it?


I use SSDs for laptops but obviously i wouldn't buy an ssd mainly for porn. That would be a waste of money right? I assume whatever laptop there is such as 250gb or 500gb hard drive thats 5400rpm, whats the best way to buy big hard drive for it? Do you just buy 1tb hard drive and replace the smaller hard drive? Do you buy a 3tb hard drive? Do you buy external hard drive? But isn't that bad since once u use it for porn, you shouldn't use it for anything else in the future since its probalby infected or does a clean install of it always clean it 100 percent?


Would like some recommendations especially laptop recommendations if anyone here has a laptop mainly for porn.

 

[BlkHawk]

You could run a virtual machine on your laptop. It is like running a computer from within a computer. Here is an article with the top five programs for creating a virtual machine, you could use one of them to create a virtual machine then install something like Ubuntu on it for your porn browsing. You can save video files to an external drive with the virtual machine, and access them with either the physical laptop or the virtual one.

The virtual machine boots from a drive image, so if that becomes infected no big deal, you can just copy the drive image before using it, and restore it when you are done browsing. The better software allows you to run the image without making any changes to it, so every time you reboot the virtual machine, it is in the state of when you first made it.

Video files will not typically infect a PC it is extremely rare, the only time I have seen it occur was with wmv, or asf files using metadata to open a link in Windows Media Player to an infected site. To my knowledge the other container formats do not support this form of linking, such as mp4, m4v, avi ogm, etc. Most infections from porn come through the web browser, usually from compromised ad networks, or for the inexperienced computer user being offered a popup, or message to install a codec to view a video. You can avoid the need for codecs (real or fake) by installing VLC.

As far as a virus traveling from a virtual machine to your laptop, I haven't seen it done yet, as the way it works the software running on the virtual machine doesn't know it isn't on a real computer.

If you want a second laptop, just about any laptop made in the last eight years will be fine, just install some version of Linux on it. Ubuntu or Mint are the top distros for new people to Linux. Right now I am typing on an eight year old laptop running Fedora 20, and I have no problems with anything. I suppose you might if you view 1080p, but from your post, and the file sizes you mention I don't think you are using anything that intensive.

 

[GodsEmbryo]

If you are so worried about viruses, why not spent your money on decent software with antivirus, firewall... instead of buying a new laptop?

 

[julien sorel]

I agree with BlkHawk: use a virtual machine (I think Virtualbox should be a good choice) and install a GNU/Linux distribution. If you need a new laptop, 4gb ram and a low-end processor (a pentium?) are ok.

 

[madeguy]

If you pay for porn through official sites I wouldn't have thought you'd have a problem

 

[lizardblizzard]

If you are so worried about viruses, why not spent your money on decent software with antivirus, firewall... instead of buying a new laptop?

I have those things. Even with that, its not 100 percent you would be virus free.

 

[lizardblizzard]

I assume upgrading ram is really useless for this?


Never heard of virtual machine. But does that guarantee any viruses i download in movies etc would never go into my main laptop though?

 

[BlkHawk]

I assume upgrading ram is really useless for this?


Never heard of virtual machine. But does that guarantee any viruses i download in movies etc would never go into my main laptop though?

I have yet to see a virus move from a virtual machine to the physical machine running the image. Anything is possible though the creator of the malware would need to code it to detect that it is running in a virtual environment, and copy itself to the physical pc. Unlikely as most malware targets the most common denominator, and rarely accounts for unusual situations.

As I said before getting a virus from a movie file is damn near impossible, as long as you avoid asf, and to lesser extent wmv format. Even then those will be fine as long you are not using Windows Media Player. Even if you use WMP you should be fine, as it has been patched for that exploit, and it was rare. If you are downloading from a paysite you have nothing to worry about in their wmv files.

A movie file is simply a container for audio/video streams that have been compressed using media codecs. There is no executable code within these containers only data. You could place executable code somewhere in the container, and even then it would not execute, it would simply disrupt playback. It is possible to design a video file to exploit a known flaw in a specific codec. Again I have never seen this done or read about this being done.

Here is a long discussion on the possibility of creating a video file that can infect a computer: http://superuser.com/questions/445366/can-avi-files-contain-a-virus

This is the most relevant post:

TL;DR

An AVI file is a video, and therefore not executable, so the operating system can/will not run the file. As such, it cannot be a virus in its own right, but it can indeed contain a virus.
History

In the past, only executable (i.e., "runnable") file would be viruses. Later, Internet worms started using social-engineering to trick people into running viruses. Specifically, they would rename an executable to include other extensions like .avi, .jpg, to trick the user into thinking it is a media file and run it. For example, an email client may only display the first dozen or so characters of the attachment, so by naming the file something like "FunnyAnimals.avi .exe", the user sees what looks like a video and runs it and gets infected.

This was not only social-engineering (tricking the user), but also an early exploit. It exploited the limited display of filenames of email clients to pull of its trick.
Technical

Later, more advanced exploits came on. Malware writers would examine a disassembled listing of a program and look for certain exploitable instructions. These instructions often take the form of some sort of user input. For example, a login dialog box on an OS or web-site may not perform error-checking and except the user to enter only appropriate data. If you then enter data that it does not expect (or in most cases, too much data), then you can end up putting the data in part of the memory that it should not be. Normally, the user-data should be contained only in a variable, but by exploiting poor error-checking and memory-management, it is possible to put it in a part of memory that can be executed. A common, and well-known method is the buffer-overflow which puts more data in the variable than it can handle, thus overwriting other parts of memory.

Media files are the same. They can be made so that they contain a bit of machine code and exploit the viewer program so that the machine code ends up running. What's worse with media files is that unlike a login which is obviously bad (e.g., username: johndoe234AUI%#639u36906-q1236^<>3;'k7y637y63^L:l,763p,l7p,37po[33p[o7@#^@^089*(^#)360as][.;][.][.>{"{"#:6326^), a media file can be made so that it actually contains proper, legitimate media that is not even corrupt and so looks completely legitimate and goes utterly undetected until the infection's effects take place.

Yes, media files (and for that matter, any file) can contain a virus by exploiting vulnerabilities in the program that opens/views the file. The problem is that exploits are fragile. They usually only affect one media player or another as opposed to all players, and even then, they are not guaranteed to work for different versions of the same program (that's why operating systems issue updates to patch vulnerabilities). Because of this, malware writers usually only bother to spend their time cracking systems/programs in wide use or of high value (e.g., Windows, bank systems, etc.) This is particularly true since hacking has gained in popularity as a business with criminals trying to get money and is no longer just the domain of nerds trying to get glory.
Application

If your video file is infected, then it will likely only infect you if you happen to use the media player(s) that it is specifically crafted to exploit. If not, then it may crash, fail to open, play with corruption, or even play just fine (which is the worst because then gets flagged as okay and gets spread to others who may get infected).

Anti-malware programs usually use signatures and/or heuristics to detect malware. Signatures look for patterns of bytes in the files that usually correspond to instructions in well-known viruses. The problem is that because of polymorphic viruses that can change each time they reproduce, signatures become less effective. Heuristics observe behavior patterns like editing specific files or reading specific data. These usually only apply once the malware is already running (but can be more effective than signatures).

In both cases, anti-malware programs can, and do, report false-positives.

Obviously the most important step in computing safety is to get your files from trusted sources. If the ******* you are using is from somewhere you trust, then presumably it should be okay. If not, then you may want to think twice about it, especially since there are groups who purposely release *******s containing fakes or even malware.

 

[jod0565]

I think a true Porn Laptop should have a hole in in the keyboard.

 

[Patrick_S]

Here´s a wild and crazy idea: Stop downloading porn illegally, and you won´t get any viruses from infected video files. Memberships to pornsites are dirt cheap. You could be a member at Brazzers for something like four years for the same amount of money that a new laptop would cost.

 

[monkeyspanky45]

invest on a 4k laptop its the way o the future