First off: ADBLOCKERS. It's dangerous to go alone.
Take this: a little browser add-on that will prevent you from seeing ads and popups ever again! Yeah, no more ads on Youtube either.
Most malware you risk getting while pirating is the result of ads and pop-ups!

Some time ago, Google announced that Chrome will drop support for adblockers. This was set to happen in early 2023, then again postponed to June 2024. I'm not sure how long Chromium-based browsers (Chrome, Edge, Opera, Vivaldi, Brave) will still support third-party adblockers.
This is simply happening because Google (who mantains Chromium) is in big parts an Ad Company, and so makes money from selling ads to you.
Mozilla Firefox is not affiliated to Google, and will support Adblocking indefinitely. Just so you know.

The BEST Ad Blocker around is uBlock Origin, by Raymond Hill (gorhill).
It's recommended that you use it at all times, as it will not slow down your browser but will improve your user experience drastically!
Official add-on installs: Firefox, Chrome (for now).


Then: VPNs. There's a growing trend going around that would lead you to believe that you should always use a VPN and your internet activity is inherently unsafer without one. That is blatantly false, and I have a deep disdain for companies that try to make you believe otherwise.
However, there's one thing that VPNs are absolutely essential for, and that is torrenting.
You don't have to care about a VPN as long as you use Direct Downloads (more on that later), but with torrenting, it's a must!

...ok, well. You can download things without a VPN. I've done it a bunch - but I'm in Italy, and controls are lax here.
Please understand though, that's unsafe. VPNs are, like, the condoms of torrenting.
Depending on how strict your Internet Service Providers are about piracy, without them you might get a hefty fine, or simply a warning, or nothing at all.
If you're located in Germany for example, expect to be REALLY CAUTIOUS and not screw up, otherwise it's fine time!
With torrenting, sadly, ISPs can kind of exactly see what you're downloading. VPNs fool your ISP. Again - I'm not a fan of how much VPN services are fooling us in thinking we need them - but sadly us pirates DO need them.

I would personally not recommend free VPNs, they aren't too reliable in my experience.
I also advice to use a VPN that allows “port forwarding” as that will make the downloads faster.
But in the end, any VPN service will do. This is a post with the current list of recommented VPN services! I personally go with Mullvad, they seem really transparent about what they do, and I don't mind not having port forwarding.

If you use a VPN service to keep safe during torrenting, it's essential that you take one last precautional step.
At times, the VPN connection you are using might falter for some seconds. These few seconds that it's not working, your torrent might still be downloading, exposing your IP address briefly and letting your ISP catch you.
There is an easy and quick way to prevent this from happening. It's called binding the VPN network interface to your torrent client - it's a big name, but it means you tell your client (qBittorrent) to ONLY connect to the internet via the VPN.
No VPN? No connection. No IP leakage. Linked guide above will take you a couple minutes at most.

There are two kinds of downloads: Direct Downloads and Torrents.

Direct Download Link (DDL): you click on the thing, the browser downloads it. Simple! It's an 1 on 1 communication between you and their servers.
Pros: no hassle, super easy, nothing else to do, pretty safe.
Cons: downloading big files is sloooow, and if your connection falters just a few seconds, you gotta start from the top again.

Torrenting: the good stuff.
It's “Peer to Peer”, or P2P. The way I understand it: you're put in a room (a “swarm”) with a bunch of people.
Some want the file (Peers and Leechers), some already have it and are giving it around (Seeders).
You all share small pieces of the file around, and eventually everyone will get a complete file.
Seeders are the most important part: a torrent with zero seeders will not start (no one is giving out the file). A torrent with 200 seeders will be immensely faster than one with 3 seeders.

It's good etiquette to seed back what you download, in a 1:1.10 ratio: you upload what you downloaded (1:1) and then a little more. Sharing is caring!
Pros: fast, you can stop and resume whenever you want, you can find torrents of mostly anything, easy to download big files.
Cons: unsafe without a VPN (might get fined), a bit harder to understand, might take an hour or two to set everything up. Still, it's the main way to easily pirate things.
How to Torrent files?
You will need: a Torrent Client, a VPN (optional, recommended), and either a .torrent file or a magnet link. Don't panic, this is easy!

Torrent Client: a little software that will actually manage the downloading. There is no reason to use anything else than qBittorrent: it's free, open source, frequently updated, has no ads, and has a neat little feature that we will see later. Download and install it and you're all set!

VPN: more info on them in the "Safety Precautions" section.

Torrent files, magnet links: a torrent file is an actual file you download and open in your client. You download “bee_move.torrent”, open it in qBittorrent, and it will start downloading!
A magnet link simply bypasses having an actual file. it's a link that you will directly open in your client and will tell it what it needs to know, and acts in place of a .torrent file. They're virtually the same.
There are dedicated torrent sites that let you search for the torrent you want, and offer either a torrent file or magnet download. Let's see how to find them!

☀ r/piracy Megathread - (alternate links here and here).
There are links to pirate anything that could be pirated. Your best available resource, I cannot overstate how good it is.
Navigate to the section you need and follow the instructions! There are usually both Torrent sites and direct download links.

☀ Awesome Piracy megathread

☀ r/FREEMEDIAHECKYEAH wiki

But Ray! some of the torrent sites listed on the masterposts are broken! :(
I hear ya, I hear ya! It's perfectly normal. For technical / legal reasons that I cannot comprehend, torrent sites need to change URLs often.
This is where unblockit comes in. I'm not sure how it works, so I'm just going to say that it's magic. It gives you working links to all the best torrenting, streaming, DDL sites. From books to music to, uh, adult material. I usually refer to the masterpost to know which sites are the most trustworthy, and then use unblockit to access them. Generally, for example, you will want to avoid ThePirateBay, and prefer 1337x instead.

I will also leave some more specific links and resources in the following sections! :-)

As always: when it comes to resources created by small artists, please do purchase them if you can afford to. If you can't afford to, or just want a taste of them, however:

☀ Online-courses.club has, like, an INFINITY of art courses and tutorials, and even some software. It's INSANE, super helpful, some of these courses would otherwise cost SO much. I've been getting a lot of use out of it. They're mostly DDLs, too! I can't recommend it enough!!

I've had a lot of difficulty finding good brushes for Procreate that didn't cost too much. This telegram channel has a neverending quantity of Procreate brushes: ☀ t.me/free_brushes.
Sometimes Photoshop brushes crop up too. For some popular brushes, they ask for “donations” to download them instead of giving the actual download, which is a big yikes. Thankfully, it's rare. In there, if you scroll really far, there's also a link to another smaller group to download Max Ulichney's brushes..

My favourite way to pirate and share music is ☀ Soulseek, a neat little software that work as a Peer To Peer service, but between you and a single other person at a time. You share all your music folder, and others can download from it when you're online. In return, you can download other people's music from their shared folders.
It's lovely, the quality of the files is GREAT, the community is actually really chill and honest, since it's just a bunch of peeps sharing mp3s and flacs.

There's also a LOT of telegram bots to download music or videos from several platforms.
@MusicDownloaderRobot downloads from Spotify, @joeymusicbot from Deezer, @mediadownbot rips videos and music from stuff like reddit, tiktok, facebook, twitter etc, and t.me/BotsArchive has a vast collection of bots just like these. They can come in handy!

Looking for torrents in Italian? Your best bet might be Il Corsaro Verde (ICV crew), which is my go-to nowadays.

Those around my age or older might remember TNT Village as the n.1 source of italian torrents. It's closed down, but you can still access the magnet link for their old uploads.
Only way to access them right now is directly via the CSV dump: CSV dump.
It's a bit tricky - you need to open the CSV file with a software such as OpenOffice Calc or Microsoft Excel. You will see on the first line, what do each of the string of numbers mean. You then need to find the torrent you're looking for, searching for keywords manually, and grab the "HASH" sequence (the longest sequence). You then want to feed it in a hash to magnet converter. You can then paste the magnet link into your torrent client. It's a lot!

There's also programmiedovetrovarli, great resource for famous software (Adobe, Office, etc) with instructions in italian. Needs adblocker to be deactivated on their site, but has no popup ads, just standard banners.