Watching TV & films for free on the internet - surely there's a catch!

[Auntie Slag]

My niece has suggested I try putlocker.is because you can watch everything for free, including all the latest films. Obviously the site is dodgy as hell. I don't touch this kind of thing, but I'm a little intrigued.

My spidey sense tells me there's got to be a horrendous catch; orders of Ultra Magnus-tude of spyware, malware, endless popups and whatever else... otherwise everyone would be using this site and the powers that be would have located it and shut it down.

I used to do a bit of Limewire for music 14 years ago, but that was about it.

So would anyone here, in their right mind go to a site like put locker.is and expect their venerable PC, tablet, phone to come away unharmed?

I don't bother with Netflix, Skygo and so on. Anything I want to watch I find dirt cheap in charity shops and CeX (who were once selling the 2007 live action TF film for 75p), not break the bank and see things I really want to see, in super high quality DVD, which is much better than VHS!

[Denyer]

They're not hosting the content (that side's farmed out to any number of file locker and streaming sites, at a guess) which offers a certain amount of protection from their point of view.

I'm reasonably confident in my anti-malware precautions -- anti virus, ad blocker, flash blocked, software restriction policy whitelisting where executables can run from.

Most of the little TV I watch is on the Beeb. The rest I generally acquire from places that won't publicly be discussed* and if it's worth watching again, buy DVD box sets. Not much interest in films and anything popular is, as you say, a couple of quid not long after release.

*Apart from YouTube, which has various licensing agreements in place (and/or the BBC make it a policy to not quibble) and is more convenient a lot of the time for old shows than finding the discs in the binders.

[Auntie Slag]

Cool, thanks Denyer. I have a friend with a Linux (Ubuntu, possibly) laptop. Could I safely recommend the site to them without them without incurring a "Thanks a lot pal, your recommendation killed my computer" response?

I have no experience with Linux, so I don't know how susceptible it is on that front.

[Denyer]

There's very little out there targeting (or able to successfully target) Linux... some discussion here;

http://www.linux.org/threads/malware-an ... inux.4455/

It's not a given, but people using it as an OS are likely to be savvy (with the exception of folk who've been given it as something they can't really break) and not be running with elevated privileges, will be using ad blockers, will have security patches/updates covered, etc. Plus architecturally it's pretty damn robust anyway.

[Brendocon 2.0]

I don't bother with Netflix

I'd heartily recommend it if you've got a games console that can stream it through your tv.

In the two months I've had it, I've watched Daredevil, five seasons of Archer, three seasons of Suits, 10 seasons of It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia and all of Danger 5. Plus numerous films. All for seven quid without having to venture into the city, risk scratched discs or have to find shelf space.

Plus there's gazillions of other things on there that I'm still to get round to.

CEX is great for picking up cheap copies of stuff you know you'll watch, but Netflix is ace for trying stuff you're on the fence about.

[Cliffjumper]

Yeh, find Netflix quite useful. A few classic recent sitcoms on there (Peep Show, Office, Extras, Father Ted, Brooklyn Nine-Nine etc.) for easy background, some great film choices (a few real curveballs on there - Blue is the Warmest Colour, Robot Joxx, Midnight Mile), the greatest show ever (Danger 5), lots of American soaps for the wife and the kids one is full of one-watch nonsense which is ideal for fickle little ones (turns out Alpha and Omega is shite? No worries, slap something else on).