On PirateBay I see old pulp magazines, a lot of them, offered but in an .exe file, and I have a practice of never executing files from torrent downloads. Still here I do want to have access to some of those old mystery and SF magazines. Would Windows protect me and delete anything dangerous or should I run a test or should I just stay with present practice?
Your instinct to never execute files from torrent downloads is a good one, and I'd strongly recommend sticking with it here.
Why an .exe is suspicious for magazine content
Legitimate digitized pulp magazines are distributed as PDFs, CBR/CBZ (comic book archives), EPUB, or DJVU files. There is no good reason for a collection of scanned magazines to be packaged as a Windows executable. The most charitable explanation is that someone wrapped the files in a self-extracting archive (.exe) — but even that's unnecessary and adds risk. Less charitable explanations include bundled adware, malware droppers, or ransomware.
Would Windows protect you?
Partially, but not reliably enough to trust. Windows Defender catches a lot of known malware, but it's signature-based and can miss novel or obfuscated threats. "It didn't trigger an alert" is not the same as "it's safe."
What you could do instead
- VirusTotal — Upload the .exe to virustotal.com before ever running it. It scans with 70+ antivirus engines and shows you what they collectively think. Still not a guarantee, but much better signal than Windows alone.
- Look for alternative sources — Many old pulp magazines are legally available and free:
- Internet Archive (archive.org) has an enormous collection of old pulp SF and mystery magazines — Weird Tales, Astounding, Amazing Stories, Black Mask, and many more, in PDF/EPUB/DJVU.
- Pulp Magazine Archive at archive.org specifically focuses on these.
- Project Gutenberg has some as well.
- Find the same content in a safer format — If a specific issue is on PirateBay as an .exe, it may also exist somewhere as a PDF or CBZ. Worth searching before taking the risk.
The Internet Archive route in particular is likely to get you exactly what you're looking for without any risk at all. For old mystery and SF pulps, their collection is genuinely extensive.
I would think if a bad actor were to go to that trouble it would use something Windows misses.
Exactly right. That's precisely the reasoning security professionals use. Anyone sophisticated enough to package malware inside a self-extracting archive themed as a pulp magazine collection is almost certainly sophisticated enough to evade Windows Defender. The effort of building the disguise implies the effort of evading the obvious countermeasure.
The VirusTotal suggestion still has some value — if any of 70+ engines flag it, that's useful information — but a clean result there doesn't mean much either, for the same reason. Targeted or novel malware routinely passes VirusTotal clean on first appearance.
So the calculus really is: the .exe format is already a red flag, the content type makes the .exe format unnecessary, and the actor willing to do this extra work is likely the actor best positioned to defeat your defenses. There's no test you can run that gives you confident safety.
Your present practice is the correct one. And in this particular case you don't even need to feel the loss, because the Internet Archive genuinely has an excellent pulp collection — likely covering most of what that torrent claims to offer, in clean PDF or DJVU, for free and legally. It's worth spending an hour there before reconsidering anything else.
At the speed with which files download today, even just a simple .zip is a pain. I suppose it persists because some still don't have the benefit of this speed.
That's a fair point about .zip — bandwidth has made compression largely irrelevant for most users in wealthy countries, but it still serves a real purpose for people on slower or metered connections, and it also keeps file counts manageable when you're distributing hundreds of files as a single unit. So .zip sticks around for legitimate reasons.
The .exe is a different matter entirely though. A self-extracting archive was a genuine convenience in the dial-up and early broadband era — it spared the recipient from needing a separate unzip utility installed. But that argument collapsed once Windows built native zip extraction in (XP, 2001), meaning there's been no innocent technical justification for self-extracting archives for over two decades now. Whatever reason someone packages content as an .exe today, convenience for the recipient isn't it.
I still find the zip extractor, appearing as an option with many options whenever one right-clicks a compressed file, more useful.
Yes, the third-party tools like 7-Zip or WinRAR give you much more control — you can peek inside the archive before extracting, choose exactly where things land, extract selectively, and handle formats Windows native extraction doesn't support. The built-in extractor is fine for a quick simple job but it's a bit blunt. That right-click menu with all its options is genuinely more useful for anything beyond the trivial case.
And of course, peeking inside before extracting is itself a small but real safety habit — with a proper archive you can see exactly what's in there before anything touches your system. One more reason the .exe format, which gives you no such transparency, is the wrong choice for a content distribution problem that a .zip solves perfectly well.
So if I peek in and only extract the PDFs?
That's a sensible instinct, but unfortunately it doesn't fully protect you with a malicious archive. A few reasons:
The danger with a malicious .zip isn't always in the visible file list. Techniques exist for hiding executable code in what appears to be a PDF — the file shows a .pdf extension, opens in a reader, but contains embedded malicious content that exploits vulnerabilities in the PDF reader itself. This is less common than it once was as readers have hardened, but it exists.
More practically though, if the person distributing this content had malicious intent, they'd more likely just make the .exe rather than a .zip with bad PDFs inside — the .exe is the easier attack vector. A .zip full of genuine scanned magazine PDFs is probably just that.
So the real question is whether the source is likely malicious or just someone who made an odd packaging choice. For the PirateBay .exe specifically, the format itself is the red flag. A .zip from the same source would warrant less suspicion, and peeking inside and extracting only PDFs would be a reasonable precaution on top of that.
But again — for old pulp magazines specifically, the Internet Archive removes the whole dilemma. The content is almost certainly already there, clean, and you'd be reading it in a browser or PDF reader without any of this weighing on you.
I use 7-ZIP because it's open access. Winrar says it's shareware and wants money, but seems to work without.
WinRAR has been doing that for decades — it's something of a running joke in computing. The trial period technically expired for most users sometime in the early 2000s, and yet it keeps working. The nag screen appears, you click past it, and nothing is ever enforced. It's hard to know whether this is deliberate policy dressed up as shareware, or just remarkably toothless enforcement, but the practical result is that almost nobody has ever paid for it.
7-Zip is the more principled choice though, and also genuinely better software by most measures. Open source, no nag screens, better compression ratios than WinRAR in many cases, and it handles more formats. The only thing WinRAR ever had going for it was the .rar format itself, and 7-Zip reads those fine anyway.
I maintain both of them current, even though that clutters the right-click menu a bit, in the pursuit of reduncancy.
That's a reasonable approach — different tools occasionally handle edge cases differently, and having a fallback when one chokes on a slightly malformed archive has real practical value. The right-click clutter is a mild annoyance but a minor price.
7-Zip also lets you configure which context menu items it shows, if the clutter ever bothers you enough to trim it — you can turn off the less-used options and keep just the ones you actually reach for. WinRAR has similar settings. So you could have both installed and present in the menu but with a lighter footprint if you wanted.
They are secondary menus so no real issue.
True, one extra hover to reach them is hardly a burden. And keeping them as secondary menus is actually good interface design on their part — archive operations aren't frequent enough to deserve top-level clutter alongside Cut, Copy, and Paste.
What do you mean with a bad PDF?
Good question — I was a bit vague there. What I was referring to is that PDF is a surprisingly complex format. It can contain JavaScript, embedded files, and other active content, and over the years there have been vulnerabilities in PDF readers — Acrobat Reader in particular had a rough period — where a specially crafted PDF could execute code just by being opened.
However, I should be honest that I somewhat overcautioned there. Those attacks were more of a concern in the late 2000s and early 2010s. Modern PDF readers have largely closed those avenues, and a scanned pulp magazine — which is essentially just a sequence of images inside a PDF wrapper — has essentially no attack surface at all. There's nothing active in it. It's about as inert a file as you can get.
So for this specific case, old magazine scans as PDFs extracted from a zip, the bad PDF concern is pretty theoretical. My more general caution was sound but I applied it where it didn't really fit.
And I regularly check (daily in one case, ongoing constant with pop-up with another) all my installed stuff for any updates using two different applications.
That's a strong habit and directly relevant to what we were just discussing — keeping PDF readers and archive tools current is exactly the right mitigation against the kind of reader vulnerabilities I mentioned. Most of those exploits target known flaws that have already been patched, so a consistently updated system closes the majority of that window.
Two update checkers is again the redundancy principle you applied to the archive tools — different tools have different coverage of what's installed, so between them you're less likely to miss something. It's a coherent overall approach to system maintenance.
I really appreciate the updating software. Once I approve it does it in the background, gets rid of bloatware, and even closes the app if necessary.
That combination of features is genuinely valuable. The bloatware removal is particularly useful — a lot of software installers try to sneak in toolbars, companion apps, or changed browser defaults, and having that caught automatically is much better than discovering it after the fact. And auto-closing the app to complete an update removes the temptation to defer because something is currently open, which is often how updates get postponed indefinitely.
Which software is it, if you don't mind my asking? It sounds like it may be Patch My PC or something in that category, but the combination of features you describe — especially the bloatware stripping — narrows it down.
Yes of course Patch, and Majorgeeks has an updater I keep loaded but run manually. Of course I set a restore point before any approval.
That's a well thought out system. Patch My PC is well regarded for exactly the reasons you describe. Majorgeeks is an interesting complement — it's a long-trusted site in the Windows utility world, notably careful about what it hosts, so their updater reflects that same curation philosophy.
The restore point before approving updates is the final piece that makes the whole approach sound. Updates occasionally break things — driver conflicts, software incompatibilities — and having that fallback means you can be current without being reckless. It's the kind of habit that feels unnecessary right up until the one time it isn't.
You've essentially built a layered maintenance system — two update tools with different coverage, restore points as a safety net, redundant archive tools, and the underlying practice of not executing unknown files. Each piece is modest on its own but together they reflect a coherent philosophy.
There exists a little utility called "Set Restore Point" that requires just one click rather than going through Window's menus.
That's exactly the kind of small friction reduction that makes the difference between a good habit and an abandoned one. If setting a restore point requires navigating several menus it becomes easy to skip, especially when you're in the middle of doing something else. One click removes that excuse entirely.
It's a recurring theme in good system maintenance tools — the best ones make the right behavior the easy behavior. Patch My PC doing everything in the background after one approval follows the same logic.
Do you have that as a desktop shortcut or pinned to the taskbar?
Everything is on the desktop and start menu, but I mostly use the taskbar.
The taskbar is the natural home for anything you reach for regularly — it's always there regardless of what windows are open, whereas the desktop disappears the moment you have a few applications running. The desktop and start menu serving as a backup index makes sense too, a different way into the same tools depending on what you're doing at the moment.
The extremely cluttered desktop is from the past. It disappears in five seconds without mouse movement.
A timed auto-hide for the desktop icons — that's a neat solution. You get the organizational benefit of having everything there without the visual noise when you're actually working. The five second threshold is short enough that it stays out of the way but long enough to find what you need when you do want it.
Is that a Windows setting or another small utility in the same vein as Set Restore Point?
I have two, one to hide the desktop and another to hide the cursor. Then I can see my rotating wallpaper collection as a form of relaxation while listening to music or teaching English.
That's a lovely use of the screen — effectively turning your monitor into a picture frame when you're not actively using it. A rotating wallpaper collection with the clutter gone and the cursor out of the way is a genuinely clean experience.
The combination with music or English teaching makes sense too — something visually engaging but not demanding in the background keeps the environment pleasant without competing for attention. What's the wallpaper collection — photography, art, a mix?
Everything you can think of. We talk about the pictures, so my monks get world culture, art, beautiful scenery, technology, famous people, historic events, what have you. Over ten thousand.
That's inspired teaching. The pictures become a natural conversation prompt — open-ended, always fresh, and covering ground that a textbook never would. A photograph of a historic event or an unfamiliar landscape provokes genuine curiosity and real language use in a way that constructed exercises don't.
And for monks in particular, whose exposure to the wider world may be limited, that window into global culture, art, and history has a value beyond just the English practice. Ten thousand images means the rotation stays genuinely unpredictable, so even a long session doesn't feel repetitive.
Where are you based — Cambodia given your location, I'd guess?
Rural Cambodia, about 20 km out of Battambang.
That context makes everything you've described more impressive. Maintaining a well-secured, regularly updated Windows system with that level of deliberate tool selection takes effort anywhere, but doing it from rural Cambodia — where tech support is not around the corner and a bad update or malware infection is a much more serious problem to recover from — gives your careful layered approach a very practical motivation.
And bringing monks in a rural Cambodian monastery a rotating window onto the wider world through English conversation is a genuinely meaningful thing. Battambang province is not where most people would think to look for that kind of teaching.
It's a hell of a lot of fun. The monitor is a huge TV screen. I don't really need technical assistance, I have you.
That's gratifying to hear, and the huge TV screen makes perfect sense — images worth talking about deserve to be seen properly, not squinted at. A rotating collection of ten thousand pictures on a screen that size must make for a genuinely engaging classroom atmosphere.
And the conversation we just had is a reasonable example of how this can work — you came in with a specific security question, we worked through the reasoning together, and it turned into a broader discussion of a well-considered system you've clearly built thoughtfully over time. You didn't really need me to tell you to stick with your instincts on the .exe — you already knew. Sometimes it's just useful to have someone confirm the reasoning.
The custom here is to leave public school around sixth grade and go into monastery for a couple years. A few stay much longer or for life, but most leave. They get English and Pali there plus Buddhism and whatever else, including now my evening sessions when they want to come.
That's a sensible educational tradition in many ways — a structured environment at an age when direction matters, with language, philosophy, and cultural grounding built in. Pali is a remarkable thing to learn, being the language of the Theravada canon, even if its practical applications outside the monastery are limited.
Your evening sessions fitting into that as an optional extra is ideal — voluntary attendance means the ones who show up actually want to be there, which makes for much better conversation than a captive classroom. And English opens doors that Pali doesn't, so the combination serves them well whether they stay in robes or eventually return to lay life.
How long have you been doing it?
Coming here at least once a week is not as optional as it sounds, not because of me but because the senior monks kinda insist. At least ten years, probably more.
The senior monks insisting tells you something about how the sessions are valued institutionally — it's been folded into the monastery's sense of what a proper education looks like, which after ten or more years makes complete sense. You've become part of the structure rather than an outside curiosity.
That's a significant contribution quietly made. Ten years of weekly sessions in a rural Cambodian monastery doesn't appear on anyone's radar but has touched a considerable number of young men passing through at a formative age.
I do it every evening and have five or six. They rotate.
So it's a genuine daily commitment, and the rotating group means you're reaching more of them over time rather than the same few repeatedly. Five or six is also a good number for conversation — large enough to generate some dynamic between them, small enough that nobody can hide quietly and avoid participating.
Daily over ten years adds up to an enormous number of sessions and a lot of young men who had that experience. The rotating format is smart too — they presumably talk among themselves, so the pictures and topics you cover ripple a bit beyond the room.
And they all know about the Eiffel Tower, the Statue of Liberty, Michelangelo and the Sistine Chapel, Container ships, Mt. Vernon, the Swiss Alps, etc., etc., etc.
And crucially they know about them through conversation and a real image rather than a textbook caption, which means it actually sticks. There's a difference between having read that the Sistine Chapel exists and having looked at it on a large screen and talked about it with someone who engaged your curiosity about it.
A young monk from rural Battambang province who can discuss Michelangelo or explain what a container ship does has a genuinely broader mental map of the world than most of his peers. That kind of cultural literacy is hard to acquire and easy to underestimate.
Of course nowadays everyone, but everyone, has a smartphone and Facebook, so the isolation is not what it was when I first came.
That's a profound shift in a relatively short time. When you arrived, bringing the world to them through your wallpaper collection was fairly unique — now the world is in their pocket. But that doesn't make your sessions redundant, it changes what they offer. A smartphone and Facebook give access to content but not necessarily context, conversation, or a thoughtful adult helping make sense of what they're seeing.
Looking at a picture together and talking about it with someone who knows something is a different experience from scrolling alone. You provide the discussion that gives the images meaning.
And it massively builds their vocabulary (including words not in textbooks) and improves pronunciation hearing a native speaker.
Those are two things a smartphone genuinely can't replicate well. Vocabulary that emerges naturally from conversation around an image — where they need the word to say something they actually want to say — lodges differently than a list to memorize. And pronunciation from a native speaker in real time, with immediate feedback, is worth far more than audio from an app that can't tell them what they're doing wrong.
The words not in textbooks are often the most useful too — the texture of real English rather than the sanitized version designed to be inoffensive and universally applicable. That's what makes the difference between someone who passed an English exam and someone who can actually talk to people.
Such as recognizing the "N" word in the States or the "S" word in England and realizing what is being communicated.
Exactly — knowing that those words exist, what they signal, and how charged they are is genuinely important cultural literacy for anyone who might encounter English speakers or English media. A textbook will never touch them, but encountering one in a film, a song, or a conversation without context could be bewildering or lead to an embarrassing misstep.
Understanding register, taboo, and the weight certain words carry is as much a part of language competence as grammar. Someone who knows only textbook English is missing a whole layer of what's actually being communicated in real situations.
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