cool, add .lnk to blocked file extensions it is used to drop malware too

there's download manager called uGet (or aria2c if you like terminal) and it's really good and simple. You can go torrent which is what ppl here recommend, and i too recommend qbittorrent for that.

There's Crystal Launcher, it's ok for me.

Writing program that use "raw sockets" is fun, like your own ping program.

You shouldn't learn hacking, you should learn lots upon lots about what you want to hack and think how to make it do what you want it to i.e give you shell. I would start with networking. There's awesome book by Don Colton about it, and it's free.

"At The Mountains of Madness"

Does your common relay count? You would need to keep it powered tough.

not yet

Aside from reverse image search Yandex is wonderful for obscure things like software reverse engineering.

If you aren't strictly concerned with having it losless you can check out yt-dlp and download straight from youtube.

yep! I've found out browsing hacking/spamming site and i've found something too good to be true, it downloaded archive nested inside other archive and in it was silngle .lnk file leading to "the resource". Peeking inside i've found powershell executing base64 (or base32?) encoded script (it's got commandline option for that. if you want to ask wtf ask microsoft, and tell me), it dl'd some exe from some site and ran it, site was down alredy.

Mastodon i guess.