Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

If you open nfo files by double click Windows open a system info tool.

But if you open nfo files with a text editor with "open with " it shows it's text.

So it didn't gather anything.

And I would argue unzipped files are less dangerous because you kinda can assume what you download already.

It's also a good idea to have a av.

Avast is very friendly regarding piracy as in they seem to only flag actual malware and not necessarily keygens cracks and stuff ( heuristics can still make mistakes just report them as false positive )

I'm not really sure what you mean by gathering data, an info or nfo file is just a text file with some instructions.

To me a zip file is a lot more suspicious than a normal directory of files.

If something pops up that you've never seen before, just search online for what it is. If you don't know what System Information is, literally search "what is system information windows" and find out. This can be done for so many things and you don't have to wait for an answer.

Additionally, in the "Open with..." dialog on Windows, you can see that System Information is the default application for .nfo files. Just change it to Notepad or something and you'll never have this problem again.

I would personally be far less trusting of downloading a zip...

sounds like you had a nfo file which when you doulbe clicked it opened "system information" because windows doesnt recognize nfo as a text file.

There is nothing sketchy about unzipped files, its zips with passwords you gotta watch out for. The nfo thing is just your system doesnt have an nfo viewer, you can search one up or just use notepad to open them if you want.

What does

gather all the data

even mean? .info are just text files with some markup.

Do you mean like a rar file that's been split up?

Those happen because the people doing the initial recording or rip are often using platforms with poor error detection and correction for transferring files, such as IRC. They need the built-in correction offered by rar.

They get uploaded to BitTorrents as is. BitTorrent has more sophisticated error detection and correction of chunks than rar does, so this is pointless from a strictly technical perspective.