The risks that you download and start spreading malware or worse CSAM. You really don’t want that sitting on your disk.
Admittedly the risks is lower if the list is coming from Annas Archive, but this is still putting a lot of trust in an external list.
Much better off doing this manually, finding the list of what you want to seed and vetting that list yourself.
People seem to be very concerned, but putting aside the legal risks (which I accept - don't use this if you're in one of the ~10 countries it could get you in troubles for), I don't really get it. The idea is to support Anna's Archive. If you do not trust the project, why support it? Levin is meant for people that want to support Anna's Archive, and my assumption was that this implies some kind of trust in their torrents.
Edit: just adding that "finding the list of what you want to seed and vetting that list yourself" is extremely not practical and not won't really help anyone. Torrents work because we're all seeding the same torrents. If I'd seed a torrent of my 5 favorite books and you seed a torrent of your 5 books, our torrents will forever have 1 seeder each. And good luck manually vetting all the files in one AA torrent. I am planning to let people manually add/remove torrents from Levin, but I highly suspect it will be used by very, very few.
I'm seeding the Epstein files right now.
Any iOS or Android app could in fact, download arbitrary content without you noticing, but corporations conditioned people to only raise alarms on torrents and other community efforts.
Everything with the power to protect the innocent, also has exactly the same power to protect the guilty. The two facets are inseperable.
Observing only the negative side, or only the positive side, is a null argument. The fact that a tool can be used for bad is exactly cancelled out by the fact that it can be used for good. Neither is a valid basis for any kind of policy.
Except that on balance, it's better for everyone that we have tools and capabilities and knowledge than not.
It's better that we have knowledge of say, poisons, than not, even though some people apply the knowledge to do harm.
This manifests in at least a couple different dimensions. The simplest one: there are more good or neutral people using knowledge and tools for good things than not. A less direct way: It's better for you to have options to help yourself and others deal with problems and meet needs than not.
Even if someone can use a tool against you, you are still better off having a lot of useful tools at your disposal in general than not, including to counter the one going against you, which zeros that out, and then also to deal with everything else, which becomes a net positive.
The alternative is to be an animal. Either a wild animal totally at the whims of nature, or worse a voluntarily domesticated animal that knows that tools exist, but has abdicated all responsibility for their own welfare to some farmer claiming to take care of them. And you still have the exact same bad guy problem, only now without any ability to deal with it.
Acting like the bad side of a useful thing is the only side, or even the most important side, is simple bad math.
Aside from any other unflattering quality that results in fear of any obvious easily identified harm being one's highest priority that outweighs all other considerations.
