6
LimeWire Was Intentionally Made to Be a Cesspool, and It Landed Innocent People Under Arrest
Back when peer-to-peer networks flourished, those too cool to pay for their music library found an answer in LimeWire. Any movie, album, or video game you could imagine free for the taking, as long as you could stomach the glut of extremely dubious mp3s that sounded like they were recorded on a wax cylinder.
But along with this veritable cornucopia of Hoobastank and Jimmy Eat World tracks was an absolutely comical amount of malware. Unless you opted for the subscription version (thus defeating the entire purpose of pirating stuff) adware/spyware was automatically installed on your computer, tracking browsing history, and possibly hijacking your homepage and spamming you with ads.
Navy Blue/Wikimedia CommonsFree, aka, "Password Stealer Edition."
An inevitable chunk of downloaded files also contained viruses, Trojanware, or other illegal stuff. Yes, "that kind" of illegal stuff. Peer-to-peer trading programs don't have any method of confirming the file is the exact thing you typed in, only scrounging for matching keywords. You could wind up downloading files others never intended to trade, or vice versa. The unlucky faced prosecution, and at least one man was sentenced to life on a sex offenders registry for child porn he claimed was unintentionally downloaded and immediately erased in horror. The LimeWire people likely knew but did nothing to stop it. Metallica was right to warn us?
5
Borat Is a Sleazy Exploitation Movie Posing as Social Commentary
One of the most grating parts about being alive in 2006-07 was being bombarded by terrible Borat impressions every waking second, inspired by the Sacha Baron Cohen mockumentary of the same name. The human race subjected to a non-stop, six month, international publicity tour, where Cohen -- remaining firmly in character -- repeated the same exact five scripted jokes verbatim again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again ...
Zscout370/Wikimedia CommonsSometimes fifteen minutes of fame is fourteen too many.