[wkat4242]

I used to copy like crazy but now that I have a good job I pay for most of my software. Mainly because I like to keep my computer clean from malware. If I ever need to run something pirated because it's ridiculously expensive (like Adobe stuff or IDA pro) I run it in a VM or an isolated machine.

It's less out of an ethical sense though. Video I still pirate by the terabyte. Most of that comes from large media concerns that I don't really have much care for. The small games industry I support as much as I can on GOG.

Latvia and Bulgaria are great for torrent sites indeed, there seems to be nobody even trying to take them down unlike in western europe.

[harha]

It’s funny how regular software now seems fishy now that everyone is calling home. I’m close to getting a VM or a raspberry pi to run Citrix and zoom because they have all this junk that runs at startup and removing it causes strange error messages.

[isatty]

Yeah the world has changed. Sure, limewire had tons of trustmebro.mp4.exes but these days I don’t trust cracked software to not be mining coins or exfiling my personal data.

I suppose it was still the case back in the day (more for botnets than coins?) but I just simply cared less. Had to get my hands on the AAA games.

[namaria]

Hell I don't trust most legit software with my data. I still remember people being in awe of how I made Teams work on my Linux notebook (the previous guy couldn't make it right for some reason) by just running it in Chromium. The more sandboxed these 'apps' can be the better.

[ElectricalUnion]

I myself run it in Edge, specifically because I believe Microsoft is less capable of exfiltrating and collecting my data effectively that Google.

That and the "official" "Linux" app is basically unsupported.

[ornornor]

MS dropped support for the “Linux” “client”.

That client was basically an electron app.

How lazy is it to drop support for it? Especially as they’re pretending to be nice now, not hate Linux anymore, rolling it into windows etc.

MS will always be the greedy MS. Embrace extend extinguish.

Fwiw, teams runs well enough in chromium. I don’t use chromium for anything else so chromium has basically become my MS teams “Linux” “client” since they dropped support for it.

I’d run it in its own Firefox container but it would seem like MS purposefully cripples teams in Firefox as I can’t get background blurring or live captioning/translation to work there.

Just like google that requires you to use chrome AND be logged in to unlock background blurring… same evil, but story for another time.

[arsome]

If you're pirating IDA Pro, you're probably the type of person who can figure out which cracks are real and which aren't pretty quick.

[wkat4242]

True yes but a lot of cracks are real and still include malware. And it can even be introduced remotely. A malware downloader is a few lines of code hidden among millions.

Also analyzing malware tends to make one more paranoid. This is definitely a thing too.

And the most powerful features of it like hexrays require cloud cooperation so they don't work :(

I really wish it was affordable for individuals because I would pay for it if I could.

[arsome]

IDA's decompiler is only cloud dependent if you have the crappy version, if you have the full Pro version with the add on its entirely local.

While it's true that malware could hide well theoretically, I'll also add that in my experience investigating malware infections from friends and family and occasionally hunting for malware myself, samples attached to cracked software tend to be things like miners, iStealer, script kiddie RATs, etc using simple "binders" - which are usually incredibly obvious, like extract the real executable into %temp% or the usual RunPE gimmick. People posting malware on torrent sites are not exactly APTs using spear phishing attacks.

[nicolas_t]

Yes, if only IDA pro had a hobbyist license :(

[rft]

For what it's worth, IDA now comes in an IDA Home version [1, 2]. It is a one year subscription for 365 USD (single arch) and is cloud tethered for at least the decompilers. I no longer have access to IDA Pro via my university, so I am now using Ghidra. I can recommend newcomers to take a look at it or other tools (e.g. binary ninja), if you are not locked into your IDA workflow.

For me IDA Home seems to lack at least one key feature we needed back then: customizable CPU plugins. We had to extend one with a newer version of the instruction set. On top of that, that CPU type is not even available via Home. Also no RISC-V support (yet?).

On another note: the whole cloud based concept for a disassembler/decompiler with debug support sounds like a recipe for disaster. One wrong key press and you might run malware on an internet connected system. Even when only disassembling, I am tempted to run everything in an offline VM to defend against bugs in the disassembler.

[1] https://hex-rays.com/cgi-bin/quote.cgi/products [2] https://hex-rays.com/ida-home/

[snvzz]

>e.g. binary ninja), if you are not locked into your IDA workflow.

As binary ninja is proprietary, I would recommend against getting locked into its workflow, too.

[seanp2k2]

luckily, Ghidra exists now

[FastEatSlow]

There is IDA Home https://hex-rays.com/ida-home/