[vegadw]

I think to an extent Microsoft is the guilty party here. For may cracks Windows Defender will trip saying "Win32/Keygen" even if there's no actual malware

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/wdsi/threats/malware-encyclo...

This trains people that do a lot of piracy to be used to turning off their antivirus to let something through, which is fine until it's not. It's like drugs, if we know a subset of the population will do them no matter what, we should make it safe for them to the extent we can. False positives, causing people to ignore actual positives, creates a market for these things.

[userbinator]

Many years ago, even a "Hello World" binary that wasn't compiled by MSVC but by a GNU toolchain was detected as "suspicious" or "potentially unwanted", and in some cases automatically deleted. MS clearly has a different definition of "malware" than many people, and while it may overlap with a majority opinion (e.g. viruses and worms), where its opinion differs is used to push an agenda.

[Gigachad]

Software is the one thing I won't pirate since the risk of installing malware is extremely high. For media files, unless you are incredibly unlucky and someone is exploiting a bug in the media player, you are entirely safe. But for software you have no way of knowing how the software has been tampered with, and often there actually is malware in it.

[ziml77]

Same. I used to pirate software but even way back I kept it limited to very popular software and established downloads (where if they were malware they were almost certain to be in a signature database by that point). And I absolutely never pirated an OS. I thought anyone doing that was out of their freaking mind because any malware there had ultimate access to block its own detection and do whatever else it pleased.

Now I don't do it at all. It's not worth the risk when I have the money to pay for the proprietary software that I like and when the ecosystem of open source software is very good.

[vegadw]

Until recently the exception for me was music software/VSTs. I definitely did get a few infections over the years doing so, but after finding some safe sources it went pretty well. To some extent, I still see advise it, actually, just with purchasing first but never using the key, just because DRM in the music software world is so aggressively bad. iLok is a cancer on that industry.

[ranger_danger]

There's always sandboxing/containers/VMs though. Even on Windows you have Sandboxie which is extremely powerful.

[ls612]

I mean this is by design? It makes pirates more likely to get malware, and thus normal people more likely to pay for MS products rather than pirate? You may think its immoral but the incentives line up.

[vegadw]

I don't think it's some conspiracy to make anyone more likely to get malware. Instead it's that for their business model of mostly being used on business PCs where the same dozen tools are installed all over the world they can be overzelous in protection and it is what most customers want. Really, they should leave the "piracy is malware" thing in defender, it should just be off by default if your PC isn't connected to a domain or setup as "work PC".